Every relationship should have stopping points when you feel yourself slipping away. Emotional abuse operates as a slow drip-feeding of toxic behaviors that gradually erode boundaries.

You’re not stupid. You’re not going crazy. You’re sensing something is wrong, and that instinct deserves your attention.

If you’ve been trying to figure out what you’re getting wrong in a difficult relationship, or perhaps taking the blame for someone else’s behavior because they’ve convinced you that you’re the problem, I want you to know that something else is likely happening beneath the surface.

I receive messages regularly from people, including mental health professionals, who didn’t recognize emotional abuse in their own relationships until it was too late. Some realized what was happening but wanted to work things through, believing they could fix it or help the other person understand.

The hard truth is that in most cases of emotionally abusive relationships, simply telling someone to stop their hurtful behaviors rarely changes anything. These patterns are typically lifelong, learned in childhood survival mechanisms that never got updated for adult relationships.

When we’re children, we develop ways of dealing with challenges based on what we observe or what works in the moment. A child who learns to hide and stay silent to avoid an abusive parent’s reaction brings that survival skill into their adult relationships as a coping mechanism for challenges.

The behaviors that protected them as a child, however, become dysfunctions in adult relationships. I know this from personal experience. Growing up in an abusive, alcoholic home, I learned coping mechanisms that destroyed my adult relationships. It took several breakups and finally a divorce before I recognized that I was the common denominator in all my relationship failures.

The turning point was when I finally accepted that I was the problem, choosing to reflect on myself rather than focusing on what others needed to do to change. I had to admit that despite all my education and certifications in helping others, I didn’t know enough to stop my own harmful behaviors.

Back then, people weren’t talking about how emotional abuse works as a slow drip of toxic behaviors that gradually disintegrates someone from the inside out. It was only after I started reflecting on what I was doing and how it was affecting others that I finally understood just how damaging emotional abuse was.

One crucial lesson I learned was about emotional triggers. Every time I was triggered by my partner’s behavior, I blamed her for my reaction. But when I started taking responsibility for my behaviors (after many years of looking outside myself for the cause of my relationship problems), I finally realized that my emotional triggers are my problem, not anyone else’s.

When an emotionally abusive person gets triggered, they blame others instead of accepting personal responsibility for their own reactions.

Another person’s triggers are their issues, not yours. In other words, their triggers are their problem to address. And emotional abuse happens when someone is triggered but tries to change you so that they are no longer triggered (and don’t have to change themselves). That’s not personal responsibility!

Anyone Can Be Conned Into An Emotionally Abusive Relationship

Even professionals trained in psychology can find themselves caught in emotionally abusive relationships because of how slowly and subtly these dynamics take hold. It’s like the frog in boiling water analogy, where you’re gradually being worn down until you reach a point of total defeat and burnout.

When you’re emotionally involved, when you love or fear someone, when logistics like children or finances complicate things, seeing your situation objectively becomes nearly impossible.

A therapist who reached out to me experienced exactly this progression. She recognized what was happening, but unfortunately, too late as burnout had already set in. Her partner showed her no care during her suffering and he eventually left, creating additional turmoil with lawyers and property division.

Her question to me was simple but profound: Can you explain the correlation between burnout and emotionally abusive relationships?

To understand burnout in the emotionally abusive relationship, we need to recognize the stepping stones that lead there. Each incident in this kind of relationship calls for what I’d call a “stopping point,” a moment to pause and evaluate whether you’re willing to accept this behavior for the rest of the relationship. These stopping points aren’t necessarily about ending things, but about addressing patterns before they escalate.

In her case, one early warning sign was her partner told her he didn’t experience emotions like sadness or anger, calling them weaknesses and “unfunctional” for a man. As a therapist, she tried explaining that emotions are signals that help us understand ourselves.

But here’s one of those stopping points. The stopping point is where you ask yourself a question that reminds you of what it will be like going forward. In this case, her stopping point question could have been, “Can I be with someone who sees fundamental human emotions as weakness?”

When someone tells you who they are and what they believe, those beliefs usually don’t change. In her case, here’s someone who doesn’t experience or express some normal human emotions. And if that’s the case, if he’s choosing not to experience sadness or anger, what replaces those emotions when he feels them?

Emotionally abusive people will often make others feel what they refuse to feel themselves.

Another stopping point came when her feelings were dismissed. This stopping point question might be: “Am I okay signing up for a relationship with someone who dismisses my feelings?”

In the holistic nature of relationships, where so many factors blend together, we might overlook these seemingly small things because everything else appears wonderful. But the reminder is crucial:
This is how it will be from now on.

If something you don’t like happens forty percent of the time, for example, dismissed feelings, are you okay with forty percent of your relationship involving your feelings being dismissed?

She also couldn’t talk about her work because it was “too much for him,” even though he was entering a profession where he’d encounter psychological suffering daily. This stopping point might give rise to the question, “Can I be with someone who can’t handle me talking about my day?”

If you have a partner who doesn’t want to give you their attention so that you can feel safe and vulnerable enough to vent about things, where does what frustrates you go?

What happens in this case is what I might call emotional displacement. One emotion takes the place of another. And when that happens, the original emotions has to find another “exit” out of your system. And sometimes, that means unexpressed emotions find unhealthy outlets. Both people can do this. If they don’t feel safe to express or they choose not to, the emotions they’re feeling have to come out somewhere at some time. If a person is emotionally abusive, you’ll feel the brunt of those unexpressed and unhealed emotions.

Coming back to the person who wrote to me, she also experienced his controlling behaviors that he disguised as concern for her well being. He began controlling her body under the pretense of “health,” pressuring her to work out and questioning her food choices.

Manipulative people convince you that what they want you to do is for your own good, guilting you into compliance regardless of your actual desires.

Someone who loves you will support the decisions you want to make for yourself.
Someone who wants to control you will not be okay with your autonomous choices.

Her letter goes on to talk about his love bombing, where he would show moments of tenderness with handwritten notes proclaiming affection. She described it perfectly as “warmth without safety.”

I see love bombing gestures as countermeasures for bad behavior, balancing the scales just enough to keep you hoping things will improve. This creates the love and abuse cycle that gives my podcast its name: they love you, then abuse you, then love you again, then abuse you again.

I’ve never seen the love and abuse cycle end on its own. That roller coaster only stops when someone gets off the ride. And the only intervention I’ve consistently witnessed working is when the victim reaches their breaking point and leaves. That’s often when the abusive person finally realizes their actions have real consequences. Until then, this is the logic that most emotionally abusive people have: “Clearly what I’m doing isn’t that bad because they’re still here.”

This twisted reasoning perpetuates abuse. When they don’t face accountability for their behaviors, they believe there’s no reason to change.

Everything described in that therapist’s experience chips away at your spirit and soul, at who you are from the inside out. Each stopping point that goes unaddressed represents another step toward complete defeat. Boundaries get gradually squeezed tighter and violated until you no longer have the energy to honor or enforce them. You reach a point where you can’t take care of yourself anymore because all your boundaries have collapsed.

The correlation between burnout and emotional abuse lies in this systematic erosion. When your boundaries are violated and overrun like water spilling over a dam, eventually the dam fails completely. Once you have no protection, you’re at someone else’s whim. And when someone has control over you, you better hope they have your best interests at mind. But always know that in emotionally abusive relationships, they don’t.

Resilience and tolerance, typically considered virtues, become liabilities in this type of relationship:

The more you tolerate, the more you get violated.
The more resilient you are, the more you trick yourself into thinking things will improve.

Someone constantly making you feel bad, sad, angry, and upset while trying to control you will wear you down regardless of your strength. And complete burnout will happen when your personal boundary walls collapse entirely. That’s when you feel like you’re drowning, overwhelmed, and unable to make autonomous decisions without upsetting someone else. You might become dismissive, feel defeated, and completely de-energized. And in that disempowered state, burnout arises on its own.

The way out often requires what feels like stepping into an abyss, doing what you don’t want to consider. Sometimes we have to take a leap of faith like that because the path we’re on has become unbearable.

No matter how far into a relationship you are, whether brand new or twenty years in, finding these stopping points and reflecting on what you’re willing to accept going forward can make the difference between continued suffering and reclaiming your life. Stay strong.

Questions I Address in this Episode:

When do childhood survival mechanisms become adult dysfunction?
Why do emotional triggers belong to the person experiencing them?
How can someone recognize stopping points before reaching burnout?
What makes the love-and-abuse cycle so difficult to break?
Why do resilience and tolerance sometimes work against abuse victims?