Understanding how someone becomes emotionally abusive isn’t about excusing their behavior. It’s about recognizing the patterns that create it so you can see what you’re dealing with.
When you understand the progression from childhood coping to adult entitlement, you start to see why change is so difficult for these individuals and why their behavior feels so justified to them.
The Foundation: Childhood Survival
Every child faces challenges they don’t know how to handle. Maybe they feel neglected. Maybe they’re being yelled at, or they watch one parent hurt another.
It’s brand new information to them, and they have no guidance on how to deal with what’s happening.
So they do whatever comes naturally in the moment. If they go silent while being yelled at, that’s how they cope. If they scream because they feel neglected, like not getting a toy they wanted, that’s how they cope.
These coping mechanisms are survival tools.
A child’s primal instinct to avoid pain, suffering, and fear usually wins over everything else.
When they survive using these skills, whether they learned them from others or figured them out on their own, they carry them into adulthood. When they’re old enough to get into close relationships and a challenge comes along, they don’t create new ways to cope unless it’s a brand-new challenge they’ve never faced before.
But even then, it comes back to avoiding pain and staying away from the things they fear. Coping is all about getting through a challenging moment in the moment. It’s about not knowing if you’re going to survive or not, so you do everything you can to live. Even emotional pain can feel like death to a child.
By the time we’re adults, we’ve coped the same way over and over again since childhood. Take silence as an example. When I was a child, I went silent around the abusive alcoholic in our home because I did not want to trigger what I call “Drunk Dad” behavior. I wanted to stay quiet and hidden so that no harm would come my way.
A child using silence as a way to protect themselves can transform into the emotionally abusive silent treatment as an adult. This kind of silent treatment is about withdrawing love and connection as a way to manipulate their partner or others to get what they want.
Unless this now-grown-up “child” develops new coping skills, they rely on the ones they’ve had over all these years because those methods worked every time. They “survived.”
If people-pleasing worked as a child, and that child tested being overly accommodating and giving in their relationships growing up, the results they got weren’t pain or fear. They may not have gotten great results, but at least they avoided pain and fear. So, coping by being overly accommodating reinforced that those skills worked for them.
Children take what worked in childhood and do the same behaviors in their adult relationships.
Children learn how to avoid pain and fear either by watching others or figuring it out on their own. And when they are not taught any other way to cope with challenges, they don’t learn anything different.
The constant reinforcement of desired outcomes from repeated use of the same coping mechanisms created a belief system that “This is how I’m supposed to act, react, and respond to those I’m in a relationship with.”
And this belief system becomes so strong that it feels like absolute truth to them. Acting any other way would be acting against their own best intentions.
What happens when those childhood survival strategies become the only way someone knows how to function in relationships? That’s when things get complicated.
The Abuser’s Journey From Belief to Entitlement
Children who bring their childhood survival mechanisms into their adult relationships have been relying on them for basically their entire lives. Even when they’re hurting those around them, they believe what they’re doing is what they’re supposed to do. In other words, they know they’re right because they’ve always survived.
Most abusive people don’t see the pain and suffering of others as their fault. They believe that the other person’s pain and suffering is the other person’s fault. They believe that since they know the “truth” of how to act, react, and respond to others (because of many years of reinforced positive results where they have avoided pain and fear), their morals, values, and standards are the ones that other people should follow as well.
With that belief system in place and their knowing that they’re right because of all the evidence over their lifetime, a selfish, entitled personality emerges.
Others can see their behaviors are clearly selfish, but they don’t believe they are. They behave from a place of entitlement because they believe with absolute certainty, even in the face of other people’s opinions, that their standards are the only standards that work and will keep them from suffering.
They are selfish because they avoid suffering by making others suffer.
They are entitled because they believe the other person’s suffering is the other person’s fault.
How we all learned to cope is basically the same across the board: Whatever you learned in childhood, you tend to bring with you into your adult relationships.
Today, you’re technically a grown-up “child.” And if you have healthy coping skills, you probably aren’t dysfunctional or toxic. However, if you have unhealthy coping skills and you haven’t done any healing around them, you are likely still responding from that child’s point of view.
Think about somebody yelling at you today. What does that feel like? Are you upset? Worried? Afraid? How did you respond to yelling when you were a child? Is your response from back then the same as it is today?
If you say, “Now I’m an adult, and I feel okay when somebody yells at me, and I’m just waiting for them to let off some steam,” and you don’t respond the same way as when you were a child, it’s probably safe to say you’ve done some healing around people yelling at you (if that was an issue when you were a child).
Or maybe how you responded in childhood didn’t transfer. Sometimes these childhood coping mechanisms don’t transfer into adulthood for other reasons. For example, let’s say you had experiences of people yelling at you, but you realized back then it wasn’t a big deal because you didn’t get hurt. So you found ways to cope or perceive danger in different ways. Or maybe you didn’t have to cope at all because yelling never felt dangerous to you as a child.
When you realize that how you learned to cope as a child usually shows up in the same way as an adult, you start to understand why change is so difficult and what needs to happen for real transformation to occur.
A Child Isn’t Abusive but Can Grow Up To Be An Abuser.
Children who hurt other children or adults aren’t being abusive. They are trying to figure out how to survive because they’ve only been alive a few years and have no idea how the world and relationships work. They are just trying to figure everything out. And there’s a LOT to figure out when you’re a child.
But when they grow up and become conscious of their own behaviors, that’s when their behaviors can be identified as abusive.
The path from childhood survival to abusive adult:
- The child faces a challenge.
- They instinctively respond, hoping to survive.
- Their response works. They survive.
- Their response becomes a pattern (A coping skill develops).
- The pattern of coping becomes a belief: “This is how I’m supposed to handle things.”
- The belief becomes “absolute truth”: “This is the right way.”
- Abuse occurs when their self-righteousness overrides empathy.
As an adult, hurtful behavior feels justified because most abusers believe what they’re doing is right. And when the people they’re hurting don’t respond well, they blame those others for not following the “right way.”
Abusive people develop moral superiority: I’m right. You’re wrong.
Entitled, selfish behavior emerges from that entire progression. This is how emotionally abusive behavior is formed.
What This Means for Change
The question becomes whether someone can recognize this pattern in themselves and choose to do the work to change it.
The emotionally abusive person hasn’t healed. They haven’t addressed their emotional triggers. They haven’t figured out what they need to do for themselves because they are so focused on making the world conform and change for them.
Even when everything’s perfect with the relationship, it’s still not going to be enough because you can never meet every single expectation of someone else. You can’t do it. You cannot meet one-hundred-percent of someone’s expectations.
That’s why emotionally abusive people need to leave room for others to make mistakes, mess up, and talk to people they don’t like and do things they don’t like. In other words, they need to find new ways to cope.
We all need to feel a sense of individuality. We all need to be able to keep our power. Keeping your power means not allowing someone else to control or change you, while you are living in a way that you feel supported for your choices.
You’re not always going to agree with others. That’s just going to happen. But you should be able to walk away from any disagreement with a sense of being heard, being understood, and feeling validated.
The path to change requires the emotionally abusive person to do something they’ve spent their entire life avoiding: They have to look inward at the very insecurities and fears they’ve been running from since childhood.
They have to develop new coping skills that feel completely foreign to them.
They have to learn to regulate emotions they’ve never properly processed.
They have to accept that the way they’ve been showing up in relationships is the opposite of what creates healthy connection.
That’s a massive undertaking. It requires them to become someone they’ve never been, to act in ways that feel completely wrong to them based on a lifetime of reinforced learning.
Asking someone to change their entire way of being is like telling them to be an astronaut when they’ve never studied astrophysics. If they were never that person and they never did healthy behaviors, all they know is what they know.
And all they know is what they learned in childhood, building those survival mechanisms that turned into horrible coping mechanisms in their adult relationships.
Those emotional triggers are their coping skills. They are the mechanisms they use to deal with challenges. What is important for the emotionally abusive person to do is work on those triggers, which means working on a lifetime of behaviors. It means becoming someone they’ve never been.
It would be like me telling you to step forward toward screeching tires instead of stepping back. When you’re stepping off the sidewalk, and you hear a car horn beeping and tires screeching, your instinct is to take a step back. That survival skill is helpful.
But if I said, “No, you need to take a step forward toward the screeching tires,” you would call me crazy! You would say, “That’s not what I’m going to do. And that’s not the way to survive. That’s just bad advice, Paul!”
That’s what happens in the mind of somebody who has been perpetrating these behaviors all their life. They believe the way they have coped, by hurting others, by controlling others, by not dealing with their insecurities (because maybe they don’t believe they have them), is how they’re supposed to show up.
They are essentially doing the opposite of healthy behavior. That is what emotionally abusive people who choose to change and heal have to deal with. And that is a massive step in the right direction that they’re not used to going in, which is why it almost always takes somebody else in their life to shake their foundation and wake them from the trance they’ve been in to let them know that this behavior is unacceptable.
Someone dealing with abusive behavior might have to get to the point of saying, “I won’t be in your life anymore if you continue doing it.”
When someone truly commits to healing, when they’re willing to face those uncomfortable truths about themselves and do the hard work of developing new patterns, change can happen.
I see these changes all the time in my Healed Being program. Emotionally abusive people can and do change when they are given the right guidance, and they actually want to change.
The key for them is recognizing that these behaviors didn’t develop overnight. And they won’t disappear overnight either. They’re the result of years, sometimes decades, of reinforced patterns that feel like absolute truth to the person engaging in them.
Understanding this progression doesn’t excuse their behaviors. But it does help explain why change is so difficult and why simply telling someone to “stop being abusive” doesn’t work.
The work has to go deeper. It has to address those childhood survival mechanisms that no longer serve them. It has to create new neural pathways and new ways of responding to triggers. It has to involve consistent practice and accountability.
If you’re dealing with emotionally abusive behavior in your relationship, understanding this progression helps you see what you’re up against. You’re not dealing with someone who’s simply choosing to be mean. You’re dealing with someone whose entire belief system is built on patterns that developed when they were trying to survive as a child.
That doesn’t mean you have to stay and endure the abuse. But it does help you understand why your partner can’t seem to see what they’re doing, why they genuinely believe they’re right, and why change requires so much more than just wanting to be different.
The emotionally abusive person has to want to heal badly enough to face everything they’ve been avoiding their entire life. They have to be willing to feel the discomfort of acting in ways that go against every instinct they’ve developed.
They also have to commit to the long, difficult process of rewiring their responses and rebuilding their belief systems from the ground up.
That’s the reality of how someone becomes emotionally abusive and what it takes to change. It’s not a simple fix, but understanding the progression is the first step toward either healing or recognizing when healing isn’t going to happen.
 | 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. |
