People are often attached to a good phase, a promised phase, or a repaired phase. That attachment is real even when the pattern is real.
Leaving gets misread when people collapse everything into one question: why did you stay. A better question is what staying had been tied to by then.
By the time someone is trying to leave, there may already be dependence, distortion, fear, administrative entanglement, social pressure, and hope still attached to the next repair.
If your read of events keeps getting weakened, decisive action starts feeling dangerous even when the danger is already present.
Leaving can carry housing, money, reputation, children, bureaucracy, social fallout, spiritual pressure, or plain exhaustion. None of that is imaginary.
People often want one calm, moral, administratively simple moment to leave. Many patterns are built so that moment never arrives on its own.
If this is current
Do not force the biggest move first.
Use safety planning, records, trusted outside reference points, and direct support routes. Recognition matters, but it does not need to become spectacle to be real.