Have you ever questioned a relationship, wondering if how you were treated was love or something far more harmful? Leaving an abusive relationship can be one of the hardest and most courageous steps we take. This post gives you insights on how to heal from abusive relationships.
Abusive relationships often leave deep scars—whether they involve physical violence, emotional manipulation, or sexual harm. Sadly, about 1 in 3 cisgender women and 1 in 4 cisgender men may experience some form of abuse by an intimate partner, though these numbers vary across countries and communities. While much of the focus on intimate partner violence centers on cisgender people, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community often face unique barriers to recognizing and leaving abusive relationships. Systemic oppression, discrimination, and the lack of tailored support can make the journey more complex. I’ll explore queer intimate partner violence in more detail in an upcoming post. For now, know that you are not alone, and healing is possible regardless of your circumstances.
And while leaving an abusive relationship is a powerful and life-changing decision, many people discover that the real healing begins only after they’ve walked away. This blog post focuses primarily on healing after abuse in romantic relationships, but abuse can take many forms. Some of my clients have faced toxic dynamics in the workplace, while others have dealt with abusive siblings or family members. Healing is possible regardless of the context. In this post, I’ll provide some steps and insights to help you move forward.
How to heal from abusive relationships: Empower your recovery journey
Healing after abuse looks different for everyone. In this section, I’ll share what to expect when learning how to heal from abusive relationships and how to begin reclaiming your strength.
Abusive relationships affect everyone differently, and the healing process is deeply personal. If you’ve been in an abusive relationship for an extended period, you may experience a range of symptoms afterward. These symptoms exist on a spectrum—some people may not notice significant changes, while others might experience severe effects, such as complex trauma or a diagnosis of PTSD.
It’s important to remember that experiencing trauma or receiving a diagnosis is not a sign of weakness. The impact of abuse on your mind and body depends on many factors, including the duration of the abuse, unresolved past trauma, your nervous system’s response, the locus of control and personality. Most of these factors are beyond your control.
While in the relationship, you may have been in “survival mode,” focused solely on getting through each day. This state often doesn’t leave room to process emotions. Once the relationship ends, those buried emotions may begin to surface.
Here are some common symptoms people experience after leaving an abusive relationship:
- Nervous system dysregulation, such as anxiety, numbness, or hypervigilance
- Sleep disturbances and flashbacks
- Feeling disconnected from yourself or fragmented
- Difficulty trusting others
- Confusion, shame, or guilt
- Heightened anger or fear
- Avoiding relationships, low self-esteem, self-blame, or fear of abandonment and rejection
- Relational or complex trauma
- Complicated grief tied to the complex dynamics of abusive relationships
- Mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, dissociation, self-injury, or suicidal thoughts
While this list highlights potential ways abuse can impact your emotional and mental health, the most important thing is to focus on your unique experience. Your feelings are valid, and your symptoms are adaptive coping mechanisms for surviving extreme situations.
Approach your healing with gentleness and patience. Allow yourself to explore your emotions at your own pace. With time and support, you can process what happened and move toward recovery.
Steps on how to heal from abusive relationships
The following steps can help you start moving forward and show you how to heal from abusive relationships with more confidence and strength.
1. Increase your safety
The first step in healing is creating a sense of safety in your life, both physically and emotionally. This might mean cutting off contact with the abuser and surrounding yourself with supportive, healthy people. If avoiding the abuser is not possible—such as in co-parenting situations—try to minimize contact and set firm boundaries. The free ebook “Toxic Relationships 101” outlines further strategies for finding distance.
Additionally, it’s okay to step back from others who display toxic behaviours, even temporarily. Healing requires a safe and nurturing environment.
2. Pause on forgiveness
Healing begins with processing your experiences, not rushing to forgive. Keep in mind that change in the dynamic can only happen when the person with abusive behaviours takes accountability and demonstrates meaningful change. Without this, the cycle of abuse may persist. However, people with abusive behaviours often also have powerful protective mechanisms that block positive change. Your forgiveness won’t change their behaviour. However, it may expose you to further harm.
While forgiveness and compassion are valuable, they should not come at the expense of your well-being. As I often tell clients, love may be limitless, but healthy relationships require clear boundaries. As Brené Brown wisely said, “The most compassionate people are also the most boundaried.”
3. Re-establish your boundaries
Abusive relationships often involve repeated boundary violations. Learning to set and maintain healthy boundaries is crucial to your healing process. Boundaries define what you allow into your life and what you don’t, helping protect your emotional and mental well-being.
For those with a history of childhood or relational trauma, boundaries can feel challenging. You may have internalized patterns or “parts” that resist boundary-setting because they once served as survival mechanisms. Creating a compassionate relationship with these parts and working to heal them is key to developing boundaries that serve your adult self. Not sure where you stand with setting healthy boundaries? Find out with my quiz on healthy boundaries and take the first step toward growth
4. Reconnect with yourself
Abusive relationships often drain your sense of joy and connection to self. Reclaiming these is an essential part of healing. Explore passions or hobbies that excite you, or find creative outlets that bring you happiness. Furthermore, practices like yoga or meditation can help you reconnect with your body and emotions, fostering a stronger sense of self and grounding.
5. Heal your nervous system
Abusive relationships can disrupt your nervous system, leaving you stuck in hyperarousal (anxiety, fear) or hypoarousal (numbness, disconnection). Learning to recognize your state is the first step toward managing your emotions healthily.
Grounding techniques like the 5-4-3-2-1 method can help you return to the present moment during hyperarousal. You can use this tool by asking yourself the following questions:
- What are five things you can see?
- What are four things you can hear?
- What are three things you can feel?
- What are two things you can smell?
- What is one thing you can taste?
Energizing activities like listening to upbeat music or dancing can help during hypoarousal. Understanding the window of tolerance and Polyvagal theory can help you to recognize your states and regulate your nervous system.
6. Explore your patterns and activated parts
Parts work therapy offers powerful tools for understanding yourself more deeply. Exploring your inner world is an important step in how to heal from abusive relationships.
Abusive relationships often expose or reinforce unresolved patterns. For example, abusers may manipulate “sore spots” you weren’t even aware of. In the healing process, this sore spot is seen as a part of you—not all of you. Parts work is a therapeutic approach that helps you understand and work with the different aspects of yourself. These parts may develop as coping mechanisms or reactions to past trauma, such as an inner critic, a people-pleaser, or a protector. Each person experiences parts differently, and common types of parts include emotions, roles or ages, creative parts, wise parts, animals, or objects.
For example, I remember a family member manipulating me by saying, “You don’t love me enough.” This touched a vulnerable part of me, leading me to overextend myself. Recognizing and healing this pattern was transformative.
The parts of you that were activated in the relationship—and those that emerge after leaving—are not your enemies. They often aim to protect you from further harm. Building a healthy relationship with these parts allows you to release their burdens and create healthier patterns moving forward.
Reconnect with yourself after abuse
Parts work therapy has been beneficial for many of my clients who have come out of abusive relationships. Here are some steps to get started:
Common parts that may show up after leaving an abusive relationship include parts that feel numb or disconnected, while other parts are filled with anger and fear. These are normal responses to overwhelming experiences and trauma. There may also be parts that believe the abuse was their fault (which is not the case—the abuser is responsible for their actions).
Practice connecting with your parts
A key aspect of parts work therapy is learning to recognize and understand these parts better. Here’s how you can start:
Step 1: Recognize the parts
Begin by being curious about the parts that are activated within you. Move your attention inward and start to acknowledge them. Take a moment to reflect on a recent experience when you felt triggered or overwhelmed. What parts do you identify as active in that moment? Could you acknowledge their presence?
Step 2: Tune insight and be curious about parts
Once you’ve identified a part, the next step is to engage with it compassionately, as if you’re having a conversation with a good friend. Ask yourself: “What might this part want to tell me?” Be open to listening.
Step 3: Build a relationship with the part
You will learn more about the part’s experience and emotions as you lean into curiosity. Validate what it shares with you. For example, if the part feels hurt, acknowledge it by saying, “I hear that you feel hurt. Can you tell me more?” You might also ask the part to describe its experience and concerns. This creates a gentle dialogue that can bring relief and clarity.
Additionally, you might discover that a part feels violated because it wasn’t allowed to express anger or was forced to ignore its needs to keep the peace. Validate these experiences. Ask the part what boundary was violated and what it needs to feel safe in the future.
You can integrate these parts into your healing journey by gently engaging with them. If you find connecting with your parts challenging, a trained trauma counsellor or coach can guide you through the process and help you integrate these parts more effectively. Many of my clients initially find parts work unusual, but they soon discover how transformative it can be for their healing. It’s a process of building trust with your inner world, which often feels unfamiliar at first.
Childhood trauma and abusive relationship
Exploring childhood trauma is often an important part of how to heal from abusive relationships, since early wounds shape how we view love, self-respect and boundaries.
Experiencing childhood abuse or childhood trauma can significantly shape our perceptions of relationships as adults. For instance, some individuals may normalize manipulative or abusive behaviours or have internal parts that excuse such actions. Additionally, a fawn or submit trauma response may emerge, making it difficult to establish and maintain healthy boundaries. After leaving an abusive adult relationship, taking an honest look at your childhood experiences can be a crucial step toward healing. Addressing and working through related childhood trauma can help break these patterns and create healthier, more fulfilling relationships in the future.
How to heal from abusive relationships: Professional support
While some people heal on their own, professional trauma counselling can be invaluable if you feel stuck or don’t know where to start. Asking for help is not a weakness but a sign of self-awareness and strength. I sought counselling myself after leaving a toxic friendship, and it was a transformative step in recognizing and healing patterns that I hadn’t noticed before.
A skilled trauma counsellor can validate your experiences, provide tools for healing, and help you reconnect with your body and emotions. For instance, I worked with a client who sought counselling after leaving an abusive relationship. They came to me feeling anxious and hopeless, but through parts-work therapy and EMDR, we were able to process their experience and work on their boundaries. After six months, they felt calmer, more confident, and hopeful about creating a healthy relationship in the future. They even started dating again and successfully set clear boundaries, confidently saying no when someone wasn’t a good match.
This success story highlights how parts-work therapy can help people break free from the effects of abusive relationships. By reconnecting with their sense of self, they regain clarity and strength. Somatic approaches facilitate reconnection with the body, while EMDR aids in integrating traumatic experiences and processing lingering emotions. Together, these methods create a transformative path toward healing and personal growth.
Final thoughts about how to heal from abusive relationships
Abusive relationships are deeply painful, but they can also be catalysts for profound growth and transformation. Healing is a journey; every step is a testament to your strength and resilience. With time, support, and gentleness, you can reclaim your life and emerge as a more empowered version of yourself.
Sources and influences
This article is informed by my professional training, lived experience in trauma recovery, ongoing study, professional practice, and the works of trusted authors and organizations in trauma recovery, mental health, and social justice. The references below include the books, trainings, and evidence-based resources that shaped the ideas discussed here:
Greenwald, R. (2020). EMDR basic training, approved by the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA). [Online professional training]. Trauma Institute & Child Trauma Institute
Center for Right Relationships (2012). Organization & relationship systems coaching training [in-person training curriculum]. Center for Right Relationships
Forward, S., & Frazier, D. (1997). Emotional blackmail: When the people in your life use fear, obligation, and guilt to manipulate you. William Morrow.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
