When the trust breaks, and there is no love left in the relationship, but the emotional abuse stops, is there a chance for it to heal, and can the trust be re-earned?
I received an email from someone who has healed from being an emotional abuser, and he wants my thoughts on whether the marriage can survive or if it’s too late.
I received a message for my other podcast, The Overwhelmed Brain, that I believe will be helpful for anyone in what they consider a difficult relationship. It’s important to note that not all difficult relationships are emotionally abusive, controlling, or manipulative. Sometimes, a difficult relationship simply means someone is dealing with their own struggles or triggers, though emotionally abusive behavior can certainly be present in challenging relationships.
Relationships can go through phases, or face triggers that people struggle to release. In my own marriage, I experienced a trigger within the first week of meeting my future wife, and I carried that trigger throughout our eight-year relationship. Every response and behavior stemmed from that initial trigger. I wasn’t truly happy or authentic, and how could she be herself when I was consistently judgmental and emotionally abusive?
While some couples can identify these triggers, discuss them openly, work through them together, and potentially save their relationship, what frequently occurs is quite different. One or both partners remain triggered throughout the relationship, with their behaviors stemming directly from these emotional wounds. The relationship becomes challenging because we’re constantly in survival mode, almost like a perpetual fight-or-flight state. We’re just trying to get through each moment and have our needs met.
In this survival state, we might become hurtful, controlling, or manipulative, sometimes unintentionally. When we’re triggered by something our partner does or even by who they are as a person, we might engage in unhealthy or toxic behavior. And then, ironically, we often blame them for our reactions.
One person might blame their partner for not changing when, in reality, it’s often about their own unresolved triggers that need healing. They need to learn either to accept the situation or choose to leave the relationship.
Bad behavior almost always stems from being triggered by something, as I experienced growing up in an alcoholic home. For years, I struggled with people drinking around me. In my past relationships, I would become visibly bothered and judge my partner, including making comments or giving them disapproving looks whenever they had alcohol. It was awful for them. And I’m sure I made them feel bad about themselves for doing something as harmless as having a drink. My trigger was activated, and I responded with toxic behavior.
When I talk about triggers, I specifically mean emotional triggers because they create an emotional response while we’re trying to get our needs met. We want to feel safe and secure, but we can’t when someone’s actions give us PTSD-like reactions.
A trigger is essentially the onset of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The trauma I experienced from an alcoholic’s behavior in my youth carried into my adult relationships. I would become re-traumatized watching my partner, someone I wanted to trust completely and be vulnerable with, engage in behavior similar to what made me feel unsafe in my past. This simplified version of PTSD can destroy relationships.
My emotional triggers were devastating to my relationships. I took them to extremes and ended up hurting people I was supposed to love and support. During my previous marriage, my triggers led me to give my wife the silent treatment and throw judgmental looks her way whenever she did something that triggered me. These reactions surfaced because I hadn’t done the necessary healing work.
The sad truth is we can carry around emotional triggers about stuff we haven’t properly healed from.
If you’re in a relationship with someone who’s triggered and acting hurtful toward you, there may be a way through and out of that cycle. Of course, there are situations that might require leaving or getting away, especially when the person is violent or even violating very sacred values or principles you hold true. When that happens, it’s a good idea to focus on yourself and take the appropriate steps for your well-being.
However, if something isn’t necessarily a values violation but you just don’t want it in your life, you might find a way to address the issues without needing to end the relationship.
Take smoking, for instance. If my partner wanted to smoke, it might be a significant issue for me, not because it violates my values but because it triggers my concerns about having quality time with her.
Aside from the issue of quality time, the smell of smoke and potential health risks like lung cancer would be a major concern for me. But if she told me she only wanted one cigarette at a party every few months, I might think harder about my response to this new activity.
If something triggers me, but it happens infrequently, I have to question whether the real problem lies with that person’s actions or my lack of acceptance of that person’s individual choices. I’d have to consider if I was trying to be controlling as a parent or authority figure might be. And that’s definitely not who I want to be.
This example illustrates how sometimes we’re dealing with a values violation, and other times, it’s just a trigger. We need to carefully weigh our options to determine the best course of action.
One option that’s definitely not healthy is repressing your feelings, avoiding discussions, and stuffing down negative emotions. That approach is harmful both to the relationship and to yourself.
When the Emotional Abuse Stops, Can the Relationship Continue?
Let me share an email I received from someone I’ll call Bob, who wrote:
“I’ve been listening to their podcast for a bit, and I love it. One of the things I love about the podcast is that I really identify with your story. I, too, brought difficult problems from my childhood into my marriage, which I then projected onto my lovely wife.
“When I first heard you say the words ’emotional abuse’ when referring to your own behaviors, I just about choked. I have emotionally abused my wife! And I have a great deal of regret around that, but I’m on a solid path to healing. I love hearing you speak about the possibility of healing. I’m taking the steps it takes to affect real change.
“My question is this: Have you ever encountered a story or situation like this where the couple involved stays together? My wife and I aren’t divorced, but we’re having trouble seeing a way forward.
“The abuse has ended, but the wounds are raw. I don’t want to speak for her, but I know I’ve hurt her to the deepest core, and I don’t know whether we can ever get back to a place of having a healthy romantic relationship.”
This is a valid, significant question because you, “Bob,” are working on this relationship and wondering if healing is possible and if you’ll get through it and return to where you once were. Or maybe you just want to know if a healthy romantic relationship is possible after an abusive one.
To answer your first question about couples staying together after emotional abuse, it’s not common, unfortunately. But it largely depends on how worn out the victim of the emotional abuse is. If they’re completely worn out and disconnected from their partner, the relationship rarely returns to a romantic connection. While it can happen, I haven’t seen it often. When it does work, it requires extensive effort from both partners, particularly from the person who exhibited the harmful behavior.
The victim needs time to heal and rebuild trust, which can be a lengthy process. When someone has endured emotional abuse, control, manipulation, or all of these, reconnecting and reopening their heart becomes incredibly challenging.
A closed heart tends to stay closed toward the person who caused so much harm.
Your wife may have reached that point, as my previous wife did, where the love was gone, and her heart was sealed. I know this sounds like bad news, but keep reading because there’s some good news, too.
Once the heart closes, it is incredibly difficult for them to reopen it to the person who’s hurt them. At one point, she likely trusted you completely, but that trust eroded through emotionally abusive behavior. As it deteriorated, her heart gradually closed more and more until she finally sealed it shut. From what you’ve described, it sounds like she’s reached that point, what I call her “threshold,” locking her heart to protect herself from further hurt.
This realization can feel devastating. I understand how you might feel about it because I’ve been there. When I recognized my own harmful behavior toward my wife, I felt terrible. I felt like throwing up. But that’s when my healing truly began, and I started asking myself, “Why would anyone want to stay with me? I can’t believe I put her through that.” It’s that moment when you step into their shoes and realize you wouldn’t want to be treated that way either.
Consider this, Bob (or anyone else who needs to hear this): this person could choose to be with anyone in the world, and they chose you.
It’s an incredible honor and privilege to be chosen like that, and it’s often something some people might take for granted. And I promise I’m not saying this to make you feel worse. I’m just trying to highlight something important for anyone who might be taking advantage of the number of variables involved in order to get two people together and create a union such as this. The person who chooses you is someone who could be with anyone else but chooses you.
To those who might be hurting someone they care about, remember the precious time you are wasting.
To be with someone who wants to be with you is such an honor and privilege.
I’ve learned to approach relationships with the awareness that each moment could be our last together. That keeps me aware of how I treat them and if I will feel good about how I treat them.
I don’t want to have an argument, then they leave in their car, never to return, whether due to an accident or because of something awful I said. I never want to experience that. I know how that will feel. So I try to never take advantage of my time with my partner.
When you keep that awareness about how precious a relationship is, it becomes a continuous process of doing your best to treat the other person, who could choose to be with anyone else in the world, with respect and kindness, showing them how special they are in your life.
Viewing relationships through this lens, treating the other person as precious because they chose you, creates a beautifully humbling perspective. I believe that having someone choose to be with you is truly remarkable. Treating them like gold feels like the only appropriate response!
When you have someone special in your life, cherishing it should come naturally. Yet many people, like Bob and myself in past relationships, failed to recognize this gift and instead engaged in abusive behaviors.
It took losing multiple relationships and extensive healing before I could maintain a healthy relationship, which I’ve now had since 2014.
Bob, I hope you don’t have to experience that loss to transform. So, let me share what you might need to work on and what to expect going forward.
First, accept that she’s not in love with you right now. She might love you, but being in love requires an unlocked heart, trust, and feeling safe with your partner.
She may not be in that space for quite some time. And instead of seeing her as someone who should be in love with you, recognize her as someone who cares about you. The fact that she’s still in your life suggests she cares and sees your potential. Though these are just my assumptions.
But being okay with her not being in love with you is crucial. When you accept this reality, you’ll stop trying to force those feelings or pull something from her that she’s not ready to give – maybe something she may never be ready to give.
Supporting her in this possible truth will contribute significantly to both of your healing processes by removing expectations from the relationship. Accept where she is emotionally. She needs to know it’s safe to feel how she feels.
This acceptance can lead to a new mindset – a different kind of comfort – even if it feels uncomfortable at first. Support her completely, accepting her exactly where she is, who she is, and what she needs to experience. Be the person who says, “You’re absolutely right. You need to be where you are. I would feel the same way if I were in your position.”
Making such statements demonstrates real empathy, which I believe you have because you feel regret. Hold onto that regret for a while, along with the awareness of the pain you caused and the pain you feel. I don’t want you to wallow in guilt forever, but you need the reminder that guilt provides to help guide your behavior to do the right thing going forward. Believe it or not, guilt is a part of your healing. It’s also part of your lesson in how to treat others.
Pain and regret serve as important reminders that you’re on a continuous journey of healing and that falling off the wagon is always possible. Even after many years of improved behavior in relationships, some of those old thought patterns can suddenly resurface. You can get triggered by something seemingly small. And before you know it, you’re in scramble mode, frantically trying to understand what’s happening in your head.
These old neural associations in our brains automatically connect certain situations with trigger responses. When we haven’t fully healed from something, we need to keep working on it. That’s why keeping those memories of regret and pain in the background can be valuable, not as a primary focus, but as a gentle reminder of the importance of continuing your personal growth.
If you’re already doing this work, that’s wonderful. If not, it’s perfectly fine to keep these reminders in your peripheral awareness. Stay present and conscious of your healing journey, knowing you could slip at any time. When you feel those old patterns emerging, turn inward to process them rather than direct them at her. The moment you project these struggles onto her, any trust she’s rebuilt will crumble instantly.
This is crucial because if you’re both committed to seeing where this relationship can go, you can’t approach it as trying to restore what once was. The previous dynamic was toxic and probably never truly healthy. Even if things seemed great at the beginning, certain unhealthy behaviors and patterns were likely present, visible at least to you and possibly to her as well.
Bob, you mentioned getting back to the way things were. I don’t want that for you. Never see going back as progress. Sure, there was a time when you both may have been happy. And it might sound like a great idea to go back to that time. But that time in your relationship also contained toxic elements, too. So you don’t want that happiness to erode into what happened before.
Instead of going back, treat this as starting a brand new relationship because, well, it has to be! Otherwise, you may end up where you are today… again.
When you meet someone for the first time, you have lower expectations of them. You don’t expect them to fall in love with you right away. You don’t expect them to just open their heart to you and start trusting you immediately. You might want that, but expecting it is unrealistic most of the time.
By having no expectations and working on this slowly, and treating one another as if you were new people to each other, you get to rediscover who each of you is. You get to learn who she is all over again, but from a new perspective – a healed place.
She’s rediscovering who you are as well because she doesn’t know this new you. She may not even trust this new version of you. So it may take her a long time to get to know this new you. It could take a year. It could take more. But if you really care about her, and if you both really want to see this work, make sure you remove any desperate need to pull love out of her.
If and when she’s ready to love, that has to come from her on her own time – if it ever even happens. But you have to respect her place and support where she is. So I highly recommend you support what she’s going through and every thought that she has, even if she says, “I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
If she says that, you have to be in a supportive enough place to be able to say, “I totally understand.” And, of course, that will hurt. It may feel even devastating. But you have to look at two ways:
- She may be wondering if you’re going to resort to your old behaviors.
- She may truly have closed her heart.
For number 1, I’m not saying she’s trying to test you specifically, but if you can respond to something that you know will be devastating in a way that still makes her feel safe – where your genuine, authentic response makes her feel like you are a safe person with whom to share even things that might hurt your feelings – that is how trust is built.
If, instead, you have a negative reaction, where you get triggered and your old behavior comes out, that may be all she needs to know you haven’t changed at all.
Plus, any progress that you two have made may be out the window. Because at that point, you are in a space where all of your behavior is under a magnifying glass. I hate to make you feel like you need to walk on eggshells, but consider that a good thing because you need to watch your own behavior under a magnifying glass, too.
The question the healing emotional abuser needs to constantly ask themselves is:
Am I doing this behavior to control or change them?
If there’s any thought of wanting to control her or make her do something you want her to do, then you might be going back to your old ways. And you need to notice that about yourself.
You might even actually verbalize that to her. i.e., “I just realized I said that because I want to control you. That’s not good. That’s very unhealthy behavior.” That would show both awareness and that you truly are considering all of your behaviors, making sure you’re making progress instead of not thinking about how you can be hurtful.
You can continue to tell her, “I’m sorry I said that. I need to work on myself regarding that. I need to work on healing from that. I now realize what I just did. I am so sorry.”
Then you work on it. You reflect. You stay humble. You accept that you are not healed and may even still be harmful to the person you are supposed to support and love. That’s truly humble.
Don’t ask for or wait for her forgiveness. Leave her be. Know that you messed up. And keep working on yourself. That’s where your focus needs to be. If you’re unable to get past your own triggers and keep messing up, join my Healed Being program. I’ve helped thousands heal from this behavior. You can have healthy, happy relationships. We just sometimes need someone else to help us get out of our own way.
If you messed up, Bob, don’t wait for her to do anything. Just know you did it. Accept it. Know you said or did something that made you want to control her, or make her feel guilty, or make her feel bad about herself.
Emotionally abusive people make you feel bad for being yourself.
And when someone feels bad just for being themselves, it can feel like they can’t do anything right. That’s why people like Bob have to continuously work on self-reflection, keeping their focus on their own healing and growth. As soon as they focus on the other person, wanting to change them and make them do what they want them to do, the emotional abuse cycle can start all over again.
Bob, if she’s open to talking about your triggers, that could be a positive sign. It creates space for honest conversation and allows you to be transparent about your journey. However, that doesn’t mean all victims of emotional abuse want to talk about what bothers you. They have enough to think about and need to heal themselves, as well. And that can often take a lot longer than the abuser healing themselves.
But when the former healing abuser can be transparent with the person they’ve hurt, sharing can help to talk about some sensitive things. And, when the relationship’s outcome is uncertain, they may have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being open while continuing their healing work.
But, healing abusers need to release all of their expectations. They should not anticipate cuddling or even holding hands with the person they’ve hurt. All affection during the healing stages of an emotionally abusive relationship may be off-limits.
Bob may have to accept that his partner’s heart is closed right now, understanding that this might be permanent. The question is, Can he love her enough to support her, even with her heart closed off to him?
I’m sure it will be challenging for him, but embracing this mindset will create the safest possible environment for her. And supporting someone exactly where they are, giving them the freedom to be themselves, allows them to thrive. It gives them the freedom to choose what they want to do with their life and who they want to spend it with. Allowing someone to make that choice is a gift. It is the opposite of abusive behavior. And it’s something to practice with everyone in your life.
Bob may or may not end up back together with his wife. But he needs to accept either outcome, no matter which way it goes. He may not like one outcome, but accepting it shows true love and support. It shows you honor the other person even if you disagree with their decision.
The end of a relationship can be hurtful to both people. It isn’t what either of you envisioned. But when a partner feels completely safe being themselves around you, you give both of you the best chance at reconciliation.
Since Bob is still with this person, he may need to consider taking practical steps to ensure her comfort, like offering to sleep in another room. That’s not separation. It’s creating an environment where she feels safe and supported. And whatever it takes to achieve that sense of security for her is worth every step of the process.
By fostering this environment, Bob can create space for both of them to heal and grow individually.
Bob, make sure she feels no pressure of getting back together, as that expectation can unconsciously alter behavior. Remember to focus on creating opportunities for individual growth and healing. This way, if you do reconnect in the future, you’ll both bring healthier versions of yourselves to build something entirely new, leaving the old patterns behind.
I want to thank Bob for sharing his story. It’s so heartening to see people changing their ways and wanting to stop hurting people they care about. Bob took huge steps to start healing.
While you can’t fix her, he can focus on healing himself and becoming the best version of himself. This growth will positively impact all of his relationships, whether this current one or future ones.
I recall when my partner shared with her friends how judgmental I used to be in my previous marriage, recounting to them the stories I’d told her about how I used to act.
She shared with me that she told them something that touched me deeply. She said, “He told me he was so judgmental in all of his past relationships, but he’s never been that way toward me.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I never heard that said about me before. It made my heart swell. I felt so good to know I was not that person anymore. It made me realize just how far I’ve come and just how good it felt to hear something so positive about me.
The people closest to us often see our growth more clearly than we do ourselves. Her words were a powerful reminder of how far I’ve come. I always want her to see me in the best light. Who wouldn’t want that!
When an emotionally abusive person starts to heal, each day that passes creates more distance between who they were and who they’re becoming. And I’ve witnessed some hurtful people turn into loving, supportive ones.
Not all of them can do this. They have to really want to change. They have to be humble. They have to know that healing requires sacrificing who they’ve been most of their life. But if they realize what they are losing is the part of them that hurts others, they’ll realize that sacrificing that part of themselves is much more of a gift than a loss.
