She Didn't Call It Abuse - What Emotional Abuse Looks Like When It Doesn't Match the Stereotype
Many survivors of emotional abuse don't recognise what they've been through as abuse. Not because they lack intelligence or insight, but because emotional harm rarely looks the way we've been taught to expect it to. This is an account, from my notes, with identifying details changed, of what recovery looks like when you're starting without even the language for what happened.
Note: Maya is a composite vignette drawn from common patterns I see in practice. Details have been changed to protect privacy.
Was it even abuse?
Through the window of my counselling room, I watched her sitting in her car.
She had been there for fifteen minutes. I didn't know that was her, at first, I just noticed the car, not moving, engine on. When the bell finally rang and she came inside, something in her posture told me that the walk from the car to the door had taken more out of her than it looked.
When we spoke on the phone to arrange the appointment, she told me she'd been through a “difficult relationship”. She didn't call it abuse. Like most of the people I see for this kind of work, she didn't yet have the word for what she had experienced. And this was her first time in therapy. The fear was something I could hear, even over the phone.
The courage required to walk through a therapist's door when you have survived an abusive relationship is not easy to explain to people who haven't done it. Not because therapy itself is frightening, but because the very thing the relationship damaged, your ability to trust that you will be safe with another person, your confidence that what you experienced was real, your sense that you deserve the space to be heard, is precisely what therapy requires you to offer. You are being asked to extend trust in a context where trust has been systematically dismantled. That is not a small ask.
Maya sat down across from me, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I left my boyfriend six months ago, and since then… I haven't felt like myself,” she said.
Finding Language for the Pain
She described how it had started. Jack had been attentive and warm in the beginning, in the way that certain people are when they are, consciously or not, building something they will later use as leverage. Over time, that warmth became conditional. Criticism appeared; small, then more sustained. He began questioning her perceptions. Withdrawing when she set a limit, then returning with just enough warmth to make her question whether the withdrawal had been real. Her friends became people she saw less and less often, not because he forbade it, but because being around them started to feel complicated in ways she couldn't quite explain.
“He never hit me”, she said at one point, almost to herself. “It was just… hard. I don't think I belong in the same category as women who have been really abused.”
This is one of the most common sentences spoken in this kind of session. The qualifier “really” is doing an enormous amount of work. Emotional abuse tends not to match the template most people carry for what abuse looks like; it rarely leaves visible marks, it often unfolds so gradually that each moment seems survivable, and it frequently occurs within a relationship that also contains genuine tenderness, which makes the harm harder to name and easier to doubt.
I told her gently what I tell most people in that position: the absence of physical violence does not create a separate category of harm. Emotional harm is real harm. Chronic uncertainty, persistent criticism, and the erosion of your ability to trust your own perception are not “just hard”. They are damaging, and the body holds them.
She went quiet. Then her eyes welled up. “I thought it was just me”, she said.
If you're struggling with similar feelings, you might find this blog helpful: Why You Still Love Them: Understanding Trauma Bonds.
You can rebuild yourself.
The Grief That Doesn't Make Sense
By her second session, Maya was somewhat more settled in the room, but as she talked, grief surfaced in ways that confused her.
“I don't understand why I still miss him. I know he was bad for me. But part of me still wishes we could have made it work.”
This is the part that many survivors find most difficult to admit, because it runs so directly against the story we are told about abuse. that you should be relieved, that clarity should follow distance, that love and harm cannot coexist in the same space. But they do coexist. The attachment system does not evaluate relationships for safety before forming bonds. It bonds first, and the work of disentangling from something harmful comes long after.
We talked about the particular difficulty of grieving an abusive relationship: that you are mourning not only the person but the version of them you believed in, the future you constructed around them, and the version of yourself that existed before the relationship slowly rewrote you.
All of that is real loss. Grieving is not evidence of weakness, or confusion, or continued feeling for someone who hurt you. It is the appropriate human response to loss that was complicated and significant.
Learning to Protect Herself
Over the next few sessions, Jack began making contact: texts, calls, promises of change. Maya didn't know how to respond. Part of her felt guilty for not replying. Another part dreaded seeing his name on her screen and didn't quite understand the dread.
We worked on what boundaries actually mean in this context, not as rules imposed on him, but as conditions she created to keep herself emotionally safe. Practically, this meant limiting contact, changing privacy settings, and having a plan for situations where she might encounter him or their mutual friends. Emotionally, it meant something harder: learning that not responding to someone who hurt you is not cruelty. It is self-care. And that you do not owe anyone continued access to you because they are asking for it.
This felt genuinely new to Maya. She had spent so long managing Jack's emotional states that treating her own emotional safety as a priority felt strange, almost selfish. That feeling is itself a consequence of abuse. When your needs are consistently treated as less important than the other person's, you internalise the hierarchy. Unlearning it is slow work.
Rebuilding from the Inside
By our eighth session, something had shifted. Maya was ready to move the focus forward, not to leave the past behind (because that's not how it works), but to begin asking what she wanted to build.
We turned toward the parts of her that had been quiet. Her creativity, which she had let go of somewhere in the middle of the relationship. Her instinct for her own preferences, which had been so consistently overridden that she had stopped consulting it. Her capacity for pleasure in ordinary things, which had been hard to access when ordinary life meant managing someone else's volatility.
She also began working on trust, specifically, trust in herself. “What if I miss the red flags again? What if I choose wrong?” she asked.
This is one of the most important questions a survivor can ask, and one of the most important things I can offer in response: the goal is not to become perfect at detecting danger. It is to become better acquainted with your own signal system, to notice when something feels off, to trust that feeling enough to slow down, and to understand that green flags are as worth recognising as red ones. Consistency, emotional availability, honesty under pressure, a partner who makes room for your reality as well as their own.
Maya is still in that process. She is not the same person who sat frozen in her car, gathering herself to ring the bell.
She would tell you, I think, that she is not fully healed. There are still days when the old patterns rise. But she has language for what happened to her now. She can name it. She trusts her own account of it. And she is building a life in which that account is the one she lives by.
That is not nothing. For most survivors, it is everything.
I'm Kat, a registered counsellor in South East Melbourne. If any part of Maya's story feels familiar, if you've been wondering whether what you experienced was “really” abuse, or if you've been carrying the weight of a relationship that left you doubting yourself, I'd welcome the chance to talk. Sessions available online and in person
📧 kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
📞 0452 285 526
Recommended reading:
Relationship Red Flags: When Love Gets Complicated
Setting Healthy Boundaries: A Guide to Respectful Relationships
