Lily Collins talks trauma, triggers & toxic relationships: ‘I felt very small’

Lily Collins has just worn her heart on her sleeve and shed light on her past relationship, and the abuse she encountered along the way.

Collins shed light on everything during the course of her appearance on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast.

There, she recalled an experience of abuse which she suffered in her “earl 20s” because of an ex-boyfriend.

Collins even went as far as to discuss the type of abuse she suffered and admitted, “For me, my romantic toxic relationship was verbal and emotional abuse and being made to feel very small.”

She also told the co-hosts Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Wambach, “He would call me 'Little Lily.' You should be 'Little Lily' and he'd use awful words about me in terms of what I was wearing and would call me a whore and all these things.”

There even came a time where the “belittling words” began getting to Collins and forced her to become “quite silent and comfortable in silence and feeling like I had to make myself small to feel super safe.”

The abuse in question even wound up forcing Collins to therapy where she came to learn, “When prey felt threatened, they made themselves as small as possible.”

“Possibly by not eating by making themselves look as least juicy and enticing as possible and that's where they felt the safest.”

Her ex’s actions even led her to feel overarching feelings of “panic” and “anxiety” nera the end.

“The situations are completely different 10 years ago to now… That panic is what I can still get triggered by. Even if I'm in the most healthy relationship, there can be a moment that happens throughout the day where history comes back like that.”

“It's like a millisecond, or shorter than a millisecond," she explained.

“And your gut reacts, your heart starts beating, and all of a sudden you're taken back to that moment where they said that thing to you 10 years ago, but you're not in that situation now and that's the trigger and it's f****** hard. It's awful.”

However, her husband has worked to alleviate some of those triggers to an extent, since “Now in my life, having my wonderful and supportive husband, we do communicate and talk about so much.”