YOU WERE PREY

Predation, Horizon Collapse, and the End of Self-Blame

For everyone who ever apologised for being manipulated

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I. The Apology You Should Never Have Made

You walked into that room without malice.

It might have been a family gathering. A workplace. A relationship. A friendship.

You weren’t trying to win.
You weren’t trying to dominate.
You were just there—participating in what you thought was a normal human exchange.

And then something shifted.

Not loudly.
Not clearly.
But unmistakably.

The atmosphere thickened.
The rules seemed to remember themselves differently than you did.
Your chest tightened.
Your thoughts stopped lining up.

You tried to stay calm.

But the words coming at you didn’t quite add up. Or they added up individually but not together. Or they contradicted something said moments earlier. Or the tone didn’t match the content. Or the silence did more damage than shouting.

You tried to respond reasonably.

But your thinking became scattered. Your reactions sharper or slower than you intended. You could feel yourself losing traction—getting confused, angry, small, or blank.

Eventually, you reacted.

Maybe you raised your voice.
Maybe you shut down.
Maybe you froze.
Maybe you left abruptly.
Maybe you cried.
Maybe you apologised just to make it stop.

And then they looked at you.

Calm.
Composed.
Reasonable.

“Why are you acting like this?”
“You’re being irrational.”
“I’m just trying to talk.”
“You always overreact.”
“Maybe you should get help.”

And because they were calm—and you weren’t—you believed them.

You apologised for your tone.
For your reaction.
For your feelings.
For existing the way you did in that moment.

You carried that shame for days.
Sometimes years.

You thought it was your fault.

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II. What Actually Happened

Here is the claim this essay makes, as precisely as possible:

You were not failing at communication.
You were undergoing a collapse of your planning horizon.

This is not a moral claim.
It is not a personality judgement.
It is not a diagnosis.

It is a description of how nervous systems behave under asymmetric pressure.

In ordinary conditions, your nervous system gives you access to:
• coherent thought
• memory integration
• pattern recognition
• future planning
• values-based choice

In destabilising conditions, those capacities narrow or disappear.

Not because you are weak.

Because they are expensive, and the brain sheds expensive functions when it believes survival is at stake.

This narrowing is what I will call horizon collapse.

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III. Predation Without Villains

In animal systems, predation does not require malice.

It requires asymmetry.

One nervous system remains coherent under rising chaos.
The other does not.

The prey’s horizon collapses: time narrows, cognition fragments, action becomes reactive.
The predator’s horizon remains intact: planning continues, strategy remains available, narrative control persists.

This advantage has nothing to do with virtue, intelligence, or moral worth.

It is architectural.

Human social predation operates on the same principle—not because people are animals, but because nervous systems obey constraints.

Some people, in some contexts, generate confusion, contradiction, urgency, or emotional pressure without experiencing those conditions as destabilising themselves.

Others collapse under that same pressure.

That differential is enough.

No intent is required.

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IV. What Collapse Looks Like From the Inside

When your horizon collapses, several things happen at once:
• abstraction becomes inaccessible
• pattern recognition degrades
• memory integration falters
• future consequences disappear
• survival responses dominate

You may fight.
You may flee.
You may freeze.
You may appease.

None of these responses look “reasonable” in a social setting.

But all of them are normal mammalian responses to perceived threat.

From the outside, however, only one thing is visible:

You are not calm.

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V. Why They Looked Reasonable and You Didn’t

Here is the cruel asymmetry.

While your horizon was collapsing, theirs was not.

They retained:
• narrative continuity
• emotional regulation
• strategic positioning
• multi-step planning

So the scene resolved visually as:
• one person losing control
• one person maintaining it

And because you had lost the very capacities required to model the interaction, you could not see what was happening to you.

All you could see was yourself failing.

Self-blame was not a mistake.

It was the only narrative available inside a collapsed horizon.

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VI. Why You Kept Apologising

You thought the problem was your reaction.

You thought that if you could just stay calmer, think more clearly, respond better, the situation would resolve.

But the reaction was not the problem.

The destabilisation was.

And because recognising destabilisation requires exactly the cognitive capacities that had already collapsed, the cause remained invisible.

So you apologised for the symptoms.

Again.
And again.
And again.

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VII. Architecture, Not Evil

It is important to say this carefully.

Most people who generate this kind of destabilisation are not villains.

They are not consciously hunting.

They are nervous systems that:
• tolerate or generate high entropy
• do not experience that entropy as destabilising
• instinctively recognise who does

In close relationships—families, partnerships, workplaces—this asymmetry becomes especially powerful, because trust lowers defences and accelerates collapse.

The harm is real even when the intent is not.

Impact does not require malice.

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VIII. Why Self-Blame Went So Deep

You likely told yourself:

“If this person treats me this way, I must deserve it.”
“If everyone else seems fine with them, the problem must be me.”
“If I were stronger, this wouldn’t affect me.”

But what you were actually observing was this:

The person who stayed coherent defined reality.
The person who collapsed lost the ability to contest it.

That is not evidence of defect.

It is evidence of asymmetric regulation under pressure.

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IX. What This Explains

This lens explains why:
• abuse is hardest to see from inside
• victims apologise more than perpetrators
• “calm” people are believed over distressed ones
• survivors doubt themselves long after leaving
• clarity returns only after distance

These are not mysteries.

They are consequences of horizon collapse.

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X. What Understanding Changes (and What It Doesn’t)

This essay does not tell you:
• to endure more
• to forgive
• to confront
• to harden yourself
• to become dominant

It offers something narrower and more precise.

Understanding.

Understanding that:
• the collapse was real
• the asymmetry was real
• the blame was not diagnostic
• your nervous system behaved predictably

If you could not think clearly while being destabilised, that was not a failure of character.

It was a constraint.

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XI. What You Are Allowed to Release

You are allowed to release:
• the shame for reactions you didn’t choose
• the belief that calm equals correctness
• the idea that sensitivity is defect
• the apologies you made to survive

You do not owe anyone continued access to a system that collapses you.

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XII. A Final Clarification

When I use language like entropy, architecture, or thermodynamics, I am not claiming literal physical equations govern human interaction.

I am pointing to structural inevitabilities:
• systems shed expensive functions under pressure
• coherence asymmetries produce power asymmetries
• blame flows toward the destabilised

These are patterns, not moral verdicts.

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XIII. The End of Self-Blame

You didn’t fail.

You didn’t overreact.

You weren’t imagining it.

You were exposed to destabilisation you could not model while it was happening.

That does not make you broken.

It makes you human.

You were prey in that moment.

And prey do not apologise for trying to survive.

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— For anyone who ever apologised for being manipulated

You were right.
It was real.
And it wasn’t your fault.