The details and circumstances of our experiences may be hugely different, but the feelings underpinning them are essentially the same. It’s these relatable feelings, not unrelatable particulars, that create meaningful, healing, empowering connection between humans regardless of our differences.

I learned this crucial lesson about empathy over the course of my life, each time with more clarity and precision. Connection is about identifying with feelings, not circumstances. Focusing on the emotions as we share our stories allows us to empower others who have gone, or are still going, through the same – even when the circumstances of their experience are drastically different from ours.

Throughout my life, I had to deal a lot with one type of experience – emotional abuse. In very simple words, it is the situation where people encourage you to be vulnerable, and then use your vulnerability against you. I had a lot of that shit happen to me growing up, long before I knew how to name it. I had it happen to me in adulthood, both in personal and professional relationships. I saw it happen to many people I came to know as well. So before fast-food psychologists and American coaches come at me with victim-blaming – saying that abuse only happens to people with childhood traumas, those with poor boundaries, and those who have internalized victim mentality – I call bullshit. Abuse can happen to anyone who is committed to practicing real vulnerability in their relationships.

So what is vulnerability about? It’s about putting down the armor and showing up as your authentic self. It’s about saying what you really think and communicating how you really feel. It’s about meaning what you say, and expecting the same from the other. It’s about only making commitments that you’re ready to make good on. It’s about only professing what you’re willing to practice. It’s about believing in your own inherent worth, and the inherent worth of the other person. Vulnerability is the only path towards meaningful, profound, and effective connection with another human being – be it friendship, or romantic love, or business collaboration.

Here's the hard truth — wherever there is an intention to build a meaningful relationship and the willingness to be vulnerable, there will be a risk of emotional abuse.

So if you want a quick, fail-proof recipe How to never get abused, here you go – don’t ever try to build meaningful, deep connection with people. Don’t aim for effective relationships. Always be your cocktail-party self. Shallow and phony. And lonely.

This last part is what most of us don’t recognize. Yes, we’d all like to be immune to emotional abuse. But we don’t want to be lonely. And we don’t realize that loneliness is the price of that immunity. The opposite of loneliness – meaningful, profound connection with other humans – can only be brought about through vulnerability, and the risk of abuse is inherent in it. So the real question is not about becoming immune or resistant to abuse, but about recognizing it when it happens, finding support within and without, dealing with it effectively, and also challenging systems around us that enable and normalize it.

Systemic change is the reason why sharing stories of abuse – be it emotional, physical, sexual – is so important. In the vast majority of cases I’ve observed throughout my life, including my own, abuse doesn’t result solely from the unhealthy dynamic of power between two individuals. Rather, if we zoom out and see a bigger, contextual picture, it becomes obvious that abuse in many relationships relies on existing systems of oppression, injustice, and inequality. So how do we help the survivors? Empathy and support are the first steps. And, it shouldn’t stop here. Holding our culture accountable, naming systemic injustices, and dismantling oppression come next. As Brené Brown says, we cannot forever pull people one by one out of this murky river. Instead, we must go find and stem its headwaters.

Over the last five years, I’ve got the biggest share of emotional abuse in my entire life. In 2015, after finishing my first novel dealing with intersectional social justice, I got face-to-face with the tough reality: talent is universal, and opportunity is not. No matter how much artistic value my book held and how much social relevance it could bring to the table, no matter how many people it could benefit and how many life-changing conversations it could spark, I remained a person from a third-world country trapped amidst socioeconomic disadvantage. There was no way I could get that product off the ground on my own. There was no way I could put it on a platform where it could most effectively serve the people it was meant to serve. I had no people in my immediate social circles who could help with a project like that either. So I started looking for people on social media who shared my social justice values and my artistic mission and, at the same time, had the opportunities and access I didn’t have. Who, as I wholeheartedly believed, would be willing to share those opportunities and access, which they got through their privilege, in order to support my work.

Finding those people, I didn’t ask for their help immediately. Instead, I first wanted to find out who they really were. I wanted to get to know them as people, even though we were separated by many time zones. I built relationships with them in a gradual, natural, boundaried, authentic way, aiming for meaningful connection.

And, it never ended well. To be more exact, it invariably ended in them emotionally abusing me. The consistency of abuse from people who eloquently portrayed themselves as empathy gurus, social justice advocates, and equality champions did break my heart every time. Because unlike them, I was genuine in those relationships. Unlike them, I was serious about my intentions and honest about my values. As it happened over and over again, aside from breaking my heart, it led me to learn hugely important lessons about self-worth, connection, and power. The lessons that didn’t only help me to rise strong and continue daring greatly in my individual journey but also could effectively empower others against emotional abuse. The lessons about systems in our society and culture that need to be changed.

These lessons are why in this series of posts, I wanna share with you four stories of emotional abuse from my journey that are indeed remarkable. They are highly illustrative of why abuse happens, how it works, and what impact it has on our lives. They are very reflective of how abuse, happening between two individual people, is in fact underpinned by systems of oppression in larger society, not readily visible but nevertheless very real. They also debunk some common mythology about abuse – including that promoted by mainstream social justice movements.

So in these stories, you’re gonna meet four people: an Instagram hijabi poet, a vegan make-up artist, a Christian fashion stylist, and a talent agent from Hollywood, who was my most epic, literally Hall-of-Fame-level abuser. Two of these people were men, and two were women. Two were straight, and the other two were gay. One was Muslim, one was Christian, one was agnostic, and one believed in fast-food spirituality BS as his religion (details in Episode 4). There were all different ethnicities. So here’s the myth-buster #1: it wasn’t their gender, or race, or sexuality, or religion that made these people abusers. What they had in common, instead, were three things.

First: Loud and eloquent value statements. They all went to great lengths to showcase their “good hearts” and profess their “abundance of empathy” in their Instagram feeds, their books, their podcasts, and their talks. Some of them directly made money from leveraging this public image to sell their products. Others made these statements just in order to get in the vulnerability/spirituality/social justice trend and to be seen as ‘good’ and ‘progressive’ – camouflaging their disowned hustle for self-worth and likability.

Second: Their self-worth, in contrast to what it looked like on the surface, was deeply broken. Cowardice, hypocrisy, grandiosity, and greed informing their abusive behavior manifested themselves gradually but steadily and could be clearly traced down to scarcity – core beliefs about not being good enough and hustling to appear good rather than actually being good.

And third: They all had huge socioeconomic privilege over me, which, once they became aware of it, was weaponized against my work, against the evidence backing up its social relevance, and even against my legitimacy as an artist.

Now, privilege is key to understanding abuse. Privilege is simply a set of unearned advantages, opportunities, rights, freedoms, access, and power that we have in life. It’s all the benefits that are not the result of our effort, our choice, and our work in life. It’s about the good things that we have that other people don’t have for no fault of their own.

Wanna some examples? Privilege is being born in a developed country, not a third-world one. Privilege is having access to higher education and access to employment in a big economy. Privilege is being male in a patriarchal society, being white in a white-supremacist society, being straight/cis-gender in a heterosexist/transphobic society, and being Christian in an Islamophobic society. Privilege is being middle-class or upper-class in a classist and capitalist society, whose culture holds as foundational the myth of meritocracy (hello America). Privilege is having a supportive family who are here for you no matter what. Privilege is having successful people among your friends, ready to empower and uplift you.

I could go on for pages, but I think you get the idea: privilege is what, for no merit of your own, sets you up for success and gives you a head start in the race called life. There would be nothing wrong about it, if not the reality that the same randomness that gives your lucky ass unearned head start puts someone no less worthy (and sometimes way more talented) at unearned disadvantage. So in the system where power and success are thought of and treated as finite, your fortunate life comes at the cost of someone else’s oppression and trauma. And the first function of privilege is, when we have it, we live without any awareness about it. We walk through life with the invisible backpack of unearned rights, freedoms, opportunities and other benefits; we take them for granted, and we assume that everybody has the same – because this assumption allows us to believe that the success we enjoy results purely from our efforts. That belief is convenient and very much aligned with most culturla messages we get. But then we come across a person whose story or lived experience open our eyes to our unearned privilege and the [possibly decisive] role it played in our success – and here the real shitshow starts.

Because our privilege, unless actively explored and worked through, triggers shame for us when someone or something exposes it. Yes, it’s shame and not guilt. Guilt is about what we do, and shame is about who we are. In the culture of meritocracy, the culture that equates your self-worth with what you’ve achieved, the truth about your achievements being more shaped by your luck than your effort is intolerable, and its experienced as shame unless or until you wrap some critical awareness around it.

And what behaviors does shame drive in relationships? Short-term: denial, blame, and rationalization. Long-term: hypocrisy, cowardice, manipulation, gaslighting.

Now, if you take these long-term shame-driven behaviors, and combine them with the third function of privilege – when you have privilege, you can get away with rationalizing and naturalizing injustice and other forms of gaslighting – you get a perfect recipe for emotional abuse. Then just target it against a person who’s disadvantaged in the area of life where you’re privileged and who nevertheless practices vulnerability in pursuit of meaningful connection – and your abuse will be as brutal and harmful as it gets.

This is exactly what happened to me so many times over the last five years. I don’t regret being vulnerable and authentic with those people. My courage reflects who I am, and I would do it again if I were back to those situations. What I do regret, what I learned, and what I wanna share with y’all in this article is why I didn’t recognize abuse early and why I didn’t walk away from those people before they harmed my life too much. That is what I would do differently, and what everyone who experiences abuse should do differently. If you follow these four stories through, the key learnings will allow you to learn what I learned at a much smaller cost. And if you’re a person looking for meaningful connection in your life, chances are you will need these lessons at one point. Maybe, if you suspect you’re being emotionally abused now, you need to act upon these lessons today.

A couple notes before we go in:

1. I will not mention the real names of these people. "Name, shame, and defame" has never been my approach. As emotionally gratifying as it might be for me to reveal their identities and imagine them feeling exposed and ashamed reading this story, I'm not gonna do it. Because save for my own emotional gratification and my toxic masculinity, this act of vengeance will not create any added value. It won't bring about any accountability on their part given their huge privilege over me. It will make them further drown in shame about who they are. Since I know their abusive behavior was caused by shame and scarcity in the first place, it would be like me seeing they're on fire and then throwing on more gasoline. Their shit is theirs to deal with. It's not my job to heal and take care of their scarcity. But I'm not gonna contribute to it.

   Instead, my intention sharing these stories is to empower y'all, my community, against emotional abuse. To help us grow critical awareness about oppression as the environment enabling it. And, to support meaningful conversations about resilience and self-worth. Therefore -- the world doesn't need to know those people's names — but it absolutely needs to see their shit.

2. Please note that privilege is intersectional by its nature. There are many dimensions of random inequality (gender, race, sexuality, class, place or residence, immigration status etc.), and your disadvantage in one dimension may be effectively outweighed by your privilege in another. Likewise, benefitting from privilege in one dimension may be completely blocked because of huge disadvantage in another. When we look at situations where abuse is happening, we have to assess which dimensions of inequality have more relative weight given the context of this particular relationship. For example, my male privilege or my white privilege may be irrelevant if the relational dynamic is mostly shaped by the economic inequality between me and my partner. This will show up clearly in the first story.

Buckled up for the uncomfortable truth? Let's dive in.