Some Cages Don’t Have Locks

Why Leaving Abuse Isn’t Just a Door You Walk Out Of

Wendi Kehn/Hellbloom Haven (Also featured on Substack & Medium)

Jan 06, 2026

Trigger Warning

This piece contains personal stories and reflections involving domestic violence, coercive control, emotional abuse, trauma, and survival, including references to suicidal thoughts and threats.

Please take care while reading.
If you’re currently in crisis or feel overwhelmed, you are not alone. Support is available.
📞 National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-SAFE (7233)
📱 Text: START to 88788
💻 www.thehotline.org

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You don’t need chains to trap someone.
Not when fear, shame, love, and survival do the job just as well.

When people say, “If it were me, I’d just leave,” they imagine abuse as something easy to step out of, as if the door is wide open and the only thing missing is a little backbone.

But that’s not how it works.

The truth is, many cages don’t have locks.
They’re built from economic dependence, emotional manipulation, trauma conditioning, isolation, legal loopholes, and a constant fear that leaving might actually make things worse, not better.

For some survivors, leaving is the most dangerous thing they can do.

This article isn’t about justifying abuse. It’s about challenging the myths we’ve been fed and replacing them with understanding. It’s about the real psychology of why people stay, what support truly looks like, and how you can become someone who helps rather than harms, even with the best intentions.

Because telling someone to “just leave” without understanding their cage doesn’t free them.
It just adds another voice to the echo of blame they already live with.

Section 1: The First Cage

I was sixteen when I met him.
He was twenty-three.

By seventeen, we were dating.
He was handsome, charming, and thoughtful in all the ways I craved.
He said I deserved better, that he’d protect me, care for me, give me the kind of love I’d never had.

He convinced me to leave home and move in with him, promising safety and something like peace.

After a childhood where I felt desperately lonely, confused, and misunderstood, I thought I had found a way out.

But I hadn’t.
I had just walked into a different kind of hell.

Once I moved in, the nightmare began.

He didn’t need locks or chains to keep me there. He learned quickly what I loved and used it against me. He got me a dog, something small and living that I could care about. and then turned that love into leverage. If I tried to leave, he threatened the dog. He threatened me. He threatened himself. He threatened people I loved.

When I did try to run, he found me. He dragged me back and made sure I understood what escape would cost.

This wasn’t new to me, even then.
People I loved had been used to control me my entire life. Fear, responsibility, and attachment had always been weapons pointed in my direction. My nervous system already knew the rules: love came with consequences, and leaving made things worse.

I didn’t stay because I didn’t know better.
I stayed because my body understood danger.

At seventeen, with no money, no family to return to, and no way to support myself, there were no safe options. Staying meant violence. Leaving meant violence. The world outside that apartment wasn’t full of resources or rescue, it was just another unknown I couldn’t survive on my own.

At one point, I tried to end my life.

Not because I wanted to die, but because I couldn’t see a way to live. Abuse has a way of collapsing the future, shrinking your world until every option feels unbearable. When people talk about suicide in abusive situations, they often misunderstand it. It isn’t about weakness. It’s about desperation in a system with no exits.

Then I got pregnant.

I had my daughter at eighteen.

Two weeks after she was born, I found out he had harmed someone I loved. Something in me broke open. I finally left.

That decision almost killed me.

After I ended things he came back to pick up his stuff, and the violence escalated exactly the way survivors are warned it will. He nearly murdered me. Leaving, the thing people insist is simple, was the most dangerous moment of my life.

Even after I got away, the fear didn’t end.

For years, there were threats. Harassment. The constant fear that he would find us, hurt us, or try to take my daughter. I lived with hypervigilance as a baseline, always scanning for danger, always bracing for impact. Abuse doesn’t always end when the relationship does. Sometimes it follows you for years.

Two months after my daughter was born, I entered another long-term relationship. We were together for fifteen years.

We were together for a long time. He never hit me. And for a while, I thought that meant it was okay, that it was safe.

But safety is more than the absence of violence.
It’s how your body feels when you walk into a room. And mine was often bracing.

He could be warm and caring one moment, then cold or critical the next. I never quite knew which version of him I’d get. Living with his family made things even harder. I was often treated like an outsider in my own home.

We both came into that relationship with trauma, and sometimes, when we’re still unhealed, our triggers end up triggering each other.
Old wounds clash with new ones, and without meaning to, you start reacting from pain instead of love.

Some relationships aren’t clearly abusive, but still leave you walking on eggshells.
Some feel safe at first, but over time, you realize you’re slowly disappearing inside them.
And sometimes, two people with a lot of hurt end up hurting each other, even if neither one means to.

We both made a lot of mistakes in the relationship, I’m not here to name villains or call anyone out.
I’m here to name patterns, the ones that keep people stuck, silent, and scared to trust their own experience.

When I finally left that marriage, I took my children and went to a women’s shelter.

I left everything behind. Our home. Our belongings. The life I had spent years building. We started over completely from scratch.

Starting over isn’t empowering the way people imagine.
It’s terrifying.
It’s filling out paperwork while traumatized.
It’s comforting your children while you’re barely holding yourself together.
It’s rebuilding a life while grieving the one you lost, just to stay alive.

It’s trusting strangers with your kids.
It’s sharing space with people you’ve never met.
It’s learning how to feel safe in a shelter when your nervous system still thinks you’re in a war zone.

And it’s the emotions no one prepares you for:

You feel guilty for breaking up your family.
For taking the kids from their dad.
You feel like you abandoned someone, even if that someone hurt you.

And you miss them.
Not because you want to go back, but because they were your everyday.
Even if it was hard, they were a constant. And now everything is different.

People judge you.
Friends disappear.
Family picks sides.
And you find out, sometimes brutally, who really cares and who doesn’t.

And then there’s this strange kind of emptiness:
You finally have freedom, but you don’t know what to do with it.
What do you want?
What do you even like?
When you’ve spent years just surviving, dreaming feels like a risk you’re not sure you know how to take.

That’s the part no one talks about.

This is why “just leave” is never simple.

Because leaving doesn’t mean safety.
It means risk. Loss. Poverty. Retaliation.
It means choosing uncertainty over known harm and hoping you survive the transition.

This is what cages look like when they don’t have locks.
They’re built from fear, conditioning, responsibility, and consequences.
And escaping them doesn’t happen all at once.

It happens in pieces.
Over years.
At great cost.

Section 2: The Psychology of Abuse

To understand why leaving abuse is so complicated, you first have to understand the psychology that holds people in it.

Abuse doesn’t start with bruises or threats.
It starts with confusion.
With charm, connection, someone paying attention to what you need, and then slowly using it against you.

What people on the outside often don’t see is that abuse is a system. It’s not about one bad moment. It’s about a pattern designed to control, confuse, and ultimately dismantle a person’s sense of safety and self.

And it’s not rare.

According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), nearly half of U.S. adult women (47%) and men (44%) report experiencing contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
Roughly 1 in 4 women (24%) and 1 in 7 men (14%) experience severe physical violence from a partner.
About half of women (49%) and men (45%) report experiencing psychological aggression by a partner, including threats, humiliation, insults, and controlling behaviors.
(JAMA, 2024, CDC)

The violence often starts early:
More than 1 in 4 female victims of IPV first experienced it before the age of 18.
And globally, the World Health Organization reports that 1 in 3 women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence by a partner during their lifetime.
(WHO, 2025)

These aren’t isolated stories. They are epidemic patterns.

Here are some of the core psychological dynamics that keep people trapped in these cycles, even when they know something is wrong:

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Trauma Bonding & Psychological Whiplash

Trauma bonding is the emotional glue that forms in abusive relationships. It’s built through cycles of fear, harm, and intermittent kindness.

One day you are screamed at, threatened, or beaten down, physically, emotionally, or psychologically.
The next day you wake up to flowers. Apologies. Tenderness. Care.
Affection delivered as if nothing happened.

And when you try to name the harm, you’re told it didn’t happen the way you remember.
You misunderstood.
You’re exaggerating.
You’re too sensitive.
You’re remembering it wrong.

This constant back-and-forth is profoundly disorienting.

Your nervous system never gets to settle. Your brain is forced to hold two conflicting realities at the same time: danger and love. Over time, your sense of truth erodes. You stop trusting your memory. Your instincts. Yourself.

It can literally make you feel crazy.

When abuse is followed by care or remorse, your brain learns to cling to those brief moments of connection. It tries to survive by minimizing the harm and maximizing the hope.

“If I were better, this wouldn’t be happening.”
“Maybe this time will be different.”
“At least he’s not hitting me.”
“He’s just broken, maybe I can love him through it.”

And then there’s the deeper part, the one most people don’t talk about:

Many of us grew up wishing someone would love us through our worst moments. Through our rage. Our depression. Our mess. We wanted someone who would stay, who wouldn’t leave just because we were struggling or imperfect.

So we learn to love others that way.
We forgive what shouldn’t be forgiven.
We explain away the harm.
We hold space for their brokenness even when they never hold space for ours.

We love people in ways we’ve always wished to be loved, even when it costs us everything.

That isn’t weakness.
That isn’t lack of self-respect.
That is a survival-based blueprint for attachment formed in pain and unmet need.

And when it’s used against us by someone who never intended to love us back, it becomes a trap that feels like love, and a love that feels like duty.

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Learned Helplessness

After enough failed attempts to leave, fight back, or ask for help, many survivors internalize the belief that escape just isn’t possible.

This isn’t weakness. It’s neurological adaptation to powerlessness.

If every time you resist or speak up you’re punished, or ignored by systems that should help, eventually you stop trying. You go numb. You stop trusting your own judgment. That’s not giving up. That’s a trauma response.

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Coercive Control

Not all abuse is physical. Coercive control is about domination through isolation, surveillance, financial dependency, threats, and emotional manipulation.

It’s how an abuser creates a world where they are the center, and everything outside that world becomes unreachable, including help.

This might look like:

• Cutting you off from friends and family
• Monitoring your phone or internet use
• Controlling money or transportation
• Making you feel like no one else would want you
• Undermining your confidence and decision-making
• Controlling when or how you sleep, eat, or leave the house

And here’s what makes it harder:
Most abusers don’t think they’re being abusive.

They may see themselves as protective, hurt, or misunderstood. They may tell themselves, and others, that they’re just “reacting” to you. They may say you’re the one causing problems, and in private, they convince you of that. In public, they may come across as kind, helpful, charming, even generous.

They don’t need to act like villains. They just need to make you look unstable, and themselves look reasonable.

That’s what makes coercive control so hard to name and even harder to prove.
It’s subtle. It’s deniable.
And to everyone on the outside, it often doesn’t look like abuse at all.

But to the person living inside it, it feels like being slowly erased.

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Responsibility and Shame

Many survivors carry a deep sense of shame, not just for staying, but for being in the relationship at all.

Abusers often exploit empathy. They position themselves as victims, saying things like:

“You’re the only one who understands me.”
“If you leave, you’ll destroy me.”
“You’re overreacting. You’re crazy.”

If you’re someone who was raised to care for others at your own expense, that pressure hits deep. You’re not just surviving abuse, you’re trying to protect your abuser, your children, your reputation, and your sense of identity all at once.

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Systemic Failures

Even when someone does try to leave, they often run headfirst into broken systems:

• Police don’t take them seriously
• Courts grant custody to abusers
• Shelters are full
• Financial assistance is limited or temporary
• Cultural or religious communities pressure them to stay

This is especially true for survivors who are young, disabled, queer, BIPOC, undocumented, or without family support.

Telling someone to “just leave” without offering resources is like handing them a key to a house that’s on fire and saying, Good luck.

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When Trauma Is Used Against You

Another painful reality many survivors face is that the impact of abuse is often weaponized against them, especially when children are involved.

People who have lived in prolonged trauma may experience mental health struggles like anxiety, depression, complex PTSD, or dissociation. These are not signs of weakness. They are signs of a nervous system that has survived long-term harm.

But in custody battles or courtrooms, those trauma responses can be twisted.
Survivors are called unstable, dramatic, or emotionally unfit.
Their trauma symptoms, caused by the abuse, are framed as evidence that they’re the problem.

At the same time, abusers may use the children as leverage:

• Threatening to take them away
• Undermining or sabotaging the parent-child bond
• Turning the children against the survivor through guilt, fear, or manipulation
• Using legal systems to prolong contact and control under the guise of “co-parenting”

This is one of the most devastating parts of post-separation abuse:
You leave to protect your children, and then the system punishes you for the damage that protection required.

And to be clear:
I’m not claiming to have experienced all of these things personally.
But this is the reality for many survivors.
These are the dynamics that keep people silent, stuck, and unseen, not because they don’t want to leave, but because doing so puts everything at risk.

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What Abuse Actually Does

Abuse is not just about what happens to your body.
It’s about what happens to your mind, nervous system, identity, and belief in your own worth over time.

It takes away your options, then convinces you that the problem is you.
It rewires your instincts to serve your survival, even if it costs you your freedom.

This is what people mean when they say:
Some cages don’t have locks.

Section 3: What Real Support Looks Like

If you’ve never experienced abuse, it can be hard to understand why someone would stay. But if your first instinct is to say, “You need to leave,” stop.

That is not support.

It might come from a place of care. But without context, resources, or safety planning, that kind of advice can sound more like blame than help. It implies the survivor isn’t doing enough, when in reality, they’re often making dozens of micro-calculations every day just to stay alive, stay sane, or protect their children.

Here’s what real support actually looks like, and what it doesn’t.

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DO: Believe Them

If someone trusts you enough to open up, that is a gift.
Don’t interrogate. Don’t minimize. Don’t say:

“But he seems like a good guy.”
“Are you sure it’s really abuse?”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.”

Just say:

“I believe you.”
“I’m so sorry that happened.”
“You don’t deserve this.”

Being believed is the first step toward healing.
Being doubted is often what keeps people stuck.

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DON’T: Push Them to Leave on Your Timeline

Leaving is not a single moment. It is a long, strategic process that often takes time, and repeated attempts.

Pushing someone to leave before they have a plan, resources, or emotional readiness can backfire. It can even increase danger.

Support means honoring the survivor’s autonomy, not replacing it with your own urgency.

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DO: Ask What They Need

Every survivor needs different things. Ask:

“What would be helpful right now?”
“What do you need to feel safer today?”
“How can I support you without pressure?”

Some survivors may need rides, emergency money, a safe place to crash, someone to keep documents, or help navigating the legal system. Others just need consistent emotional support.

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DON’T: Make It About You

This isn’t the time to say:

“I could never let someone treat me like that.”
“I’d leave if I were you.”
“I just want to fix it for you.”

Those responses center your discomfort, not their reality.

Instead, show up with humility. Know that your role is to witness and support, not to control or rescue.

DO: Offer Tangible Support (If You Can)

Practical help matters:

• Offer to store important documents
• Help them research resources or lawyers
• Provide transportation
• Babysit during court or therapy appointments
• If possible, offer temporary housing or financial assistance

If you can’t do those things, even checking in regularly can make someone feel less alone.

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DO: Understand the System Is Often Not Safe

Know that survivors often have very good reasons for not going to police, CPS, or court:

• They may fear losing custody
• They may have been ignored or retraumatized by past systems
• The abuser may be using the system to maintain control

If you truly want to help, don’t push someone toward systems they don’t trust.
Help them navigate those systems if they choose to engage. Be a witness. Be a buffer. Be backup, not pressure.

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DO: Educate Yourself

Don’t put the burden of teaching you on the survivor.
Read. Learn. Ask informed questions.

Familiarize yourself with terms like:

• Coercive control
• Trauma bonding
• Post-separation abuse
• Protective parenting
• Legal and economic abuse

Knowledge allows you to offer better support without unintentionally causing harm.

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What to Say Instead of “Just Leave”

Here are trauma-informed alternatives:

“I believe you, and I’m here for you.”
“I trust you to know what’s safest right now.”
“You don’t have to go through this alone.”
“If or when you want to leave, I’ll help however I can.”

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DO: Set Loving Boundaries Without Punishing Them

If you care about someone who’s in an abusive relationship, it can be incredibly painful to watch them stay, or leave and go back. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed, angry, heartbroken, or exhausted.

You’re allowed to have those feelings.
You’re also allowed to set boundaries if supporting them is affecting your own health or life.

But here’s the key:
You can step back without stepping away completely.
You can say:

“I care about you deeply, and I can’t keep being part of this cycle right now. I understand you’re in a really hard situation, and when you’re ready for help, I will be here.”

What helps most is not ultimatums, but consistency.
Letting them know your support will still be there when they’re ready can be the thread that keeps them connected to hope.

Because most people don’t leave until they’re ready, emotionally, financially, physically, and logistically.
And rushing someone to act before they’re ready can be more dangerous than waiting.

And just to be clear:
Neither of you is a bad person.

• The survivor is not weak or irresponsible for staying.
• The supporter is not cold or selfish for needing space.

You are both trying to survive, protect, and love people the best you can with what you have.
That’s not failure, that’s humanity.

Section 4: You Are Not Alone, and You Are Not Powerless

I want to be honest about something:

I’m not a therapist.
I’m not a lawyer or a crisis worker.
I’m a survivor, someone who’s lived through a lot, learned the hard way, and is still standing.

And I know something that people in pain often forget:

You are not powerless just because you’ve been hurt.

You may feel stuck and broken.
You may feel like the world stopped hearing you a long time ago.

But you are not broken, you are adapted.
You’ve been surviving in impossible conditions with strength, strategy, and heart.
And that is not weakness, that is resilience in its rawest form.

If you are in something now, or still carrying the weight of what you’ve been through, I want you to know this:

You don’t have to do it alone.

You can reach out to me.
You don’t have to have a plan or the perfect words. You don’t have to explain everything.
You just have to be human. That’s enough.

📧 wendikehn@gmail.com

I can’t promise I’ll have all the answers.
I’m not a crisis line or a formal service.
But I will do what I can, whether that means:

• Sitting with you while you sort through your thoughts
• Helping you think through a safety plan
• Pointing you toward real resources in your area
• Simply listening, and believing you, without judgment

You are not a burden.
You don’t need to be “ready.”
You don’t need to be sure.
You just need someone who gets it and I do.

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If You’re Ready to Talk to a Shelter or Hotline

Women’s shelters are there for you and often have the resources, help, and support you need.
They won’t push. They won’t pressure. They’ll help you take one step at a time.

Shelters can often offer:

• Emergency housing
• Help acquiring important legal documents like birth certificates, and social security cards
• Help getting medical care
• Safety planning
• Legal support
• Help with custody or protective orders
• Advocacy for you and your children
• A soft place to land when you have nowhere else to go

📞 National Domestic Violence Hotline (U.S.)
Call: 800-799-SAFE (7233)
Text: START to 88788
Or visit: www.thehotline.org

It’s confidential. It’s 24/7. You don’t have to be sure, just willing to talk.

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Final Words

To anyone still in it:
You are not stupid, weak, or crazy. You are doing what you need to survive.
And that means you’re already strong.

To anyone who made it out but still struggles:
Healing takes time. Don’t let anyone rush your process. You are not behind. You are rebuilding something sacred.

To anyone trying to support someone else:
Thank you. Just by showing up, you are already doing more than you know.

Whether you’re still in the storm or clawing your way out of it:
You are not alone, and you are not powerless.

Yes, leaving is hard, maybe one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.
But it’s also a gift.
A gift to finally begin healing.
To come back to yourself.
To learn who you are underneath all the survival.
And to realize, maybe for the first time, just how damn capable and amazing you really are.

With love, Wendi Kehn

Thank you for reading.
If this resonated with you, I offer 1:1 virtual peer support sessions, intuitive readings, energy mapping, poetry, workbooks, books, tees, and more here at Hellbloom Haven

You are allowed to bloom. Even after everything. Especially after everything.