So Why Is It So Hard to Leave?
It doesn’t make any sense, right?
From the outside, it can be difficult to understand why someone stays in a relationship that is making them frightened, miserable or increasingly unlike themselves. Sometimes the person inside the relationship doesn’t understand it either.
Unfortunately, there are any number of reasons why people stay in abusive relationships. Some are practical. Lack of money, young children, difficulty finding housing or employment, language barriers, lack of social support, family or cultural pressure and fear of what might happen if you leave can all make leaving extraordinarily difficult.
But there are psychological reasons as well.
A relationship with a narcissist can come at the cost of your sense of self, while at the same time becoming extraordinarily difficult to leave. The very dynamics that make the relationship painful can also make it harder to work out what is happening, trust your own judgement and eventually do something about it.
Of course, narcissism and abuse are not the same thing. Not everyone with narcissistic traits is abusive, and abuse needs to be recognised in its own right. But some of the ways narcissistic people relate to others can create a relationship that is confusing, destabilising and very difficult to leave.
So why do people stay?
Understanding What Keeps Us There
There is rarely a single reason. Someone may love their partner and still be frightened of them. They may know that something is badly wrong and still hope that things will change. They may have children, financial commitments or nowhere else to live. They may be frightened of what their partner will do if they leave. And sometimes the relationship itself has gradually made it harder to trust their own judgement about what is happening.
Understanding what keeps people in damaging relationships is not an argument for staying in them. It is a way of understanding why leaving can be so difficult.
1. The relationship didn’t begin the way it is now
Most people don’t knowingly enter a relationship in which they expect to be controlled, frightened, humiliated or constantly undermined.
Often, the beginning looks very different.
There may be intense attention, excitement and affection. You may feel extraordinarily understood or desired. There might be candlelit dinners and roses, extravagant promises and a sense that you have finally met someone who really sees you.
People often call this love-bombing. Sometimes it is deliberately manipulative. Sometimes it reflects idealisation, infatuation or the narcissistic person’s own need for admiration and closeness. Either way, the contrast with what comes later can be profoundly confusing.
Someone can go from buying you candlelit dinners and roses to screaming at you when you’ve committed the tiniest of transgressions.
It can be extremely difficult to reconcile the early rose-coloured narcissist with the angry, demanding or controlling person who is now making regular appearances.
What went wrong?
Quite reasonably, you may keep looking back at the beginning for evidence of who this person “really” is. Perhaps the loving person will come back. Perhaps something has happened. Perhaps you have done something wrong.
And so you stay a little longer.
2. Unpredictability can make the relationship harder to leave
Abusive relationships are not necessarily cyclical. People do not behave according to diagrams.
But unpredictability matters.
Your partner may be cruel or contemptuous and later affectionate. There may be an appalling argument followed by apologies, sex, tenderness, promises or a brief return of the person you remember from the beginning.
Relief can be enormously powerful when you have been distressed.
Intermittent reinforcement is one process that helps explain why some painful relationships become so compelling. When affection, approval or safety is unpredictable, we can become intensely preoccupied with getting it back.
You are not simply weighing up the good things against the bad things in some calm, rational fashion. You may be living in a state of anticipation, dread, hope and relief.
That can magnetise you in place.
3. You can gradually stop trusting your own experience
Emotional manipulation can make it difficult to remain grounded in your own sense of what is happening.
Perhaps your partner denies saying something you clearly remember them saying. You find yourself scrolling back through text messages looking for proof. You start recording conversations because otherwise you know that later you will be told they happened differently.
Perhaps every argument somehow ends with you apologising.
This is where gaslighting becomes important. Gaslighting is more than disagreement, lying or remembering something differently. It is a pattern in which your confidence in your own perceptions and experience is repeatedly undermined.
Over time, you may become less certain.
Was it really that bad? Am I overreacting? Perhaps I am too sensitive. Maybe I started it. Maybe I’m the abusive one.
Narcissistic ways of relating can make this particularly difficult because there may be very little room for another person’s subjectivity. Your version of events is not simply different. It is treated as wrong.
The argument then becomes less about what actually happened and more about whose reality is allowed to exist.
Heaven help anyone who demurs.
4. Earlier relationships matter
For some people, what is happening in the current relationship intersects with much older ways of relating.
If you grew up with a volatile, intrusive, rejecting or narcissistic parent, you may already be very good at monitoring other people and much less practised at noticing what is happening to you.
You may take too much responsibility when relationships go wrong. Anger may frighten you. You may appease quickly, doubt yourself or work extraordinarily hard to restore connection. If maintaining an important relationship once required you to accommodate another person, suppress your own needs or remain alert to changes in their mood, some of these responses can persist into adult relationships.
This does not mean that childhood experience determines whom you will choose or condemns you to repeat the same relationship forever. But our earliest relationships matter. They can shape what we expect from intimacy, what frightens us, what we tolerate and what we do when an important relationship feels threatened.
Sometimes what keeps us in a relationship is not that the relationship feels good. It is that something about our position within it feels horribly familiar.
There are other possibilities too. Some people are attracted to the confidence, status or apparent certainty of a narcissistic person. Others may find it easier to disappear into someone else’s life than to risk being fully known in a genuinely mutual relationship.
None of this means that someone has unconsciously chosen to be abused.
But understanding what the relationship asks you to become can be illuminating.
5. Fear can keep you in place
When an abusive or controlling partner realises that you might actually leave, the situation can change.
There may be pleading, promises or sudden declarations of insight. There may also be intimidation, threats, stalking, financial pressure, threats involving children or attempts to frighten you into staying.
Some relationships gradually become coercively controlling. The non-abusive partner becomes increasingly isolated and disempowered, with less freedom to make ordinary decisions or maintain an independent life. In extreme cases, someone may fear for their children or their own life.
At this point, asking Why don’t they just leave? misses something very important.
Leaving does not necessarily make an abusive person less dangerous. Sometimes the loss of control itself can increase the danger.
The more useful question may be: What is making it so difficult or dangerous for this person to leave?
6. Isolation changes what feels possible
Other people give us something against which to check our reality.
If you have gradually become isolated from friends or family, you lose that.
Sometimes an abusive partner actively discourages friendships or creates conflict around family. Sometimes the isolation happens more subtly. Social occasions become so difficult that you stop going. You become embarrassed about what is happening at home. You get tired of explaining why you have left and then gone back.
Eventually, the relationship can become your whole emotional world.
That makes leaving harder, not easier.
Seeking support isn’t a sign of weakness. It is often one of the strongest and most stabilising things you can do.
7. You have already invested so much
Then there is the sunk cost.
Years, perhaps. A house. Children. Friends. Plans. Money. A whole imagined future.
We are used to believing that worthwhile relationships require work, and of course they do. So when a relationship becomes difficult, the instinct to work harder is not necessarily foolish.
But in a chronically one-sided relationship, the amount of emotional work required simply to maintain some kind of equilibrium can become enormous.
You accommodate. Explain. Forgive. Try another way of communicating. Read books. Suggest therapy. Lower your expectations. Avoid particular subjects. Wait for a better time.
The self-sacrifice can become almost invisible because it happens incrementally.
And after investing so much, admitting that none of it has produced the relationship you hoped for can be painful. It can even feel humiliating to admit that you have been hoodwinked or exploited.
But there is no shame in leaving an abusive relationship.
Nor is there shame in finding it difficult to leave.
For many people, it takes more than one attempt.
Knowing Something Is Wrong Is Not the Same as Being Ready to Leave
One of the mistakes we make when talking about abusive relationships is imagining that insight should automatically produce action.
It doesn’t.
You can know that someone is hurting you and still love them.
You can understand a great deal about the relationship and still be frightened of losing it.
You can desperately want to leave and desperately want them to become the person you once thought they were.
You can leave and grieve.
These things can coexist. In fact, this is part of what makes these relationships so painful.
And sometimes leaving is dangerous. If there is coercive control, stalking, threats, escalating violence or fear for your own or your children’s safety, this is no longer simply a question of finding the psychological strength to leave. Safety needs to come first, and appropriate domestic violence, legal and professional support may be important.
For other people, leaving is less immediately dangerous but still extraordinarily difficult. You may need other people around you while you begin to disentangle what has happened, recover your confidence in your own judgement and work out what you actually want.
Getting your sense of self back does not necessarily begin the day you leave.
It can begin much earlier, with something apparently quite small.
Believing your own experience again.
If You’re Trying to Make Sense of a Narcissistic Relationship
You may also find these articles helpful:
Trauma Bonds
Why do some relationships feel almost impossible to leave? This article looks more closely at attachment, trauma bonds and the forces that can make painful relationships difficult to disentangle from.
What Is Narcissistic Abuse?
An exploration of how narcissistic abuse can affect your confidence, your perceptions and your relationship with yourself.
Recovering from a Relationship with a Narcissist
What happens after a narcissistic relationship, and what can help you begin to recover your sense of yourself?
Therapy for Narcissistic Abuse
If you’re trying to understand what has happened in a narcissistic relationship, or you’re finding it difficult to work out what you want to do next, therapy can give you somewhere to think about it without being told what you should do.
I work with people across Australia via Zoom.
Why Do I Keep Ending Up in These Relationships?
If you find yourself repeatedly drawn into relationships that leave you confused, depleted or doubting yourself, you may be wondering why this keeps happening.
My free guide, Why Do I Keep Ending Up in These Relationships?, explores some of the patterns that can make certain relationships feel so compelling and so difficult to understand.
Free Relationships Guide
MORE FROM THE RECOVERY ROOM BLOG
Why is it so difficult to leave a narcissistic relationship, even when you know it is hurting you? This article explores the practical, emotional and psychological reasons people stay, including fear, isolation, gaslighting, earlier relationship patterns and the hope that things will change.