When you leave an emotionally abusive relationship, you might think the hardest part is behind you. You made the decision, you got out, and now you can start healing.
But for many people, especially those with children or shared assets with their former partner, the abuse doesn’t just stop because the relationship ended. The manipulation, control, and emotional harm can continue long after you’ve physically separated.
I received an email from someone who left an extremely abusive relationship several months ago. She has a child with her ex-partner and hoped they could co-parent peacefully.
Instead, the abuse continued in different forms. She’s dealing with threatening interactions, verbal abuse, and the constant stress of trying to keep her ex-partner happy in hopes of maintaining peace for their child’s sake.
She wrote about how she’s starting to realize she’s still walking on eggshells, staying on high alert to protect her child, and taking weeks to recover from each threatening interaction with him.
She did leave, so she can rationalize that she’s safe, but she doesn’t actually feel safe. And that’s the reality for many people who’ve left abusive relationships but still have to maintain contact because of children or other ties that bind them together.
The situation she described is incredibly difficult because it’s not something she could just walk away from. When there are children involved, you’re forced to continue interacting with someone who has hurt you deeply and may continue trying to hurt you.
The abuser often sees this ongoing contact as an opportunity to maintain control and continue the patterns that worked for them during the relationship.
What makes post-separation abuse so insidious is that the person who left might feel like they should be over it by now. They might think, “I’m no longer in the relationship, so why am I still so affected by this person?”
Leaving doesn’t erase trauma from an abusive relationship. It doesn’t immediately restore your sense of safety or rebuild the boundaries that were systematically destroyed during the relationship.
The person who wrote to me mentioned she’s been told her ex’s behaviors indicate he is high risk. She’s considering taking legal action to protect herself and her child, something she was previously too afraid to do, partly because he gaslit her into believing it wasn’t necessary.
This is a common pattern. Abusive people often convince their partners that seeking legal protection is an overreaction, that it will make things worse, or that it’s somehow a betrayal.
When an ex-partner with whom you share children continues to threaten you, verbally abuse you, and create an environment where you’re constantly on edge, that’s not co-parenting. That’s continued abuse with children as the excuse for ongoing contact.
Nothing Happened Until It’s Documented
One of the most critical steps in dealing with post-separation abuse is documentation. Everything needs to be documented.
Every interaction should happen through means that can be recorded and saved, whether that’s email, text messages, or voicemail. If you’re having conversations that aren’t documented, those conversations essentially never happened from a legal standpoint.
This might sound cold or overly cautious, but it’s necessary protection. If your ex-partner promises you something over the phone in a conversation that wasn’t recorded, you have no evidence of that promise.
If they threaten you in person with no witnesses and no recording, you can’t prove it happened. Documentation creates a paper trail that can protect you and, if necessary, demonstrate patterns of behavior to courts or other authorities.
Make all communication with an abusive ex-partner administrative, non-emotional, and functional.
It’s important to protect yourself from someone who has shown they will use emotional access to hurt you. If you can communicate through attorneys, that’s even better because it creates another layer of protection between you and them.
Some states, at least in the US, allow you to record phone conversations as long as one party knows about the recording. Other states require both parties to consent.
You should get to know the laws where you live about recording so that you know your rights. But the principle remains the same: You need evidence of what’s being said and done, especially if threats or manipulation are involved.
When documentation isn’t possible, and you must have direct contact, the strategy changes. You need to become what’s called “gray rock.” This means showing up as emotionally neutral as possible.
As a dull, gray rock, you don’t display your emotional state. And without your emotions for them to pick up on, you don’t give them anything to work with.
Emotional abuse works because the abuser can see or hear your emotional responses and then manipulate you at the emotional level.
If they can’t tell what you’re feeling, they can’t effectively abuse those feelings. And if they try to provoke an emotional reaction and don’t get one, they lose their power in that moment.
This is incredibly difficult to do. You’re not a robot. You have feelings. And suppressing them or hiding them when someone is actively trying to hurt you takes enormous strength.
But when you’re dealing with someone who uses your emotions against you, not showing those emotions becomes a form of self-protection.
The person who wrote to me mentioned she continues to normalize and cover for how badly her ex treats her. This is another pattern that’s important to recognize.
When you’ve been in an abusive relationship, you develop coping mechanisms that help you survive, often minimizing the abuse, explaining it away, or covering for the abusive person’s behavior.
These survival strategies made sense during the relationship. They helped you get through each day. But after you’ve left, these same strategies can prevent you from taking the steps you need to truly protect yourself.
When you’re still minimizing the abuse, you might not seek the legal protection you actually need. You might convince yourself it’s not that bad, or that you can handle it, or that taking legal action would be an overreaction.
But if someone’s behavior is threatening enough that even professionals have told you it indicates high risk (like the person I’m talking about here), that’s not something to minimize. That’s something to take seriously and act on.
If you were gaslit into not taking legal action, that doesn’t mean you can’t take it now. When you have new information and a clearer perspective outside the relationship, you can make different choices that help you instead of serving them.
Finding out your rights is essential. Talk to an attorney who can tell you exactly what your options are. Even if you’re not ready to take action immediately, knowing what you can do gives you power. It gives you options. And it helps you understand what’s actually possible rather than what your ex-partner has convinced you is possible.
Give Them Someone or Something Else to Blame
When you have legal agreements in place, whether through courts or attorneys, you’re no longer the only person trying to enforce boundaries. The paper, the court order, and the custody agreement become the authority.
This means you’re not asking your ex-partner to respect your boundaries out of the goodness of their heart. Instead, you’re pointing to a legal document that says ‘this is how things need to be.’
This takes the personal element out of it as much as possible. When your ex-partner tries to manipulate or control the situation, you can refer back to the agreement.
The agreement is not about what you want or what they want. It’s about what was agreed upon legally. If they don’t follow it, there can be consequences that don’t depend on you enforcing them.
The person who wrote mentioned she’s been trying to keep her ex happy in hopes of peaceful co-parenting. This makes sense! When you have a child together, you want things to be as smooth as possible for that child’s sake.
But the unfortunate reality is that you cannot keep an abusive person happy by managing your own behavior. Their unhappiness, their anger, their need to control comes from inside them, not from anything you’re doing or not doing.
Trying to keep an abusive person happy is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom. No matter how much you pour in, it’s never enough because the problem isn’t the amount you’re giving. The problem is the hole. And you can’t fix someone else’s “hole.”
Learn When To Make Decisions
When you’re making decisions about how to handle interactions with your ex-partner, make those decisions when you’re alone and reflecting quietly. Write them down. In those quiet moments, those are your truths. Those things are what you know are right for you and your children when you’re not being influenced or manipulated.
Then, when you have to interact with your ex and they try to convince you to do something different, you can go back to what you wrote. That’s your anchor. That’s the decision you made when you could think clearly, before someone started trying to talk you into something else.
Someone who’s abusive will absolutely do everything they can to make you think their way is the best way. They’ll use the tactics that worked during the relationship. They’ll push your buttons. They’ll try to make you feel guilty or responsible for their feelings or their reactions. But you don’t have to accept that anymore.
The truth comes out when you’re reflecting on what’s best for you and your children, when you’re remembering the past and how it always goes their way, or how you always get hurt by what they say or do. That’s truth. When someone else is trying to convince you otherwise, that’s manipulation.
Before you have any communication with your ex-partner, look at your notebook where you’ve written down your decisions. Remind yourself what you decided was right. Then, no matter what they say, you have that to come back to. It’s written in stone. It’s your law.
The challenge of post-separation abuse is that you’ve already done the hard work of leaving. You’ve already made that enormous, difficult decision. And now you’re discovering that leaving wasn’t the end. It was just a new chapter with different challenges.
That can feel defeating. You might wonder if it was even worth it to leave if you’re still dealing with this person’s abuse.
Leaving someone who refuses to stop hurting you is always worth it.
Leaving that environment means you’re no longer living in the daily environment of abuse. You’re no longer sleeping in the same house as someone who would rather hurt you than appreciate you.
Leaving gives you space to think, heal, and make decisions without constant interference. Yes, you still have to deal with this person because of your children. But the nature of that contact can be controlled much more than it could be when you were together.
Is Taking Legal Action Necessary?
If you need to take legal action, don’t think about it as being vindictive or punishing your ex-partner. Going the legal route is about creating structure and protection where there currently isn’t enough. It’s about making sure there are consequences for threatening behavior, verbal abuse, and actions that make you feel unsafe.
Courts exist for this reason. They create enforceable boundaries when one person won’t respect the boundaries the other person sets.
Taking legal actions also means you don’t have to go through this alone. Having attorneys, mediators, and the court system gives you some sense of support and a feeling of not being so alone. It’s a support system that’s larger than just yourself.
After all, trying to manage an abusive person’s behavior on your own is exhausting and sometimes impossible.
The person who wrote to me said the realization of the depths of the abuse she went through continues to open up as she stops blaming herself for being negative, which was her ex’s favorite way of framing her hurt in response to being abused.
This is such an important point:
Abusive people often reframe your legitimate hurt and anger as you being negative, dramatic, or oversensitive.
When you start to see that reframing for what it is, when you recognize that your responses to being hurt were normal and justified, it changes everything. You stop questioning whether you’re the problem. You stop wondering if maybe you were too sensitive or if you overreacted. You see clearly that you were responding to real harm, and calling that “being negative” was just another way to avoid taking responsibility.
As that clarity grows, so does your ability to protect yourself. You can see the patterns more clearly. You can recognize when someone is trying to use the same tactics they used before. And you can make different choices about how to respond.
Healing from emotional abuse takes time, especially when you can’t have a clean break from the person who hurt you. Every interaction can feel like it sets you back. You might spend weeks recovering from one threatening conversation, only to have to face another one soon after. That’s not sustainable, and it’s not what healing should look like.
That’s why creating distance through documentation, legal agreements, and gray rock communication is so important. Doing these things protects your healing process.
You can’t heal if you’re constantly being reinjured.
And it can feel impossible to move forward if someone keeps pulling you back into the same dynamics that hurt you in the first place.
Your safety matters. Your children’s safety matters. And if you don’t feel safe, even after you’ve left the relationship, then more steps need to be taken.
That’s not an overreaction. That’s listening to your instincts, the same instincts that finally got you out of the relationship in the first place.
The abuse doesn’t have to continue just because there are children involved. With the right boundaries, documentation, and legal protections in place, you can limit that person’s ability to hurt you.
It won’t be perfect. There will still be difficult moments. But it can be so much better than what you might have to deal with otherwise, where you’re still walking on eggshells and trying to manage someone else’s behavior to keep yourself safe.
To the person who wrote: You’ve made it this far. You left an abusive relationship, which many people never find the strength to do. You’re recognizing the patterns that are still happening. And you’re considering the steps you need to take to truly protect yourself and your child.
These are all qualities of strength, courage, and clarity. Remember, you have always had those qualities in you. Never forget that.
 | 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. |