Love can feel like a double-edged sword, cutting deep despite the tender moments. Or is that really love? Caring and kindness mixed with toxic, controlling behaviors create a dangerous emotional cocktail of bonding and trauma. 

Let me ask you what might seem like an unfair question: If you had a pet that you absolutely loved, one that was sweet and loving most of the time but scratched your face or bit you every single day, would you keep it? Would you continue to love it and make excuses for its behavior?

I bring this up because it perfectly illustrates what happens in a trauma bond. A trauma bond forms when you love someone deeply, but they consistently hurt you. You experience their love, but you also experience their pain. And this cycle happens almost daily.

I received a message from someone recently that broke my heart. She wrote, “I met the love of my life, and he moved across the country to be with me. But after he arrived, everything changed.”

She went on to describe how she’s naturally bubbly, outgoing, and social. She loves her friends and enjoys meeting new people. But because his previous partners had cheated on him, he became extremely controlling and abusive with her. He accuses her of cheating, calls her horrible names, and tells her she’s “not wife material” simply because she talks to other people, including men.

When other men showed interest in her, he blamed her entirely. He called her awful names and insisted she was attracting this attention on purpose. Despite her attempts to change herself to make him more comfortable, his behavior only got worse.

She says he turns everything around on her. He claims she’s the abuser, that he’s just “defending himself against a lying cheater.” He refuses to contribute to their relationship, won’t get a real job, and accuses her of using him for money.

This is exactly how a trauma bond works. We develop trust with someone, feel safe with them, and experience moments where we feel loved, worthy, and important. Then comes the emotional injury – the proverbial scratch, the emotional “bite,” the cruel words. When this happens, many of us look for ways to justify it. We think, “Maybe I did something wrong,” or “Maybe if I change, things will get better.”

So we start making changes. Maybe we dress differently, act differently, or stop doing things we enjoy. We transform into someone we don’t want to be because we care so much about our partner. We sacrifice who we are to make them feel more comfortable, to avoid their insecurities being triggered.

But the truth is, when someone tries to change who you are through emotional injury, through wounding words and behaviors, that’s not love. They’re trying to mold you into who they want you to be because of their own insecurities. This isn’t your problem to fix – it’s theirs.

If someone wants to wear something sexy, they should be able to.
If someone is naturally outgoing and social, they shouldn’t have to change that.

You should feel comfortable being yourself around your partner.

When someone is uncomfortable with you being yourself around them, that’s a massive red flag.

I share this because you need to understand that in these situations, it’s not your fault. When someone hurts you but is occasionally loving, it creates confusion. You might think this is what love looks like, but it isn’t.

Real love doesn’t require you to constantly heal from emotional wounds inflicted by the person who claims to care about you.

When we enter a romantic relationship, we do so because we love who that person is right now. Think of it like a job promotion. When someone gets promoted, it’s because their employer appreciates how they’re already showing up and performing. They don’t promote someone hoping they’ll become a different person. They promote them because they want more of what they’re already seeing.

The same should be true in relationships. We choose to be with someone because we want to share our life with them exactly as they are. We find them not just acceptable, but lovable and appreciable. Their current state of being is what drew us to them in the first place.

That is what a healthy relationship looks like. Sure, there will be incompatibilities and differences. You might like something they don’t, or vice versa. That’s normal and perfectly fine. What isn’t fine is when someone tells you that you’re not good enough as you are.

To the person who wrote to me about their partner’s controlling behavior: You are perfectly fine as you were.

When you change yourself for someone who’s hurting you, you’re sending two dangerous messages. First, that it’s okay for them to hurt you. Second, that it’s okay for them to try to change you. Both of these messages are wrong, and both can lead to more harmful behavior.

This might sound harsh, but it’s important to understand. When you change yourself to please someone who hurts you, you’re actually reinforcing their negative behavior. You’re showing them that hurting you is an effective way to get what they want. And the more you comply with their demands and submit to their control, the more you demonstrate that their harmful behaviors are an acceptable way to treat you.

I’m not saying this to blame or shame anyone who’s been in this situation. Instead, I want you to remember that you deserve to be treated as you are, not who someone else wants you to be.

You deserve to be who you are, not who someone else demands you become.

The best personal changes we make come when we’re surrounded by people who love us, trust us, and make us feel safe. For example, imagine you’re not completely happy with your weight, and you meet someone who loves you exactly as you are. They don’t care about your size; they just love being with you and sharing time with you.

Then one day, you look in the mirror and think, “I want to feel better about myself. I want to make some changes, not because I have to, but because I want to.”

When you make changes from a place of self-love, it’s like giving yourself a gift that your partner might appreciate too. But I want to be very clear, I’m not suggesting you should change for someone else. What I’m talking about is what happens when someone fully accepts you as you showed up on day one of the relationship.

What does that look like? It’s when they don’t talk down to you, put you down, or make you feel bad about yourself, your body, your friends, your choices, or the activities you enjoy. When someone accepts you completely, something amazing happens: you get your brain to yourself.

I know that sounds strange, but when no one is trying to manipulate or control you, you’re free to make your own choices without the conflict of someone else’s thoughts and judgments weighing on you. This is crucial. If you’re thinking about changing for someone else, make sure that person is treating you right, because if you change for someone who makes you suffer, you’re teaching them that causing you pain is how they get what they want. And that suffering will continue throughout your relationship.

That’s not how love should work. You are worthy of being accepted exactly as you are, without having to change for someone who doesn’t deserve those changes.

Here’s another important truth: Someone who hurts you doesn’t deserve to see an “improved version” of you that they’re trying to create. Any improvements you make should come from your own decisions, based on what you want for yourself. If someone is making you feel unworthy or unlovable unless you change, why would they deserve the “better” version they’re trying to mold you into?

Let’s say you’re feeling tired and sluggish, you’ve gained some weight, and you’re not happy about it. Then your partner starts commenting on it, giving you looks when you eat foods they don’t approve of, and pressuring you to “do something about it.”

Even if you were thinking of making changes for yourself, how motivated are you going to feel when the person who is supposed to love and support you the most can’t even accept where you are right now?

This is something many emotionally abusive people don’t understand. They don’t get that the more pressure they put on someone to change, the more likely that person will become exactly who they don’t want them to be.

I see this as a self-fulfilling prophecy playing out over and over again in the emotional abuser’s life. When someone tries to control their partner’s decisions or change who they are, that partner often resists making any changes at all, not because they don’t want to change, but because they don’t feel motivated when they’re being made to feel bad about themselves.

What a person in relationships needs is a loving, supportive partner who says, “Whatever you do, I’m okay with. Whatever you want to do with your life is fine with me. Whether you want to exercise or not, it’s your choice because it’s your life. You’re an individual with your own wants and needs, and you may or may not want to make changes. And I’m okay no matter what because I just love spending time with you.” Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

In emotionally abusive relationships, however, you often hear manipulative statements like, “If you loved me, you would do this,” highlighting something they want to control about you. Or they’ll make subtle or overt threats such as, “You need to change or else.” Controlling words and behavior like this will make you feel bad and unsupported.

It’s hard to do what someone wants you to do if they aren’t supportive of who you are right now.

There’s no motivation to change when someone isn’t satisfied with the way you’re showing up right now.

When you feel unsupported, or worse, put down for who you are today, you might find yourself emotionally disconnecting from the person doing that to you just to protect your heart.

The person I talked about before, who wrote me that message, described herself as “a shell of a person.” Her life was falling apart: her social life, her health, her sleep, her job… everything was affected by the endless fighting and harassment.

She wrote, “I want to leave, but I can’t. I know the beautiful man he can be without all this behavior. I’m worried that if I leave, he’ll change, and someone else will get to experience the good version of him.”

She mentioned that he seems to know his behavior is horrible, but then tells me that he says things like, “You don’t deserve the good me until you earn it.”

After two years of this treatment, she saw her own reactions becoming abusive, too. She told me things she said in retaliation that she’ll regret forever, feeling ashamed of who she was becoming.

To the person who wrote this message to me, or anyone else who needs to hear this:
You don’t deserve abusive behavior.

And to answer this person’s question about whether her partner will change if she leaves, here’s the irony: when we stay in an abusive relationship, the other person rarely changes because there’s no real accountability for their behavior.

You might think withholding sex or emotional connection sends a strong enough message about their bad behavior, but many emotionally abusive people won’t stop until they truly understand their own behaviors are the reason the person they claim to care about is disconnecting from them.

Can The Emotional Abuser Change?

Change is absolutely possible for many abusive people, but they almost always need to seek help through therapy or a program like Healed Being. I’ve worked with many emotionally abusive people who are actually wonderfully compassionate and loving people deep down, but they’re covered in layers of unhealthy coping mechanisms. And instead of dealing with their emotions, they push people away by being hurtful, making their partners deal with their inability to cope and regulate their own emotional state. The abusive person’s unhealed issues become their victim’s trauma.

When you stay with an abusive person, they might not think their behavior is “bad enough” to warrant change. It’s often not until you make leaving a fact rather than a threat, saying “I’m leaving because I can’t take this behavior anymore”, that reality hits them. That’s when they might finally realize there’s real accountability for their actions.

Of course, some people just want power and control, and they’ll blame you even after you leave, claiming you broke up the family or caused all the problems. But in most cases of emotional abuse, it’s when the person being victimized finally says, “I’ve had enough, I’ve reached my limit, this has to stop or I’m gone,” that the abusive partner finally gets it. That’s when they realize their behavior has real consequences and that yes, you really are affected by their actions.

It might seem impossible that they don’t see how their behavior affects you. You’ve cried, stayed at your family’s house, slept on the couch or the extra bedroom on many nights, but none of these actions were enough to show them just how awful they were being. None of those painful moments were enough to get them to look inward and reflect on themselves, perhaps taking responsibility for what they were doing.

Most emotionally abusive people need to face real consequences before they understand just how damaging they are being.

Abusive people need to know that you have your own voice, can make your own decisions, and have every right to follow your own path. When you finally say, “I’ve had enough and I refuse to take anymore,” it hits them like a ton of bricks because they are used to getting what they want.

If that were to happen, you’d likely get a response like, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”, even though you’ve told them countless times in countless ways. And you might wonder, “Why wasn’t my crying and pain enough to make you see just how awful you were being? Why do I have to give you an ultimatum for you to change?”

Then they might plead, “But I love you. Please don’t leave! Okay, I’ll never do that again.” But by then, you’ve reached what I call your “threshold.” That’s the critical point where you either save yourself or continue suffering. After all, why would you want to keep getting hurt by someone who claims to love you?

When someone hurts you and says they love you, they have the wrong definition of love. And you might, too.

Love means supporting someone else’s path to happiness and accepting who they are completely, even if you don’t like some of that person’s quirks (or even major aspects of their personality.)

Love is showing someone they are okay as they are.

When you feel the opposite of acceptance, that’s when the relationship becomes toxic and abusive, and you become a shell of your former self.

To the person who wrote to me, let me make a prediction about your partner. If you leave, he’ll likely say terrible things about you and move on to another relationship where he’ll cause just as much pain and damage, if not more. The only way he’ll change is if he seeks help. The toughest part is accepting that he probably won’t seek that help unless and until you leave.

I know this perspective well because it used to be mine. I thought, “Well, my behavior can’t be that bad. After all, she’s still here! If she thought I was being terrible, she would have left.”

When we did have conversations about my behaviors, I would always reply with, “I know. I’m sorry. I’m working on it.”

I was always working on it! But the truth was, I never actually got anywhere. It took eight years and a divorce before I realized just how bad my behavior truly was. My then-wife got to her breaking point (her threshold), and I finally had to face my own ignorance, lack of empathy, and unloving ways.

I needed people to leave me to learn what I needed to learn.
I needed relationships to end with someone saying, “I can’t take it anymore.”

That’s what finally pushed me to start healing. And I’m actually grateful for the people who left me. If they didn’t, I might be the same person I always was, hurting people who didn’t deserve it, then blaming them for my own behaviors. Just writing that out seems ludicrous (I couldn’t connect the dots back then). But I had to face full accountability in order to accept the reality I was creating.

Some people say, “It takes two.” And in many cases, yes, two people have to communicate and learn to find balance in a relationship. But if one person doesn’t want balance, and they only want control, at that point, it takes only one to destroy a relationship.

In most cases of abuse, the victim tries hard to make things better while the abuser blames the victim of their behavior for not trying hard enough. The abuser has no intention of changing themselves, while the victim does everything they can to change to create a balance that never materializes.

I know this point may not help someone who’s deeply attached or afraid of being alone. When you have insecurities or fear abandonment, when you depend on another person for your happiness and well-being, leaving a situation like this feels impossible. But sometimes it’s the only way forward, both for you and, ironically, for them, too.

When we’re caught in a toxic relationship, we need to work on our dependencies and insecurities. It’s like the analogy I used earlier of having a cat that scratches you or a dog that bites you every single day, but you continue telling them that you love them. Again, that’s an unfair comparison because most pets are unconditionally loving and wonderful. But I use this analogy to show what a trauma bond can do to someone.

A trauma bond makes you keep someone in your life because you love certain parts of them while hating and suffering from other parts of them. You might experience a single wonderful day where they give you a surprise kiss in the morning or take you to lunch, and that’s the day that sticks in your mind. It’s 1% of the 2% of good times you have. And you may hold on to that 1 or 2%, hoping a day like that will repeat time and time again.

But what about the other 98% of the time? That time might be spent consumed with worry, thinking things like:

I hope they don’t get upset.
I hope they don’t yell at me.
I hope they don’t call me names.

Thoughts like this float around in your head constantly. You’re always waiting for the other person to change, but real change requires desire, empathy, humility, and vulnerability.

True change happens when someone finally realizes, “Oh my God, I’ve been hurting you all this time. I feel sick to my stomach.”

I’ve experienced this myself and seen it in many people I work with. Those who have such a realization have reached a point where they feel genuine shame. They will often say something along the lines of, “I can’t believe I treated someone I’m supposed to love like this. I don’t ever want to be that person again.”

If you hear that, maybe there’s a chance true healing can take place. But be careful of empty words like, “Yeah, you’re right, I probably need to change.” That’s just talk.

Real change happens when someone has a lightbulb moment and steps into full empathy for the first time. They suddenly understand and think, “I would never want to be treated this way. I feel sick because that’s what I’ve been doing to them – someone I’m supposed to love and support.”

What If The Emotional Abuser Reads This and Pretends They Are Healed?

Some people do exactly that. Some try to pretend they have changed and are healing. And some get away with it… But only for a few days.

Fake healing does not persist.

Someone who pretends they are healing or have changed might fake shame and guilt for a day or two, but by day three, they’re back to their old behaviors. A fake healer, one who hasn’t addressed their underlying issues, insecurities, and dysfunctions, will always reveal themselves in a matter of days.

When someone truly changes, you will feel strange because you’re not used to feeling comfortable around them. You’re not used to speaking freely without worry. It feels different when someone who has been abusive actually stops being abusive. They are a completely different person and you won’t know what to make of it.

To the person who wrote, let me be direct: Your partner is not the love of your life. You might be upset hearing this, but this is not what love looks like. That person is a lesson. They are someone who may have brought you some joy, but the overwhelming pain and suffering you’re experiencing is not what life or relationships are about.

And, of course, there’s always a possibility they could change. But that usually requires a complete breakdown before any breakthrough can happen. Often, it takes a person saying, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving,” before they can really feel the accountability.

Even if your partner does find healing, remember that you will need time away from their influence. When you’re trauma bonded, you’re in a fog, trying to make them happy, conforming to their wishes, believing their version of reality. Only when you step away from that fog can you truly understand what’s happening and start your own healing journey.

I witnessed this transformation with my own mother after she left her abusive marriage of 40 years. Even after divorcing him, she still said she might take him back if he returned. When I reminded her of his decades of abuse, she just shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, but I would probably take him back.”

My mind was blown. What started off as a joke turned into a dose of reality I didn’t expect. I was joking when I asked her if she’d take him back. I knew how much she hated him and just wanted him gone. But she was still trauma-bonded, and her head was in a fog.

But something remarkable happened about two months later. She brought up that conversation we had and said, “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I said I’d take him back. I would never f****g take him back!”

The fog in her brain had finally lifted, and she could clearly remember what those 40 years were really like. She realized she didn’t want just 2% enjoyment in her life. 2% happiness… it just didn’t make sense. She was tired of spending 98% of her time worried about his next drunk episode, what he might break, or how he might hurt her again.

She had been living in a constant state of anxiety for so long that it became her “normal.” Like many people in abusive relationships, she probably thought this was just how relationships worked: You take the bad with the good.

But once she could think clearly, she firmly stated she would never take him back ever again.

This experience, her saying she’d take him back initially, was pivotal for me. And as I started helping others with their relationships, I began noticing a pattern with people leaving abusive relationships in general. I learned that it can take up to four months or more for the fog to lift.

This fog consists of confusion, fears, worries, self-doubt, and all the toxic thoughts that accumulate during a relationship with an abusive person. And when the fog finally clears, you have an opportunity to reconnect with who you really are.

Sometimes you might feel like you’ve lost yourself completely, becoming just a shell of who you used to be. You might need to rebuild yourself from scratch. While that sounds daunting, it’s far better than staying in a situation where you’re emotionally hollowed out day after day.

Many people reach their breaking point where they feel empty, purposeless, and devoid of happiness. But here’s the beautiful truth:

Even when you feel like an empty shell, the core of who you are remains intact. That genuine, lovable, worthy version of you is still there.

Yes, you’ll need healing after leaving a relationship like this, but at least you won’t be constantly oppressed while working on that healing. When you’re no longer pushed aside or pushed to your limit, you can finally blossom.

Every relationship has its good moments. Most people are capable of occasional kindness. But if someone who claims to love you is hurting you day after day, if you’re constantly getting “bitten by the dog” or “scratched by the cat,” that’s not love.

You don’t deserve to be hurt on a daily basis. Just like you probably wouldn’t keep a dog that draws blood from you every day just because it’s cute and sometimes affectionate (perhaps they could go to therapy, uh, I mean dog training).

Daily pain is not supposed to be a part of a loving, caring relationship. And just because love may show up once in a while, remember that it is supposed to consist of more than 2% of a relationship.