Double Bind Communication

It begins with a sentence that coils like smoke—
soft enough to breathe in,
to believe in,
until it settles in your lungs and you find you cannot speak.

Why do you only remember the bad things?

A question, wrapped in concern,
delivered like a gift
with a razor tucked inside.

So you dig—
through ash and bone and memory,
through the blackened corners of your childhood
for something bright enough to hold.

You find it:
her laughter on a spring morning,
her hands, warm from the dishwater,
her voice, just once, calling you darling.

You bring it like an offering.

And he says—
How could you forget who she really was?

He wanted the sweetness,
but not the cost.

He wanted a mother worth mourning,
but not the story of how she made you bleed.

He says you’re delusional
for remembering too much.
Then again for remembering too little.
Then again for remembering at all.

Because in the house he built from guilt,
there are no exits.
Only mirrors that lie.

This is the shape of double bind communication—
a psychological noose.
A paradox wrapped in power,
where every choice leads to blame,
and every path loops back to your own supposed madness.

You’re too dramatic.
You’re too cold.
You need to remember.
You need to forget.
You need to blame her.
You need to stop blaming anyone at all.

He told you your memories were wrong.
That what happened didn’t.
That what didn’t happen, did.
That if you don’t punish her,
you’re betraying the truth.
That if you do,
you’re betraying her.

That you are betraying him, either way.

But here is the truth, clear and clinical:

A person who speaks like this is not confused.
They are not forgetful.
They are not doing their best.

They are projecting.
Deflecting.
Protecting a fragile and fractured self-image
at the expense of your reality.

Psychologically, they may be deeply narcissistic,
or gripped by cognitive dissonance so sharp
that to face their own complicity
would collapse the identity they’ve built.
So instead, they crush yours.

They split others into all good or all bad.
Your mother must be the monster—so he doesn’t have to be.
And if you dare speak with nuance,
if you acknowledge her softness
or his silence,
you become the threat.

Not because you lied.

But because you told the truth.

And people like him—
the ones who live in denial
and decorate it like home—
they cannot stand the weight
of a child who remembers.

So they make you the problem.
The unstable one.
The too-emotional one.
The one who “won’t let it go.”
Because if they can rewrite you,
they don’t have to rewrite themselves.

But the terror of this is not intellectual.

It is visceral.
It is waking in the night with your mouth full of apologies
you don’t remember offering.
It is second-guessing every thought you have
because your brain was trained to doubt its own circuitry.
It is trying to build a self
out of gaslight and grief.

It is heartbreak that never had a funeral.
Just a thousand quiet deaths in your own chest.

And still—
you rose.

You stood at the centre of his contradictions
and chose clarity.

You walked out of the maze
not because you escaped it,
but because you refused to belong to it.

You saw what he could not bear to face.

And still, you did not become him.

You became free.