"There's no way it could have been abuse/that bad, because I stayed/kept going back."
Yeah, unless you were conditioned by CPTSD to believe you couldn't do better, "deserved" it, and/or it was safer to stay or go back than to leave.
Also, there's this thing called dissociation.
I didn't know that abuse was abnormal until I was in a relationship where I wasn't being abused.
People can also be desperate for numerous reasons, the primary one being financial. I don't think the current employment crisis while slowly removing women's rights was on accident during a baby bust.