It’s hard to tell someone you’ve been in any kind of abusive relationship.
Living with abuse, especially over time, commonly creates feelings of shame, fear, and self-blame, sometimes to a debilitating degree. Telling other people about the abuse you’ve suffered means kicking those feelings up into high gear, and risking disbelief, dismissal, or denial, any of which can do everything from make you feel worse than you did before you said anything to isolating you further, locking you further into you in continued and, typically, escalating abuse.
Disbelief, dismissal, or denial — all unfortunately common reactions to being told someone has been abused — are less likely when you’re telling someone you’ve been abused when you have visible physical injuries, or by a person who matches what the person you’re telling believes that an abuser looks or acts like. A small, quiet woman with bruises and a large, muscle-bound male partner disclosing abuse will often get a very different reaction than if it’s the big guy in the picture with the tiny partner who’s disclosing. And when your wounds are mostly on the inside, where no one can easily see them, it’s unfortunately common for people to react very differently than they might to someone with visible injuries, even though emotional wounds are usually the wounds that cause the most ongoing pain for victims of abuse no matter what ways they’ve been abused.
Unfortunately, many people still only recognize or understand abuse when it is physical, loud, or when it’s sexual, though that often also depends on the kind of sexual abuse and who’s perpetrated it. Some can’t even understand any of that. But many, many people still don’t understand emotional abuse at all, and even when you tell them about it or explain it to them, disbelieve or discredit it, or just don’t get that it tends to create the same kinds of large and lasting impacts that other kinds of abuse do.
To get help and support either getting out of an emotionally abusive relationship, staying out of one, healing from it, or all of the above, a first step is most typically asking for some validation, help and support, and to do that, we have to tell who we’re asking what’s been happening to us. Too, sometimes, the only way we can get to even just telling ourselves the truth, so that we can start to take any steps, is by telling it to someone else.
Why might you want to tell someone that you’ve been in or are currently in an emotionally abusive relationship? For any number of reasons, like because:
- You need another person to reflect back the truth you know or suspect about how your relationship is abusive so you can tell that truth to yourself
- You want help and support so that you can leave the relationship now or soon, and survive it in the meantime
- You want to start healing from the relationship and the effects it had on you
- You want to come back from the isolation the relationship imposed
- You want to start shining a light on what has happened or is happening to you so that you can stop being held back by shame or fear
- You want to stop being gaslit by your abusive partner or ex, and stop any way you might still be gaslighting yourself
- Because you want help holding your partner or ex accountable and moving on
- You want to process your experience and the feelings and impacts it’s left you with
- You need the person or people you are telling to stop idealizing your abusive relationship or enabling it or the abuse in it, and/or because you want to ask them to stop engaging with the person who abused you or giving them information about you which helps them keep hurting you
- You have become isolated from the person you are telling — or have left out this part of your life experience — and want them to know what is happening so you can be close again or for the first time
- You are seeking help leaving, healing, or both from someone like a therapist, crisis worker, doctor, or another kind of qualified helper
- Or, because you simply need to be seen and believed, because it is vital for your soul
Besides the help I’ve provided to people through Scarleteen over the decades I’ve worked here, I’ve also had to make disclosures like this myself, have guided people close to me through this process, and I’ve been the first person many people have told. My hope is that my experience shared in this series can help you choose who to tell, figure out how to tell in a way that works best for you, how to respond to some commonly crummy reactions as well as some commonly excellent ones, and where to go from there.
