Why is it so hard to leave when I know I should?

Why does the decision to leave keep coming undone?

Because leaving is a process rather than a moment, and a process gets interrupted. Deciding once does not finish it. That is the part almost nobody is warned about, and it is why so many people arrive believing the undoing is a fault in them.

The research points the same way. People reach leaving through several shifts in how they see the relationship rather than in one move, and what predicts leaving takes in material circumstances as well as how a person feels and thinks¹. A small interview study of women who had left, and of the workers who had supported them, found no fixed sequence of stages at all: some things build readiness over months or years, other things tip a decision over quickly, and love for a partner holds the decision back while a change in that feeling moves it². Neither study tells you where you are. What they tell you is that the question is not only whether you have decided. It is also what is actually open to you, which is a different question and no measure of your resolve.

Let me say early where this article stops being the right instrument. I can describe the shape of the process. What I cannot do from here is tell you where in it you are, what is genuinely available to you, or what any of it would cost you, and the decision turns on exactly those things. That is individual work with a therapist, and you would come on your own. The reading of your own situation stays yours; nothing here is meant to replace it.

What does the pull back actually feel like?

It feels like certainty on the way home and nothing at all once you are in the room. The feeling goes first and the body follows: the shoulders come down, the breath shortens, and the sentence you had ready stays where it is. Only later do you get to thinking that you must not have meant it.

• Clarity that does not travel. What you worked out on your own does not survive contact with the person it concerns.
• Affection that is not a mistake. The warmth is real, and it is also part of what holds you in place.
• The known against the unpicturable. A bad arrangement you understand pulls harder than a better one you are unable to picture.
• Improvement that arrives on time. Things get better just as you reach the edge of going, and that is where a great many decisions come undone.
• Grief running early. You are mourning the relationship while being told you are the one destroying it.

Those 2 states, the clarity and the blankness, belong to the same person and the same week. Holding both without calling either one the real you is most of the early work. Read more about whether to leave your partner or stay and try.

What are the threats actually doing?

Each threat moves the subject off what you want and onto what you will be blamed for. In my clinical judgement they are shaped, deliberately or not, to make the next step unthinkable rather than merely hard.

• Leaving reassigned. Going becomes their idea, and you become the one who was left.
• The children. You are told what will happen to them, in a form you have no way of checking.
• Money and the home. You are told you will have nothing, and that nothing in the house counts as yours.
• Your standing. Your family or your employer are handed a version of you that would take years to correct.
• Your right to stay. If you moved to Denmark for this relationship, your residence gets used as the lever, and the person applying that pressure is not a reliable account of where you stand.
• Their own wellbeing. It arrives in a form that makes you responsible for it, and this is the one I see hold hardest.

Seeing what a threat is doing does not make it harmless, and I would not pretend otherwise. What it does is put the subject back where it started, which was what you want. A controlling pattern works by narrowing the space a person has to act in³, so the room you actually have is part of the explanation, and reading a failure to go as a failure of nerve leaves that part out.

Where a partner threatens their own wellbeing, this article is plainly the wrong instrument. In my judgement you cannot hold another adult in place by staying with them, and that is not a conclusion to reach alone off a page. It is work to take to a therapist with you in the room. Read more about coercive control.

Why is couples therapy the wrong room for this?

Couples therapy asks 2 people to be honest in front of each other and then go home together. That arrangement works only when both of them can afford the honesty.

• Honesty with a price attached. What you put on the table is answered for later, and the cost of it lands on one of you.
• New language, old use. A controlling partner learns the vocabulary of therapy quickly and takes it home.
• Even responsibility assumed. The couple format treats the load as roughly shared, and here it is not.
• My position. I take no couple into joint sessions where one partner is afraid of the other, and that is my clinical judgement rather than a research finding.
• Where this belongs. Individual psychotherapy is the room for it, whether you leave or stay, and there is also couples therapy on your own.

Read more about walking on eggshells and about red flags in a relationship.

What actually helps, and where does this stop?

What helps is getting the process out of your own head and in front of somebody who is not inside it. Nothing below is a plan and I am not going to write you one: what would fit your situation needs your particulars, and those get worked out with somebody rather than read off a page.

• Say it out loud once, outside. Tell one person outside the relationship what an ordinary week actually looks like, for a second reading rather than for advice.
• Locate yourself in the process. Readiness builds slowly, and knowing you have been here before, and further on, is information rather than failure.
• Stop grading yourself on speed. Going back is part of how a great many people eventually leave, and treating it as proof of weakness is what keeps people still.
• Let the pull in both directions be examined. Each side of it is telling you something, and the work is hearing what, rather than picking a side quickly to end the discomfort.
• Put down what is not yours to carry. In my judgement the responsibility for another adult is not something you can discharge by staying.
• Begin individual work. One session on your own, where nothing has to be settled that day and nobody has to be managed.

Read more about what to agree before a trial separation and about gaslighting in a relationship.

Those are aids to thinking and nothing more, and they run out quickly: when you are watched too closely to think freely, when you no longer trust your own account of the week, or when you are frightened of your partner. At that point the next step is individual work with a therapist, on your own. What stays genuinely unresolved is whether and when to go. No article should answer that for you. It needs closer exploration with somebody who knows the particulars, and the judgement at the end of it is yours and nobody else’s.

Questions people ask

Does therapy help if I have not decided whether to leave?

Yes, and in my experience that is most of the work. You arrive without a decision, and I start with what frightens you rather than with what you ought to do about it.

Will you tell me to leave?

No, and I would be doing you harm if I did. My work is to help you see the process you are actually in clearly enough that the decision is yours and holds once you have made it.

Should I come on my own or with my partner?

On your own, where this is the subject. Joint sessions are the wrong setting when one partner is afraid of the other, which is my clinical judgement and the way I work.

What happens in a first session about this?

Mostly your own account of how the decision has gone so far, in detail, and my questions about what undoes it. If you would rather get a sense of the fit first, there is a free 30-minute call.

What if I have left and gone back before?

That is ordinary rather than disqualifying, and it is useful material in a session. What undid the decision last time tells me more about where you are than anything else you could bring in.

If leaving feels impossible right now, I can support you through it in therapy after narcissistic abuse, at your own pace and in confidence.

Sources

1. Anderson and Saunders, Leaving an abusive partner: an empirical review of predictors, the process of leaving, and psychological well-being, Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 2003
2. Di Basilio, Guglielmucci and Livanou, Conceptualising the separation from an abusive partner as a multifactorial, non-linear, dynamic process, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
3. Tolmie, Smith and Wilson, Understanding intimate partner violence: why coercive control requires a social and systemic entrapment framework, Violence Against Women, 2024

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.