It's amazing what you see when your thinking clears and you get out from under the dysfunction.
And it's amazing what seeing other people's reaction to your story does. For me, when I started talking about how AXH had treated me and the kids, when I saw the shock in other people's reactions, I realized that somewhere, I had known. Somewhere underneath all the dysfunction, I did know that this relationship wasn't healthy. I was just to enmeshed and scared to allow that thought to surface as long as I was still in the relationship.