What does it take for an abusive person to change?
A whole lot (if they even want to change), but their consistent focus on you can make their healing and change much more difficult, let alone having no time and space to heal yourself.
A listener recently wrote to me about her husband joining my Healed Being Program after she left him due to his severe verbal and emotional abuse.
Her relationship assessment score from The M.E.A.N. Workbook was 134 out of 200. The assessment helps you pinpoint and quantify the amount of emotional abuse in your relationship. Any score above 80 is very challenging. The closer to 200, the worse it is.
Her score of 134 indicates significant control and manipulation. And while her husband claims to be healing and working on himself, their interactions reveal a troubling pattern: She finds herself emotionally supporting him through his painful emotions, as if he were the one hurt most by the situation.
Her question to me was whether she should step back and let him heal on his own or continue helping him through his struggles.
Before addressing this question, there’s something crucial to understand about why people join programs designed to help those who’ve been emotionally abusive. Some join with the sole intention of saving their relationship.
While this might seem like a positive motivation, it actually creates a significant problem. When someone’s primary focus is saving the relationship rather than healing themselves, they typically don’t go through the internal changes necessary to become the best possible partner. Instead, their journey becomes driven by fear and desperation.
Fear and desperation in someone who has been emotionally abusive leads them to change harmful behaviors for the wrong reasons. They might go through the motions, appearing to transform on the surface, but something remains off. And the person they’ve hurt can sense it.
What’s missing is genuine healing of emotional triggers, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and the underlying patterns that caused harm in the first place.
When the emotionally abusive person’s focus stays on “how do I keep this person from leaving me?” rather than “how do I address what’s broken inside me?” their changes are almost always temporary and often superficial.
In fact, the healing abuser can even use their desperate desire to keep the relationship together as a form of control and manipulation, even when unintentional. They may do or say things that coerce the other person to say in the relationship, regardless of that person’s feelings or needs. This mirrors the same dynamic that caused problems throughout the relationship in the first place!
When someone coerces you to do what they want instead of honoring what you want, that is emotionally abusive.
In the Healed Being Program, I tell members it’s acceptable to use saving the relationship as their motivation (as that can fuel the work they need to do), but if preventing the relationship from falling apart is their primary purpose, their unhealed behaviors will inevitably resurface.
I emphasize this repeatedly, particularly in Lesson 6 of Healed Being on the subject of Focus. That lesson addresses the importance of concentrating on personal healing and growth rather than putting the attention on what will happen to the relationship.
Someone who genuinely wants to heal their own abusive behaviors must pursue their own transformation as something deeply personal.
The healing abuser needs to recognize not only that they’ve been harmful, but that continuing these destructive patterns is fundamentally wrong and will prevent any improvement in their life or current or future relationships.
The healing abuser must go through the process of examining and reflecting on their emotional triggers and how they cope with challenges. For many emotionally abusive people, hurting others is their coping mechanism, functioning almost like an addiction.
An addict uses their addiction to cope with challenges. An abuser abuses to cope with challenges. Typically, both are dealing with emotional struggles and vulnerabilities they don’t want to experience, so they can make others around them suffer.
When someone doesn’t know how to cope with life’s difficulties, they take out their inability to manage challenges on those around them.
This connects directly to the situation described by the woman who wrote to me. Her husband previously used alcohol as a coping mechanism. But now that he’s stopped drinking, he likely has other behaviors filling that void because he hasn’t learned healthy ways to cope with difficulties.
To answer her question of whether she should step back and let him heal on his own or continue helping him through his struggles, my answer to her is Yes, absolutely. Step back! He needs to work on himself and heal on his own. He may not like it. It will probably bring up his fears and insecurities. He’ll be unhappy and afraid, because he’ll be so focused on losing the relationship that he may not address what truly needs addressing. But it’s essential for him to understand that the relationship isn’t the problem. The person doing the harmful behavior is.
When someone perpetrating abusive behavior realizes they are the problem, real healing can begin. And, though it’s rare for someone to tell the person they’ve hurt, “You should stay away from me because I’m harmful and need to heal,” if they did say that, it would represent a truly healed perspective. Or, at least, the beginning of healing.
To the emotionally abusive person who wants to heal and is reading this right now:
Your focus needs to be on you. If you find yourself begging someone not to leave, desperately wanting them to stay in your life, that desperation itself needs healing.
Wanting someone to stay so badly that you’re pleading with them to stay represents the same pattern that’s been present all along: wanting them to do what you want regardless of how they feel.
That doesn’t honor their path or their boundaries. It’s saying “This is what I want you to do, please do it,” without asking the fundamental question, “What do you want?”
That question matters profoundly for someone you’ve been hurting. If they say they don’t want to be with you until you heal, the response should be to honor their path, honoring what they want. When you can accept them as an individual with their own thoughts, ideas, and plans for the future, you demonstrate genuine change.
If they want to be with you, if they care about you, if love remains in their heart, they’ll want to work on the relationship. But they also need their own time and space to heal.
The victim of emotional abuse requires time to reconnect with themselves after losing so much of who they are. When abuse finally stops, and they’re left alone in a liberating way, it creates a mixture of feelings. They wonder why they’re no longer the subject of constant attention and scrutiny.
Being the center of attention meant fearing saying or doing the wrong thing, walking on eggshells, unable to share thoughts or feelings without triggering trouble. When that intense focus lifts, they’re suddenly left alone with their own thoughts and feelings for perhaps the first time in years!
That’s when they can think without someone telling them how to think.
That’s when they can feel without someone dictating how they should feel.
This represents the first step toward genuine healing. And, in general, victims of abusive behavior typically take a lot longer to heal than the abusers themselves. Of course, this makes sense when you consider that the abuser isn’t the one who was hurt. The person who endured the abuse carries wounds that need tending.
The healing timeline varies, but generally it takes a minimum of two to four months for the fog to start lifting. Around six months, victims begin realizing their thoughts are truly their own and start reconnecting with themselves in certain ways.
It can take up to a year or more, but the typical range for a victim to start feeling like themselves again is between two and twelve months. Before that, it can be very difficult for them to reach a point where they can even consider trusting the person who hurt them again. This assumes they even want to stay connected to that person, which will be dependent on whether love still exists in their heart.
For someone who still loves their partner and would like the relationship to heal and reconcile, rebuilding trust and faith that things are moving in a positive direction takes substantial time.
Many victims lose faith in their own decision-making process, questioning why they should trust themselves when their decisions led them into this situation. The more someone is exposed to toxic influence, the less clearly they can think, which is why I refer to it as being in the fog.
When you’re in the fog, making clear decisions becomes nearly impossible. You fear making wrong choices because previous decisions resulted in punishment, blame, or guilt. You reach a point where it seems that no matter what you do, it’s wrong.
When everything feels wrong despite trying hard to make things right and trying to please someone who can’t be pleased, you either lose faith in your ability to show up adequately or lose faith in your worthiness of love and affection.
This belief develops through conditioning. You can be groomed to believe you aren’t good enough, aren’t lovable, aren’t worthy, aren’t relationship material. It becomes hard not to believe these things when someone you’ve come to love and trust makes you feel wrong about everything.
But when someone makes you feel bad, doesn’t support what makes you happy, and doesn’t seem to care about your happiness, that has nothing to do with how you’re showing up and everything to do with how they handle life and relationships.
The person in your life should want you to be happy. They should want you to feel good and loved.
When you don’t feel those things from someone who’s supposed to be there for you, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s simply the way they show up and try to control their life and the people in it so that they don’t have to deal with anything they find difficult.
When someone loves you, they never want to bring you down. They only want to lift you up.
Questions I address in this episode:
Why does focusing on saving a relationship often prevent genuine healing?
What happens when victims of emotional abuse finally get space to themselves?
How long does it typically take for someone to heal from emotional abuse?
Why do victims often take longer to heal than abusers?
What does it mean to honor someone’s path even when it doesn’t include you?
