The picture shows a pattern.

The man in the frame barely exists. He is there to validate. The woman exists mainly through reflection. Through being seen. Through external confirmation. That is how the self is held together. I have met several women like this. The attachment feels familiar to the pawn. Endless photos, endless posting, endless need for validation. As long as the audience confirms, things remain calm. When validation drops, the audience turns into a threat. Not because people attack, but because they don’t confirm.

What happens next is predictable. The closest people pay the price: the ex, the partner, the relationship at that moment. Pawns are used against pawns. Triangulation follows. Sometimes escalates. When there is a child, the pattern repeats. The child sits in the same position. When validation is insufficient, pressure increases. The child no longer has an audience. Everyone becomes a potential threat. They think I’m stupid. They think I’m ugly. I shouldn’t talk. I’m wrong. My parent is right. We see this everywhere: abusive relationships, “Are We Dating the Same Guy” groups, repeating dynamics across platforms. You can write reports forever. The pattern is visible.

The trend is increasing. The violence is increasing. And the child is still the one paying the price. Some illnesses are real. Others function primarily as shields within these systems, so I met the woman with fibromyalgia. In recent years, chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia have increasingly been discussed in relation to stress and trauma earlier in life. Some clinicians focus on measurable pain points. Others cautiously explore psychological histories. There is still no consensus.

What follows is not a medical conclusion. It is a pattern. I was in a relationship with that woman for about eight months. She lived in constant pain. Exhaustion. Complaints. Doctor visits. Fibromyalgia, according to several physicians. She needed care. Support. Understanding. I became the caretaker. Her previous relationship was described as abusive and chaotic. The story was familiar: she had suffered deeply, and the consequences were still present.

She had a son another unseen pawn. A young adolescent. Quiet. Withdrawn. Poor grades at school. He spent most of his time indoors, gaming. Few friends. Conversations were short and cautious. Eye contact fleeting. Without explanation, he understood the rules. When I arrived, he went to his room. No discussion. No resistance. A man in the house meant withdrawal.

This was not shyness. It was learned behavior. After several months, I began speaking with him more regularly. Carefully. Slowly. What became visible was loneliness. A sense of worthlessness. Fear of saying the wrong thing. When his mother became angry, she told him he was stupid. That nothing about him was good enough. These moments were not isolated. They were repetitive. At school, there was no diagnosis. No label. No ADHD. No autism. Nothing that would trigger attention. A quiet child without a label does not exist in the system. I had already seen it in his eyes. They were flat. Empty.

This was not normal adolescence. Anyone familiar with emotional humiliation recognizes the pattern immediately. At some point, it became clear that this environment was not safe. This boy needed help. At the very least, he needed someone outside the household who could see him. I added him on social media. We exchanged occasional messages. Nothing dramatic. No accusations. Just contact. That was enough to change something. When his mother noticed that I was reaching out to him, the atmosphere shifted. For people who rely heavily on external validation, there is one unacceptable threat: being seen as imperfect. Not as a flawless mother. Not as a caring, suffering woman. She always told me the boy was smart, perfect and her sunshine. The reality was not seen.

Shortly after, the relationship ended. Leaving did not feel like a normal breakup. It felt like escaping a closed system, one that pulls you in while simultaneously pushing you away. The personal details of this relationship are described elsewhere. They do not matter for understanding the mechanism, which occurs far more often than we like to admit. Afterward, I tried to reach the boy. His WhatsApp profile picture was gone. Messages unanswered. Facebook deleted. Instagram disappeared. He vanished. I drove by the neighborhood occasionally. I never saw him again. Something felt deeply wrong.

A few years later, I heard what had happened, through a friend of hers. One year later, after i had met him for the last time, her soon took his own life. Out of disbelief, I checked her social media pages again. I had not looked at them in a long time. Before that, he was almost never there. Sometimes he appeared in the background of a picture; sometimes he dissapered from the pages all together. Her pages had always been filled with holidays, expensive trips, and different men. Those men were the ones who took pictures, during the honeymoon phase. The same images were then reused andlessly on WhatsApp and social media. Endless photos. Endless validation. A child did not fit that image. It is easier to appear available and desirable when no child is visible in the frame. (Non-confirmation is punished by removal from the frame (sometimes literally) and the image. You are painted black, assigned to the army rather than the confirming audience. This status is provissional and reversible).

So, he was absent. And then, suddenly, he was there, Photos appeared. Posts appeared. She was in tears. She had lost her son. The grief was visible, overwhelming. Messages of sympathy followed immediately, before the holiday pictures started rolling again. Hearts appeared, love quotes followed, and slowly everything returned to normal. Everyone felt for this woman with fibromyalgia, and that she was so strong. The system responded exactly as expected. Her pain was seen, the mother with the ilness and how nobody saw her true self. Her loss was acknowledged. Her story was protected. The child, however, was already gone.

This is not an isolated story. Children growing up under chronic emotional pressure learn early that speaking has consequences. Silence becomes safety. Withdrawal becomes strategy. When no diagnosis is present, nothing alerts the system. Schools see poor grades, not despair. Doctors see physical complaints, not fear. The family narrative remains intact. The adult is visible. The child disappears. Until there is nothing left to see.