Why Leaving Is So Hard

A note before you read: this post discusses domestic violence, including the increased risk of harm during and after separation. Please read at a pace that feels right for you.

Last week I wrote about the forms of domestic violence that leave no mark. Isolation, financial control, gaslighting, surveillance. The tactics many people don't recognize.

If you read that post, the question on your mind is probably the one many people ask.

Why don't they just leave?

Most survivors have been asked this, sometimes by people who love them. Some ask it of themselves at 3 am, staring at the ceiling.

The question sounds reasonable, but answering it properly means understanding four things: what coercive control actually is, how it plays out, what keeps someone in place besides fear, and why leaving itself can be the most dangerous part of the whole story.

A system of control

If the forms of abuse I mentioned last week felt like separate problems, they aren't. They are spokes on a wheel built to turn together.

The Power and Control Wheel was developed in the early 1980s by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, in Duluth, Minnesota, based on interviews with survivors (Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, 1984). Because the original version was designed around gendered roles, it has been adapted many times, including a gender-neutral version that fits relationships of every kind (Snider, n.d.).

The wheel maps common tactics: coercion and threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing and blaming, using children, economic abuse, and using privilege.

So if you try to assess an abusive relationship by counting individual incidents, you miss the overlapping dynamics that are doing the actual work. The wheel is a list of methods that an abuser uses to systematically limit the other person's autonomy and sense of self. Coercive control is the system that runs them. That system is why leaving is so hard.

The calm is part of the control

What most people miss, because it is the least obvious and the most attractive, is that the calm moments are not a break from the abuse. That's one way the abuse takes hold.

If the abuse were constant, it might be easier to leave. Cruelty that never lets up sends a clear signal. But when someone is cruel and then, at some point, tender, leaving gets much harder. The tenderness feels real. The cruelty starts to look like the exception.

The survivor begins to believe something that is entirely sensible from where they stand. The "good" version of their partner is the true one. If they just do the "right" thing, that version will stay. This is where the self-blame comes from. This is what people outside the situation find hardest to understand. It isn't weakness, and it isn't a lack of self-respect. It's hope. Hope that gets fulfilled occasionally and unpredictably, just often enough to keep a person going.

In the language of coercive control, this is not a lull between incidents. The tenderness is delivered on purpose, and intermittently. Unpredictability is the mechanism. A person who cannot tell which version of their partner is coming home keeps working for the good one. Keeps waiting for it. Long after it stops coming back.

What else keeps someone there

The emotional dilemma is real, but there are barriers beyond that, and every one of them was either built or exploited by the abuser, and every one of them maps directly onto a spoke of the wheel.

Children. A parent may stay to keep the family together and give the kids stability. A parent may also stay because the abuser has threatened to take custody, harm the children, or turn them against them. It can feel like two impossible risks with no third door. Staying can look like the only way to protect the children who are already here.

Pets. Abusers target pets precisely because they know the survivor will not leave an animal behind, and many shelters still cannot take them. People will absorb a great deal to keep a beloved dog or cat out of harm. That is a real barrier, not a misplaced priority.

Money. Financial control is rarely easy to reverse. When someone has no job, no access to bank accounts, no credit, no transportation, and nowhere to stay, telling them to leave is not reasonable. An abuser who has spent years making sure every resource is missing has locked the door from the outside.

Shame. Subtle, potent, and almost entirely social. Picture a survivor who finally confides in a close friend and gets back, "Why did you let it get this far?" The lesson lands immediately: telling the truth invites judgment. Shame produces silence, and silence keeps abuse hidden.

Isolation. By the time someone is thinking about getting out, they usually have no one left to call. Step by step, the abuser has withdrawn them from friends, family, and colleagues. They have no one left to call because the isolation began years before they needed anyone.

These barriers hit some survivors harder than others. Immigration status and dependence on a partner's visa. Disability. A rural location with no services within reach. A relationship already hidden from family and community. Each one adds weight that people outside the situation rarely see.

Add it all up, and the question changes. Not, "why don't they leave?" but "how is it possible that anyone leaves at all?" What's remarkable isn't that people stay. It's that some of them, against every one of these forces, still get out.

The dangerous time is leaving — a solid plan can make all the difference

What many people don't know, including many who mean well, is that the period right after a person leaves, and the weeks and months after separation, is when the risk of serious harm is greatest. Researchers have documented this for decades. The legal scholar Martha Mahoney named the pattern in 1991: separation assault (Mahoney, 1991).

While a survivor stays in the relationship, the abuser still has most of what they want. Control. Only when the person leaves do they lose it. People who enjoy controlling others do not let go easily. Someone who has built their safety and their self-image on controlling another person will experience that person's leaving as the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to them. That is when abusers are most desperate and least predictable. The danger that continues after the relationship ends has a name too. Post-separation abuse, and it is one of the most underestimated risks in domestic violence (Spearman et al., 2023).

This is why "just leave" is not only unhelpful. It can be dangerous. A person pushed to leave suddenly, without a plan and without knowing where they could go, can be shoved into the single most dangerous phase of the relationship, unprepared.

None of this is meant to frighten anyone into staying. It's meant to correct the most harmful myth about domestic violence: that walking out the door means the abuse stops. It doesn't. Leaving marks the start of a new phase, often a more severe one, and that phase has to be planned for.

It also helps to think of leaving as a process, not a single event. It can take years and several attempts. The people who get out safely are rarely the ones who ran. They are the ones who planned, who had somewhere to go, and who had people around them who understood that the hardest part comes after the decision, not before it.

If this is you

If you recognize yourself here, staying is not evidence of failure or a lack of intelligence. The obstacles you face are considerable, and many of them were built on purpose by someone close to you. Noticing your own circumstances is already an act of agency. Reaching for support when you are ready is brave.

If you're reading this because you love someone who is in it, next week is for you. I'll write about what to say instead of "just leave."

If you need support

If you are in immediate danger, call 911.

• National Domestic Violence Hotline – 1-800-799-SAFE (7233); TTY 1-800-787-3224; text "START" to 88788; chat at thehotline.org. Free, confidential, 24/7, open to anyone regardless of gender or relationship type.

• StrongHearts Native Helpline – 1-844-762-8483.

• love is respect – 1-866-331-9474, or text "LOVEIS" to 22522.

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline – call or text 988.

A note on technology precautions. If someone may be monitoring your phone, accounts, or location, seek help on a device they don't have access to, like a work or library computer or a trusted friend's phone.

References

Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. (1984). Power and control wheel. Duluth, MN.

Mahoney, M. R. (1991). Legal images of battered women: Redefining the issue of separation. Michigan Law Review, 90(1), 1–94.

Snider, J. (n.d.). Gender-neutral power and control wheel [Adapted]. University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Spearman, K. J., et al. (2023). Post-separation abuse: A concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in daily life. Oxford University Press.