Updated on June 18, 2025
Getting over an abusive relationship can be a challenging process, as it involves rebuilding your self-esteem from the ground up and regaining your power, voice, and inner peace. It takes immense determination and time to process the breakup and wean off the person you formed an unhealthy bond with.
Many people struggle to disconnect from their ex as they’re addicted to their ex’s presence, adoration, and commitment. Despite rationally understanding that their ex isn’t good for them, especially in the long term, they’re emotionally stuck with their ex and need their ex close to them to feel secure or important.
Their ex has a drug-like effect on them and fulfills their biggest mental and emotional needs. Without their ex, they feel lost, unloved, and unneeded. This is especially true for those who grew up unloved by their parents and developed an insecure attachment style. Such people tend to suffer the most as they become dependent on their partner for love and recognition. They need the longest to detach and find their own strength and purpose.
If you want to know how to get over an abusive relationship, you have to go back to the beginning and analyze your choices (motives). Ask yourself what or who made you get into a relationship with an abusive person. Did you grow up with unmet needs and expectations, and desperately needed someone to love you? Was this your first serious relationship in which one of you or both lacked experience or did you ignore the early warning signs and commit to your ex anyway?
Asking these questions is important as it helps you figure out whether your ex was fully responsible for the abuse in the relationship or if you also contributed to it. Some people aren’t meant for each other. They provoke each other and trigger a chain of reactions that destroy trust, respect, and eventually, love.
Although a toxic relationship can last for months, years, or even decades, it often persists for the wrong reasons. Most unhealthy couples function out of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, and therefore, become deeply attached rather than genuinely in love.
For a while, they convince themselves that what they have is true love. That’s why it takes them some time to realize that their relationship is built on negative emotions and that it’s become too exhausting. Even though couples often try to mask their problems with good moments, deep down, they struggle to believe they’re truly meant for each other. Eventually, they grow weary and increasingly doubtful—and wait for some negative event to break them up. Oftentimes, this is a disagreement or an abusive act that crosses the boundaries of a healthy relationship.
In other words, they hurt each other one too many times and stop tolerating abuse.
If you recently left an abusive relationship (especially if it wasn’t by choice), you probably have a lot of healing to do. You have to avoid taking the breakup personally and understand on an emotional level that your anxiety or depression isn’t caused by your ex’s value, but by the fact that the relationship served as a source of security and stability.
You invested in it with the hopes of receiving certain rewards. Since those rewards have gone up in a blaze, they took your steady flow of feel-good hormones with them. This lack of happy hormones produces the stress hormone, called cortisol, which strongly affects your response to stress and pain. It makes your breakup much more painful and requires acceptance and healing.
Getting over an abusive relationship will be significantly easier if you understand your reasons for feeling anxious, stressed, and abandoned. That’s because you’ll know that you’re in pain, not because of your ex’s amazing personality, maturity, and healthy behavior, but because you became obsessed with your ex for the wrong reasons. You got attached to the ups and downs your ex put you through and craved the fantasy you envisioned, not the reality you lived.
Over time, as feelings grew, you couldn’t even imagine leaving and being with someone else. You felt good with your ex because your ex made you feel stronger emotions than any of his or her predecessors. Those strong, but negative emotions in an abusive relationship gaslit you into thinking that what you had was unique and worth fighting for until the very end.
It’s a belief you’ll need to change if you want to get over an abusive relationship.
Instead of convincing yourself that your ex was the best person you could have been with, shift the narrative by recalling the bad moments your ex put you through and the reasons the breakup needed to happen. Also, write down your ex’s negative traits and behaviors. It will help you see things more clearly and detach quicker.
Journaling your ex’s negative actions and your feelings will help immensely, but so will signing up for therapy. A therapist will help you understand why you even gave an abusive person a chance and why it took so long for the relationship to end. If you had this knowledge back then, you might have been able to grow your self-esteem and avoid letting the wrong person into your heart.
Knowledge and self-understanding might not seem like they can help you cope with the breakup now that it’s happened, but that’s not true. The more you understand your choices, the less you’ll blame yourself and the quicker you’ll let go of someone who abused you.
Abuse is no joking matter. It may be present in many relationships, but that doesn’t justify your ex’s harmful behavior. It has likely left a mark on your sense of self and will require time and care to heal. If you don’t take time to heal or don’t heal properly, you might develop trust issues, low self-esteem, and various anxiety issues and triggers that impact both your single and future relationships.
You mustn’t let an abusive ex affect your post-breakup life. He or she has caused you enough problems, which is why I’m sure you agree that it’s time to let go and become stronger, not weaker/afraid. It’s okay to be more selective when it comes to dating. No one says you should give every single person a chance.
But don’t become someone who distrusts everyone. If you close yourself off, you risk missing out on meeting someone great, forming a healthy bond, and reaching your goals.
At the moment, it’s probably too soon to date because you’re still hurt, sad, and confused. That’s understandable. But the thoughts you think and the things you do now will affect how you interact with people once you’re healed. If you tell yourself that all men are like this or all women are like that, you’ll generalize things and form negative assumptions that prevent you from seeing people for who they truly are.
All I’m saying is, don’t let your abusive relationship define you or change you for the worse. You’ve come too far to let your ex mess with your life even now that he or she is gone.
In this post, we share some tips on how to get over an abusive relationship and get the most out of it.
How to get over an abusive relationship?
You can get over an abusive relationship by doing absolutely nothing, but that will significantly delay your recovery and increase the odds of finding yourself in another abusive relationship in the future. You might also choose not to date again due to the fear of getting used, abused, and abandoned.
If you don’t want the ghost of your abusive ex to cause you trouble during your healing or in your next relationship/s, you’d better learn what you can from this experience. Figure out why you committed to your abusive ex or why you stayed with him or her when you discovered the relationship wasn’t working for you.
It’s essential for you to understand your incentives for giving someone like your ex a chance.
For example, if you started dating your ex for money, power, or influence, the foundation of the relationship may have been built on external validation rather than genuine connection and love. You may have stayed with your ex for superficial benefits and got taken advantage of when the novelty of the relationship waned.
Moreover, if you got into a relationship with your ex and tolerated abuse because of low self-esteem, insecurities, a pleasing personality, or a lack of dating options, you likely appeared to be an easy target for your ex. Your ex considered you overly bendable and easy to manipulate and control. Your upbringing and past romantic experiences shaped you into someone who badly needed love and validation.
And unfortunately, your ex took advantage of that. He or she wanted to control you and benefit from your vulnerability and naivety.
I can’t list every possible reason why you may have gotten involved with an abusive person. It’s something you’ll need to reflect on and discover for yourself. When you understand what made you gravitate toward your ex or stay with your ex if your ex was good at hiding his or her abusive traits, you’ll know what to work on and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Once you’ve identified your reasons for getting attached to an abuser, work on forgiveness and self-forgiveness. You won’t move on very quickly if you blame yourself and hate your ex’s guts. Self-blame and resentment create powerful emotions that overprioritize the past and neglect the present and future.
Moving on requires acceptance, forgiveness, and inner peace. You need to let go of thoughts and emotions that force you to relive an uncomfortable past over and over again. Every time you think about your ex and feel negatively about yourself, you do nothing but take power away from yourself and give it to your ex.
Remember this whenever you feel like indulging in self-pity or dwelling on resentment toward your ex. If your thoughts or feelings hurt you and make you think and dream about your ex more, they’re clearly not good for you.
By all means, journal them or talk about them with a therapist or a good friend, but don’t allow yourself to be consumed by them. You’ll struggle to get over an abusive relationship if you act like your ex is still a part of your everyday life.
To get over an abusive relationship, you need to carry yourself as though the breakup no longer controls you. That doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions or ignoring unresolved questions, but rather facing them with strength and refusing to let them define you. By projecting emotional stability and self-control, you’ll gradually begin to feel stronger and get your abusive ex out of your system.
It’s super important not to communicate with your abusive ex. If you ignore this advice and talk to your ex as a friend, you’ll remember the difficult past and perhaps even miss the emotional intensity. You’ll probably experience another setback and need much longer to recover.
So make sure to go no contact with your ex. No contact will prevent you from analyzing your ex’s behavior or happiness. If your ex continues to abuse or disrespect you, you can also delete and block your ex. Don’t let your ex get close to you, even if he or she apologizes and wants to be friends or more.
Due to continuous abuse, you might have lost your confidence, identity, and purpose. You’ll need to regain them by keeping yourself busy with hobbies and friends. A busy, fulfilling post-breakup life and healthy new boundaries will show you that you don’t need your ex to be happy. You just need to invest in yourself and things that make you feel good.
Lastly, redefine your understanding of love. In healthy relationships, love feels safe, consistent, kind, forgiving, understanding, and emotionally supportive. It’s rooted in mutual respect, growth, open communication, and a willingness to work through all and any challenges. Although couples occasionally have disagreements, their relationship doesn’t swing between extremes.
Mature and respectful individuals love selflessly and do what’s best for the relationship as a whole, rather than just for themselves individually.
That said, here are my tips on how to get over an abusive relationship.
How long does it take to get over an abusive relationship?
Abuse can take quite some time to process. Some days feel strong and steady, while others bring back confusion, sadness, nostalgia, or even guilt. It’s important to remember that healing is nonlinear and that the worse your self-esteem is and the more attached you are, the longer it will take to heal.
Don’t expect to instantly get over someone who abused you for months or longer. You won’t be able to detach quickly because you first need to come to terms with abuse, redevelop self-love, and set personal goals. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to convince yourself that the breakup happened for a reason and that you need to keep distancing yourself from your ex.
If your abusive relationship lasted only a little while and you didn’t get too close to your ex, you’ll probably get over your ex in a matter of months. But if your ex abused you for months or years and dumped you in the end, then you’ll likely recover from abuse and abandonment after a year or longer.
Again, it depends on your self-esteem, breakup experience, purpose, support system, how you handle the breakup, and other things mentioned in this article. The scars of abuse can embed themselves deep beneath the surface. They can be felt while you’re still healing or may remain hidden until you start seeing someone else.
No matter how long it takes to heal, remain patient and kind to yourself. It may feel like healing is taking forever, but don’t rush the process. If you try to force it, you’ll likely complicate your detachment process and miss the connection and safety you had with your ex when the relationship worked.
Try to remember that healing is a marathon, not a race, and that it takes as long as it takes. If you’ve been neglecting yourself, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start rebuilding. You must invest in parts that need investing and allow yourself to gradually wean off your ex.
You’ll know you’ve gotten over your abusive ex when you don’t obsess about him or her, love or hate your ex, and question your importance and direction in life.
Do you feel stuck in the aftermath of abuse and wonder how to get over an abusive relationship? Post your relationship and breakup story in the comments section below. We’ll respond shortly.
And finally, if you need guidance to heal from an abusive relationship, coaching can help. Subscribe and take that first step.
My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.
