When they threaten to leave or take something away from you, but they never follow through, expect them to repeat that behavior indefinitely.

Empty threats are effective on those who fear them coming true. There is a way to stop the empty threats (but you probably won’t like it).

In this article, I’m going to talk about recursive, abusive behavior – behavior that repeats, usually because it keeps working.

For example, somebody wrote to me and said, “Every time my fiancé gets mad because I have asked for something that I think is reasonable, but it requires him to change something he’s done or is doing, then he claims that he feels beaten down, and then he tells me he’ll move out.

“He says this is what he feels in the heat of the moment when he says it, but then he comes back and says, ‘I hate when we fight. I love you. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to leave.’ And it just repeats itself. He threatens to leave, and then he comes back, and he doesn’t even say sorry.

“He rarely apologizes for hurting me, and my resentment is growing because it doesn’t seem like he cares that he’s hurting me, or his solution is to break up because he can’t or won’t stop or change this. This is taking a major toll on me and our relationship, and I also don’t trust that he won’t abandon me and my children, who have grown very close to him, and he considers them his daughters.”

I’m so sorry you’re going through this, and I know what you’re dealing with. It is someone who is controlling and wanting to control how you respond. So, he is setting you up to respond in a way that works for him. And by setting you up to respond in that way, he maintains power and control in the relationship.

He also maintains power and control in his own life because if he doesn’t get what he wants (by maintaining a sense of control), he will feel either weak, vulnerable, or afraid. He doesn’t want to express his real thoughts or emotions. And when somebody doesn’t want to deal with their own stuff, they push that stuff onto you.

Again, to the person who wrote this, I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this. Let me address what you wrote. One of the things you said was, “I don’t trust that he won’t abandon me and my children.” That tells me right there he is exploiting a need that you have.

There are a couple of other major things in this message that you sent me that I’m going to address in a moment, but this one stuck out. If you have a strong need for something, and someone who wants to maintain control and power over you knows about that need, they will take advantage of it.

He knows that you fear abandonment, even if you never mentioned that. He can tell by your words and behaviors. For example, if you are kind of clingy (and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing) and really emotionally connected to him all the time, and you want to hang out with him a lot, doing things together – all normal relationship stuff, and he observes all of that from you, and he has a tendency or some dominant personality trait to want to control and keep his power in the relationship and over you, he will use that vulnerability in you to his advantage.

This is what some people do. They will find a vulnerability in you, then use it to their advantage to keep their power and control over you.

Some people will use what you fear to control you.

It’s like a form of emotional blackmail. i.e., “I have something to hold over your head, and if you don’t do what I want, and if you behave in a way I don’t like, I’m going to hold this over your head. So you better straighten up and comply with what I want.”

Or, in this case specifically, this person’s partner is essentially saying, “I don’t want to do what you’re asking me to do, so here’s how I’m going to control you so that I don’t have to do it.”

The stuff that this person listed for her partner to do is very reasonable, like “stop threatening to move out… ” That’s a pretty darn reasonable request!

When he doesn’t want to be told what to do, or he feels that his “power tool,” if you want to call it that, is in jeopardy of being taken away from him, that’s when he uses one of his power tools (control mechanisms), to put you in your place.

There’s no other way to say it. That’s what’s happening here. He is putting you in the place he wants you to be so that you will leave him alone and focus on yourself instead of him.

When the emotionally abusive person makes you focus on yourself, you may end up doing what many victims of abuse do: take the blame, take responsibility, ask yourself, “How can I show up better? What can I do differently so that this person will stop mistreating me or will make the relationship better?”

Victims who believe they themselves are at fault for the abusive behavior they are receiving will try harder to work on the relationship and on themselves. In other words, they do exactly what the perpetrators should do: Try to improve. But most perpetrators of abusive behavior don’t believe they have to improve, which is why they’re always turning it back onto the people they are hurting to do the work.

They Know Your Vulnerabilities and Have No Accountability

If someone threatens to leave the relationship as a way to get what they want, as this person’s partner is doing, and you say, “Please don’t leave!” or “Please don’t say that,” that is not accountability. In fact, those responses play directly into the abuse equation of power and control that works every time.

Some abusive people design it that way. They do behaviors that predict the response they will get so that they can get away with those behaviors. Not all of them necessarily do it consciously. Some people have just learned toxic ways to communicate with others. Some believe control is a normal part of relating to people you love, believe it or not. That’s no excuse, but it can sometimes help to understand that not every abusive person is being purposefully malicious.

Again, there’s no free pass. Abuse is abuse. And you don’t have to stand for it. But some people will be this way all their lives and not realize just how awful and hurtful they’re being. And in this person’s case, he is being awful and hurtful by continuing to threaten to leave. She is clearly distraught, and yet he keeps putting it out there as a means to make her fearful.

It reminds me of another abusive behavior – When someone threatens to kill themselves if you are showing signs of leaving the relationship. Sure, there’s a big difference between the two, but the threat has the same intent: To make the other person feel bad or guilty enough to comply with the abuser’s wishes.

Either way, it’s wording meant to control another person, but it’s of the same variety of threat. It exploits one’s vulnerability or, in the case of a threat of suicide, one’s compassion. The challenge is that you never know if the person using the threat is telling the truth or not.

The biggest challenge when you’re with someone like that is that they know that kind of threat, that language, works, so they keep using it!

How Do You Stop Someone Who Controls You By Threatening to Leave You or Hurt Themselves?

The way you stop such behavior is by making the person accountable for what they are threatening to do. It’s accountability in the form of (and you’re not going to like this) some version of the words, “Fine. Do it.”

I’m not telling you to say that to the person who threatens suicide. That’s a different topic altogether. In fact, I address that very issue in this episode of Love and Abuse.

But I am saying if someone uses manipulative or threatening language to take advantage of your vulnerability and/or exploit your fears, then the bottom line is that they know what works to control you. And, the truth of the matter is, if someone uses the same threatening language over and over again to make you feel responsible for something they are going to take away from you, most of the time it’s an empty threat. Empty threats have no substance and certainly no follow-through.

Again, it’s a completely different scenario with someone who threatens suicide if you don’t do what they want you to do. The episode I did on that (link above) goes into detail about the possible ways to deal with that situation. You never know how serious someone is, which is why you can’t treat a threat like that as empty or baseless.

In other cases where it’s not a life or death situation, I come back to my suggestion on how to stop it: Say something along the lines of, “Okay, if that’s what you need to do.” Or, “Okay, fine, go ahead.”

I know most people reading this won’t like that. And I’m not saying that you should do that. I’m saying that’s how you stop it.

Telling them to follow through with their threat causes them to reveal whether their threat is empty or not. And their behavior has to stop because after you tell them to follow through with their threat, they will have to follow through with it or reveal they were lying the whole time.

They’re either going to follow through or they’re going to tell themselves, “This threat doesn’t work anymore, so I can’t keep using it.”

The solution to empty threats is to give people the opportunity to show they are serious.

If that doesn’t feel very good, it’s not supposed to. Is there a chance they are serious? Yes. There’s a tiny chance they are. And that will also stop the behavior in its tracks (because they will actually follow through).

And I know that’s the scary part. I know that’s why most people won’t tell the other person to follow through. They don’t want the loss or whatever the person has threatened to take away from them. But if you never make them accountable for their own words, nothing will ever change.

What makes threats like this work is your compliance with their behaviors. If you didn’t comply with what they wanted, their behaviors wouldn’t work. That may sound like simple logic, but from an abusive person’s standpoint, where the abuser reaches into their bag of tools and uses what works, there’d be no point in using a tool that doesn’t achieve their desired goal. If the threat was met with, “Okay, that’s fine. Whatever you need to do,” the tool is no longer effective.

Your compliance makes many tools abusers use effective, unfortunately. I say that’s unfortunate because you probably don’t want to have to be anyone but yourself in a relationship! And I agree – you shouldn’t have to be anyone but you. In fact, the primary result of emotional abuse is that it causes the victim to change into the person the abuser wants them to be. But that never, ever works out because trying to change someone into who they are not almost always ends badly.

I never want you to change the wonderfully perfect person you are, but I do want you to be aware that some of your amazing qualities can be taken advantage of. That’s why abusive behavior is hard to avoid for kind, caring, generous, supportive people: Good qualities are often the most exploited.

You can keep your good qualities, but you may have to change some of your responses to abusive behavior if you want that behavior to stop.

At this point, most people think, “Why should I change? Why shouldn’t the abusive person change? Why isn’t it their responsibility to stop their awful behaviors?”

I agree with that! And, if that happened, it would be a miraculous day in the relationship. But will they change? Has it ever happened? If your pain and suffering aren’t enough for someone to rethink their own behaviors that cause that pain and suffering, the chances they’ll change are slim.

Change is absolutely possible. I’ve witnessed it many times in my Healed Being program. But in almost every case, the emotionally abusive person doesn’t change until they are held accountable for their actions. That doesn’t always look like punishment, either. In fact, if anything, it’s solely consequence that changes an abusive person’s behaviors. The majority of healing former abusers I work with faced a consequence they didn’t want. And that was the crucial point of change for them.

In fact, most of them had to experience the real threat of the relationship ending before they finally realized they needed to heal and change or else. Most of them don’t like the “or else” consequence, so they finally seek the help they need. Those who don’t seek help, or can’t admit they are hurting the person they are supposed to care about, almost always end up without that person in their life. Anyone who has had enough emotional abuse will reach their threshold, which is a point of no return.

Some will return if the person hurting them is actually changing and healing. But it requires real work. When the emotional abuser decides to do the work, they give themselves the best chance at saving the relationship, if that’s their goal. Some relationships can’t be saved, but doing the work is what makes any chance possible.

There’s A Consequence To Doing Nothing

The emotionally abusive silent treatment is a good example of getting a result you don’t want, time and time again. If someone uses this type of silent treatment on you, they are trying to get you to comply with their wants and needs by manipulating you into thinking you’re wrong or bad.

The emotionally abusive silent treatment is different than the kind of silent treatment you sometimes need to process things. The type of silent treatment used to manipulate someone else has a goal of making that person do what you want.

An example of the emotionally abusive silent treatment might look like this: John is doing something that Mary doesn’t like, so Mary might think, ‘I can’t get John to stop doing that, so I’m just going to withdraw. I’m going to emotionally disconnect. He’ll wonder where I am because he won’t feel love and connection.’

This might make John feel bad because he won’t be able to feel Mary’s presence anymore. He won’t know where she is inside her head and heart. And, especially, he’ll think that love only comes when there is compliance with what Mary wants and needs.

So in this example, Mary goes silent and waits for John to finally say, “Please come back. What can I do?” This is what Mary wants. She wants John to see that he caused this and that she needed to withdraw because John was doing something wrong (which wasn’t true, but she wants him to think that).

John learns that when he does certain things Mary doesn’t like, she disconnects emotionally. Since John doesn’t want that to happen, he learns to stop the behaviors she doesn’t like.

An example of a behavior Mary doesn’t like is when John smokes in the house. Instead of having an authentic conversation about how the smoke affects her, she withholds and withdraws, making John feel bad, hoping that he feels so terrible that he stops smoking in the house.

That was a minor example, but you get the point. The emotionally abusive silent treatment can be used to manipulate a kind, caring, compassionate person because they hate to see the person they love feel miserable and appear depressed.

In this example, John sees the results of his behavior and learns not to do the behavior that upsets Mary anymore. The problem is that there’s a consequence to John responding the same way over and over again to Mary’s silent treatment. If he doesn’t change his response and always gives in to what Mary wants, nothing will change, and Mary will repeat this behavior indefinitely.

Mary gets her way because John will do anything to help her return to a better emotional state, where he can feel loved and connected again. There are two consequences in a situation like this:

1. John feels emotionally and physically drained when Mary disappears like this. He doesn’t know what to do. So he tries so hard to bring her back. John is slowly, maybe for years, falling out of love with Mary.

2. Mary learns that the silent treatment works every time, so she has no reason to ever give it up. It’s a perfect control mechanism to make John do what she wants.

Like I said, there’s a consequence to doing nothing.

What does this have to do with someone threatening to leave if you don’t comply? It’s almost identical, just performed in a different way:

Silent treatment makes the other person comply to keep love and connection.
Threatening to leave makes the other person comply to keep love and connection.

In the case of the person who wrote to me, as long as she always complies, he won’t leave – at least, that’s her belief. He could leave whether she complies or not. But why would he? There’s no reason if he is able to keep his power and control over her.

In either situation, the silent treatment or threatening to leave the relationship, if the victim of that behavior has a deep fear of abandonment, they are more likely to do exactly what the abuser wants to make sure that fear never becomes a reality.

That’s why it’s important to understand that the abusive person has no reason to change their behavior when they keep getting what they want.

With the silent treatment example, John will give Mary more love and attention when she disconnects. And that fulfills Mary’s dysfunctional need. She withdraws from John, and John gets her back by attending to that dysfunction.

It’s not wholly fair to say “dysfunctional,” but that’s what she’s dealing with in the example I just gave, where Mary doesn’t want John to act in a certain way, or Mary doesn’t feel like she’s being loved or given enough attention. She goes silent and gains something from her silence (like secondary gain, where there’s a benefit to someone’s “suffering”).

When Mary gains the benefit of his connection, she might start to come back, making John feel better and letting Mary know that whenever she wants him to be compliant about something in the future, all she has to do is withdraw, which will fulfill the recursive cycle of abusive behavior.

The consequence of John doing nothing different will be the repetition of abusive behavior by Mary. That’s not to victim-blame John or anyone in this situation, but it’s important to know that sometimes in order to see change in a difficult relationship, you have to be the one to change it. Remember, if there’s a chance the abusive person will change, it will probably be because the other person is going to make them accountable for their behavior.

That accountability always means a great loss of some sort. And, quite often, the loss will need to come in the form of the real threat of the end of the relationship. If they don’t believe there will be an actual loss, they may never stop the behavior.

“If That’s What You Believe You Need To Do”

In the sixth grade, I just started going to a new school. My first day there was a kid who said, “Let’s go outside and fight. I’m going to punch you.” I thought, What? I don’t want to fight! Who is this kid?

I came home and tried to put it out of my mind. The next day and the next, this same kid kept coming up to me, telling me he wanted to fight me. I felt so tiny back then. I wasn’t a fighter. I didn’t want to deal with this.

I finally told my dad that this kid kept saying he wanted to fight me. I did everything I could to avoid this kid, but he always found me! So my dad said, “People talk a big game, but they rarely follow through. Just tell him you’ll fight him.”

What? “Are you serious, Dad?” He said he was serious and told me nothing would happen. I couldn’t believe my dad was sending me into the lion’s den. I felt even smaller now, realizing I didn’t have my dad backing me up or talking to the teachers or anything. My task was to go to school the next day and tell this bully ‘Okay, let’s fight.’

I was so scared. The next morning, I woke up and went to school. There he was, coming over to me. I still remember his face. He said, “Come on, let’s go outside and fight. I’m gonna kick your butt,” or something like that.

I looked at him and realized this was my last day on earth. But instead of backing down this time, I did exactly what my dad told me to do. I said, “Okay, let’s go.”

He looked at me with a straight face. I don’t think he expected that response. Then he said something that floored me: “Aww, I’m just kidding! I was only messing with you.”

I spent days stressed out at my new school because I thought I was going to get beaten. Every day, I responded to this kid the same way: “I don’t want to fight,” but it didn’t matter. He did, or so I thought. And so every day, my response to him was the response that he wanted. And that’s how he kept his power over me.

But the day I changed my response, he shifted completely. He became someone I didn’t recognize. I thought, ‘You’re just kidding??’ I was in kid-shock. I didn’t know how to process it. My reality, what I believed would happen, shattered in a good way. It was a valuable lesson that changed my life. I still had boundary issues, but that gave me a big boost in my confidence.

I told the person who wrote in about her partner that she could tell him to follow through with his threat of leaving. She could say, “If that’s what you need to do, then maybe you should do it.”

Could he really leave her? Absolutely. Just like I could have been beaten up that day in the sixth grade. I didn’t want to get beaten up. But I also didn’t want to live every day in fear. So I made a change in the relationship because I knew he never would. What would be his incentive to change? When someone has power over you, and they enjoy having that power, don’t expect them to give it up.

Now, of course, I would never, ever tell you or anyone else to give permission to someone to follow through with a threat because they might actually do it. And not everyone is prepared to take that proverbial punch in the face.

But the way I look at it, if you stay in a relationship with someone who uses control to keep you in line, expect nothing to change. People in control do not want to lose it.

This person’s partner will continue using the threat of leaving to control her because he knows she fears being without him. To the person who wrote, I’m sure he’s seen that fear in your face. He probably has seen you cry. He’s probably heard you say, “Please don’t do that. Please don’t say that,” because he can see and feel the fear in you. He knows that you don’t want him to leave, which is why he will continue using the threat of leaving to control you.

Compliance Completes The Abuse Cycle

The compliance that this woman normally gives to her partner, telling him not to go and showing fear and worry, inadvertently completes the abuse cycle. And I’m not saying she’s to blame. She’s trying to keep her life together. But this is how abusers operate. They feed off your fears and vulnerabilities.

That’s why accountability is so important. Saying something along the lines of, “If you feel you need to do that, that’s up to you,” puts the spotlight back on the person doing the behavior and takes it off of you. When the spotlight is on you, the attention is on you. When the attention is on you, the person doing the bad behavior gets away with it!

Saying, “Please don’t leave. I’ll try harder,” is compliance, giving the abuser exactly what they want. They want you to believe that they are serious about their threat. They may be! But they may also be doing something they know keeps you compliant.

Compliance with what hurtful people want of you is the opposite of empowerment.

What if this woman responded to his threat of leaving with, “If that’s what you feel you need to do, then I won’t stop you because you have a right to do anything you want. You’re an adult. You can make that decision.”?

That’s a removal of compliance. He wants her to say, “Anything for you, just don’t leave.” That compliance allows him to keep his power over her. But the scary part is that he may actually follow through with his threat and leave.

What if he does leave? If that happened, I’d have to ask you what the quality of that relationship was in the first place. In this person’s letter, she said he would apologize after a while, telling her, “I love you. I love you so much! I never want to leave you.” And he’s said that many times!

So, he threatens to leave, then apologizes and tells her he would never leave…

If you wanted to know why I went the direction I did in this article, that one comment above is exactly why I went in that direction. He uses the same threat over and over again. He does it because he knows it works.

But what if she says, “Fine, just leave,” and he does? Back to my previous question:
What does that say about the quality of your relationship? And what does that say about the longevity of that relationship, too?

The permanence of a relationship with someone who says one thing and does another cannot last. In fact, it seems that this relationship’s permanence had more to do with his control over her rather than his love for her. And if that’s the case, if she is with someone who wants to maintain the permanence of the relationship by keeping his control over her, then she has to seriously consider whether it was a relationship worth keeping in the first place.

To the person who shared this challenge with me, I know none of this is what you wanted to hear. And, there’s no magic pill. Actually, that is the magic pill: The accountability part is the magic pill. Making him accountable by telling him to follow through.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to be happy in the end. As I said, he really could follow through. But my guess is when you say something like, “Okay, if that’s what you need to do,” he’s going to be surprised and not know what to do with that information. He’s not going to expect that you are going to throw a wrench into his control machine. When that happens, and the onus and responsibility of what happens next in the relationship is up to him, then you’ll get to see his true colors. Because someone who says, “I love you, I never want to leave you,” and then actually leaves, that says a lot about who you’re dealing with.

To conclude, I want to address the last sentence in this person’s email. It reads, “He rarely apologizes for hurting me. My resentment is growing because it doesn’t seem that he cares that he’s hurting me, or his solution is to break up because he can’t or won’t stop or change his behavior.”

If somebody doesn’t seem to care that they’re hurting you, please let that land.

Someone who claims to love you, who doesn’t seem to care that they are hurting you, is not loving.
Someone who says they never want to leave you but threatens to leave you is not loving.
Someone who takes advantage of your fears is not loving.

Someone who loves you supports the person you are, never wants to see you hurt, and never, ever takes advantage of your fears.

Stay strong.