She’s not crazy. She’s calculated. The tears, the apologies, the you made me do this — that’s not love, that’s a pattern. Huda on Love Island isn’t a villain. She’s a mirror. And if it feels familiar? That’s your cue to look closer.
You ever find yourself wishing someone would just hit you?
Not because you want to get hurt. Because at least then you’d have proof. At least then you could point to a bruise and say, “See? This is what they did to me.” Instead, you’re sitting in your car in a Target parking lot at 9 PM, trying to remember the last time you said something without running it through a filter first. *If I tell them I’m going out with friends, they’ll get quiet for three hours. If I don’t answer within eight minutes, they’ll call seven times. If I say the wrong thing, they’ll cry and tell me I’m abandoning them just like everyone else.*
That’s the thing about emotional abuse. It doesn’t leave fingerprints. It leaves *confusion*.
I’m Julie Ty. I’ve been covering Love Island all season on Instagram and TikTok, and Huda has been the most controversial person in that villa. Not because she’s evil. Not because she’s a monster. But because she doesn’t *look* like an abuser. She’s beautiful. She’s charming. She cries real tears. And when she screams at Jeremiah—*”You’re a [ __ ] ass [ __ ]”* —half the internet cheered her on.
The other half saw something else. They saw the pattern.
Here’s what I’ve learned from working with over a thousand clients, from my master’s degree in psychology, from my own messy, painful history with people who loved me and broke me in the same breath: abusers don’t always look like monsters. Sometimes they look like someone who just loves you *too much*. Someone who’s just *scared*. Someone who had a terrible childhood and just needs you to prove you’re not going to leave like everyone else.
And that’s exactly how they get you.
—
Let me take you back to episode four. Amaya walks into the villa. She breathes. That’s it. She just exists. And Huda—four days into knowing Jeremiah—says, *”Can’t she see what Jeremiah and I have?”*
Four days.
She doesn’t know how he handles conflict. She doesn’t know how he handles grief. She doesn’t know if he snores or leaves the toilet seat up or forgets birthdays. But she’s already planning their wedding. Naming their kids. Imagining their life outside the villa.
That’s not love. That’s a *fantasy*.
And the second reality bumps into that fantasy—the second Jeremiah looks at another woman, or makes breakfast without enough protein, or doesn’t cook the pancake all the way through—the whole thing shatters. And Huda doesn’t get sad. She gets *angry*. Because to her, that’s not a minor disappointment. That’s *betrayal*.
This is what psychologists call splitting. It’s black-and-white thinking. You’re either the greatest person who ever lived—perfect, flawless, on a pedestal—or you’re the villain. The enemy. The one who ruined everything.
There is no gray. There is no *”he made a mistake but he’s still a good person.”* There is only good and evil, and the line moves based on how triggered she feels.
I’ve dated someone like this. A man with borderline personality disorder. And in the beginning, I gave him so many passes because I thought I knew what abuse looked like. I’d dated a narcissist before. I knew the power games, the control, the coldness. But this wasn’t that. This was *pain*. This was a person who was so terrified of being abandoned that he’d blow up my phone with 29 missed calls if I didn’t text back in ten minutes. This was someone who’d sob and apologize and say *”I don’t know what’s wrong with me”*—and I believed him. Because he meant it.
But meaning it doesn’t make it stop. And apologies without changed behavior are just manipulation with a sad face.
—
Here’s a number for you: **34,000**.
That’s how many of you are subscribed to my channel now. When I started this year, I was thanking my first 2,000 subscribers from a green wall in my dream house. Since then, I’ve gone through a breakup, packed my entire life into my car, moved to Montana, and now I’m sitting in an apartment in Los Angeles. Life doesn’t care about your plans. And neither do abusers.
But here’s another number: **zero**.
That’s how many times Huda has taken real accountability. She says sorry. She cries. She says *”I know I messed up.”* But then she turns to Jeremiah and says *”It’s your fault I’m acting like this.”* That’s the line. That’s the tell. *”Look what you made me do.”*
I’ve heard that sentence before. From the narcissist. From the borderline. From the people who loved me in ways that felt like drowning. And every time, I believed them. I thought, *Maybe if I just love them harder. Maybe if I just prove I’m not going to leave. Maybe if I just stop having needs, stop having boundaries, stop being a separate person with my own feelings—then they’ll finally feel safe. Then they’ll finally stop.*
But that’s not how it works. Because the problem was never you. The problem is the hole inside them that no amount of your love can fill.
—
Let me explain the difference between hurting someone and abusing someone.
In any relationship, you will eventually hurt the other person. You’ll say something thoughtless. You’ll forget something important. You’ll have a bad day and snap. That’s being human.
Abuse is not a single incident. Abuse is a *pattern*.
When Serena popped off on Cordell last season, people cheered. When Leah ran around the villa screaming *”F[__] you”* to Rob, it was a meme. And when people asked me, *”Why are you calling out Huda but not them?”* — I realized something. Most people don’t actually know what emotional abuse looks like. They think it’s about volume. About swearing. About who yells loudest.
But abuse is about control. It’s about making someone else responsible for your feelings. It’s about walking on eggshells so you don’t trigger an explosion. It’s about the slow, grinding erosion of someone’s reality until they can’t trust their own perceptions anymore.
Do you know when the spiral is coming? Can you time it? Do you find yourself thinking, *If I say this, they’ll get mad. If I do that, they’ll cry. If I go out with my friends, they’ll accuse me of cheating.*
That’s not love. That’s *training*. Pavlov’s dog, but instead of a bell, it’s their mood. And instead of drool, it’s your exhaustion.
—
The Huda defenders on the internet fascinate me. They say, *”She’s just anxious. She just loves too hard. She’s been hurt before.”*
And all of that might be true. But it doesn’t make the abuse okay.
I see people falling for the same tactics that victims fall for in real life. The tears. The apologies. The wounded-child act that makes you want to rescue them. *”If I just love her enough, she’ll heal.”*
No. She won’t. Not like that.
People with BPD—and I’m not diagnosing Huda, but she fits the criteria—develop these behaviors as coping mechanisms. Somewhere in her childhood, she learned that love is not safe. That caregivers leave. That the only way to keep someone is to hold on so tight you break their ribs. That black-and-white thinking is survival: if someone is all good, they’ll save you. If someone is all bad, you can hate them before they can hurt you.
But that’s not a relationship. That’s a hostage situation.
And the tragedy is, people with BPD *hate* themselves just as much as they hate you when they’re splitting. They live in a nightmare where they’re either perfect or worthless, loved or abandoned, saved or destroyed. That’s a terrible place to live. I have empathy for that.
But empathy doesn’t mean you stay. Empathy doesn’t mean you set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Empathy doesn’t mean you accept abuse because the abuser has a sad backstory.
—
I saw someone comment on one of my TikToks: *”You’re just triggered by Huda because of your own stuff.”*
Yes. Exactly. That’s the point.
I am triggered. Because I have been in rooms with people like Huda. I have apologized for things I didn’t do. I have walked on eggshells until my feet bled. I have wished someone would just hit me so I could finally have proof that what I was feeling was real.
That’s the insidious part. Emotional abuse makes you doubt your own mind. You start to think, *Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I did push them. Maybe it really is my fault.*
It’s not.
And the only way out—the only way to stop being a target for people like Huda—is to stop needing to be saved. To stop looking for someone to fill the hole where your self-worth should be. To learn that love isn’t about intensity. It’s about consistency. It’s not about someone putting you on a pedestal. It’s about someone seeing you—all of you, the messy parts, the boring parts, the parts that don’t perform well—and staying anyway.
—
When Huda moved on to Chris, the internet said, *”See? Redemption arc. She’s growing.”*
But here’s the thing about growth: it doesn’t happen overnight. And it doesn’t happen without the trigger.
Huda seemed calmer with Chris because the attachment wasn’t there yet. Her symptoms were dormant. Taking a little nap. But the moment they had sex—the moment attachment formed—the mask started slipping again. Because the problem isn’t Jeremiah. The problem isn’t Chris. The problem is the mechanism inside Huda that equates love with fear of loss.
Until she heals that—and that takes years of intensive therapy, not a week on a reality show—she will keep repeating the pattern. And the people who love her will keep getting hurt.
This is what I teach my clients. Most of them come to me because they keep ending up with the same person in a different body. The same intensity. The same chaos. The same apologies that never stick.
And I tell them: *You are not broken because you attract these people. But you are the only one who can stop accepting them.*
—
The word *gaslighting* gets thrown around too much these days. But here’s what it actually looks like. It looks like someone screaming at you, and then when you react—when you finally lose your mind after months of eggshells—they say, *”See? You’re the abusive one. You’re the one with the problem.”*
That’s reactive abuse. And it’s exactly what Huda does to Jeremiah. She pushes and pushes and pushes, and when he finally pushes back, she points at him and says, *”You’re playing victim.”*
I’ve been there. I’ve been the one who finally snapped, who finally screamed back, who finally threw something—and then spent the next week apologizing for being “crazy” while the person who drove me there sat quietly, looking wounded, collecting evidence of my instability.
That’s the game. That’s the trap. And the only way to win is to stop playing.
—
If you see yourself in Huda—if you recognize that black-and-white thinking, that terror of abandonment, that urge to control because control feels like safety—there is hope for you. But it starts with accountability. It starts with looking in the mirror and saying, *”I am part of the problem.”*
Not because you’re evil. Because you’re wounded. And your wounds are making you hurt other people.
Denial is a coping mechanism. Defensiveness is a coping mechanism. Projection is a coping mechanism. They all feel safer than shame. But they will keep you sick. They will keep you alone. They will keep you cycling through relationships that start like fireworks and end like firestorms.
The good news is that you can change. I’ve seen it happen. But it takes work. Real work. The kind that doesn’t happen in a villa on a reality show. The kind that happens in a therapist’s office, in the quiet moments when no one is watching, when you finally sit with the part of you that’s terrified and ask it what it needs.
The answer is not someone else’s love. The answer is your own.
—
So here’s what I want you to take away from this.
If you’re dating a Huda, stop waiting for them to change. Stop believing the apologies that don’t stick. Stop walking on eggshells and calling it love.
If you *are* a Huda, stop defending. Stop projecting. Stop telling yourself that everyone leaves so you might as well push them first. There is another way. But you have to choose it.
And if you’re somewhere in between—if you’ve been the victim and the abuser at different times, in different relationships, because hurt people hurt people—then it’s time to break the cycle. For yourself. For the people who love you. For the person you could become if you stopped running from the shame and started walking toward the truth.
Emotional abuse is insidious. It hides in plain sight. It wears a pretty face and cries real tears and says *”I just love you so much”* while it’s slowly erasing you.
Don’t let it.
The apology that matters isn’t the one they give you. It’s the one you give yourself when you finally walk away.
And the healing doesn’t start when they change. It starts when you do.
I’ll see you in the next one.
