After months or years of being emotionally abused, you may find yourself doing behavior that resembles the same type of behavior you’re a victim of.
If that’s the case, you can end up thinking you are also abusive and may start believing that perhaps you are just as bad as them, or worse.
When you’ve been in an emotionally abusive relationship for years, something shifts inside you. You start to behave in ways you never thought you would. You withdraw affection. You stop talking unless absolutely necessary. You blame them for your problems. You withhold validation and emotional support. And then you start to wonder if you’ve become the abuser.
This is one of the most painful questions someone in an abusive relationship can ask themselves. After enduring years of manipulation, control, lies, and emotional torture, you finally start protecting yourself in whatever way you can. But those protective behaviors can look a lot like the abuse you’ve been experiencing.
So how do you know the difference? How do you tell if you’re protecting yourself or if you’ve actually become abusive?
The answer isn’t always simple, but it’s important. Because the person who has been abusing you will often use your defensive reactions as proof that you’re the problem. They’ll point to your coldness, your silence, your anger, and say, “See? You’re the abusive one. You’re treating me terribly.”
And if you’re already questioning yourself, already feeling guilty for how you’re behaving, their words will cut deep.
Understanding the difference between self-protection and abuse requires looking at the full picture of your relationship. It requires understanding how emotional abuse works, what it does to a person over time, and why victims often develop behaviors that mirror the abuse they’ve endured.
What is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse isn’t a single incident. It’s not one argument or one bad day. It’s a pattern of behavior that repeats over and over, slowly eroding your sense of self. When you look at a relationship and try to determine if it’s emotionally abusive, you need to see the pattern, not just isolated moments.
Think of it like water dripping on your head. The first drip is annoying but manageable. The twentieth drip is irritating. But by the two hundredth or two thousandth drip, it feels like someone is driving a nail into your skull. That’s what emotional abuse does. Each individual behavior might seem small or explainable, but the cumulative effect is devastating.
The emotional abuse pattern typically includes multiple behaviors happening regularly. There’s lying about big and small things. There are threats to leave, to take the children, to tell everyone what a terrible person you are, even to harm themselves.
There’s blame shifting where everything wrong in their life becomes your fault. There are lectures about what you did wrong or can’t do right that can sometimes go on for hours or even days, mixed with withdrawing love and connection (the silent treatment). There are large purchases made without your knowledge or consent, then justified as being “for the family” when you object.
When you try to bring up something that hurt you, the conversation gets turned around to focus on your faults. When you try to defend yourself, you’re accused of interrupting or not listening. If you stay silent to avoid conflict, you’re accused of not caring or being cold. You can’t win because the game is rigged.
The abusive person changes facts and rewrites history to fit whatever narrative serves them in the moment. They make rules and then change them when those rules no longer benefit them. They accuse you of things you never said or did, and when you try to correct them, they insist you’re lying or misremembering.
This creates a state of constant confusion and self-doubt. You start questioning your own memory and perception. You feel crazy because what they’re saying doesn’t match what you remember, but they’re so confident and insistent that you begin to wonder if you’re wrong. This is crazymaking, and it’s one of the most damaging aspects of emotional abuse.
Over time, this pattern destroys your self-esteem, self-worth, and self-trust. You lose confidence in your ability to make good decisions. You feel isolated and alone, even when surrounded by people. You walk on eggshells, constantly trying to avoid the next explosion or the next lecture. You rehearse conversations in your head, trying to predict how they’ll react and how you can minimize the damage.
The emotional abuse becomes a form of torture. It’s not physical, so there are no visible scars, but the psychological damage is profound. You’re being slowly broken down, piece by piece, until you barely recognize yourself.
Emotional Abuse Can Turn Victims Into Perpetrators
After years of this treatment, something happens. You can’t take it anymore. You’ve tried everything to make the relationship work. You’ve been patient, understanding, and forgiving. You’ve explained how their behavior hurts you. You’ve begged them to change. You’ve gone to therapy. You’ve read books. You’ve done everything you can think of, and nothing has worked.
So you start protecting yourself in the only ways you know how:
You withdraw.
You stop being affectionate because every time you open your heart, it gets trampled.
You stop talking because every conversation becomes a trap.
You stop sharing your feelings because they’ll be used against you.
You stop meeting their emotional needs because you have nothing left to give.
These behaviors look like emotional abuse. Withholding affection, refusing to communicate, not validating someone’s feelings, these are all things an abuser does. But there’s a crucial difference between doing these things as a form of control and doing them as a form of self-preservation.
When you’ve been emotionally wounded over and over, you eventually have no choice but to put up walls. Think of a coyote caught in barbed wire. You want to help, but as you approach, the coyote feels vulnerable and afraid. It doesn’t understand that you’re trying to help. All it knows is that it’s trapped and in pain, so it barks and tries to bite you. That’s not the coyote being aggressive or abusive. That’s the coyote protecting itself with the last bit of energy it has.
This is where you are. You’re so wounded that anything else coming at you feels like an attack. You feel like you have no choice but to use the last of your energy to defend yourself. You’re not attacking. You’re protecting what little is left of you.
Your silence isn’t the silent treatment designed to punish and control. It’s self-protection. You’ve learned that speaking up leads to hours of lectures, blame, and manipulation, so you stay quiet to survive. Your lack of affection isn’t a punishment. It’s a boundary. You can’t keep opening yourself up to someone who hurts you every time you’re vulnerable.
Blaming them for your problems might seem unfair, but when someone has controlled, manipulated, and mistreated you for years, they are responsible for a lot of your problems. The loss of self-esteem, the anxiety, the depression, the inability to trust yourself, these are direct results of their abuse. Acknowledging that isn’t the same as refusing to take responsibility for your own life.
The key difference between the behaviors of an emotional abuser and one who is reacting to abusive behavior is intention and pattern:
An abuser uses these behaviors to control, dominate, and maintain power over their victim.
A victim uses these behaviors to protect themselves from further harm.
An abuser does these things from a position of power.
A victim does them from a position of powerlessness.
When you’re the victim, you’re spending the last of your emotional energy putting up a defensive front so you don’t get attacked again. Even if you know logically that they might not attack in this specific moment, your entire system is geared toward protection because you’ve been hurt so many times before.
Will The Emotionally Abusive Person Ever Choose Change?
When you finally decide you’ve had enough and ask for a divorce or separation, something interesting often happens: The abuser suddenly wants to change.
They promise to be different. They tell you they’ll do whatever it takes to save the relationship. They might even stop some of their more obvious abusive behaviors, like the raging and yelling.
But this isn’t always real change. A one-eighty like this stems from fear. They’re afraid of losing their structure, their control, their comfortable setup where they get to behave however they want without real consequences.
For years, you stayed. You tolerated the abuse. You kept trying to make it work. And because you stayed, they learned that their behavior was acceptable. There were no real consequences. Sure, you might have complained or cried or gotten upset, but you didn’t leave. And to most abusive people, they think, “I can’t be that bad, otherwise they’d leave. So I don’t think I need to change at all.”
But when you decide that enough is enough and choose to leave, they panic. But they’re not panicking because they’ve suddenly realized how much they’ve hurt you. They’re panicking because their world is falling apart. They’re losing the person they could push around, lie to, and control. They’re losing the structure they built where they were in charge, and you accommodated them.
Real change requires genuine empathy and remorse. It requires the person to sit with the pain they’ve caused and truly understand it. It requires them to reflect on their behavior, acknowledge the harm, and commit to doing the deep work necessary to heal whatever is broken inside them that made them behave that way.
Does your partner do that? Do they sit night after night thinking about the specific times they hurt you? Do they bring up those moments and say, “I can’t believe I said that to you. I remember when you were cooking dinner, and I told you it smelled awful, and you started crying because you’d worked so hard on it. Then I yelled at you for crying. I can’t believe I did that. I’m so sorry.”
If they’re not doing that kind of deep reflection, they’re not really changing. They’re just afraid of the consequences. And the moment they feel secure that you’re not leaving, the old behaviors will return. Maybe not all at once, but gradually. The default state will come back because nothing fundamental has changed inside them.
The biggest accountability you can provide to an abusive person is showing them that their behavior has consequences. For many abusive people, the threat of losing the relationship is the first time they’ve faced real accountability. And even then, many of them don’t use that opportunity to genuinely change. They use it to manipulate you into staying.
They’ll make promises. They’ll be on their best behavior for a while. They’ll tell you they’re going to therapy or reading books or doing whatever they think you want to hear. But unless they’re doing the actual internal work of understanding why they behaved that way and healing the wounds that led to that behavior, nothing will change long-term.
You leaving or threatening to leave is actually a gift to them, even though they don’t see it that way. It’s an opportunity for them to wake up, to realize what they’ve done, and to become a better person. But most abusers don’t take that opportunity. They see it as you being unfair, holding the relationship hostage, or punishing them.
Protecting Yourself Isn’t Abuse
When you’ve been emotionally abused for years, and you finally start protecting yourself, you might feel guilty. You might worry that you’re being mean or cold or abusive. The person who has been abusing you will likely tell you that you are. They’ll say you’re holding grudges, that you’re not giving them a chance, that you’re being unfair.
But protecting yourself is not abuse. Refusing to be vulnerable with someone who has repeatedly hurt you is not abuse. Staying emotionally distant from someone who has destroyed your sense of self is not abuse. These are survival mechanisms.
You didn’t start the relationship this way. You were open, loving, and trusting. But years of mistreatment changed you. You learned that being open led to pain and that trusting them meant getting hurt. You also learned that sharing your feelings meant having them used against you.
That’s why you adapted. You built walls. You became guarded. And now they’re complaining that you’re not the person you used to be. But whose fault is that? Who created the environment where you had to protect yourself this way?
If you came back to the relationship after leaving for a while, you probably came back emotionally “done.” You had no love left. You might have come back for the children, for financial reasons, or because you felt you had no other choice. And you set boundaries: no hand-holding, no kissing, minimal interaction.
Those boundaries aren’t abuse. They’re self-protection. You’re trying to survive in a situation you don’t want to be in. You’re trying to protect what’s left of yourself.
The abusive person will likely complain about these boundaries. They’ll say you’re being cold or withholding or punishing them. But what they’re really complaining about is that they can’t access you the way they used to. They can’t manipulate your emotions as easily when you’re not emotionally available. They can’t control you as effectively when you’ve built walls.
Your lack of emotional availability is a direct result of their behavior. You’re not doing this to hurt them. You’re doing this to protect yourself. And there’s a big difference.
When you’re protecting yourself, you’re in a defensive position. You’re reacting to ongoing harm, trying to minimize damage. An abuser, on the other hand, is in an offensive position. They’re actively trying to control, dominate, and harm. They’re not reacting to anything you did. They’re choosing to behave this way because it serves them.
You didn’t choose to become emotionally distant. You were forced into it by years of mistreatment. Given the choice, you would probably prefer to be in a loving, open, trusting relationship. But that’s not possible with someone who abuses you, so you do what you have to do to survive.
That’s not abuse. That’s self-preservation. And you have every right to protect yourself, even if it makes the other person uncomfortable. Their discomfort with your boundaries is not your problem. Your safety and well-being are your priority.
If you’re going through a divorce with someone who has abused you for years, they might accuse you of being abusive now. They might say you’re holding the divorce over their head or blackmailing them.
Asking for accountability is not abuse.
Refusing to pretend everything is fine is not abuse.
Protecting yourself during a difficult process is not abuse.
You’re not the abuser for finally standing up for yourself.
You’re not the abuser for setting boundaries.
You’re not the abuser for refusing to accept mistreatment anymore.
You’re someone who has been hurt repeatedly and is finally doing what you should have done a long time ago: protecting yourself.
The guilt you feel is understandable. You’re a caring person, and you don’t want to hurt anyone. But you need to recognize that what you’re doing isn’t hurting them in the way abuse hurts someone. You’re not destroying their self-esteem or making them question their sanity or isolating them from support. You’re simply refusing to be their victim anymore.
That’s not abuse. That’s strength. That’s self-respect. That’s you choosing to value yourself enough to say that you deserve better treatment.
And no matter how much they complain or how guilty they try to make you feel, you have every right to protect yourself and demand respect.
This article is for educational purposes. Pick your battles wisely and use The M.E.A.N. Workbook to assess your relationship.
 | Paul Colaianni Paul Colaianni is a Behavior and Relationship Specialist with experience 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 the mechanics of behavioral change and the identification of hidden manipulation. |
