What Is Love? (Baby Don’t Hurt Me)

The stories that follow represent experiences many survivors face when navigating relationships affected by trauma. Lucille and Dominique’s journeys aren’t outliers or extremes – they illustrate common patterns that emerge when love becomes entangled with harm. Through their experiences, we can explore the confusion, pain, and ultimately the clarity that comes from understanding love’s true nature amid the fog of trauma.

As you read through these stories and concepts, you may find yourself confronting painful questions: “How did I not see this sooner?” “Am I stupid for loving someone who treats me this way?” “Why do I keep making the same relationship mistakes?” Please know that these thoughts are not only common but an expected part of processing relationship trauma. Later in this article, we’ll explore why intelligent, perceptive people find themselves caught in these patterns and why self-blame isn’t just undeserved—it’s actually part of the trauma itself. If these thoughts arise as you read, try to notice them with gentleness, knowing we’ll address them directly when we explore the grief that comes with recognizing what’s been missing in our relationships.

Lucille’s Choice

Lucille sat on the floor of her new apartment, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes that contained the modest remains of her former life. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across bare walls – walls that held no family photographs, no inherited heirlooms, no visual reminders of where she had come from.

Three months ago, she had made the hardest decision of her life: to move across the country and change her phone number, cutting contact with her family of origin. It wasn’t done in anger or as punishment. It was done because she finally understood that her survival depended on it.

For years, Lucille had battled thoughts of ending her life. Each interaction with her family – the subtle criticisms, the dismissal of her feelings, the explosive arguments followed by pretending nothing had happened – left her feeling hollowed out, worthless, and increasingly convinced that her presence in the world was unnecessary. Therapy had helped her recognize that these weren’t her original dark thoughts but internalized messages planted through years of emotional abuse.

“You just need to be stronger,” her mother would say whenever Lucille tried to discuss her depression. “Everyone has problems. I love you, but you’ve always been too sensitive.”

Before he died, her father’s approach had also been damaging. Though he too regularly told Lucille he loved her, his actions communicated something else entirely. He would walk away whenever emotions entered the conversation, dismiss her accomplishments, and make all her life choices about himself, criticizing anything she did that he felt made him look bad. The stark contrast between his words of love and his acts of rejection created a confusing double-bind that Lucille had spent decades trying to reconcile.

When her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Lucille dropped everything to care for him. She spent months shuttling between hospitals and his home, managing his medications, coordinating with doctors, and sitting beside his bed during long, silent nights. Her siblings visited occasionally, but the daily burden fell to Lucille.

What confused Lucille most was her own reaction to his diagnosis. Despite years of emotional neglect and having essentially given up on ever having a real relationship with him, when she learned about his cancer, she was overcome with panic and terror. She sobbed uncontrollably at the thought of losing him. This panicked devotion felt entirely disconnected from her understanding of their relationship.

Despite his lifelong emotional unavailability, she couldn’t bear the thought of him suffering. Throughout those months, she kept spending her own limited money on things to make his room nicer. She wanted the whole family to come closer and lend emotional support during this hard time. She waited for a shift in what “I love you” felt like. It never came. Her father died as he had lived – emotionally closed. And her family never hugged and cried together, she felt utterly out of place.

Oddly, once he passed, Lucille didn’t really miss her dad. The grief she expected never materialized. This confused her deeply – how could she have felt such desperate attachment at the thought of losing him, yet such numbness once he was gone?

Sometimes, when Lucille questioned whether her parents had ever truly loved her, a particular memory surfaced—one that made it harder to walk away. She was nine, home sick with the flu, curled up on the couch in a ball of fever and chills. Her mother, who usually brushed off illness as weakness, had unexpectedly brought her a bowl of homemade soup and stroked her hair while Lucille drifted in and out of sleep. For that one afternoon, there was no criticism, no tension—just warmth. Lucille had clung to that sliver of tenderness for decades, using it as proof that love had existed, even if it had rarely returned.

After her father’s death, Lucille hoped that perhaps her mother would finally become more emotionally available. She had always believed that her father’s narcissism somehow prevented her mother from showing the warmth and empathy Lucille craved. With him gone, Lucille waited for the mother-daughter relationship she had always wanted.

Instead, her mother’s emotional neglect continued unchanged. When Lucille finally gathered the courage to express her needs directly, her mother responded with dismissal. This final rejection of what seemed like such a reasonable request – to be treated with basic empathy – felt like a betrayal. The subconscious fantasy that had sustained Lucille for years – that her mother was capable of loving her but simply prevented from doing so – collapsed entirely.

Lucille had tried casual distancing with her remaining family. She had tried limited contact. She had tried explaining how their behaviors affected her. They would respond by insisting they loved her, but nothing changed, except that her resolve to stay alive grew more tenuous with each attempt at connection.

So she left. Not with a dramatic announcement, but quietly, as if stepping backward out of a room where no one had noticed her presence anyway.

Now, as she unpacked her sparse belongings in this new space, Lucille realized something unexpected. The crushing weight she had carried for so long had begun to lift. She slept through the night. The constant knot in her stomach had eased. Most surprising of all, she didn’t miss them. She had anticipated grief, guilt, longing – but what she felt instead was relief. Freedom. Space to breathe.

And this confused her deeply. If she loved her family – and surely she must love them, they were her family after all – shouldn’t she miss them? Shouldn’t their absence feel like a wound rather than a healing? If she could feel this peaceful away from them, had she ever truly loved them at all? Or was the fierce protectiveness she had always felt toward them, the desperate hope that they would change, the willingness to endure their mistreatment just to remain connected – was that something else entirely?

As she reflected, Lucille realized she had already been grieving her family for decades – grieving the relationships she had always wanted but never had, grieving the support and love that never materialized. The grief had started long before she physically left.

Even now, in her moments of peace, bitter memories would occasionally ambush her – her brother mocking her teenage poetry, her father saying “I love you, princess” while turning away when she tried to hug him, her mother ignoring her tears. Each memory triggered physical symptoms – racing heart, tight chest, the urge to hide. Her therapist had explained these as symptoms of complex trauma, remnants of a nervous system still responding to dangers no longer present.

Her mother had reached out through mutual connections, expressing profound hurt at Lucille’s decision to cut contact. “Why did you leave me? I miss you. I’ve always loved you more than anything,” she had said, words that triggered waves of guilt and confusion in Lucille. Was she wrong to protect herself? Was her mother’s pain more important than her own survival?

It had been three weeks since any fleeting thoughts of not wanting to be alive had drifted through her mind, a vast improvement. As Lucille placed a small plant on her windowsill – the first living thing she had ever felt confident she could nurture – she wondered: What exactly is love, anyway? And can we love someone we cannot safely remain connected to?

Dominique’s Boundary

Dominique stood in the center of what was now her room, a small utility room she had transformed into a sanctuary. The walls were freshly painted in soft blue, a color her husband disliked. Books she loved filled the bookshelf. A comfortable single bed replaced the air mattress she’d been sleeping on for the past two weeks.

Ten years into her marriage, Dominique had discovered her husband’s secret porn habit. While devastated, she had committed to working through it together. He had promised to stop, and as far as she could tell, he had kept that promise. But three years later, she discovered something worse – while there had been no physical affair, her husband had maintained inappropriate emotional relationships with several women, flirting, sharing private marital struggles, and seeking validation outside their marriage. When confronted, he dismissed her concerns, insisting she was trying to control him and “overreacting.”

This pattern of dismissal was nothing new. Throughout their marriage, Dominique had consistently found herself at the bottom of her husband’s priority list. He never missed his weekly basketball game with friends, but frequently forgot commitments he’d made to her. He remembered his mother’s favorite flowers but couldn’t recall Dominique’s birthday without a reminder. He would stay late at work to help a coworker but rarely offered the same support to her. In the early years, before the erosion began, he used to write her notes and make her laugh until she cried. That version of him felt like a dream she had once believed with all her heart.

What made all of this especially painful was that Dominique had chosen to save herself for marriage. Her decision to wait for physical intimacy had been deeply important to her. Yet within the first week after their wedding, her husband began turning down her advances. This profound rejection, followed by his years of sexual disinterest while maintaining a secret porn habit, left her questioning her identity as a woman and feeling fundamentally undesirable.

For years, Dominique had silenced the alarm bells in her body – the tightness in her chest when he was nicer to the female server than he ever was to her, the nausea when he dismissed her feelings, the exhaustion from constantly wondering when the next wrecking ball would hit. She had convinced herself that marriage required sacrifice, that her discomfort was the price of keeping her family intact. Somewhere along the way, she had mistaken endurance for virtue.

Periodically, only after Dominique took action to distance herself, her husband would seem to recognize the damage his behavior caused. He would apologize, promise to change, and show genuine improvement for weeks or even months. During these periods, he would be attentive, communicative, and seemingly committed to rebuilding their connection. Each time, Dominique would cautiously hope that this change would last. And each time, once she had emotionally reinvested in the relationship, he would gradually return to his old patterns, as if maintaining healthy connection required too much effort to sustain.

With two young children and no independent income, leaving seemed impossible. After a particularly painful argument – where her husband had once again shown complete disregard for her emotional safety – something in Dominique shifted. She didn’t have the resources to leave the house, but she could leave the bedroom. She could create a boundary, a space where she didn’t have to pretend.

On her first night in the new bedroom, Dominique had expected to feel sad, to mourn the loss of the marriage she had wanted. Instead, she felt an unexpected lightness, almost giddiness. The relief of not having to sleep next to someone unsafe, of not having to wake up with a feeling of dread seeing him there – it was overwhelming. For the first time in years, she felt free.

In the weeks that followed, Dominique and her husband established a careful choreography of co-parenting. They shared meals with the children, coordinated schedules, maintained the appearance of family unity. But beyond these necessary interactions, they rarely spoke. Her husband, who was taking her warnings seriously for the first time, occasionally attempted to discuss “fixing” their marriage, insisting he loved her and wanted to make things work. Dominique would simply respond, “What you did wasn’t love. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have lied to me for our entire relationship.”

Since their in-home separation, her husband had begun therapy, stopped his emotionally unfaithful behaviors, and was working on healthier communication styles. He seemed genuinely committed to change, though still very limited in his understanding. Yet despite these improvements, Dominique felt no return of warmth toward him. Her nervous system remained on high alert in his presence; her body remembered the years of emotional abandonment even as her mind acknowledged his efforts.

The strangest part for Dominique was that even with these changes, even wondering if she could eventually have financial independence if she returned to work once the children were older, she couldn’t imagine actually divorcing him. The thought of being the only two people left in the house after the children eventually moved out felt like a crisis, yet she couldn’t picture taking the final step to legal separation. This confused and frustrated her – why couldn’t she leave, even in her imagination? What invisible force held her in this relationship when all warmth and connection had died?

Sometimes Dominique worried that she had lost the capacity for romantic love entirely. The thought of physical intimacy – with her husband or anyone else – left her cold. Was this a temporary protective shutdown, or a permanent change? Had the years of emotional neglect and betrayal fundamentally altered her ability to connect?

Like Lucille, Dominique realized she had already been grieving her marriage long before learning about her husband’s secrets – grieving the partner she had thought she married, grieving the future she had imagined, grieving how she’d been mistreated, grieving the person she had been before repeated betrayals had taught her to expect pain from closeness and made her put up walls.

And like Lucille, she experienced unexpected moments of bitterness – rage at the years she had wasted trying to earn love from someone refusing to give it, sorrow for the younger self who had accepted so little while giving so much. These emotions would arrive without warning, bringing with them physical symptoms – headaches, digestive issues, overwhelming fatigue, panic attacks – that her therapist identified as manifestations of trauma stored in her body.

As she arranged her new space, placing framed photos of her children and herself (but none of her husband) on the dresser, Dominique wondered: Was what she and her husband had over the years ever love? And if not, what was it? And what would happen to this family once the children were grown?

What Is Love?

Love is perhaps the most discussed yet least understood human experience. We speak of it as an emotion, a choice, an action, a bond, and a commitment – sometimes all at once. To build a meaningful understanding of love, particularly when examining it through the lens of trauma and healing, we need to consider both its behavioral expressions and its felt experience.

At its core, love is a combination of genuine care for another’s wellbeing coupled with consistent actions that demonstrate that care. However, how this care is expressed may vary significantly based on neurological differences.

True love manifests through:

• Consistent kindness and compassion toward the other person
• Deep respect for their autonomy, thoughts, and feelings
• Active support during both their triumphs and struggles
• Understanding that accepts imperfection without enabling harm
• Reliability that builds trust and safety

Bell Hooks in her book All About Love eloquently defined love as “a willingness to extend ourselves for the spiritual growth of others.” While profound, this definition may seem abstract to those seeking practical understanding. We might expand this to say that love is the ongoing commitment to support another’s fullest, healthiest self-expression and development, while respecting their autonomy and honoring our own boundaries and wellbeing.

Neurodivergent Expressions of Love: Different, Not Deficient

When discussing authentic love, it’s crucial to recognize that neurodivergent individuals (those with autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences, etc.) may express love in ways that don’t align with neurotypical expectations. These differences don’t indicate an absence of love or attachment, but rather reflect fundamental neurological variations in how connection is experienced and expressed.

How Neurodivergent Love May Look Different

Communication Styles: An autistic partner might express love through detailed information-sharing about special interests rather than conventional romantic gestures. They may demonstrate deep care by solving practical problems or creating systems that support your wellbeing, rather than through words of affirmation or physical touch.

Emotional Processing: Neurodivergent individuals may process emotions differently—sometimes experiencing them more intensely, less intensely, or with delayed recognition. A partner with alexithymia (difficulty identifying emotions) might deeply love you while struggling to articulate those feelings in ways you immediately recognize.

Sensory Considerations: For those with sensory sensitivities, traditional expressions of love like sustained eye contact, certain types of physical touch, or crowded social gatherings might be genuinely distressing—even when desire for connection is strong. Their avoidance isn’t rejection but self-regulation.

Executive Function Impact: Someone with ADHD might forget anniversaries or struggle with consistent check-ins not from lack of care, but from differences in time perception and executive functioning. Their love might appear in bursts of hyperfocus and enthusiastic connection rather than steady, predictable patterns.

Distinguishing Difference from Harm

The key distinction: neurodivergent expressions of love may look different, but they should never be consistently harmful. Mutual respect, basic consideration, and willingness to understand each other remain essential regardless of neurotype.

When a neurodivergent person loves you, they may:

• Need explicit communication about your needs rather than picking up subtle cues
• Show care through unconventional but meaningful gestures
• Require accommodations for sensory or executive functioning differences
• Express love more directly or literally than you expect

However, neurodivergence never excuses:

• Consistent emotional neglect or dismissal of your feelings
• Refusal to acknowledge impact regardless of intent
• Unwillingness to work together on mutually satisfying compromises
• Using diagnosis as a shield against accountability

Building Bridges of Understanding

For neurotypical-neurodivergent relationships to thrive, both partners need:

• Explicit communication about needs and expressions of care
• Willingness to translate across neurological differences
• Recognition that different doesn’t mean deficient
• Respect for neurodivergent boundaries and accommodations

For readers questioning whether differences in love expression reflect neurodivergence or genuine emotional unavailability, consider: Does this person demonstrate consistent care in their own way, even if it’s not your preferred style? Are they willing to discuss these differences with openness rather than defensiveness? Do they acknowledge impact even when intent was different? The answers help distinguish between neurological differences and truly harmful patterns.

Love, in its healthiest form, is never one of submission, self-erasure, or suffering. True love cannot coexist with patterns of abuse, control, or disrespect. This fundamental truth forms the foundation for the questions we’ll explore throughout this article.

Understanding the Person Who Cannot Love: It’s Not About You

The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling

While intellectually understanding “it’s not about me” can provide relief, your body may still react as if you’re the problem—flooded with shame, self-doubt, or the urge to become “enough” to earn love. This disconnect between mind and body is normal when healing from relational trauma.

As you read, notice if your body tenses, if thoughts like “but in my case, it really was my fault” arise, or if you feel compelled to defend the person who hurt you. These responses don’t mean the information is wrong—they signal your nervous system is processing truths that challenge deep survival beliefs. Healing begins when we hold both the intellectual truth and the body’s protective reactions with compassion.

Why Some People Cannot Love Authentically

Most people are born with the capacity for love, seeking connection instinctively. Under healthy conditions, secure attachment forms through consistent, attuned caregiving, creating a blueprint for future relationships.

Yet this innate capacity can be profoundly disrupted by:

1. Childhood Attachment Wounds
   When early needs for safety, attunement, or validation go unmet, the ability to form secure bonds fractures. A person who never received consistent love struggles to give what they’ve never known. Their relational template organizes around survival rather than mutual care.
2. Survival Adaptations
   Harmful behaviors often begin as creative childhood strategies. Emotional withdrawal, control, or manipulation may have once shielded them from overwhelm or danger. These adaptations become automatic, operating far below consciousness.
3. Intergenerational Trauma
   Patterns of neglect, abuse, or dysfunction often pass through generations like an invisible inheritance. Epigenetic research and attachment studies show how relational behaviors and stress responses are unconsciously replicated, even when they cause harm.
4. Developmental Trauma
   Trauma during critical developmental stages can alter brain structures governing empathy, emotional regulation, and connection. This may impair their ability to read emotions, regulate stress, or maintain consistent presence.
5. Personality Structure
   Some develop psychological frameworks (e.g., narcissistic or borderline patterns) organized around protecting a fragile sense of self. Their entire system avoids vulnerability—the cornerstone of authentic love. While these patterns are deeply entrenched, some individuals, particularly those who commit to long-term therapy, can develop a limited capacity for reciprocity over time. Their limitations don’t reflect a conscious choice but a psychological system that makes genuine connection feel threatening.

In rare cases, genetic predispositions combined with severe early trauma may result in an almost absent capacity for empathy or attachment, as seen in some antisocial traits. These extremes highlight that love’s absence isn’t always about you—or even something the other person can fully control.

The Nuance of “Self-Love First”

The adage “you can’t love others until you love yourself” contains partial truth but oversimplifies. While self-worth fosters healthier relationships, love isn’t just a choice or self-improvement project. It emerges from biology, early experiences, culture, and relational history.

The person who cannot love you authentically isn’t merely “choosing not to love themselves.” They may be trapped in attachment wounds, nervous system dysregulation, or personality structures that render vulnerability intolerable. That said, rebuilding your own self-worth remains essential—not to change the other person, but to break cycles of tolerating inadequate love.

What This Understanding Offers You

1. Freedom from the Impossible Task
   Recognizing their limitations stem from factors beyond their (or your) control liberates you from the fantasy that “if I just try harder, they’ll change.” You’re released from a mission that was never yours.
2. Compassion Without Compromise
   Understanding their wounds allows compassion—without confusing it with permission. You can think, “This person acts from unhealed trauma,” while affirming, “I deserve relationships that don’t demand my self-abandonment.” Healthy boundaries aren’t punishment; they prevent further harm to both parties.
3. Breaking Trauma Bonds
   Intermittent reinforcement—cycles of idealization and devaluation—can create addictive emotional hooks. Understanding the other person’s limitations can help you recognize that the “good times” aren’t evidence of potential for consistent love, but rather part of a pattern driven by the person’s own attachment needs. Seeing these patterns helps you disrupt their pull and choose relationships grounded in consistency, not familiarity with pain.

The Line Between Understanding and Enabling

A trauma history explains behavior but never excuses it. Compassion for someone’s wounds doesn’t require tolerating harm. In fact, boundaries with those incapable of authentic love may be the most compassionate act—for yourself and them.

Their inability to love reflects their limitations, not your worth. You can grieve the wounded child they were while refusing to be harmed by the adult they’ve become.

Remember: Their deficits were never about you. Your worthiness of love is immutable, regardless of another’s capacity to recognize it.

When Attachment Isn’t Love: Understanding Trauma Bonds

The Biology of Trauma Bonds and Fantasy Attachments

One of the most confusing aspects of recovering from relationship trauma is reconciling the intense feelings we have for those who have harmed us. Many survivors describe feeling desperately attached to those who hurt them – experiencing anxiety when separated, relief when reunited, and persistent hope that things will improve despite evidence to the contrary.

Trauma bonding occurs when a powerful emotional attachment forms through repeated cycles of abuse, tension, and reward. This happens on a biological level – when an abuser unpredictably alternates between cruelty and kindness, it triggers the brain’s survival mechanisms and addiction pathways. The resulting biochemical response creates feelings that can be more intense than typical romantic or familial love.

This biological reaction involves several key processes:

• Stress hormones and pleasure chemicals create powerful emotional highs and lows
• The body’s natural pain/pleasure system becomes dysregulated, creating addiction-like patterns
• The primitive attachment system, designed to keep us connected to essential caregivers for survival, overrides our logical assessment of danger

For someone like Dominique, her husband’s occasional moments of attentiveness after long periods of neglect created exactly this kind of emotional rollercoaster. Each improvement triggered hope, flooding her system with relief and reinforcing her attachment despite the overall pattern of emotional abandonment.

Many survivors describe their trauma bonds as the most powerful “love” they’ve ever felt. These feelings are real and overwhelming, but there’s a critical distinction: trauma bonds are rooted in survival responses, not authentic love. They revolve around relieving anxiety and pain rather than mutual growth and joy. They create dependency rather than healthy connection. And they feature dramatic highs and devastating lows rather than consistent safety and respect.

Often what keeps someone in a harmful relationship isn’t love for the person as they actually are, but attachment to who they could potentially become. This “fantasy bond” involves loving a fictional future version of the person rather than accepting the reality before us.

Dominique wasn’t in love with her husband as he was – chronically dishonest and emotionally withholding. She was in love with who he had pretended to be (who she believed was the “real” him) in the beginning, and who he could be again if he overcame these tendencies and went back to his “real” self. Each small improvement reinforced this fantasy, keeping her invested in a future that never fully arrived.

Lucille experienced a similar pattern with her mother. After her father’s death, she clung to the fantasy that her mother would finally become emotionally available. When this didn’t happen, Lucille felt not just disappointed but betrayed – as if a promise had been broken, though no such promise had ever been made except in her own mind.

When survivors finally accept that this potential version of their loved one may never exist, they experience grief – not just for the relationship, but for the death of a dream they’ve held onto, sometimes for decades.

Love vs. Trauma Bond: How to Tell the Difference

The Existential Search for Love’s Logic

Beyond the biological mechanisms of trauma bonding lies an even deeper existential drive. When someone who should love us fails to do so consistently, we often find ourselves returning to check if love has finally appeared—not just from emotional need, but from a profound desire to make the world make sense.

This impulse operates below conscious thought, arising from our instinctive understanding that being properly loved is the natural order of things. The mind struggles to accept a reality where this fundamental need remains unmet by those designed to fulfill it.

It’s like desperately craving a hug from the person who just punched you—a paradoxical yearning that defies logic but speaks to our soul’s deep need for coherence. This creates a reflexive pattern where, even after painful interactions that logically should push us away, survivors experience an overwhelming urge to reconnect—as if drawn by gravity to repair the tear in the fabric of how relationships should work.

This isn’t merely attachment seeking security; it’s the human spirit seeking coherence in a situation that fundamentally violates our deepest understanding of how the world should function.

The Protective Shutdown: When Your Body Says “Enough”

Both Lucille and Dominique experienced moments of emotional detachment – periods when they felt numb or even disgusted toward people they had once deeply cared about. This numbing isn’t a character flaw or evidence of coldness; it’s a protective mechanism deployed by an overwhelmed nervous system.

Emotional numbness is your body’s way of protecting you from repeated emotional injury. When you’ve been hurt too many times in a relationship, your nervous system essentially “powers down” emotional receptivity to prevent further damage. This protective shutdown often involves the dorsal vagal response – a primitive survival strategy that conserves resources when fighting or fleeing isn’t possible.

Signs of this protective shutdown may include:

• Feeling emotionally “flat” or numb
• Physical distance (avoiding touch or proximity)
• Cognitive distance (difficulty remembering positive aspects of the relationship)
• Dissociation (feeling detached from your own emotions or body)
• Disgust or aversion toward the person who caused harm

For Dominique, her aversion to physical intimacy represented this kind of protective mechanism; her body wisely refused to remain vulnerable with someone who had repeatedly proven unsafe with her heart.

Rather than seeing this as “falling out of love,” we might understand it as the protective wisdom of a body and heart that value survival over harmful attachment. This emotional detachment represents the natural boundary that love requires to sustain itself. Just as our physical pain response prevents us from keeping our hand on a hot stove, emotional detachment prevents us from continuing to invest in connections that consistently cause harm.

For some survivors like Lucille, suicidal thoughts can emerge as the ultimate form of protective shutdown. In therapeutic approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS), these thoughts are understood not as self-destructive impulses but as desperate attempts by protective parts of the self to end unbearable emotional pain when no other escape seems possible. These parts believe they’re helping—trying to protect the person from continued suffering when all other coping mechanisms have been overwhelmed. Recognizing these thoughts as misguided protection rather than character flaws can reduce shame and create space for healing. When Lucille’s suicidal ideation decreased after establishing physical distance from her family, it demonstrated how creating external safety can reduce the need for these extreme internal protective measures.

When Your Mind and Body Are on Different Timelines

For many survivors like Dominique, a confusing disconnect emerges between intellectual understanding and bodily response. Her mind had already cataloged her husband’s betrayals and recognized the relationship as harmful—yet something kept her physically unable to take decisive action toward divorce.

This mind-body gap creates profound confusion. “If I know this relationship is damaging me, why can’t I just leave?” survivors often wonder. “Am I weak? Do I secretly want to stay? Is something wrong with me?”

This mismatch isn’t weakness or contradiction—it’s your nervous system working exactly as designed. Your cognitive brain can process information and reach conclusions rapidly through conscious thought. Your body, however, changes more gradually, through lived experience rather than intellectual insight.

Dominique’s conscious mind understood her marriage was unhealthy, but her nervous system—shaped by years of intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonding—remained physiologically tethered to the relationship. Her body remembered both the pain and the occasional relief of connection, creating a complex web of neurological and hormonal responses that couldn’t be dismantled through reasoning alone.

This gap explains why many survivors experience the frustrating cycle of “knowing better” while feeling unable to act on that knowledge. You might intellectually recognize a relationship as harmful on Monday, yet find yourself deeply longing for that same person on Tuesday—not because your assessment was wrong, but because your body is processing change at its own necessary pace.

Healing this disconnect requires patience with your body’s timeline. Rather than forcing action before your nervous system is ready (which often leads to return cycles), focus on gradually building safety signals that allow your body to catch up with your mind. Small, consistent steps toward safety—like Dominique creating her separate bedroom—often prove more sustainable than dramatic gestures that overwhelm your system’s capacity to integrate change.

Harmful vs. Abusive: Understanding the Spectrum of Relational Harm

Relational harm exists on a spectrum – from consciously abusive to unintentionally harmful. While both can damage your wellbeing, understanding where someone falls can help determine whether reconciliation is possible or whether distance is safest. Many survivors struggle to categorize relationships that cause pain but don’t fit clear definitions of abuse. Is Lucille’s mother who failed to protect her from her father’s emotional neglect “abusive,” or simply “harmful”? Is Dominique’s husband who betrayed her trust repeatedly but shows a measure of remorse “abusive” or just deeply flawed? Does intention matter when the impact damages your wellbeing either way?

While impact ultimately matters more than intent, understanding these distinctions can help you navigate complex relationships and determine appropriate boundaries. Consider these differences:

Signs a person may be engaging in abuse:

• Pattern of control and domination (limiting your autonomy, monitoring behavior)
• Consistent disregard for your boundaries after they’ve been clearly communicated
• Calculated manipulation, including intermittent reinforcement to keep you attached
• Emotional punishment when you assert independence or challenge their behavior
• Denies harmful behavior even when presented with clear evidence
• Shows dramatically different behavior in public versus private
• Creates isolation from potential support systems
• Blames you for their harmful actions (“you made me do this”)
• Shows minimal genuine remorse that translates into sustained behavior change
• Uses threats (explicit or implied) to maintain compliance

Signs someone may be harmful without being intentionally abusive:

• Causes harm through passivity or avoidance rather than active control
• Shows genuine remorse and temporary improvement when confronted
• Their harmful patterns often mirror their own unhealed trauma
• Lacks emotional skills rather than deliberately manipulating
• Behavior is more consistent across different relationships and contexts
• May show real confusion or distress when told they’ve caused harm
• Has moments of genuine empathy and connection, though inconsistent
• Harmful behavior often emerges from overwhelm, fear, or limited capacity rather than from desire for control
• May accept boundaries once they truly understand them, though they might struggle to maintain this acceptance under pressure

Questions to help you reflect on your specific situation:

1. Does this person show different sides to different people, or are they consistently flawed?
2. When they hurt you, do they seem satisfied or distressed by your pain?
3. Have they shown capacity for change in other areas of their life?
4. Do you generally feel controlled by them, or disappointed by their limitations?
5. If they had more awareness and skills, do you believe they would choose to treat you better?
6. When they do show improvement, does it seem strategic or genuine?
7. Do they seem invested in your growth and independence, even if they struggle to support it?
8. When they apologize, is it focused on your pain or their justification?
9. Do you find yourself constantly researching their behavior to understand it?

Remember that these distinctions aren’t about excusing harmful behavior, but about helping you understand what you’re dealing with. Even well-intentioned harm can necessitate strong boundaries. The key difference is that relationships with non-abusive but harmful people may have potential for change if the person commits to sustained work with appropriate professional help and sincere effort, while relationships with truly abusive individuals rarely improve sustainably without profound intervention and change.

Your nervous system will often signal the difference before your conscious mind recognizes it. Trust that wisdom—it’s trying to keep you safe. When harm persists despite awareness, even well-intentioned relationships can leave us emotionally numb – a protective response we’ll explore next.

Affirmation: Understanding someone’s harmful behavior doesn’t mean I must endure it. My boundaries protect, not punish.

The Heartbreak of Growing Numb: When You Still Want to Love Someone Who Hurts You

Perhaps one of the most painful experiences for survivors is the disconnect between their hopes and their nervous system’s protective responses. This is especially acute when dealing with people who may not consciously intend harm but repeatedly fail to provide safety—particularly aging parents or long-term partners who seem to understand in some moments yet continue patterns that cause pain.

Many survivors face relationships where the harm isn’t constant or obviously malicious, but occurs in patterns of:

Inconsistent protection – Like a parent who acknowledges your pain in private but won’t stand up for you when it matters, saying they “don’t want to get involved” in conflicts between their children, even when one child clearly harms the other

Moments of genuine connection followed by devastating betrayals – Such as when a parent sincerely validates your experience and promises change, only to revert to harmful patterns when pressured by others

Passive enabling – When someone doesn’t directly hurt you but consistently allows others to do so, perhaps due to their own fears, dependency needs, or conflict avoidance

Selective awareness – When someone seems to genuinely understand in some contexts but becomes conveniently “unable to see” the problem in situations where protecting you would come at personal cost

These unpredictable patterns – where hope and harm alternate – create a special kind of pain because they offer just enough hope to keep you invested while repeatedly demonstrating that the person cannot or will not provide consistent safety. Your nervous system registers this inconsistency not as “sometimes safe” but as “fundamentally unpredictable”—a state that often triggers stronger protective responses than consistent harm.

When someone is unpredictable—loving one moment, hurtful the next—our nervous system doesn’t know how to respond. If a situation is always dangerous, our brain can adapt with clear survival strategies. But when the danger comes and goes without warning, we’re forced to stay on high alert all the time, never sure what’s coming next.

This kind of inconsistency creates deep confusion in our bodies and minds. It’s what trauma experts call disorganized attachment—a painful inner tug-of-war where we’re wired to turn to someone for safety, while also sensing that person might be a source of harm. It’s a no-win situation that leaves us stuck in a constant state of stress.

Imagine living in a house where the floor could give way at any time. Even when things seem calm, you can’t truly relax. That’s what it feels like to be close to someone whose love isn’t safe. Over time, this nonstop vigilance can be even more damaging than being in a situation that’s always hurtful—because at least in predictable pain, your brain knows when to brace itself. With unpredictable harm, there’s no off switch.

Many survivors express this heartbreaking dilemma: “I know they sometimes try. I see them understand in certain moments. I want to feel warmth and compassion toward them, especially knowing they won’t be around forever—but my body won’t let me. Instead, I feel dread, obligation, and guilt about these reactions. Why can’t I override this? Am I broken?”

This gap—between the compassion you wish to feel and the protective numbness your body imposes—creates a special kind of grief. This is a double grief: mourning the love and safety you deserved but never received, and the love you long to give but cannot safely express. It’s okay to ache for both.

This emotional numbing isn’t a moral failing or character flaw. It’s your body’s wisdom asserting boundaries that your conscious mind—influenced by cultural expectations, guilt, or genuine compassion for the other person’s struggles—might not be ready to establish. Your nervous system has reached its limit for absorbing harm while maintaining connection, even when your mind understands the reasons behind the harmful behavior. This numbness isn’t indifference—it’s often the aftermath of prolonged emotional strain. Think of it as your heart’s ‘calluses’ after years of walking barefoot over gravel.

Many survivors find themselves in an impossible bind: maintaining contact damages their wellbeing, yet distance triggers guilt and grief, especially with aging family members. The thought, ‘They’ll be gone soon, and then I’ll regret not trying harder,’ often overlooks a harder truth: you’ve likely been trying for decades. Healing isn’t about giving up—it’s about redirecting your care in ways that don’t demand your own destruction.

If you’re experiencing this disconnect, consider:

• Your emotional numbing doesn’t negate your compassion; it exists alongside it
• You can hold awareness of someone’s limitations and good intentions while still honoring your body’s need for protection
• The guilt you feel often comes from cultural messages that prioritize others’ needs above your survival
• It’s possible to wish someone well from a distance that protects your nervous system
• Healing may eventually allow you to feel compassion without the overwhelming need for protection, but this healing requires safety first

Remember that your nervous system’s protective responses developed for good reason. Rather than fighting against this numbness or judging yourself for it, you might view it as valuable information about what you’ve endured and what you need now to heal. Sometimes the most compassionate choice—both for yourself and ultimately for the other person—is to honor these protective responses while finding ways to express your values that don’t require continued exposure to harm.

Your numbness isn’t a wall—it’s a bridge. It carries you toward a future where compassion won’t require self-abandonment, and where love won’t demand your silence.

Affirmation: My body’s protective responses are wise, not cold. This numbness is keeping me safe, not making me heartless.

Read the rest of this article in the first book of Ellen’s series “There’s A Word for That”: https://a.co/d/0fA4uGN6

Copyright Notice: This excerpt is from my book. All content is © 2025 Worldwide Groove Corporation. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this material without permission is prohibited. Thank you for respecting my work. 😊

Photo Credit: Author, Substack

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

He too knew the darkness, intimately; instinctively, we spoke one another’s language, like siblings do. Yet there was also a darkness in his disparagement of the objectively good place that, against the odds of the ACE score, had become my reality, a darkness that would expand and soon permeate every aspect of our togetherness. 

In the aftermath of this relationship, I learned more about BPD and its overlaps with CPTSD. I concluded that while I had traits of the former, my symptoms overall added up to the latter.

Since cutting off contact with my family of origin a decade ago, my life had grown and healed in ways I never dared hope for, which is indicative of the context-dependent activation of triggers that is characteristic of CPTSD but not BPD (Martin 2026). Nonetheless, the point raised by my ex-partner – who would you be had it not been for your horrendous childhood – touched a nerve and remains difficult to explore. Partly, this is due to the fact that since day one of my professional life, I had aimed to perform and succeed ‘as if’ – as if everything was, and had always been, hunky-dory. The achievements that ensued from that mindset, and from working as if my life depended on it (which, on reflection, it did, as I was unable to maintain a relationship, and relying on my family of origin was not an option), meant that over the years, I would increasingly find myself in rarefied settings, rubbing shoulders with the super-rich. 

At home with the homeless

I had arrived, it would seem, I had made it, at least professionally. But there is a paradox to flourishing as a survivor of childhood abuse. Mingling with highly accomplished and confident people can seem like a betrayal to an inner child who is certain that this is not where we belong. On a social continuum that extends from homeless junkies via those crippled by personality disorders and suffering from CPTSD to those whose emotional and financial affairs are in marvelous shape, is our tribe not that of Gabor Maté’s hungry ghosts?

Pitiful, revolting, filthy, broken addicts whose stench and existential hopelessness are but a stomach-churning testament to the severity of the crimes committed against their younger selves, a deafening silent scream the world cannot ignore, however hard it tries. No, their wordless reproach goes, I am not okay, and neither were the things that happened when I was a child, nor is the fact that nobody cared to ask questions, let alone intervene. Now look away already, you know you want to.

According to my inner child, it is with these people, like with my BPD ex, with whom I will always share an instinctive, kin-like belonging. In contrast, interacting with emotionally healthy, high-functioning, and immaculately groomed folks while nibbling unpronounceable foods at swanky dos involves painstakingly learning a whole new language.

This, foreign to me, idiom is the shibboleth to social and emotional mobility of dizzying proportions, a leap into the world of generations of professional triumph and familial stability. My blending into these circles is the ultimate ‘as if’, an overcoming of childhood adversity so enormous that my inner child feels invisible, more so as the language barrier works both ways: these graceful sophisticates are protected from many of life’s trials through not just their wealth but by many-layered, strong personal bonds and professional networks, and the permanent severing of family ties is not just a delicate and ugly taboo subject but indeed, beyond comprehension and unfathomable.

Connectedness is everything, and so is family. This is a healthy sphere, seemingly with no concept, let alone first-hand knowledge, of the darkness. Of course, my fitting in here is only skin-deep, and my healing only partial. My private life remains non-existent, a vacuum so obvious that it too is a silent scream, telling the untellable story, making sure the inner child does not go ignored. 

The best revenge

And then I kept investing in my recovery. I am incredibly grateful to be alive at a time when I could stumble across the transformative works of Bessel van der Kolk and Richard Schwartz, among others. Eventually, my private life too began to heal, but only after I made a deal with my inner child, telling her that while my life will more and more look ‘as if’, the past will never be denied or forgotten. And that the best revenge is a life well lived.

Alice Segell is a pseudonym. The author is a wife, researcher, writer and survivor.

References:

Martin, Mozelle (2026), ‘When Dysregulation is not what First Appears: Differentiating BPD, CPTSD with Attachment Dysregulation, Trauma-Bonded Anxious Attachment, Chronic Pain Identity, and Long-Term Instability’, https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/03/24/when-dysregulation-is-not-what-first-appears-differentiating-bpd-cptsd-with-attachment-dysregulation-trauma-bonded-anxious-attachment-chronic-pain-identity-and-long-term-instability/.

Maté, Gabor (2009), In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, Random House Canada.

Schwartz, Richard C. (2023), Introduction to Internal Family Systems: A Revolutionary Therapy for Wholeness & Healing, Vermilion.

van der Kolk, Bessel (2014), The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Penguin.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

This is where you come from, this is who you are, and don’t you forget it. Let’s cut you (and whatever semblances of confidence and self-esteem you have scraped together since last we met) down to a devourable size. Then let’s be having you, again and again and again.

Just like old times. Only you’re no longer little. What makes this even more fun is that you are all grown up now, and back here out of your own free will. Things can’t have been so very terrible, can they, if you keep rocking up for more of the same, and to play happy families for all to see. For you are in your prime now, and potentially so very powerful.

There are no victims, only volunteers; my dear, dare I say you are asking for it?

Like the best torturers, we never left any marks (and will not have to answer to any court) but there is the danger of you realising your strength, and of you finding the words for what we have done, and for what we are. The truth to us is a like a red rag to a bull, and to keep it at bay we have to keep you discombobulated and uncertain of yourself at all times while with us: trapped in that painfully familiar, utterly false childhood self – lying, self-denying, desperately trying to please us, accepting that truth, love, confidence and happiness are unthinkable and unspeakable in this house.

You are what we want you to be, a nothing, a joke, a tool to be used at our convenience.

We will do whatever it takes. Words for us are deadly blades in this, your first home. Even after all these years, we can still take your breath away with our unfettered sadism and creative callousness. But we are getting on, and as we grow old and frail, we use your stupid morality against you: you would not want to upset someone weaker than yourself, would you?

Well, that’s a good one coming from unrepentant child abusers, but in this as in other matters, we take great delight in duping you. The past, of course, is for us to rewrite as we see fit. Go there at your own peril – we will call you a liar, a fantasist, a lunatic, whatever it takes to shut you up, and more.

Why go? Why yank your inner child back to the place it worked so hard to escape – they might have crippled you for life, but hey, it’s a holiday or a special family event, that somehow is reason enough?

You likely go because you need the approval and validation of the world in a primal, desperate way, and thus want to do right by its standards. You hunger for a healthy normality, but the thought of having a family of your own scares you senseless, as does the thought of a Christmas all by yourself.

And while the world out there pays lip service to the protection of children, it is all out of sympathy when it comes to adult survivors of child abuse – how bad can it have been, you turned out alright, be grateful, forgive … anything other than the truth will do, on this much of the world concurs with the predators. 

And yet, fortunately, the world has also begun to change over the last decade or so. 2025 saw the release of Eamon Dolan’s excellent book, The Power of Parting, Finding Peace and Freedom through Family Estrangement – one of many powerful experiential and academic contributions to a thriving field focused on legitimising cutting abusers out of one’s life.

Alice Segell is a pseudonym. The author is a wife, researcher, writer and survivor.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

In July 2020, eleven months since we first went no-contact, my father wrote me his own obituary.

Entitled “Who I Am on the Way,” my father described in the third person his early profound religious experiences (“[a]s if he’d written John 21:25” himself), how for him, “making love was a continuous, collaborative art form,” and even included a suspiciously short list of his flaws, such as his ability to “speak truth to power” and “yell without raising [his] voice.” Most disconcerting to me still is his choice of words when he wrote that he “shared Thoreau’s aim to ‘suck the marrow out of life.’” One thing is certain. My father always sucked the life out of me.

At the time, his latest attempt to hoover me back into a relationship with him was traumatic in the extreme. Reading it now, “Who I Am on the Way” is, more than anything, educational. Painstakingly self-aggrandizing (I can just imagine him hunched over the blue light of the laptop he claimed to hate, typing away with two fingers at three in the morning), my father’s obituary is an admission, an unwitting invitation to bear witness to the insecurities that corrode his soul. It is also – in all its entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of insight or boundaries – my original case study of narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

Contemporary research defines narcissism as a chronic set of personality traits characterized by significant impairments to interpersonal functioning, primarily resulting from insecure attachments in early childhood. Dr. Ramani Durvasula defines narcissistic personality disorder (or NPD) as a learned behaviour pattern that causes harm to others.[1] Unlike most personality disorders, in which the person most negatively impacted is the person with the disorder, narcissism has the most profoundly negative impact on those affected by the narcissist, as the traits they exhibit are, by definition, interpersonally antagonistic and damaging. Experts characterize narcissistic traits as including, but not limited to, entitlement, grandiosity, lack of empathy, validation seeking, superficiality, interpersonal antagonism, insecurity, hypersensitivity, contempt, arrogance, and poor emotional regulation (especially rage). [2] These traits act as shields against narcissistic injury (i.e., a narcissist’s hypersensitivity to signs and indications of feeling undervalued or unappreciated) and internalized shame. While they may succeed in the short term, these traits lead to considerable difficulties in making and sustaining healthy relationships as an adult.[3]

These traits further make pathological narcissism extremely difficult, if not impossible, to treat. Mental health clinicians agree that, so far, no empirical studies have successfully identified a reliably effective psychotherapeutic or psychopharmacological treatment for narcissism.[4] For one thing, narcissists’ bullying behaviour extends to their therapists, considering the unlikely event that they are willing to seek help in the first place. Giancarlo Dimaggio observes that:

“[Narcissistic] [c]lients may involve therapists in different maladaptive relational patterns, pushing them to feel angry, devalued, helpless and inadequate and to disengage from the therapy process…Very often patients barely accept they are in treatment to deal with their own personality issues and only ask for symptom relief. This is one source of impotence and frustration in therapists, who eventually ask themselves: ‘Is this person really suffering? And if he does, is he willing to helped?’”[5]

Bottom line, narcissists are so interpersonally difficult and so unwilling to accept responsibility for their actions that they alienate even trained professionals. It is my belief, therefore, that we should focus on prevention, not treatment, of narcissism, the most effective method being psychoeducation.

Psychoeducation refers to psychological or therapeutic interventions presented in an educational format. These interventions can take the form of ‘passive materials’ such as pamphlets, informational websites, social media posts, and email listservs, or more ‘active’ methods like group exercises, workshops, therapy sessions, and training.[6] Psychoeducation has been proven in many contexts to be effective in both treating and preventing mental disorders[7] and, in the case of narcissistic abuse, “may be the most important part of the treatment.”[8] As Durvasula notes, “[m]any clients just don’t know how narcissistic patterns work – they often fall unto attribution biases and blame themselves.”[9] Given that narcissistic abuse also occurs in cultural contexts where abuse, particularly of marginalized people, is often normalized and romanticized, psychoeducation in narcissism does the powerful work of de-normalizing these behaviours and uncoupling them from cultural images of power and success. As the Hans Christian Anderson story famously said, the emperor has no clothes.   

At the dawn of Donald Trump’s second U.S. presidency, we are entering a dangerous era of narcissists in power. Given that, I argue that we must include another component in regular discourses on narcissism: gender. Despite growing awareness of narcissism, issues of gender and misogyny continually go unaddressed and unchecked. In a recent profile of mass shooters on The New Yorker Radio Hour,[10] which cited drug use, access to weapons, mental health issues, and fame-seeking among some of the main factors in an individual’s propensity to commit a mass shooting, profilers failed to account for gender as the single biggest factor (99% of mass shooters in the U.S. are male).[11] Traditional masculinity, as this example illustrates, is so interchangeable with violence that we often fail to see it as the threat it undoubtedly is. As Clare Bielby notes, “because masculinity and violence so often mutually constitute each other, masculinity has tended to be ignored in discussions of so-called political violence and perpetration, functioning…as the unmarked gender.”[12] Yet violence is gendered, and until we as a global community challenge gendered concepts that devalue male emotion and vulnerability and overvalue power, our world will continue to be a violent place.

My father was a narcissist, but he was also a man. A man who had learned – from his father and his father’s father and anyone else who subscribed to the patriarchy – that vulnerability equaled weakness, dominance equaled strength, and that, as a husband and father, he was entitled to control the women in his life. And yet, he would have been so much happier, so much more loved, if he hadn’t. My mother, sister, and I, feeling safe, would have loved him.

In Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That, he says, “[t]he better we understand abusers, the more we can create homes and relationships that are havens of love and safety.”[13] Psychoeducation in narcissism is a crucial step toward that goal, and I welcome the difficult walk ahead.  

[1] Durvasula, Ph.D. “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”: How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. (Post Hill Press, 2021), 5.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Flett, Gordon L., et al. “The Anti-Mattering Scale versus the General Mattering Scale in Pathological Narcissism: How an Excessive Need to Matter Informs the Narcissism and Mattering Constructs.” (Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, vol. 41, no. 6, 27 Oct. 2022), 621.

[4] Caligor, Eve, et al. “Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Diagnostic and clinical challenges.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 172, no. 5, 1 May 2015.

[5] Dimaggio, Giancarlo. “Treatment principles for pathological narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder.” (Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, vol. 32, no. 4, Dec. 2022) 409.

[6] Donker, Tara, et al. “Psychoeducation for depression, anxiety and psychological distress: A meta-analysis.” (BMC Medicine, vol. 7, no. 1, Dec. 2009), 2; Burman, Erica. “Fanon, Foucault, Feminisms: Psychoeducation, Theoretical Psychology, and Political Change.” (Theory & Psychology, vol. 26, no. 6, 1 Aug. 2016), 707.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Durvasula, Ramani. “Navigating Narcissism: Giving Our Clients a Compass.” (Psychology Today, 5 Dec. 2019), Paragraph 4.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Remnick, David, et al. “What Makes a Mass Shooter?” The New Yorker Radio Hour, 27 May 2022.

[11] Martin, Michel, and Emma Bowman. “Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men.” All Things Considered, NPR, 27 May 2021, Line 6.

[12] Bielby, Clare, and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer. Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 4.

[13] Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. (Penguin Random House, 2008), 36.

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Going no contact can be one of the hardest decisions you will ever have to make. Severing ties with family is a self-determined and empowered step toward ending emotional, physical, and psychological abuse. The consensus is that the choice to go no contact falls into three distinct categories:

1. Limiting family connections and the amount of time spent with family or avoiding specific family members or events that are the most triggering and abusive. (This could be a first option before fully going no contact and might feel like the best long-term option for your situation.)
2. Deliberately choosing to go no contact and removing toxic family members from your life.
3. The choiceless choice – when the choice to go no contact is automatic, made for you, or when there is literally no other choice to make but to sever all contact.

You may find that one choice may feel too much, another too little, and one may feel just right. No matter where you are in the process of making this decision, it is never easy. Making this choice is much more consequential and important than porridge, or the comfort of household furniture, and should not be taken lightly. No offense, Goldilocks.

For many going no contact means cutting ties and having no interactions or communication with a dysfunctional family of origin or removing yourself and moving farther away geographically. Going no contact is an empowering step to take, but it is also challenging to navigate this kind of break from toxic family members and extended interpersonal relationships. The web of players, loyalists, and enablers can often work together to undermine your decision and cause more trauma, shame, and harassment, all in an effort to get you back into your assigned role within the family structure. The abuse you receive leads to the relief that abusers count on to manage their own demons. Losing you as the scapegoat, whipping post, and innocent vessel to project all their own anger, fear, insecurities, and mental health issues onto is a loss for them and their egos. However, unfortunately, they will generally find another person to traumatize and project onto if you cut ties, so they can continue to avoid and deny their own issues and revel in seeing pain and suffering play out in another.

Concerns might arise over the timing of your decision or you may experience invalidating and sabotaging thoughts about separating from family despite your own mental health needs. You may find yourself ruminating over the consequences, fallout, or backlash that you may suffer, or equivocating and negotiating with yourself to decide if the situation is “bad enough” to move forward with severing ties completely. If you find yourself normalizing or minimizing toxic behavior this could be a sign of trauma bonding and a way of avoiding this very difficult decision.

Trauma bonding is developed over time and lives within the nervous system. It is the glue that holds an abusive relationship together. Every time your fight/flight survival response is activated in conjunction with sustained trauma by an abuser, an adrenaline connection is established. Repetitive abuse coupled with a familial abuser or abusers can create a confusing narrative that muddles the boundaries between healthy and toxic attachment. When we are taught that mothers, fathers, and family in general are supposed to love us, but they hurt us instead, a psychological conflict or cognitive dissonance occurs that creates insecurity, shame, low self-esteem, and internalized wounding. This repetitive dissonance, abuse, and hormonal triggering can create a labyrinth of misperceptions that confuse abuse and neglect with love.

In my own experience, it was never a decision I made willingly. It was a choiceless choice. I felt lucky in some small way that the choice was one that was clear and made for me. My family, especially my mother, had pushed me to my limit. There were many growing and considerably toxic moments that had been coming to a head – and then the last straw broke. I was at a family event and my niece overheard a very degrading and hurtful statement that my mother said to me. My mother was usually able to hide her jabs and hateful actions toward me, but,  on this occasion, she was revealed. The look on my niece’s face towards my mother was absolute disbelief and disgust – and then she looked at me to see my reaction. My niece explained her outrage to me, as she was confused and concerned for me. I was so used to being treated cruelly and wasn’t sure what to say but was uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the fact that someone else was now in the toxic pool with me and had seen a small portion of what was going on. I was stunned. The level of shame I experienced by having a witness to my abuse was terrifying at that moment and is still felt today, and the tears that arise as I write these words and relive that moment are a time capsule of disgrace still held deep within me.

Although I am a minimalist, I found a thread of similarity when I realized that hoarders often experience a sense of feeling violated, left vulnerable, and exposed when their homes are cleaned and organized. The mountains of clutter, clothing, belongings, and random, everyday things are put in place initially to isolate themselves; hide behind feelings of embarrassment, shame, and pain; and shield and protect themselves from others and what they fear. I did not realize the full scope of my hidden feelings and triggered wounds at the time, but once someone else saw the truth of what was happening, the hidden hoard, you might say, I soon realized how exposed and vulnerable I felt in that moment.

There was always a big part of me that wanted others to understand what was happening behind closed doors, to help and save me, to find out about the abuse and neglect at the hands of my mother, and how she had recruited family members and others to her side as proxies and enablers. Yet, when my niece looked at me, I felt so much shame and humiliation that I was the one exposed and left feeling unprotected and completely devastated. It was as if the truth had been hiding behind layers of trauma and neglect that were now cleared away, and visible for all to see. While the truth was revealed so too was a level of shame that I could not abide. It was as if my own niece could now see my unworthiness, undeserving self, and unlovability. She could see that my own mother and family did not care for me or love me and treated me with disdain.

At that moment, as much as I love my niece, and knowing how much she loves me, I felt a breaking point within me and knew that I could not sit through another family event. I could never have her or any other person witness my degradation and abuse at the hands of my mother and family or see me exposed. I also realized what I had been putting up with, accepting, and how retraumatizing each encounter with my family was and would be in the future. This event was the last straw, and when it occurred, it was clear and severe enough to make my decision to go no contact. I knew then that I was done. It was never a solid thought or a statement that I made to myself. I don’t think I had even entertained the idea prior, but, at that moment, I knew I could no longer play the part I had been playing in my family or feel like a victim of their abuse one more day.

I ended up moving more than 2,000 miles away from my family, which included my extended and loving family of friends and the few members of my family of origin that I trusted. My new home was a place that felt like home to me from the first time I had driven into town and thereafter. I had visited this place frequently over the years and fell in love with the energy, beauty, space, simplicity, and response of my own personal feelings. It seemed like a great place to start building a new life. So, one day, when it felt just right, I hooked up my truck to a U-Haul packed with my belongings, along with my dog and two cats, and left everything behind in hopes of better times ahead.

I remember starting out in my new community and feeling free. It was as if someone turned on a bright light and said, “Now, go be authentically you.” I did not have to hide or wonder who I might know around every corner, or who was going to judge, ostracize, harm, or hurt me, or just do something randomly mean and demeaning towards me. The experience and freedom to be authentically myself had never been more realized than it was in my new town. My shame was nowhere to be found because no one had access to my past, my history, or my family that recruited others to join in abusing and hurting me. My family was well known in my hometown, so the feeling of freedom, peace, and relief that no one knew me in my new world was transformative.

My relationships continue to ebb and flow as all involved get older. I feel much more empowered and have developed very strong boundaries when dealing with family members, and others who push their limits with me, but there is still unhealed trauma that gets activated and boils to the surface. I struggle, heal, and fall again and again, but I keep getting back up. I write and share and listen and heal one Friday Edition and HeartBalm Healing podcast at a time. There is growth, expansion, and evolution that happens when going no contact and facing the next steps of rebuilding a life for yourself that is grounded in healing, self-loving actions, and an empowered HeartSpace that grows as we grow. It is an ongoing garden that needs tending, nourishing, harvesting, and a lot of love, compassion, understanding, rest, forgiveness, and gratitude.

Getting support from a trauma-informed professional can help make this transition more manageable and provide tools, structure, and a developed plan for moving forward. When you begin to remove toxic people from your life, you begin to understand that who you surround yourself with is entirely your choice. These empowered and positive actions support your own wellness and healing journey, and you begin to understand and embrace your own magnificent, deserving, authentic, and loving self. You nurture the ground you walk on and begin to find all the ways that you are deserving and that you are worthy of everything good!

I no longer look to my abusers with any expectation of remorse, apology, restitution, restoration, or relationship. I’m at peace, accepting that they won’t and can’t help me out of the mess they created. But,  I’m the best qualified for that job anyway and I’m happy with the job I’m doing.

— Christina Enevoldsen, The Rescued Soul: The Writing Journey for the Healing of Incest and Family Betrayal

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This piece shall focus on what to do with the inevitable grief and guilt that often follows going no contact.

Part II – Going no contact with your family

Part I – Going no contact

Ways to Go No Contact with Your Family of Origin

There are many ways you can utilize when going no contact with your family of origin. Going no contact is to break away from your family and discourage them from reaching out to you.

One can expect the family to try to interrupt your determination to remain away by spreading rumors of how horrible you are or how sick you must be to “hurt them like that.” While these rumors are highly inconvenient and may cause you to want to lash out, it is critical to keep your wits about you and not respond.

You should block them from all your social media accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter, and your telephone. If you must, change your phone number and stay away from social media for a while to help you feel sane.

You might want to consider blocking friends of the family and other family and friends besides your immediate family as they might carry back to your family information you do not want them to have. Even innocent information leaked by someone can remind your family and spur an abusive person to reach out to you again or once again spread lies about you.

Be cautious about your accounts by adding a two-step authentication to your online account and apps, and in some cases, you may want to watch for attempts to hack your bank accounts. The best way to avoid problems is to change your passwords to something they cannot guess.

Dealing with Guilt When Going No Contact

Self-doubt and guilt often accompany going no contact with family members who have entangled in your life to cause you to be dependent upon them. They may have said they need you or have said similar to your friends who tell you about what they said. Their words and reactions to your going no contact may spur enormous feelings of guilt that is undeserved.

Lifelong guilt that has built up surrounding your interactions with your family members can make the going no contact process emotionally difficult.

However, there are four things you can do to lessen or destroy the guilt you might be feeling.

Make sure your needs are met. Make sure during the initial days of going no contact, and after that, you are doing your very best self-care and make sure you have what you need to help you get through this trying time. Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ensure you have all the components met so you can focus on being happy.

Focus on you. Now might be the first time in your life you have been on your own and responsible for only your needs and not others. You may never have been capable of embracing yourself without judgment without the drama your family of origin placed on you. Spending time with friends who make you feel good and lift you up and that you add interests to your life such as exercise or a hobby, is critical. Doing these things reconnects or connects you for the first time to things that make you happy and feel joy. Work on developing self-confidence and loving yourself unconditionally no matter what trauma your family has put you through.

Pay attention to how much better things are for you now that you have gone no contact. Since you have gone no contact, it is assumed that you have discovered and are remembering that you were abused and made to live in a toxic family environment. In the early days of no contact, you might feel you overreacted and worry about the people you cut off from your life thinking you are bad. It is vital to recall how bad things were when your family member(s) were treating you poorly and making your life a living hell. Pay close attention to how much better your days go without contact from your family and the peace you have found.

Allow yourself to feel guilty. While this may seem counterintuitive, allowing yourself to feel the guilt you experience will help you examine yourself better. Once you have acknowledged your guilt’s existence, you can find ways to work through it. Perhaps you are more empathetic towards your family than they were for you; if so, you can know that you are a good and loving person. The challenge is not to give in to feelings that can derail you by believing it wasn’t really necessary. You would not have gone no contact if it were not necessary.

Trust yourself and your decision.

Dealing with Grief When Going No-Contact

Often when people choose to go no contact, they feel grief for their actions, at least for a while. After all, the family you just disowned was all you knew for most of your life, even if they were abusive.

You might be experiencing feelings of betrayal from their treatment of you and a loss of family connection, identity, and support, although those attributes were not given freely or often. If you have begun the process of healing from childhood abuse by family members, you are highly vulnerable to feeling grief for the family you never had.

Your family of origin might be trying to use toxic shame on you to force you back into their dysfunctional fold, making you feel unreal and like you betrayed them when it was they who betrayed you.

You must challenge this toxic shame and the grief it brings to your life by having a more reality-based sense of positive self-identity, potential, worth, agency, and a harmonious relationship with yourself.

There are some steps you can take to minimize the grief you may feel after family estrangement begins.

Remember going no contact will cause grief. Acknowledge to yourself that you are typical when you feel confusion, frustration, anger, fear, hurt, and a myriad of other strong emotions. Use self-compassion to guide yourself through extraditing yourself from a harmful family situation.

Try to avoid fantasizing about abusive family members. If your family of origin was abusive and crazy dysfunctional, they would always be this way. You cannot change someone else; that is impossible. Don’t waste your time thinking they weren’t as bad as you thought as this trap can lead to emotional disaster.

Take time away from triggers. If you find yourself triggered into wanting to reconnect with your abusive family members, do not act at once. Instead, take time away from that thought and allow the triggered flashback to diminish. Remind yourself that the worst is over and that you are no longer in danger. These two realities will strengthen your resolve.

Grieving over the loss of a family, even a dysfunctional one, will happen because you are a good person.

Will I Need To Be No Contact Forever?

The simple answer to the above question is no. You aren’t required by any law or obligation to remain no contact. The choice is yours. Do you want to allow people back into your life that are harmful?

You must decide under what circumstances you would contact and interact with your family of origin after going no contact. Ask yourself some questions.

• Did you intend to go no contact forever?
• What do you do if there is a death in the family?
• Have you reached a point in your healing where you can handle the crap your family will visit on you?
• Have you reached the goals you wanted to, such as finishing therapy?

If you choose to return relations with your family, keep in mind you are not a helpless and dependent person anymore and do not need to play their games or allow them to play games with you.

Ending Our Time Together

Deciding to go no contact with your family of origin is a tough decision that should not be made lightly. Talk to your therapist and think long and hard about leaving before you do.

Weigh the pros and cons of going no contact and do not romanticize it. There is nothing glamorous about feeling the guilt and loneliness you will initially experience from cutting yourself off from the chaos because that is what you’ve always known.

“You are your own refuge
There is no other
You cannot save another
You can only save yourself.”
― Guillaume Musso

“If you want to be happy, you have to study people who are happy. You have to hang out with people that are happy. Life won’t go in the direction you want by simply trying to stay positive in a life you’re not happy with. You have to know what you want and why you truly want it so badly. When you figure that out, then you need to change your current identity in order to fit the type of person you envision would make those dreams come true. Happiness is not reliant on the actions or inactions of other people. It is your “courage in motion” toward your dreams.” ― Shannon L. Alder