Losing You While Lusting Over Him

Just a reminder of what domestic violence does to the mind of a Black girl.

Dear Brilliant Minds,

The Elders told us that love was this beautiful thing.

Disney showed us that we had to be trapped in an attic, lose a glass slipper, be a devout warrior princess for our family, be a certain height, shape, or shade to be loved.
On Sundays, love was patient, love was kind, never prideful, loud, or boastful.
But love SHOWN, tuh, was found at the bottom of a bottle and beat our mothers in the face. Was the revolving bedroom door of mothers far and wide. Some fathers, too, if they weren’t out getting the milk.

Love meant silence.
Love meant loyalty.
Love meant survival.

Love walked into our bedrooms and told us that if we said anything, our little brothers would be taken away. Love was called “struggle.” Love was called “pain.” Love was, “stop lying on my family, I know your ass is just being fast.” Love meant silence.

It’s the aunties who told us to “pray about it,” the mothers who called it tough love, the systems that punished us for reacting to our own pain.

In all honesty, what kind of character-building exercise was this? This was worse than boot camp, now that I think about it. I would hate to compare the militarization of children in third-world countries to that of a black girl’s survival tactics as a child on American soil, but you know what, damn it, if I might be close. And as grown women, we are psychologically out of whack.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022), domestic violence is defined as a pattern of coercive behavior, physical, psychological, sexual, or economic, used to maintain control over another person. It is not always intimate, but it is always about power.

For Black girls, that power imbalance has historical roots. Violence against us didn’t begin in adulthood or even in our own homes; it began centuries ago, during colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. Black women were legally unrapeable, their bodies seen as property, their pain dismissed as character. The same system that forced our ancestors to give birth in fields now punishes us for saying we’re in pain (Feimster, 2011; Roberts, 1997). So when we say “love,” we’re often naming the first place we learned fear.

Fear, when introduced early, becomes muscle memory.

You learn to love people who make your chest tighten. You learn to argue and call it passion. You learn to stay, because leaving feels like danger too. And before long, chaos starts to feel like home. They call it butterflies, I call it anxiety, and you need to run, but whatever makes your boat float.

That’s the part nobody wants to talk about. When love and fear keep switching places, your brain doesn’t know which one to trust. You crave the person who hurts you because the calm that follows feels like relief. That’s how the cycle keeps you loyal (Dutton & Painter, 1993; Carnes, 1997).

We call it “ride or die.” We call it “being a good woman.” The world calls it “strong.” It’s none of that. It’s a nervous system that’s been running on high since childhood (van der Kolk, 2014; Williams & Mohammed, 2009). And then they have music, movies, and all the societal norms around you to feed it to you to make it seem like it’s right, even though it feels devastating.

“I’m sorry, but I still feel Love Jones was Nina’s ultimate death to herself as a woman-fight me. She gave in. And in my eyes, Robin Givens asserted herself. He never listened to her. She never said anything about wanting a relationship. He heard what he wanted by being infatuated with her feet, eww. And Halle Berry settled for a man simply because she was chosen last. Yeah, ohhhh love, great. She gets sloppy seconds. Why do the smart, awkward ones get sloppy seconds after men realize they can’t get the high-powered laced-up ones they want? And why do the quirky have to be like “oh well, I guess this is it if I want a man, yeah.” Maybe I’ve been abused so much that I can’t see the good in anything, OR maybe I’ve been abused so much that the veil has been lifted and there’s no more rose-colored anything in my vision. I see through the bullshit of it all. Love is mute. It is something I will never get to feel.”

Zsanine R. Gross-Black Love Movies of the 90’s

This is where the psychology gets dark. Prolonged exposure to stress and fear creates what clinicians call hypervigilance, even when none is present (van der Kolk, 2014). It’s why some of us can’t sleep unless we hear movement in the house. Why do we replay arguments in our heads, trying to find the line where things turned left? Why some of us “read the room” faster than anyone else, because our lives depended on it.

The American Psychological Association (2023) notes that chronic exposure to interpersonal violence is associated with anxiety, depression, low self-worth, and identity disturbance. But for Black girls, those symptoms don’t always get labeled.

They get called “attitude.” They get called “defiance.” They get called “strong.”

Let me REMIND you: what looks like strength is often a stress response.

Many of us are still running on the same adrenaline we built in childhood. We don’t know rest; we only know recovery. That’s why we love men we have to fix. That’s why we confuse “he needs me” with “he sees me.” It’s not a choice. It’s programming.

And when the world keeps telling you that your only value is in endurance, it’s hard to see survival as a symptom. That’s why Black girls lead with attributes and accolades instead of identity, because who we are never feels safe enough to show up first.

Superwoman Schema

It’s what happens when you’re raised to believe strength is your only safe place. So you keep showing up, showing out, and holding it together, because breaking down has never been an option. Rest starts to feel like a risk.

Then, you add what Dr. Sherman James called John Henry to prove you’re not lazy, that you belong, that you can handle it (James, 1994; Hudson et al., 2016). And before you know it, exhaustion starts to feel like accomplishment. The world keeps clapping for our overwork, calling it excellence and drive. I honestly cannot stand when people tell me, “You got this.” To me, it’s the laziest form of “I ain’t got time for you, but be well.” It’s a slap in the face. It also lets me know where I am with you. They don’t realize how much of a shock it is to the system to hear those words. And let’s be crystal: that’s not resilience. That’s chronic stress dressed up as character.

Research connects these same behaviors to higher cortisol, high blood pressure, and higher rates of depression (Thomas et al., 2021; Watson & Hunter, 2016). So what the world calls the Strong Black Woman is really our nervous systems doing crisis management, our brains adjusting to survive a world that never permitted us to rest. Hence why a certain 92% are trying to do just that, yet people are furious and do not understand why it is much warranted and much deserved. It’s not just political, it’s psychological.

That same wiring follows us into relationships.

When your nervous system has been trained to earn peace through pain, love that feels calm starts to feel suspicious. You are side-eyeing every single move made. We confuse tension with passion. We mistake fixing people for intimacy. We find comfort in chaos because stability feels like a setup. And then there is even the chaos setup that still feels like a setup because once you have reached a point where you are safe in your own solitude, when someone wants to interrupt that, you are questioning the motive.

That’s not love. That’s our early programming replaying itself. Studies show that survivors of chronic family or partner violence often reenact familiar power dynamics as adults, not because they want to, but because their brains equate predictability with safety (Teicher et al., 2016; van der Kolk, 2014). The mind wants what it recognizes, even when what it recognizes hurts. And until you get to a point where you are no longer fighting yourself, it’s always going to feel this way.

So when we keep choosing men who need saving, jobs that drain us, or friendships that demand our silence, it isn’t a flaw in judgment; it’s a trauma loop.

Our culture just taught us to call it loyalty.

But let me REMIND you: survival is not the same thing as love.

Every generation of Black girls has paid the cost of confusing the two. EVERY. We’ve built whole identities around being dependable in the middle of danger. And the hardest part of recovery isn’t leaving the person or the situation, it’s learning that peace doesn’t mean boredom. It means your body finally believes it’s safe.

You don’t owe anyone your silence, your suffering, or your strength.

Sources

American Psychological Association (2023). Report on chronic interpersonal violence and psychological outcomes.

Carnes, P. (1997). The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022). National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 Report on Intimate Partner Violence.

Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120.

Feimster, C. (2011). Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching.

Hudson, D. L., Neighbors, H. W., Geronimus, A. T., & Jackson, J. S. (2016). The relationship between socioeconomic position and depression among a U.S. nationally representative sample of African Americans. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 51(3), 418–427.

James, S. A. (1994). John Henryism and the health of African Americans. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 18(2), 163–182.

Roberts, D. (1997). Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

Teicher, M. H., Samson, J. A., Anderson, C. M., & Ohashi, K. (2016). The effects of childhood maltreatment on brain structure, function, and connectivity. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(10), 652–666.

Thomas, A. J., Witherspoon, K. M., & Speight, S. L. (2021). Gendered racial socialization of African American women: A cultural framework. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 27(1), 49–59.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Watson, N. N., & Hunter, C. D. (2016). An initial study of the Strong Black Woman schema and its relationship to mental health. Journal of Black Psychology, 42(5), 424–452.

Williams, D. R., & Mohammed, S. A. (2009). Discrimination and racial disparities in health: Evidence and needed research. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 32(1), 20–47.

Woods-Giscombé, C. L. (2010). Superwoman schema: African American women’s views on stress, strength, and health. Qualitative Health Research, 20(5), 668–683.*