Don’t freak out, but the chances of you or someone you know being in an abusive relationship are high (actually, yes, we should be freaking out about this). A recent study showed that nearly 60 percent of all young women have experienced abuse. In Another study 72 percent of women reported that being ridiculed by their abusive partners had the greatest impact on them, followed by threats of abuse, jealousy, and restriction (or isolation).

If that’s not scary enough, 4% of the population are sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings. I know what you’re thinking…4% doesn’t sound like much…but that’s 12 million sociopaths in the U.S. alone. Yikes.

Can I be honest? I believe the word “abuse” gets easily tossed around so I want to be clear: having a fight with your partner in which you both say things you regret is not emotional abuse. Your boyfriend forgetting your birthday is not emotional abuse. Instead, a few examples of physical, sexual and emotional abuse look like:

1. Your partner frequently speaks to you in a disrespectful manner, talks down to you, criticizes you, tells you you’re overreacting or makes you feel down about yourself.

2. Your partner is continuously jealous and/or limits where you can go, what you can wear, who you can see and who you can talk to.

3. You find yourself over analyzing and apologizing frequently, because even if you did nothing wrong, it feels like you did. This is Master Manipulation, at its finest. Not only has your partner behaved poorly, but he or she has found a way to manipulate you into believing that their behavior is (and will continue to be) your fault.

4. Your partner breaks things when they are mad. This behavior is used as punishment or used to scare a person into submission.

5. You experience extreme highs and lows with your parter. In other words, your relationship thrives on chaos.

6. Your partner slut shames (using sexual insults toward someone including yourself) P.S. that’s literally never okay…in any situation.

7. Your partner doesn’t seem to want you to feel good about yourself. If you do, you might realize you could do better elsewhere (because you can). Let’s be real, your partner should be your biggest cheerleader when it comes to making positive changes.

Red flags are there to help you. This may sound obvious to you because you might think you know what abuse looks like — but keep in mind that physical and psychological torture can be subtle.

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Dealing with the aftermath of abuse can be a real challenge, especially on your mind and heart. The emotional scars of abuse can stay with you long after the abuser has left the relationship. However, choosing to stay with an abuser will have even worse emotional and/or physical consequences. Don’t be surprised if you take longer to heal after an abusive relationship because the process of rebuilding eroded self-worth, restoring normal adrenaline levels, and finding inner strength not previously known takes time.

I’m not a doctor or an expert, but if you need help 1–800–799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline can give you professional guidance. Always keep in mind:

You are lovable.

You deserve respect.

You are powerful.

You are resilient.

You should know that being a victim of abuse has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence or even their social position, rather their vulnerability.

If you see these “red flags” in your relationship, please do not choose to remain stuck in the comfort or familiarity, but instead trust yourself enough to bring yourself safely out of your current situation.

I wish I could somehow show you the look on people’s faces when I remind them to take care of their mental health. Some people react with a smile, others look at me like I am speaking an entirely different language to them. When I tell people that I am sick with a common illness like the cold, they send me their best wishes and encourage me to rest, see a doctor, drink plenty of water, take it easy etc.

However, when a person is sick with a mental illness, they rarely receive the same compassion and understanding. Why is that? I don’t have all the answers, but if I had to guess it would be because so many of us don’t know how to recognize a mental illness and/or we don’t feel comfortable sharing our real emotions out of fear of oversharing or being misunderstood in a society that highlights only the best parts of their lives.

Sure, I joke about how the traffic is making me “crazy” or how my professor might be “driving me nuts,” but the reality is that approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. (thats 43.8 million) experience mental illness in a given year. Additionally, approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S. (9.8 million) experience a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.

That means that 1 out of every 5 adults is highly likely to have experienced prolonged depression, feelings of extreme highs and lows, excessive fears, worries and anxieties, suicidal thoughts, dramatic changes in eating or sleeping habits, social withdrawal…the list goes on. For those of you that have never experienced any of these things — please tell me your secret. But for most of us, 1 out of every 5, we have a real problem that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Why?

From my own experience, I believe that it’s the closeness of mental illness rather than it’s uncertainty that makes it so scary and taboo. In addition, many people don’t seek treatment, remain unaware or refuse to believe that their symptoms could be connected to a mental health condition. To add fuel to the fire, Western medicine generally asserts mental illness as an individual problem: that people with mental health challenges are personally responsible for achieving our own wellness and therefore don’t have the resources to get help from a professional.

If you’re someone who has felt out of place because of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder etc. I wrote this post to remind you that you’re not any less human than the rest of us. I want you to know that regardless of how satisfying or how lousy your life might feel at this very second, hope is a beautiful thing and you’re right to not give up.

You matter.

You matter.

You matter.

I’ll conclude by saying that everyone has their own way of taking care of their mental health. I encourage everyone, even if you don’t feel like you’re struggling, to practice self care. Practicing good mental health has proven to strengthen and support our ability to have healthy relationships, make good life choices, maintain physical health and well-being, handle the natural ups and downs of life, and discover and grow towards our full potential. If you don’t know where to start, I’ll give you my top 5 mental health priorities:

1. Take care of that smokin’ hot body of yours
2. Slowww downnnn
3. Reach out to others for help when you need it
4. Practice healthy thinking
5. Do things that you actually enjoy doing

Compassion, support and an open mind all help reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. We can all do our part by making our own mental health a priority, replacing the stigma with hope, and helping individuals overcome any challenges and barriers.

NOTE: If you or someone you know needs help, call 1–800–273–8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

The weeks before I moved to Denton, after years of living in the comfort of my hometown, a bunch of friends gave long hugs and said our goodbyes as I set off to find my place in the city. When they were gone and I was alone, I cried. Make no mistake: I believed that moving out of Amarillo to finish college was the best thing for me. Yet at the time, I felt tangled having to leave behind the security of home and the closest people in my life.

You see…love gets all the big headlines, but friendship is where the true action is. Fundamentally, it’s the snugness of friendship that warms you in the various seasons of setbacks and brings life in the seasons of joy. For a lot of us, especially in our twenties, friends are our primary partners in life; they are the ones who move us into new homes, out of bad relationships, through the trials of college and family drama. My friendships have been some of the greatest romances in my life yet there’s no satisfying way to recognize the role that we play for each other.

Saying “life is busy” is an obvious statement. New career goals, love interests, homework etc. demands a lot of attention from each of us, so it’s easy to forget that our friendships need to be nurtured to stay strong. To appreciate the friends you are most vulnerable with while discovering your own independence.

Despite the challenges of trying to find a place in a new community, my friends never let me feel alone. They encouraged me to stick it out and reminded me to fight back when life knocks you down. I even made new friends that welcomed and included me, introduced me to a new friend group, and helped me settle in. And let me tell you, I am so very thankful to be a friend and to have friends that are committed to decoding the mystery of unconditional love. By leaning just a little on each other, we learned the delicate balance of remaining close even miles apart.

So yes, romantic love is powerful and should be celebrated. But let’s not forget to glamorize the importance of people in our lives who give themselves away without romantic expectations.

Side note: Please, don’t walk, but run to your best-friend(s) and hug them. Pick up the phone and call them just to remind them that you care. Thank you to all of my friends for loving me through the good and the bad.

“We can work through this, why won’t you work through this with me?”

“Because, I don’t want to,” he responded.

And this is how I found myself sitting on stairs, utterly convinced that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.

I’ll explain. When I moved out of my hometown to a new city, I was excited about a lot of things. One of those things being a bigger and (fingers-crossed) better dating pool. Ironically enough, one of the first dates I went on was with a man I went to middle school with, who had moved to the same area a couple years prior. We were never friends, never hung-out with the same group and had obvious differences. But, he knew what it was like to be a speckle in a big new city so when he asked me to hang out, I took him up on his offer.

I invited him to my apartment. It was summer and too humid to hang out outside. I found him on my front door step, when it was fairly dark. We chatted about how crazy it was that we grew up in the same town and talked about our experiences when we moved away. We spent the entire evening talking as if we were two best friends catching up on lost time, becoming more comfortable with each hour that past.

First dates can be awkward, they’re like interviews, but more personal. In fact, most dates I’ve been on have actually felt like a job interview…but not this one. I’ve never been the kind of woman that feels like she needs a man to be happy, but we “clicked” and there was a harmony between us that felt right in my young, twenty-something year old mind.

So, we continued to hangout. In fact, we started hanging out every single day. We did everything together: workout, travel, cook, clean…you name it. He prided himself on never being this way with a woman and as naive as it was, it made me feel significant. In hindsight, I recognize the unhealthy level of codependency, but at the time I chalked it up to “love” and lived in my blissful ignorance.

We carried on like this for months. Until I returned home from spending Thanksgiving with my family, when my fantasy of “happily ever after” came to a halt.

“I’m not sure this relationship is really what I want,” he said.

Me, being the most stubborn person that I know, swallowed the lump in my throat and assured him that he was just going through a funk and it would pass. But it didn’t.

Each day I could feel him detaching himself from the relationship little by little until a week passed and his feelings (or lack thereof) were too obvious to overlook.

“I don’t want this,” he said. “I want my old life back, I want to be single.”

The dull-ache I felt was overwhelming. I didn’t understand how the same man who once wanted forever now wanted invariable separation. I cried on his stairs for hours, red-faced and blowing my nose. And knew it was really over.

We both updated our social media accounts from “in a relationship” to nothing. I took down the cutesy picture of us and replaced it with a picture that I hoped said “I’m happy without you.” I learned that no matter how many times I went to the gym or how many glasses of merlot I drank while gushing to my girlfriends…I still wanted answers, a reason why. I even convinced myself that he would come around and show back up on my doorstep.

Instead, he moved on.

I wanted his feelings to match what I convinced myself: that he had reached his highest potential with me. I failed to recognize that I was hanging on to our relationship way too long, waiting for the man I loved to rise to an emotional maturity that he wasn’t reaching for. He isn’t ready for, and that’s okay.

Despite having a bruised ego (which is sometimes a good thing in my book), I’m thankful for the opportunity to learn just how capable I actually am. You see, it was through the heartbreak, that I realized I had a choice: to stop fighting for men who don’t know how to love and get back to the project of loving myself.