In this episode we tackle three questions: What happens when the abuser is the one who leaves? How do you live with the fear of post-separation or post-divorce revenge? And what do you do when your friends just don’t get it?

Key Takeaways:

• Why some abusers discard their victims (and what it reveals about your progress)
• The difference between fear you should listen to and fear that steals your peace
• What actually helps kids navigate their father leaving
• The one question to ask yourself when trying to help someone understand your experience
• Why chasing validation from people who don’t get it creates unnecessary suffering

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Article: What If Your Abuser Discards You First?

What do you do when your abuser is the one who leaves?

Most of the time in emotionally abusive marriages, the victim is the one who finally reaches her breaking point and walks away. But sometimes he files for divorce first. He’s the one who leaves. He’s the one who says he’s done.

And that can feel deeply confusing. Wasn’t he the one trying to keep you hooked? Wasn’t he the one who needed you to manage his emotions, pick up after him, be his audience? So why on earth would he be the one to leave?

Let me tell you what could be happening here.

Why Would an Abuser Discard His Victim?

When I see men discarding their victims, it’s usually when the victim has already emotionally left first.

Think of an abuser like a predator. A wolf is going to prey on a victim as long as that victim is presenting a good supply of food. 

But if a victim sees him for who he really is…if his mask comes off and she can see the truth, and he knows that she sees him? Something shifts. If she detaches emotionally, even though she might still be physically present, she’s no longer his plaything. She’s no longer emotionally impacted by his drama. She’s living in her own world. There’s individuation. She’s a separate person.

And that means his food supply has dried up.

Many abusers in that situation will discard any prey that has no supply to offer. It’s no longer challenging. It’s no longer fun. In fact, it actually makes them feel smaller, weaker, less of a man. So they leave to protect their ego.

Why Don’t We See This More Often?

The reason I don’t see this scenario as frequently as women leaving is because it’s incredibly difficult for a victim to detach while still living with a wolf who’s pretending to be a nice man.

As long as she belongs to him, heart and soul, just as we’ve been taught, he’s going to suck her dry. She’s still hoping he’ll change. She’s still trying to fix things. She’s still emotionally hooked. And he’s feeding on that.

But when a woman has done the work, when she’s stopped trying to get him to see how he’s affecting her, when she’s stopped asking him to change because she’s radically accepted that she can’t change him, when she can no longer be gaslit because she’s accepted the truth of who he is…well, that changes everything.

Abusers hate that. They hate it more than anything else.

And sometimes they hate it so much that they’re willing to be the first to file for divorce.

How Do You Navigate Life After Being Discarded?

The woman who wrote this question said she had already stopped asking him to change. She was done apologizing. She was done groveling for attention. She had done what I train women in my program to do.

So my answer to her was simple: Girl, just keep going. You’re already navigating life.

In fact, you were navigating life with a monkey on your back before. Once he’s gone, do you think it’s going to be harder? 

Now, if I were talking to someone who hadn’t done this work yet, someone who hadn’t detached, then that person would find it harder to navigate life simply because they’re still going through the process of radically accepting reality. They’re still hoping to find a life of meaning and purpose with their abuser.

But if you’ve already gone through that work? Navigating life minus an abuser might actually feel like a cakewalk. 

How Do You Help Your Kids Navigate This?

The listener also asked about helping kids when their dad leaves.

Here’s the best thing I did for my kids: I worked on my own healing.

I wasn’t able to pass on any skills or tools that I didn’t already have and practice myself.

As we grow and learn, we pass those things onto our kids and they get to grow and learn in the same ways.

If your kids are struggling and you’re not sure how to help them, it’s most likely because you have similar issues that you don’t know how to address yet in your own life. They have trauma responses of fighting and running and hiding and freezing and pretending because we have those same trauma responses.

What we needed was someone to break the cycle for us, and no one did. But now we can break that cycle for our kids.

If love can heal our trauma, it can heal their trauma. But it has to start somewhere. Maybe it will be you.

How Do You Live With the Fear of Revenge?

Another listener asked: How do I live with the fear that my ex-husband will carry a grudge forever and possibly want to lash out with property damage or even physical harassment?

Fear is your nervous system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s reading the data from your history with this person, and it’s keeping you alert to real danger.

Post-separation abuse is real and it is common. Some abusive partners escalate their tactics after separation because they’ve lost that day-to-day control they had over you.

So the goal here isn’t to talk yourself out of fear. The goal is to help you stay as safe as possible while also refusing to let his potential grudge control your entire life.

Here’s what you can control:

You can have a personalized safety plan. What are the warning signs that he might be escalating? You know him better than anyone else. Do you have a safe room in your house with a door that locks? Who can you call immediately if you feel unsafe?

Having a plan helps reduce panic. When you know what you’re going to do in advance, fear has a lot less power.

You can document everything. Every concerning incident. Every threatening text. Every time he drives by your house. Every boundary violation. Take screenshots, photos, dates, witnesses if there are any. Keep a log.

This builds a paper trail that could protect you legally down the road. There’s an AI tool for domestic violence victims called Aimee Says that will organize everything in a timeline and folders, getting you ready if you ever need to make a presentation in court or get a protective order.

You can know your legal options. Have you talked to an attorney? Has his behavior risen to a level where you could get a restraining order? What counts as evidence in your state? Talk to your local DV center and ask, “What are my options?”

And you can tend to your trauma response. If you’re constantly living with chronic anxiety about “what if he lashes out,” that’s exhausting. That’s not just worry, that’s a trauma response in your body related to past danger.

When that fear spikes, try grounding techniques. Slow down your breathing. Name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel. Move your body. Then come back to your safety plan and remind yourself: I’ve got a plan. I know what I’m going to do. I’m not helpless here.

The antidote to fear is agency. It’s taking your power back. It’s knowing you have options, knowing you’re not just sitting there waiting for something bad to happen.

What About Friends Who Don’t Get It?

The last question was about a friend who’s never been married, doesn’t have children, and doesn’t seem to understand emotional abuse or coercive control. This woman had spent a year crying and reaching out for support, and now her friend seems “over it.”

The friend turned it around and said the woman was “stuck in victim mode.”

And now this listener wants to send her friend something like a podcast episode, or an article that could give her the “aha moment” about what she’s actually been through.

Here’s my answer: I can’t help you with that.

Because I can’t control what your friend knows or believes or needs. And even if I could, I couldn’t guarantee she’s going to get it.

This friend has never been married. She has no kids. She has no categories in her brain for what you went through. And here’s the harder truth: she doesn’t want to.

If she wanted to learn more, there are millions of articles and podcasts and books out there now. She could learn if she wanted to. She doesn’t want to.

So you’re resisting reality. You’re fighting against something because you don’t want it to be true. And when we do that, we create a lot of dirty pain for ourselves.

There’s the clean pain—the grief that our friend doesn’t get it and can’t help us. But then we layer on top of that all this dirty pain of believing, “No, it shouldn’t be this way.” 

But it is that way.

What Can You Control?

You can’t control your friend. You can’t control her history, her knowledge, her experience, her perspective, her level of awareness, or her interest in learning about this. You can’t control her care for you or her thoughts or her feelings or her behaviors.

But you can control you. Your knowledge. Your healing. Your choices. Your beliefs. Your behaviors. Your perspective. Your self-awareness. Your growth. Your personal progress.

And that’s a lot. And that’s amazing.

When we stop trying to control all these other people out here, things start to clear up for us and we can see what we need to do next for ourselves.

Come join hundreds of women in Flying Free who get it. Women who understand what you’ve been through because they’ve been through it too. Women who are learning how to take care of themselves instead of waiting for other people to validate their experience.

Go to joinflyingfree.com to learn more and apply.

Until next time, fly free.

XOXO,
Natalie