Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about navigating the difficult relationship,

from simple disagreements to emotionally abusive behaviors.

You deserve respecting kindness.

All the information on this show is meant for educational purposes only.

Always seek a professional for your mental health and well-being, and always pick your battles wisely.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

All right, there's something really important that I want to convey to you.

I want to express it to you because I care about you and I want you to recognize that, I want you to recognize what's happening in this dynamic I'm going to outline for you.

So there's an emotionally abusive person or someone doing hurtful behavior, someone who's

difficult in controlling and manipulative ways, and they say they're

going to change. They say they're going to work on themselves. And so let's say that you believe that,

or at least let's say you have hope that that's true. And you're willing to give this another chance, another opportunity

to make this relationship work because you've invested so much into it. You've invested so much

emotional energy, so much of your time, and you really want it to work because of the investment.

Because maybe you know each other so well and maybe there are a lot of good things about

the relationship or there used to be.

So you are invested in this relationship and you want to have this, or at least what you used to have,

maybe what you think you used to have back again.

And what I mean by that is sometimes we think we had it great with someone and there were good times.

Maybe at the very beginning there were good times. You just want those good times back.

And what I'm going to talk about today is when the abusive behavior or the hurtful behavior

starts to show up in the relationship, it doesn't go back to the good times and feeling safe and feeling confident that

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