When the Wounded Wound

Intimate Partner Violence, Trauma Reenactment,

and the Path Back to Wholeness

The Moment You Hear Her Words in Your Own Voice

There is a moment that some men will recognize immediately and others will spend years avoiding.

It happens in the middle of an argument. Or in the silence after one. Your partner says something that lands wrong, or pulls away in a way that activates something old and deep, and before your prefrontal cortex has time to intervene, you hear yourself say something. The tone. The edge. The particular way the words are designed not just to respond but to control. And somewhere in the back of your awareness, a quiet voice says:

That sounded exactly like her.

Not your current partner. Your ex. The one who hurt you. The one whose voice you still carry in your body even though the relationship ended years ago.

For some men, that moment passes quickly. They shake it off, tell themselves it was just the heat of the argument, and move on. For others, it opens a door they are not ready to walk through. Because behind that door is a question that can feel annihilating:

Am I becoming the thing that nearly broke me?

This essay is an attempt to walk through that door. Not with judgment. Not with easy answers. But with the kind of honesty that real healing actually requires.

Why I’m Writing This (And Why It’s Difficult)

I want to be upfront about something. I am not writing this as an expert on intimate partner violence. There are researchers and clinicians who have devoted their entire careers to studying IPV, and I have deep respect for their work. What follows draws heavily on that research.

I'm writing this as a therapist who works primarily with men. Men who are accomplished, intelligent, and often carrying pain they have never been given language for. And I'm writing it because I've seen this pattern in my orbit. I have also done things I am not proud of, that hurt others, such as manipulation and withholding. Often I was not honest with myself. Not easy to admit. But honesty is the price of entry for the kind of work this essay is asking you to do, and I am not going to ask you to pay something I am not willing to pay myself.

A man comes into my office after a difficult divorce. Over time, the story unfolds. His ex-wife was controlling, emotionally manipulative, perhaps volatile in ways that left lasting marks on his nervous system. He may not even use the word “abuse.” He calls it a bad marriage. He says they weren’t compatible. He says she had “issues.” But as we sit together and he describes what actually happened, the picture becomes clearer: he was in a relationship defined by coercion, emotional control, and the systematic erosion of his sense of self.

And then, sometimes years later, I hear about the new relationship. And slowly, carefully, a different kind of picture emerges. His new partner is walking on eggshells. His new partner feels controlled. His new partner is starting to describe the same dynamics that he once endured.

He doesn’t see it. That’s the part that matters most. He genuinely does not see it.

I want to name that relationships are challenging for everyone. I have navigated my own difficult relationships. I don’t write from a place of having it figured out. I write from a place of sitting across from men who are suffering, and noticing something that I believe deserves honest conversation. Because if we can name what is happening, we can begin to change it. And if we refuse to name it, the pattern just keeps running.

It is easier to see this from the outside. That is both the gift and the limitation of being a therapist. I can see the pattern. But I also know that seeing it from the inside, when it’s your own life and your own relationships, is a fundamentally different kind of work. This essay is an invitation into that work. Not a verdict. Not a diagnosis. An invitation.

Understanding Intimate Partner Violence Beyond the Binary

We tend to talk about intimate partner violence in binary terms. There are victims and there are perpetrators. There are good people and bad people. There are the ones who were harmed and the ones who do harm.

This framework exists for important reasons. It protects vulnerable people. It creates legal and social accountability. It names power dynamics that need to be named. I am not interested in dismantling it.

But I am interested in the space it leaves unaddressed. Because the binary doesn’t account for the man who was genuinely victimized by his partner and who, years later, begins perpetrating the same patterns of emotional abuse in a new relationship. The binary says he must be one or the other. Either his original victimhood was real and therefore he can’t be an abuser, or he’s an abuser and therefore his victimhood was exaggerated. Neither of those is true. Both of those are easier than the actual truth, which is that a person can be a genuine victim of intimate partner violence and a genuine perpetrator of it, not simultaneously in the same relationship, but sequentially across relationships.

Holding that complexity is uncomfortable. It should be. Discomfort is often a sign that we are close to something real.

What follows is an attempt to understand how this happens, why it happens, and most importantly, what can be done about it. Because the man caught in this cycle is not a monster. He is wounded. And his wound, left unaddressed, is wounding everyone around him. His new partner. His children. His friendships. His own capacity for the love he actually wants. The collateral damage of unprocessed intimate partner violence does not stay contained. It radiates.

What Is Trauma Reenactment and Why Does It Happen?

In 1920, Sigmund Freud described something that puzzled him. He noticed that people who had experienced painful events did not simply try to avoid them. They seemed drawn, almost magnetically, to recreate them. He called this repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to repeat what has not been resolved.

Freud initially hoped that this repetition was the psyche’s attempt at mastery. That by returning to the scene of the wound, the person was trying to finally get it right. To take what was once overwhelming and bring it under control. But clinical experience told a different story. The repetition rarely led to resolution. It led to more suffering. For the person caught in the cycle, and for the people around them.

Nearly seventy years later, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk expanded on this idea in a landmark paper called “The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma.” His research demonstrated something that changes how we understand intimate partner violence: when a person reenacts their trauma, they don’t always play the same role. Sometimes the victim becomes the victim again, finding themselves in another abusive relationship. But sometimes the victim becomes the perpetrator. The roles reverse. The person who was once controlled begins controlling. The person who was once manipulated begins manipulating. And in most cases, they are not doing it consciously. The reenactment is running below the level of awareness, driven by a template the body learned under duress and never had the chance to unlearn.

This is not a moral failing. It is a psychological process. And naming it as a process is not the same as excusing it. We can understand the mechanism and still hold the person accountable for the impact. That is part of the tension this essay is asking you to hold.

A second concept deepens the picture. In 1932, psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi described what he called identification with the aggressor. He observed that when a person is subjected to overwhelming abuse, particularly when escape is not possible, something remarkable happens in the psyche. The victim begins to internalize the abuser. Not just the abuser’s behaviors, but their perspective, their emotional logic, their way of seeing the relationship. It is a survival adaptation. If I can think like the person who is hurting me, I can predict what they will do next. I can stay one step ahead. I can survive.

The problem is that this internalization does not end when the relationship ends. Research by Yael Lahav and colleagues, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2021, found that identification with the aggressor persists in intimate partner violence survivors long after the abuse has stopped. The defensive structure that was built to survive the relationship continues operating in the background, shaping how the person relates to intimacy, conflict, vulnerability, and power. And critically, a follow-up study in 2022 found that the degree to which survivors adopted their perpetrator’s perspective and identified with their perpetrator’s aggression was significantly associated with both inward aggression (directed at the self) and outward aggression (directed at others).

Read that again. The mechanism that helped a person survive abuse can, if left unaddressed, become the mechanism through which they perpetrate it.

This is what I see in my practice. Not men who woke up one day and decided to become abusers. Men who survived something genuinely painful, who never received adequate support for what happened to them, and who carry an internalized template of their abuser that activates under the specific conditions of intimate relationship. Closeness. Vulnerability. The stakes of love. These are the exact conditions that bring the old programming online.

And here is the part that makes it so difficult to interrupt: most of these men cannot see it happening. The pattern operates below conscious awareness. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the automatic reactions that fire before the thinking mind can catch up. Which brings us to the question that matters most. If the pattern isn’t primarily cognitive, why would cognitive understanding be enough to stop it?

How Intimate Partner Violence Rewires the Relational Template

To understand why insight alone doesn’t interrupt this cycle, we need to look at what actually gets transmitted in an abusive relationship. Because it is not just behaviors. It is an entire relational operating system.

When a man spends years in a relationship defined by emotional control, manipulation, and coercion, his nervous system learns a particular version of what intimacy is. Not intellectually. Somatically. The body learns that love comes with surveillance. That closeness requires vigilance. That the way you keep someone from leaving is by managing their emotional state. That conflict is not something you navigate together but something you win. That vulnerability is dangerous, and the person who shows it first loses.

These lessons don’t arrive as conscious beliefs. They are absorbed through thousands of daily interactions over months and years. They become the water he swims in. And when the relationship finally ends, the water doesn’t drain. It stays in his body. It becomes the baseline against which all future intimacy is measured.

So when he enters a new relationship and his new partner behaves in ways that are actually healthy (setting a boundary, expressing a need, asking for space) his nervous system may register that health as threat. Because in the old template, when someone pulled away, it meant the beginning of a punishment cycle. When someone expressed a need, it was the opening move in a manipulation. His body doesn’t know the difference between then and now. It responds to the pattern, not the person.

And here is where it becomes tragic. The behaviors he reaches for in that activated state are the ones he learned from the person who hurt him. Not because he admires those behaviors. Not because he has chosen them. But because under stress, the nervous system defaults to what it knows. And what it knows is her playbook.

Control as connection. Volatility as engagement. Emotional manipulation as the currency of intimacy.

He may monitor his new partner’s phone. He may interrogate her about where she was. He may withdraw affection as punishment, or explode in ways that seem disproportionate to the moment. He may gaslight without knowing the word, because gaslighting was the air he breathed for years and he absorbed its logic the way a child absorbs language: not by studying it, but by living inside it.

And if you were to confront him in that moment, he would likely tell you, with complete sincerity, that he is nothing like his ex-wife. He might even tell you he is protecting himself from ever being treated that way again. The irony is crushing. The very defenses he built to survive her have become the weapons he uses against someone new. And the story he tells himself about those defenses (“I’m just being careful,” “I’m not going to be a pushover this time,” “I have a right to know where she is”) sounds, to his own ears, like strength. Not abuse.

This is the relational template at work. It doesn’t just transmit behaviors. It transmits the justification structure. The felt sense of righteousness. The emotional logic that makes the behavior feel not only acceptable but necessary. That is what makes it so much harder to interrupt than simple behavioral mimicry. You are not just asking a man to stop doing something. You are asking him to dismantle a worldview that his nervous system built to keep him alive.

The Shadow and the Tension of Opposites

Carl Jung spent his life studying a phenomenon that lives at the center of what we have been discussing. He called it the Shadow: the part of the psyche that holds everything we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves.

Most people encounter the Shadow concept as a self-help idea. “Embrace your dark side.” But Jung meant something far more precise and far more dangerous. The Shadow is not simply the traits we don’t like. It is the traits we cannot see. It is the material that has been so thoroughly exiled from conscious identity that it operates autonomously, like a separate personality running its own agenda beneath the surface of the ego.

For the man who survived intimate partner violence at the hands of a controlling partner, the Shadow now contains something extraordinary: it contains her. Not as a memory. As a living complex. Her patterns, her emotional logic, her way of wielding intimacy as a weapon. All of it was introjected during the years of abuse. It entered his psyche not through the front door of conscious learning but through the back door of survival. And now it lives in him as what Jung would call an autonomous complex: a cluster of emotionally charged material that can seize the ego when the right conditions are met.

When Jung described someone as being “gripped” by a complex, he was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing the phenomenology of a man in his kitchen at 10 p.m. who hears his own voice saying things he does not recognize, in a tone he did not choose, with an intent that feels foreign and familiar at the same time. The complex has taken the wheel. The ego is in the passenger seat, watching. Sometimes not even watching. Sometimes completely absent, only to return later with a vague sense of shame and no clear memory of what was said.

This is the mechanism. This is how a good man says terrible things. Not because he is secretly terrible. Because he is carrying an unintegrated complex that activates under the conditions of intimate vulnerability.

But Jung offered another concept that goes even deeper. He called it enantiodromia: the principle that any psychic extreme inevitably produces its opposite. When a man builds his entire post-divorce identity around the vow “I will never be like her,” he has set up the precise conditions for becoming her. The more rigidly he identifies as the victim, the more energy accumulates in the Shadow on the side of the perpetrator. The more fiercely he rejects the possibility that he could be controlling, the less he is able to see it when it emerges. The one-sidedness is the pathology. The refusal to integrate his own capacity for harm is what guarantees its eruption.

This is not victim-blaming. This is how the psyche works. Jung observed it in individuals, in cultures, in civilizations. The thing you refuse to face does not disappear. It grows in the dark.

So what is the alternative? Jung called it the transcendent function. Not transcendence in the spiritual bypass sense. Transcendence as the emergence of a third possibility that can only appear when two opposites are held in full tension without collapsing into either one. The man who has been caught in this cycle does not heal by choosing the victim identity or the perpetrator identity. He heals by holding both. By saying, with his full chest: what was done to me was real, and what I am doing is also real. Those two truths do not cancel each other. They require each other to be understood.

Jung called this holding the tension of opposites, and he considered it the central task of psychological maturation. It is brutal. It is the hardest thing a man can do in a therapeutic setting. And it is the only door that leads somewhere new.

Why Insight Alone Isn’t Enough

If everything I have described so far could be resolved by understanding it, this essay would end here. You have the framework. You see the pattern. You understand the mechanism. Change should follow.

It doesn’t. And this is the place where most clinical writing fails the men it claims to serve.

Understanding the cycle intellectually is necessary. It is not sufficient. Because the template we are talking about does not live in the thinking mind. It lives in the body. It lives in the tightness in the chest when your partner doesn’t text back within an hour. In the sudden flush of heat when she mentions a male coworker. In the constriction in the throat that precedes the words you will later regret. The pattern fires at the speed of the autonomic nervous system, which is orders of magnitude faster than conscious thought. By the time the prefrontal cortex comes online and says, “Wait, I know what this is,” the damage has already been done.

This is what I have come to call the Somatic Lock. It is the body’s way of holding unresolved trauma in a state of protective tension that persists even after the threat has passed. A man can sit in my office and articulate the entire cycle with perfect clarity. He can name the repetition compulsion. He can identify the moments when his ex-wife’s voice takes over. He can feel genuine remorse for what he has done to his current partner. And then he goes home, and his partner says something that activates the old template, and his body responds before his mind has time to intervene.

The Somatic Lock is not a metaphor. It is the felt experience of a nervous system that learned its lessons under fire and does not trust words to keep it safe. It is the body refusing to let go of a survival strategy even when the survival context has changed. And it is the reason that purely cognitive therapy, while valuable, often fails to interrupt the deepest patterns of trauma reenactment.

The lock holds both the wound and the weapon. The memory of being controlled and the muscle memory of controlling. The terror of vulnerability and the reflex to eliminate vulnerability in others. These exist in the same body, often in the same breath. And the nervous system’s job, as it understands it, is to make sure both of those truths never come into awareness simultaneously. Because feeling both at once is almost unbearable. It is the somatic equivalent of the tension of opposites. And just as Jung said that psychological growth requires holding that tension, real healing from this cycle requires the body to learn that it can hold both without being destroyed.

That is not something you think your way into. It is something you practice. Which brings us to what actually works.

Evidence-Based Strategies for Breaking the Cycle of Intimate Partner Violence

If the previous sections were the diagnosis, this is the beginning of the treatment plan. And I want to be clear: what follows is not theoretical. These are interventions with substantial research support, each one targeting a specific mechanism in the cycle we have described.

Cognitive Processing Therapy: Rewriting the Distorted Beliefs

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is one of the most rigorously studied treatments for trauma. It is recommended by both the American Psychological Association and the VA/DoD as a first-line intervention. CPT works by helping a person examine and restructure the beliefs that formed around their traumatic experience.

For the man in the pattern we are discussing, CPT targets the cognitive distortions that keep the cycle running. It addresses six core domains that trauma corrupts: safety, trust, power, control, esteem, and intimacy. These are not random categories. They are the exact fault lines along which an abusive relationship reshapes a person’s worldview.

CPT helps a man examine beliefs like: “If I don’t control the situation, I’ll be hurt again.” “Vulnerability means someone will take advantage of me.” “The only way to keep someone close is to manage their behavior.” These beliefs feel like wisdom. They feel like lessons hard-won from a painful marriage. CPT helps a man see that they are, in fact, the scar tissue of his abuse, and that they are now causing harm in his current life.

EMDR: Processing What the Body Still Holds

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) works at a different level than talk therapy. Where CPT targets beliefs, EMDR targets the stored sensory and emotional memory of traumatic events. It helps the brain reprocess experiences that have been locked in the nervous system in their original, undigested form.

For a man whose body still carries the imprint of his ex-wife’s voice, her rage, the particular quality of silence that preceded an attack, EMDR offers a way to metabolize what cognitive therapy alone cannot reach. Research with survivors of intimate partner violence has found statistically significant improvement in depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms after EMDR, along with qualitative improvements in self-control, assertiveness, and self-acceptance.

This matters because the Somatic Lock is, at its core, a body phenomenon. It requires a body-level intervention. EMDR does not ask a man to talk about what happened until he understands it differently. It helps his nervous system complete the processing that was interrupted by the trauma itself.

Trauma-Informed Mindfulness: Building the Space Between Trigger and Response

This is where my own clinical work is most directly relevant. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and its trauma-informed adaptations offer something that neither CPT nor EMDR provide on their own: the cultivation of present-moment awareness as a lifelong practice.

Research on trauma-informed MBSR with IPV survivors has found robust reductions in post-traumatic stress symptoms, with large effect sizes. Perhaps more importantly for our discussion, one randomized controlled trial found that TI-MBSR significantly reduced anxious attachment in IPV survivors, marking the first time a mindfulness-based intervention was shown to positively impact attachment style in a controlled study.

That finding matters enormously. Because the relational template we have been discussing is, at its deepest level, an attachment pattern. When mindfulness practice begins to shift how a man attaches, it is working at the root of the cycle, not just its surface expressions.

But mindfulness is not a passive practice, and it is not a cure-all. For men with significant trauma histories, mindfulness can initially increase distress by reducing the avoidance that has been keeping painful material at bay. This is why trauma-informed instruction matters. The practice needs to be guided, titrated, and held within a relational container that can absorb what arises. Mindfulness is not about sitting quietly and hoping the pain goes away. It is about building the capacity to be present with what is actually happening in your body and your relationships, without the automatic reactivity that the old template demands.

In practical terms, here is what mindfulness offers the man caught in this cycle: a wedge. A tiny gap between the trigger and the response. His partner says something that activates the old pattern, and instead of the complex seizing the wheel immediately, there is a half-second of awareness. A moment where he notices the heat rising, the chest tightening, the familiar words forming. And in that half-second, for the first time, he has a choice. Not a guarantee. A choice. That is what practice builds.

Self-Compassion and Loving-Kindness: Addressing the Shame Spiral

There is a moment in this work that is particularly treacherous. It is the moment a man first truly sees what he has been doing. When the denial lifts and the pattern becomes undeniable. That moment can go one of two ways.

He can collapse into shame. Shame says: I am fundamentally broken. I am my abuser. I am beyond repair. Shame is totalizing. It doesn’t say “I did a harmful thing.” It says “I am a harmful person.” And shame, paradoxically, fuels the very cycle it claims to condemn. Because a man drowning in shame has no resources left for change. He is too busy surviving his own self-annihilation to do the work of repair.

Or he can meet himself with what the contemplative traditions call compassion. Not self-pity. Not excuse-making. Compassion as the practice of witnessing your own suffering and your own capacity for harm with equal clarity and equal tenderness.

Research on loving-kindness meditation (metta practice) suggests that it promotes emotional flexibility, the ability to shift from negative to positive emotional states, and psychological flexibility, the ability to step back from your current mindset and consider other possibilities. For a man locked in either denial or shame, this capacity is not optional. It is the difference between the insight that destroys and the insight that transforms.

Compassion does not mean letting himself off the hook. It means staying on the hook without being annihilated by it. It means being able to say: I was hurt, and I have hurt others, and I am going to do the work to stop the cycle. That sentence requires a man to hold three things simultaneously. His wound. His impact. And his agency. Shame collapses all three into one. Compassion holds them apart so each can be addressed.

The Complex Trauma Framework: A Humanistic Approach

The newest APA guidelines for treating PTSD and complex trauma emphasize something that resonates deeply with the men I work with. The guidelines use the word “humanistic” as the starting point. They acknowledge that complex trauma patients have often experienced inhumane treatment at the hands of people they should have been able to trust. They name betrayal as a central feature. And they recommend that clinicians begin not with technique but with helping the person feel safe, fostering personal agency, and reinforcing self-efficacy.

For the man in this cycle, that framing matters. It validates his original wounding without letting the wound become a permanent identity. It says: what happened to you was real, and wrong, and it makes sense that you are struggling. And: you have agency. You are not condemned to repeat this. The cycle is a pattern, not a destiny.

Holding Both Truths: Victim and Perpetrator in the Same Body

We have arrived at the hardest part.

Everything in this essay has been building toward a single challenge, and it is a challenge I cannot resolve for you. I can only name it and stand with you as you face it.

The challenge is this: Can you hold the full weight of what was done to you and the full weight of what you are doing to someone else? Not alternating between them. Not using one to minimize the other. Not collapsing into the identity of victim so completely that you cannot see your own impact. Not drowning in shame so completely that your original wound disappears.

Can you hold both at the same time?

Jung called this the tension of opposites, and he believed it was the central task of becoming a whole human being. Not a comfortable one. Not a resolved one. A whole one.

The man who can say “I was genuinely abused by my ex-wife, and I am genuinely hurting my current partner” has done something extraordinary. He has refused the false comfort of the binary. He has stepped into a space that most people spend their entire lives avoiding. And in that space, something becomes possible that is not possible anywhere else: actual change. Not the performance of change. Not the promise of change. The real, grinding, unglamorous work of dismantling a pattern that has been running his life from the shadows.

This is not a one-time event. It is a practice. Some days you hold both truths with clarity and grace. Some days you lose one or the other and have to find it again. Some days the shame wins and you want to give up. Some days the denial wins and you tell yourself it’s not that bad. The practice is in the returning. In the willingness to pick both truths back up every time you drop them.

Your current partner deserves that practice. Your children deserve it. And so do you. Because the man who can hold both truths is no longer being lived by his trauma. He is living. Imperfectly, painfully, but with his eyes open. And that is the beginning of everything.

The Path Back to Joy and Wholeness

I want to end here not because the work is finished but because the work has a direction, and the direction matters more than the destination.

The clinical literature has a term for what happens when a person moves through trauma rather than around it: post-traumatic growth. It is not the absence of pain. It is the presence of something that was not available before the pain was faced. A deeper capacity for connection. A more honest relationship with yourself. A kind of freedom that is only possible on the other side of the thing you were most afraid to look at.

I have watched men do this work. I have watched men who came into my office convinced that they were beyond help sit with the tension of opposites and not break. I have watched men rebuild relationships that they thought were destroyed. I have watched men become the fathers they wished they had. Not because they found some magic solution, but because they stopped running from what was true about them and started working with it.

Joy does not return all at once. It comes back in small moments. The first time you have a conflict with your partner and notice the old pattern rising and choose a different response. The first time your child sees you take accountability without collapsing. The first time you sit in stillness and your nervous system does not interpret the quiet as danger.

These moments are not dramatic. They will not make a good movie. But they are the proof that the cycle can break. That the wound does not have to define the rest of the story. That the man you are becoming is not limited to the man you have been.

Relationships are hard. They are supposed to be hard. They ask us to bring everything we are into the room, including the parts we have spent our lives trying to hide. The work I am describing here is not about becoming perfect. It is about becoming honest. Honest about what happened to you. Honest about what you are doing. And honest about the fact that you have the capacity, right now, to begin doing it differently.

That is not optimism. That is evidence. The research supports it. The clinical experience confirms it. And the men I have worked with embody it.

You are not your trauma. You are not your worst moment. You are not the voice of the person who hurt you. You are a human being with a wound and a choice. The wound is real. The choice is yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a victim of intimate partner violence become an abuser?

Yes. Research on trauma reenactment and identification with the aggressor shows that survivors of intimate partner violence can unconsciously adopt the behavioral patterns of their abuser in subsequent relationships. This is not a moral failing but a psychological process driven by unresolved trauma. The mechanism that helped a person survive abuse can, if left unaddressed, become the mechanism through which they perpetrate it. Evidence-based interventions including Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR, and trauma-informed mindfulness can help interrupt this cycle.

What is trauma reenactment in relationships?

Trauma reenactment, also called repetition compulsion, is the unconscious tendency to recreate the dynamics of a traumatic experience in current relationships. First described by Freud and later expanded by Bessel van der Kolk, research shows that when a person reenacts their trauma, they may play the role of either the victim or the perpetrator. The reenactment operates below conscious awareness, driven by a relational template the body learned under duress.

What is identification with the aggressor?

Identification with the aggressor (IWA) is a psychological survival mechanism first described by Sandor Ferenczi in 1932. When a person is subjected to overwhelming abuse, particularly when escape is not possible, the victim begins to internalize the abuser's perspective, emotional logic, and behavioral patterns. Research by Lahav et al. (2021) found that this identification persists in intimate partner violence survivors long after the abuse ends, and is associated with both inward aggression (self-harm) and outward aggression (harm toward others).

How do you break the cycle of intimate partner violence?

Breaking the cycle requires interventions that address both the cognitive and somatic dimensions of trauma. Evidence-based approaches include Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for restructuring distorted beliefs about safety, trust, power, and intimacy; EMDR for processing stored traumatic memories in the nervous system; trauma-informed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (TI-MBSR) for building present-moment awareness; and self-compassion practices for addressing the shame that fuels the cycle. The latest APA guidelines recommend a humanistic approach that validates the original wound while fostering personal agency.

Why do abuse survivors repeat abusive patterns?

Prolonged exposure to intimate partner violence rewires the relational template at a somatic level. The nervous system learns that love comes with surveillance, that closeness requires vigilance, and that conflict is something you win rather than navigate together. Under stress, the nervous system defaults to what it knows. These patterns operate below conscious awareness, which is why cognitive insight alone is often insufficient to interrupt them. The body must also learn new patterns through practices like trauma-informed therapy and mindfulness.

Sources

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Lahav, Y., Ginzburg, K., & Spiegel-Laufer, O. (2021). Painful bonds: Identification with the aggressor and distress among IPV survivors. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 142, 6-12.

Lahav, Y., Allende, S., Talmon, A., Ginzburg, K., & Spiegel, D. (2022). Identification with the aggressor and inward and outward aggression in abuse survivors. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(15-16), NP13992-NP14017.

Gallegos, A. M., Crean, M. K., Pigeon, W. F., & Heffner, K. E. (2017). Trauma-informed mindfulness-based stress reduction for female survivors of interpersonal violence: Results from a Stage I RCT. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 73(6), 735-751.

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American Psychological Association. (2025). Clinical practice guideline for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults.

Watkins, L. E., Sprang, K. R., & Rothbaum, B. O. (2018). Treating PTSD: A review of evidence-based psychotherapy interventions. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 12, 258.

Levy, M. S. (1998). A helpful way to conceptualize and understand reenactments. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 7(3), 227-235.

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James O'Neill is a licensed clinical professional counselor with over 20 years of experience, trained at Johns Hopkins, and the founder of Journey Mindfulness. He works with men navigating divorce, identity disruption, high-achiever burnout, and the space between external success and internal truth. He sees clients in person in Columbia, Maryland and virtually anywhere.

If something in this piece resonated, you are welcome to a free 15-minute conversation. No pressure, no pitch, just an honest talk about what is going on and whether this work is the right fit.