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What I Had to Unlearn About Loving Someone Who Was Abused as a Child
I want to start with something honest: for a significant part of my relationship, I was doing it wrong. Not maliciously. Not even consciously, most of the time. But wrong nonetheless — in a way that I now understand was slowing things down rather than helping, and placing weight on my partner that was not mine to put there.
My professional background was in emergency medicine. When someone is in distress, my instinct is to assess, stabilise, and intervene. That instinct served me well throughout my career. In a relationship where my partner carries the legacy of childhood abuse, it took me a long time to understand that it was working against both of us.
This is what I have learned — and, just as importantly, what I had to unlearn.
The moment I recognised what I was doing
I remember a specific evening. My partner was going through a difficult period — not a crisis, just a sustained stretch of heaviness that trauma can bring. I found myself reorganising her week for her. Phoning ahead to cancel commitments I had decided she was not up to. Answering questions on her behalf. Steering conversations away from topics I thought might be too much.
I told myself I was protecting her.
Looking back, I was managing her. There is a difference, and it matters enormously. Protecting someone respects their right to make their own choices. Managing them removes it — and for a survivor whose early experience included people taking control of their life in harmful ways, being managed by a partner, however kindly, can replicate the very pattern they are working to heal from.
I didn’t understand that then — I do now.
What parenting a partner actually looks like
It rarely announces itself. You do not wake up and decide to undermine your partner’s independence. It creeps in, quietly, dressed in the language of care. Some of the ways I recognised it in myself:
Making decisions without consulting her, because I had decided she would find the decision too stressful. Taking over problem-solving before she had a chance to work through the problem herself. Monitoring her emotional state so closely that she could feel the surveillance, even when it was well-intentioned. Reassuring her constantly, at a level that was more about managing my own anxiety than genuinely helping her. Steering her toward the responses I thought were “healthy” and away from the ones I was uncomfortable with.
None of these things felt like control from the inside. They felt like love. That is what makes the pattern difficult to recognise and even harder to address.
Why partners do this
I think there are a few honest reasons, and naming them matters.
The first is the rescue instinct. When someone you love has been badly hurt, you want to fix it. For those of us with caring or medical backgrounds, that instinct is particularly strong. The problem is that childhood trauma cannot be fixed by a partner. It is not a wound that can be dressed or a problem that can be solved. The work of healing from abuse is the survivor’s own work to do, with professional support, at their own pace. A partner’s job is to be alongside that — not to manage it, accelerate it, or take responsibility for it.
The second is fear. Loving someone who has experienced significant trauma means living alongside pain that you cannot always reach. That is genuinely difficult. When my partner was struggling, my fear of doing the wrong thing sometimes tipped me into doing too much. Action, even misguided action, felt better than the uncertainty of doing nothing.
The third is the unconscious echo of old patterns. This is the one I found hardest to sit with. Some of the patterns that emerge between partners — the one who takes over and the one who allows it — can mirror, without either person realising it, the patterns of the original trauma. A survivor accustomed to others making decisions about their life may initially find a partner who steps in to be soothing. The familiar can feel safe, even when it isn’t. Part of my learning was to ask whether what I was doing was genuinely supportive or just comfortable — for both of us.
What actually helped
Learning to ask rather than assume. “What would be helpful right now?” sounds simple, but it changes everything. It places the knowledge of what she needs where that knowledge actually lives — with her — rather than with me.
Tolerating my own discomfort. This was the hardest thing. When my partner was in pain, the urge to do something was almost physical. Learning to sit with that urge, to acknowledge my own anxiety without acting on it, took time and honestly required some support of my own. Partners of trauma survivors need care too. Seeking it is not weakness — it is necessary.
Stepping back from outcomes. I had to let go of the idea that my support should produce visible improvement on a timeline I was comfortable with. Healing from childhood abuse is not linear. There are difficult weeks, setbacks, seasons when things feel like they are going backwards. My job is not to prevent those or to fix them. It is to be steady, present, and honest.
Supporting her independence rather than working around it. This meant encouraging her to make her own decisions, holding back from offering solutions she had not asked for, and genuinely — not just superficially — trusting her capacity. Survivors are often far more capable than their partners give them credit for. The damage of childhood abuse does not mean a lifetime of needing to be managed. It means a person doing extraordinary work to build a life on difficult ground.
Learning about trauma. Not to become an amateur therapist, which is its own trap, but to understand enough about how childhood abuse shapes the nervous system, relationships, and self-perception that my responses became more considered. Knowledge replaced some of my anxiety with something more useful: informed patience.
Getting support for myself. I underestimated this for too long. Being a partner to a survivor is meaningful, but it is also demanding. I needed space to process my own feelings — the fear, the helplessness, the grief of loving someone who was hurt before you ever met them — without putting that weight on my partner. A therapist, a trusted friend, or a peer support group for partners: these things are not indulgences. They are part of doing this well.
For the partners reading this
If you have recognised something of yourself in what I have described, I want to say: that recognition is already something. This parenting pattern develops out of love, not out of ill intention. The fact that you are reading an article like this, and sitting with the discomfort it might bring, suggests you are already asking the right questions.
The aim is not perfection. It is not getting everything right from now on. It is continuing to pay attention — to your partner’s actual needs rather than the needs you have imagined for them, and to your own. Both of you deserve a relationship built on genuine equality, where each person’s independence is respected and neither person carries more than their share.
That kind of relationship is possible. I know, because we are building one. It took time, some honesty about things I would rather not have seen in myself, and a great deal of patience from both of us. But it is possible.
Getting it wrong for a while does not disqualify you. It is just part of learning how to do this right.
Jack B is a partner to a survivor and a contributing author at Survive Child Abuse.
