This article is written from personal experience as a wife, a mother, and a woman who stayed in an emotionally abusive and neglectful marriage too long. Emotional abuse isn’t just expressing hurtful words to a partner. Emotional abuse and neglect, from my experience, can be communicated through actions taken in a relationship that indicate you are emotionally withdrawing from your partner. Our actions speak louder than words.

Emotional withdrawal in a relationship can be concerning because it’s basically one partner making the choice to withdraw emotionally from the other partner as a form of punishment. This behavior can lead to a partner feeling alone, hurt, and emotionally neglected. Other side effects include, but are not limited to: depression, enhanced anxiety, emotional projection onto others around them (including their children), questioning their worth, and in extreme cases feeling of insanity.

Here are several ways that a partner can lose, abuse, neglect, or push away their partner using tactics of emotional withdrawal and abuse.

Stonewalling and Shutting Down: Stonewalling is a form of not communicating and shutting down. It’s making the conscious choice to avoid meaningful or important conversations all together with a partner and choosing to only engage in short conversations with them about household tasks and responsibilities. When stonewalling, you are basically closing the door to opportunities to discuss or resolve problems in a relationship like an adult. Your partner will always feel the pressure and responsibility of being the one who has to start the hard conversations. This uneven balance of responsibility and pressure will eventually tip the relationship scale and your partner will falter.

Silent Treatment: Giving your partner the silent treatment is worse than not being physically present at all. Choosing to intentionally withhold conversations from your partner implies they are at fault. You are saying, “I’m not going to talk to you until you say you’re sorry first,” even if you know that you are in the wrong. This is a form of brainwashing your partner into always taking responsibility for your actions and admitting fault, when in fact, it’s not their fault at all. Think of this as emotional control and manipulation, so that you don’t have to be the one who takes responsibility for what’s occurred.

Being Vain When Their Upset: Being vain means thinking everything is about you. Maybe there is something else going on in their life that consumes their mental energy, but you think it is about something you did.. When there are days that your partner is upset or staying quiet you have two options. Option one, ask them what’s wrong, ask if it was something you did, or ask if they need to talk about something. Option two, you could be vain and assume the issue is all about you and revert to giving them the silent treatment until they decide to talk to you first.

Imagine the two paths of your life again in this situation. Had you simply asked what was wrong and talked with them, the issues would have been discussed, addressed, and fixed. However, being vain and just assuming you’re the problem and reverting to the silent treatment can lead to hours, days, and even weeks of partners not speaking to you, when in fact the problem had nothing to do with you. Instead, the silent treatment led your partner to losing respect for you, your trust, and feeling secure with you.

Reducing Physical Affection: Intimacy and physical affection in a relationship goes beyond sex. Small acts of physical touch communicate love, security, and safety. Avoiding physical touch all together including hugs, kisses, and intimacy because you’re upset with your partner (or because you’re assuming their attitude or quietness is about you) is spiteful and hurtful.

Imagine your partner and you are in the kitchen at the same time. It’s a small space so you are bound to bump into each other. Instead of gently placing your hand on them as you squeeze past them, you choose to intentionally pull back your body to avoid them all together. What if you’re laying in bed near your partner, they’re on the far east side of the mattress and you’re on the far west side of the mattress. Instead of meeting in the middle, you choose to stay far on the other side. When your partner’s foot lightly touches you as they adjust their placement, you quickly move it away as though they’re a stranger. What are you communicating to them? What do you think it leads your partner to believe about your attraction to them?

A Ghostly Presence: Emotional unavailability is communicated when a partner is ‘physically present’ but gives off the impression that they are not emotionally available when their partner needs support, wants to share their feelings, or wants to talk about their day. In the hype of today’s technology, cell phones have taken over the quality of the time spent with our partners. A cell phone in hand paired with an earbud in your ear gives the message that you are busy and unavailable.

Picture this, you’ve had a bad day and want to unload and share the events of your day at work with your partner. You go to sit near them and they have an earbud in their ear, as they watch a podcast on their phone. When you start talking to them they have to literally turn their non-earbuded ear in your direction to hear you and replies, “huh?”. Would you still desire to continue sharing your day with them? What if that same partner had their phone playing all day in their ear? Would you be willing to always need to interrupt them to ask for a moment of their time? 

After multiple attempts and after that being the norm for communication in the relationship, your partner may simply give up and keep their thoughts to themself. Sometimes a partner’s ghostly presence is worse than having them physically there at all. Even avoiding eye contact or maintaining a distant gaze during conversations diminishes your presence.

Spending More Time Away: Sometimes partners can be so close, but yet so far away from us. Your partner could interpret your increased time away from them as a form of emotional withdrawal. Steadily increasing the time spent away from home, either at work or with friends, or increasing the amount of time spent away isolated in a man cave or in the bathroom hideaway to avoid emotional connection, communicates that you are (emotionally) unavailable towards your partner.

For a partner whose love language is quality time, this causes more harm than good. They would rather have the tough, hard conversations together to talk through issues than have you run and hide from them to pretend nothing is wrong. In the case of children, your increased time away can project onto them, leading your partner to have to explain and justify your absence over and over again.

Secretive and Addictive Behaviors: Becoming more secretive about your thoughts, feelings, addictions or activities can eventually push your partner away emotionally. Something I’ve learned is that addictive behaviors and activities can lead a partner to feel isolated. They can feel as though you’re neglecting your responsibilities or even feel a loss of your love, emotional distress, betrayal, emotional abandonment, distrust, suspicion of infidelity, and the burden to carry the relationship forward alone. The effects of secretive and addictive behaviors can project emotional withdrawal and abuse onto your partner.

Decreased Interest in Shared Activities: Imagine how your partner would feel if in your relationship, you all went from going from two love birds sitting near each other on the couch, while binge watching shared shows on Netflix, to you all of a sudden losing interest in doing that anymore. What if this was a shared date night tradition that brought the two of you together? Becoming less interested in engaging in shared activities and hobbies with your partner may signal to them that you are drifting away emotionally and allowing the relationship to erode.

Choosing to Not Take Initiative: The personality of a woman and the personality of a man can be very complex to figure out. Some enjoy being in control and taking initiative in daily household duties, while others prefer their partner to take initiative.

When it comes to the quality time that a couple spends together, the relationship dynamic between the pair will determine if one or both partners take on the initiative of planning events and time together. In the event that your partner feels the burden of always being the one who has to initiate conversations or has to be the one to initiate and plan date nights, they might become exhausted after a while. They may begin to feel unloved and unappreciated. In their own mind, they may be telling themselves the story that you just don’t care enough or want to spend time with them, which is why it [the initiative] always falls on them in the relationship. 

Choosing Defensiveness Over Understanding: Being the partner in a relationship who is brave enough to bring up tough conversations, takes a lot of courage. Now what if your partner sat you down and shared with you something that’s been on their mind about the relationship. You have two options on how to react. Option one, is that you will listen to what they have to say and try to understand their perspective. Option two, is you choose to immediately jump to defensiveness and start pointing the blame at them. If you repeatedly jump to defensiveness, your partner will withdraw emotionally. Your partner may begin to question their willingness to speak up to you in the future and make themselves begin to believe that they were actually wrong about the situation, even though they were not. Always jumping to defensiveness and pointing blame can start to feel like emotional abuse.

Mood Change Towards Partner: Your partner knows your attitude and moods probably better than most. When they start to notice that your temperament, mood, or aura changes more frequently when they’re around, it can lead them to feel that you’re pulling away from them and aren’t as emotionally invested in them as you once were.

Our temperament shifts when we are in environments where we don’t want to be or if we are around people that don’t bring out the best in us. Instead of being moody and unhappy around your partner who doesn’t bring out the better in you anymore, set them free so that both of you can be happy. 

Manipulative Mind Games: Have you heard the lyrics from Katy Perry, “You’re hot then you’re cold you’re yes then you’re no ”? When you act that way to your partner it can be confusing as to what you actually want from them. You can’t want to be with them one day, then not want to be with them the next day. You can’t toy their emotions just because you can’t make up your mind about how you’re feeling.

Playing manipulative mind games can cause your partner to feel a loss of emotional connection with you. They may feel you emotionally withdrawing one day then back in the next. The ups and downs of manipulative-emotional mind games are a form of emotional abuse towards your partner.

Picture your life in one of two ways: (1) you caught the afternoon train home from work and (2) you missed the train and had to call an Uber. Both situations will lead your life down two very different paths. Imagine how different one small change in your day can impact the sequence of events that follow in your life. 

The same goes for choosing to stay in a relationship and accepting the consequences of emotional abuse and emotional withdrawal from a partner. HOWEVER, if you choose to be brave and say no more and choose to walk away, the results of the new and improved YOU will be drastically different!

If you or someone you know is experiencing emotional withdrawal or emotional abuse in a relationship, it’s essential to address the issues right away. Seek open and honest communication from your partner or consider seeking professional help, such as couples therapy, to address these issues. Staying and choosing to accept your partner’s behavior will only lead to you living a depressed and isolated life that could have been changed by choosing to stand up for yourself and saying no more!