HAVE YOU EVER LOVED SOMEONE WHO ONLY EXISTED WHEN THEY WERE SUFFERING?

Have you ever been left with that strange feeling after a conversation — that you gave a lot, received little, and somehow still felt guilty about it? This text is about what no one says regarding those who live as victims in their most intimate relationships. By Marcello de Souza

It was a Thursday night. I remember the sound of the fan and the cup of coffee that went cold without me noticing — because for forty minutes I was completely immersed in a conversation that, at some point, had stopped being between the two of us and had become all about her. About the family that never understood her, the friend who betrayed her, the job that diminished her, the life that didn’t recognize what she deserved. When I hung up the phone, I found myself staring at the cold cup and realized I couldn’t remember anything I had intended to say when I called. Not due to inattention. Because there was no room. And the most disturbing part: I felt guilty for noticing this.

That residue — guilt for noticing what was happening — is where this text begins. Because I know this residue from the inside. I’ve been the one on the line. And, needing to be honest with myself, I’ve also been, in other relationships, the one who occupied the center without knowing I was doing it.

This is what I need to talk about.

The pain that doesn’t want to move

Every person carries marks. Relationships that left scars, moments when abandonment was real, phases when the world seemed systematically unjust. Human life is also made of fractures — and pretending they don’t exist would be a cruel dishonesty.

What is up for discussion is something else: what a person does with those fractures over time.

There are those who carry them as part of a story — painful, yes, but part of something larger that continues to be written. And there are those who install them at the very center of their own identity, so that the fracture ceases to be something that happened and becomes what the person is. Someone who was abandoned and becomes, forever, the abandoned one. Someone who was betrayed and comes to exist, in every new relationship, as someone who will be betrayed again — and who, unconsciously, organizes everything to confirm this.

When pain becomes identity, it needs to be sustained. Sustaining an identity requires that the surrounding environment continually confirms it — that relationships organize themselves in a specific way, with the sufferer at the center, and everyone else in orbit around them, gravitating between the guilt of being okay and the obligation to repair something they didn’t cause.

What happens inside a love relationship

In the beginning, there is something that seems like depth — an emotional openness that seduces, a vulnerability that seems rare, an intimacy that arises too quickly to be questioned. You feel special for having access to something this person apparently doesn’t show just anyone.

Over time, you realize that openness has a very specific direction. It always goes one way only. The other person talks a lot about what they suffered, what they lost, what they didn’t receive — and when you try to bring something of your own to the center of the conversation, the subject gently returns to them, or you feel the moment wasn’t right, that they needed you more than you needed them.

You begin to regulate your own emotional state not by what you feel, but by what the other person can handle. You learn not to be too much — not too happy, because that seems insensitive, nor too sad, because that would take attention away from the other’s pain. You come to occupy an increasingly smaller space within the relationship that, in theory, exists for both of you.

And you do this thinking it’s love.

What friendship reveals when the mask falls

In friendships, the pattern is even harder to name because camaraderie covers up the imbalance for longer. A friend who is always in crisis seems to need you — and the feeling of being needed is, for many, confused with the feeling of being loved.

Pay close attention to what happens when you are the one in crisis.

There are friends who show up. Who stay. Who listen without turning your pain into a springboard for their own pain. And there are friends who bring the conversation back to themselves — not out of malice, but because they genuinely cannot exist relationally anywhere other than the center of suffering. When you are doing badly, they show up more. When you are doing well, they disappear. And you learn, without anyone formalizing it, that to keep this friendship you need to be sufficiently vulnerable.

I say this without comfort — because there is something in this dynamic that also tells us something about ourselves: if we remain unaware for so long, it’s because, to some extent, we needed to be needed. Which makes us not only those who are captured, but also those who, in their own way, were also seeking something in that arrangement.

The family — where it all began and where it hurts most to recognize

It is in the family that this pattern usually originates. And it is also in the family that it is hardest to name — because there, real love, shared history, moral obligation, and genuine affection are all mixed together in a way that makes any cleaner analysis nearly impossible.

It could be the mother who was always the center of suffering in the house — and around whose pain all the children learned to organize their own existence. The father who never talked about himself without recounting an injustice suffered, an opportunity denied. The sibling who was always the fragile one, who mobilized the entire family around their crises — while the others learned not to have crises so as not to overload the system.

Growing up inside such a dynamic teaches things that are in no book and that no one verbalizes: that love is proven through sacrifice, that being okay is a form of abandonment, that loyalty to the group requires you not to occupy more space than the one designated for you.

And the most silent lesson: that your pain matters less. Not because anyone said so. But because the whole environment confirmed it — every time attention reorganized itself around another’s suffering, every time your achievement was minimized so as not to overshadow someone else’s difficulty.

What no one has the courage to say — about both sides

Here is where I need to be uncomfortable with both sides of this conversation.

For those who live with someone in this pattern: your compassion is not innocent. There is something in you that chose to stay — not only out of kindness, but because being someone’s supporter has a reward that is rarely admitted out loud. You feel necessary. Moral. Superior, in a way you would never admit. And while the other person is the one who suffers, you never have to be the one who errs. This is a comfortable position disguised as generosity. Looking at this requires an honesty that hurts more than blaming the other person.

For those who live as permanent victims: the pain you carry is real. And it is also true that you learned to use it — not out of malice, but because it was the only language the world around you taught that guaranteed presence. But that language has a cost you may not have calculated yet: it prevents you from knowing what it is like to be loved when you are whole. You only know the love that arrives when you are broken. And you will never know if the other person would stay for you — because you never allowed yourself not to be in collapse to find out.

Neither of these positions is the victim. Neither is the victimizer. Both are learned and ancient ways of surviving emotionally — that have become too old for the present you could be living.

What you feel but can’t say

I am going to name some things you might feel but have never been able to put into words.

You feel guilt for being okay when the other person is not. Not because you caused their distress — but because your well-being seems an unacceptable contrast next to their pain.

You feel anger — and immediately afterward, shame for the anger. Because how can you be angry at someone who suffers?

You feel tired. Not the tiredness of having done too much, but the specific tiredness of always being in the role of emotional support for someone who never seems to get better — and who gets worse exactly when you start to pull back a little.

You miss yourself within the relationship. You miss when you could talk about what you feel without calculating if it’s the right moment. You miss when being okay didn’t need a justification.

These feelings are not small. And they are not signs that you are a bad person. They are signs that something is structurally imbalanced — and that your internal system has been trying to warn you about this for longer than you recognize.

What happens inside those who live this way

Those who build their identity around pain usually learned, very early on, that it wasn’t safe to exist fully. That there was a price to pay for being okay, for wanting too much, for taking up too much space. And that vulnerability was the only state that guaranteed the other person would stay close.

This learning was not a choice. It was an adaptation. A way to survive within a system that did not offer unconditional love — the kind of love that doesn’t need your pain to be activated, that doesn’t disappear when you are well, that doesn’t require you to be fragile to deserve presence.

What happens to those who didn’t receive this is a silent and devastating belief: that being loved requires suffering. That pain is the currency of affection. That giving up pain means risking abandonment.

Seeing this clearly is not to absolve. It is to see that what looks like a strategy of control is, almost always, an ancient cry from someone who never learned they could be loved without being in collapse.

The choice this text invites you to make

If you recognized yourself in the one who stays close: the question is not whether you should stay or leave. It is what you are willing to do with clarity. Because clarity is the only real antidote to emotional capture — not cold distance, not abandonment, but the honesty to say what you perceive, name what you feel, establish what you are not willing to concede. Without cruelty. But also without the silence you were using as a way not to hurt the one who hurts.

If you recognized yourself in the one who suffers: the question is not whether the pain is real. It is. The question is what you want to do with it from now on. There is a huge difference between being a witness to your own pain and being its hostage. And that difference is not crossed with willpower — it is crossed with the courage to ask what exists in you beyond the wound. Who are you when you are not suffering? What do you want when you are not trying to be repaired?

And if you recognized yourself in both sides — know that this is more common than anyone admits. The patterns we live in relationships are rarely one-sided. Frequently, we are captured in some bonds and protagonists of the same pattern in others — because we all learned twisted forms of love before we learned freer ones.

Including me.

Relational maturity is not the absence of difficult patterns. It is the ability to see them — in yourself before seeing them in others — and to choose, with that sight, a different path. Even if that path requires conversations you had been putting off. Even if it means disappointing those who expected you to stay in the same place.

You do not need to be the territory where another’s pain plants its flag.

If this text touched something you hadn’t yet been able to name, there is much more waiting for you. On my blog, hundreds of texts explore what is deepest, most difficult, and most transformative in human relationships — far from clichés, close to what is real. Visit marcellodesouza.com.br and continue this conversation with yourself.

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