You’ve spent years in this relationship, and something finally clicked. You discovered you’ve been emotionally abused. Now you’re standing at a crossroads, wondering what comes next.
The clarity feels both validating and terrifying. You finally have a name for what’s been happening, but now you’re stuck with a harder question:
Do I tell them?
Do I just set boundaries and keep going?
Do I lay everything out and hope they understand?
My honest perspective: I don’t think you should tell someone they’re abusive.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. When you walk up to someone and say, “You’re emotionally abusive,” or “You’ve been abusing me for years,” you’re handing them a bucket term they can easily dump right back on you. An abusive person can turn it around faster than you can defend yourself:
“I’ve been abusive? No, you have! What about all those times you got upset with me? You’re always so sensitive. You always make me feel like a terrible person. You tell all your friends I’m awful…”
That conversation can derail before it even begins. Then you’re left defending yourself against accusations instead of addressing the actual harm that’s been done to you.
When it comes to sharing with someone that their behaviors are harmful to you, specifics work – generalities don’t.
Specifics look like this:
“When you criticized me in front of your friends last night, it hurt. It made me feel like you don’t respect me, like you don’t even want to be with me.” That gives them something concrete to respond to. They can’t as easily dismiss a specific moment and a specific feeling.
They might still try to minimize or invalidate you, but at least you’re anchored to something real. If they do try to make you doubt your reality, you can follow up with something like, “It did hurt. I’m telling you it hurt. And I don’t want you to do that anymore.”
I’m not pretending this is easy. It’s not a magic formula where you say the right words, and everything gets better. But specifics give you a foothold. They force the conversation to stay grounded in reality instead of spinning off into abstract arguments about who’s worse.
The hard part is pinpointing what’s actually happening in the moment. Emotional abuse doesn’t usually announce itself. It’s a look. An inflection. A specific phrase delivered in a way that makes you feel small.
You might not even realize you’ve been invalidated or minimized until hours later when you’re replaying the conversation in your head, trying to figure out why you feel so awful.
This is why paying attention to what you think and feel in the moment matters so much. Emotionally abusive behavior happens throughout the day in small, repeated doses.
One poke doesn’t seem like much. But when someone pokes you in the same spot every single day for months or years, you start to lose your mind. You can’t quite articulate what’s wrong because each individual moment seems too small to complain about. But the cumulative effect is devastating.
Emotional abuse is a drip-feeding of harmful behaviors that compound over time.
Start taking mental notes. When something happens and you feel that familiar knot in your stomach, pause. Ask yourself, “What just happened? What did they say to cause me to feel this way? What do I feel right now?”
You don’t have to bring up your thoughts and feelings right away, especially if things are heated. But file it away so you can articulate it later if you choose to.
When you bring up something specific that hurt you, you’re giving that person a choice. You’re empowering them to decide how they want to treat you going forward. And their response shows you what will continue to happen in the relationship.
If they say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that hurt you. I won’t do that again,” that’s good! (If they follow through.
But if they say, “That’s just who I am. If you can’t handle it, I’m sorry,” then you know what you’re dealing with.
Once you tell someone their behavior hurts you, and they continue doing it anyway, they’re now consciously choosing to hurt you. That means they know. They see your pain. And they’re doing it anyway.
Sit with that for a moment.
Anyone who decides to continue behavior they know causes you to suffer is someone you need to be very careful around.
Are they even cognizant of their own hurtful behaviors?
What if they don’t realize they’re being hurtful? What if they’re on autopilot, unconscious of the harm they’re doing?
Believe it or not, that’s possible. I was that person once. I didn’t realize the ways I was manipulating and controlling my partners throughout the years.
I learned coping mechanisms as a kid that I carried into my adult relationships without ever questioning whether they were healthy or appropriate. For example, in childhood, when I got scared, I withdrew. I stayed silent so I wouldn’t cause trouble.
But when I grew up and started getting into adult relationships, I withdrew to make people I was supposed to care about feel guilty and alone. That emotionally abusive silent treatment made them try harder to make me happy, which turned out was really a manipulation on my part. i.e., If I got more love and attention by withdrawing, ‘that must be how love works.’
That’s not an excuse. It’s just the way I operated at one time in my life. I was unconscious of the abusive behavior I was doing. I saw it as survival.
It was survival because I was terrified of being alone and of experiencing rejection, so I did everything I could to control my environment and the people in it to make sure they never left me.
On top of everything else, I didn’t have boundaries, so I manipulated people into behaving the way I wanted instead of asking for what I needed and accepting the consequences if they said no.
It wasn’t until my previous wife left me that I finally looked inward instead of pointing at everyone else around me, and I understood what I’d been doing.
I asked myself a question that changed everything: “If I’m so upset by the way my partner behaves, why don’t I just leave?“
That thought had never occurred to me before. I was committed to staying in the relationship no matter what, even if it meant controlling and manipulating to get what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the bad guy. I didn’t want to be responsible for ending things. So, unfortunately, my default behaviors made my partners suffer instead.
When I finally put myself in their shoes and imagined being on the receiving end of my own behavior, I actually felt sick to my stomach. I accessed the pain I’d been inflicting for years, and it was unbearable. I realized I’d been making the people I claimed to love feel terrible and responsible for my unhappiness.
My point is that unconscious emotional abuse does exist. Some people genuinely don’t realize what they’re doing. But don’t see that as an excuse to tolerate it. No abuse is acceptable.
The “good” news is that once an unconscious emotional abuser is told about the hurtful behaviors they are doing, you make them conscious.
And a conscious person has no choice but to accept that they have a choice in how to treat you. That’s why how they behave afterward tells you everything you need to know about what to expect going forward.
How do I know if this is emotional abuse or simply normal relationship difficulties?
The difference between a normal relationship challenge and emotional abuse comes down to frequency and pattern.
In a healthy relationship, conflicts happen every now and then:
You have a misunderstanding. Someone says something the wrong way. You have a conversation, maybe it gets heated, but the overarching theme is still, “I love you, and I want this relationship to work.” You both prioritize the relationship over being right.
Emotional abuse is different. It’s a drip-feed of multiple moments, every single day, where you’re being put down, made to feel guilty, blamed for problems you didn’t create, or convinced you’re the issue in every conflict.
Emotional abuse compounds. One incident might look like nothing to an outside observer, but when it happens day after day, it erodes your sense of self until you don’t recognize who you are anymore.
If you’re in a relationship where you can’t even communicate without things getting worse, that’s not much of a relationship. You’re just existing. You’re surviving in a state of confusion and fear, never knowing what’s going to set them off next.
So if you’re deciding whether to bring up the harm that’s been done to someone after years of these behaviors, ask yourself:
Can I actually communicate with this person?
Will they listen?
Will they try to understand?
Or will they deflect, monologue, and turn everything back on me?
If they’re the type to talk and talk and talk until you’re exhausted and can’t remember what you even brought up in the first place, you need to stay focused. Write down what you want to say if you have to. And keep bringing it back to the specific behavior and how it made you feel. Don’t let them change tracks and pull you into a different conversation.
They might try to make you the perpetrator while they play the victim: “What about the time you did this?”
They’ll bring up things they know will trigger you. They’ll try to throw you off course. If that happens, you can say, “We can talk about that too. But right now, I need to address this. Then we’ll get to what you want to talk about.”
Again, I’m not pretending this is easy. Some people are masters at deflection. They know how to turn things around so smoothly that you end up apologizing for bringing it up in the first place. And some people might be too dangerous to have a conversation like this, so definitely pick your battles wisely – stay safe no matter what.
But if you’re with someone who actually cares about you, they’ll hear you. They’ll feel bad that they hurt you, even if they didn’t intend to. They’ll own it: “I’m so sorry. That wasn’t my intention. I won’t do that again.”
That’s what accountability looks like. That’s what love looks like. Not, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but that’s not what I meant.” Not, “That’s just how I am.” Accountability is real ownership and real change.
You deserve to be in a relationship where your feelings matter. Where you don’t have to walk on eggshells. Where you feel relief when your partner comes home, not when they leave. Where everyday conversations don’t fill you with anxiety.
If you’ve been emotionally abused for years and you’re finally seeing it clearly, you don’t owe anyone your vulnerability. You don’t need to lay your heart on the table and hope they don’t crush it.
What you need is inner strength, a little bit of skepticism, and maybe a sliver of hope that when you bring up one specific behavior, they’ll respond with care instead of defensiveness.
Be prepared for either outcome. If they respond well, you’ll be surprised in a good way. If they don’t, at least you’ll have solid footing. You’ll know what you’re dealing with. You’ll know whether this person is capable of change or whether they’re prioritizing their own comfort over your well-being.
And if they continue the behavior after you’ve told them it hurts you, you have your answer. They’re choosing themselves over you. They’re choosing to keep hurting you even though they now know exactly what they’re doing.
That’s the information you need to make your next decision. You don’t want to use a bucket term like “emotional abuse” when expressing your suffering. And we don’t want to use an abstract concept like “You’re bad” or “You’re a terrible person,” because those are not specific enough to answer the How and What of what they’re doing.
The specifics help you communicate exactly what hurts. Those undeniable facts give them a choice of how to respond next instead of turning it back on you.
You’ve already done the hard work of recognizing what’s been happening. Now it’s time to see if the person you’re with is willing to do their part.
Start with one specific behavior. See what happens next. And trust that whatever you learn, you’ll know how to move forward from there.
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Paul Colaianni
Paul Colaianni is an Emotional Abuse Expert and Behavior and Relationship Specialist who has been analyzing complex relationship dynamics since 2010. As the creator of the Healed Being program and host of the top-rated Love and Abuse and The Overwhelmed Brain podcasts, with over 21 million downloads worldwide, he specializes in helping people recognize hidden manipulation, navigate emotionally abusive relationships, and empower themselves to make informed decisions.
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