Psychoeducation · Trauma responses
Why did our relationship feel so special at the start?
You might think…
“At first, I thought I'd finally found the person I'd been waiting for.”
“Were they pretending to be someone else even then?”
A closer look
At the start of an abusive relationship, someone may shower you with attention and kindness. They might message you constantly, give you lots of gifts, try to please you in every way, want to spend all their time with you, and talk about a future together very early on. You may feel like no one has ever loved you this much.
This kind of overwhelming attention is sometimes called love bombing. In an abusive relationship, it can help someone win your trust quickly, making it easier for them to influence or control you later.
Not every relationship that starts intensely involves love bombing. One important difference is whether the other person respects it when you want to slow things down, spend time with friends, or say no. Over time, what seemed like intense affection may come with jealousy, possessiveness, or more and more rules about what you can do.
What matters
Maybe you spent a long time wishing you could go back to those first weeks or months, when they seemed so caring and loving. You may have kept looking for the person you thought you'd met at the start.
When they later hurt you, it may have been hard to make sense of how someone who'd been so kind could treat you that way. Maybe you still wonder how much of that early love was real. But you don't have to blame yourself for trusting them, enjoying their attention, or believing in the future they talked about.
A reminder
I couldn't have known what would happen. It wasn't wrong to trust someone who seemed so caring.
What felt like love at the start may also have been part of the abuse that came later. It wasn't my fault that I couldn't see that then.