My Man Hurt Me Emotionally: How to Feel Good Anyway

Inside: These empowering steps will help you feel better, even when your boyfriend keeps hurting you emotionally. Don’t forget to download your free scripture cards to neutralize your boyfriend’s hurtful words.

I didn’t make a sound as I slipped into my clothes. You could tell from my furtive movements that I was desperate to get out of there…fast.

For a moment, I paused and braced my hands on the bathroom countertop. Just like I was bracing myself for the next time my boyfriend hurt my feelings.

He hadn’t picked away at some new flaw in me recently. So of course, a knot of dread was eating away at my stomach as the proverbial other shoe loomed over me.

Thank God I’d woken up before him this morning. As soon as I was conscious enough to make my escape, I slid from under the sheets like a ninja.

Now, my mind raced ahead to my next move—getting out the door without waking him. I could taste freedom, and I needed to avoid making a mistake at all costs.

Which is why I was sneaking around like a ninja in my own house.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, get this free printable download—The Blame Game Grand Slam Checklist. It gives you 6 unusual tips to win back your peace when it’s always your fault.

When You Love a Man Who Keeps Hurting You Emotionally

Perhaps, like I used to, you’re doing the daily ninja slide out of bed, followed by the gymnastics of silently getting dressed.

And maybe like I did, you live in constant anxiety, waiting for him to dig up and dig into some new way you’re not good enough for him.

You see, my boyfriend hurt me emotionally way too often. And by then, I felt unworthy of his love. So I absorbed every emotional wound, letting him convince me he was helping me become a better person.

Except, both his efforts to change me and my efforts to change myself for him were futile.

What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

Ecclesiastes 1:15 (ESV)

Once, I even wrote a letter to him about my feelings. In essence, it screamed, “I really love you but you always really hurt me and I really need you to stop.”

It stayed, undelivered, in my secret journal.

Now you, as I did, feel like your partner doesn’t care about hurting your feelings. And if your man is like my ex was, he’s a pro at twisting things around, so his hurtful ways are somehow always your fault.

Related: My Husband Turns Everything around on Me: 3 Unusual Tips to Restore Your Peace

And I bet you have a secret journal too, where you pour out how sick you are of living with your own personal negative nelly.

Which means you’re also wondering, “He hurt my feelings so badly. Why do I still love him?”

Why Do I Love Him So Much, Even Though He Hurts Me Emotionally?

Ah, the million-dollar question. And a conundrum, to be sure.

Because you see yourself as strong and independent, yet you’re with a man who—let’s be honest—emotionally abuses you.

I see your confusion, my darling, and I’ve felt it too. But years after breaking up with my boyfriend who kept hurting me emotionally, I have some answers for you.

Then stick around for what to do about it.

1. You still love him because you believe in commitment.

You love him with all your heart, which is obvious to anyone who knows the inside story.

The dreams you’ve put on hold or abandoned for him. The self-esteem and self-worth you’ve sacrificed to his endless criticism. Even the friends you’ve subtly edged out of your life, just to keep him comfortable and ease his insecurity.

And you do it all because you believe that’s what you do for the one you love. You put them first, do everything to make them happy, and love them no matter what.

The truth: Even though he keeps hurting you emotionally, you still love him because you believe in commitment.

2. You trust your boyfriend’s good intentions, even though he hurts your feelings.

Although it hurts like a mother when your boyfriend inflicts his emotional wounds, you suck it up and keep going.

You may have lost touch with the woman inside you who knows her worth. But you’re not so broken that you’d be with someone who’s cruel on purpose.

Right?

Someone whose intention is to break you to his will. Someone who has you in a fast-track self-improvement program so you’ll finally be good enough for him.

So you trust that, surely, your boyfriend has good intentions even when he hurts you emotionally.

The truth: You still love your boyfriend because you expect and assume that his intentions when he hurts your feelings are good.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, get this free printable download—The Blame Game Grand Slam Checklist. It gives you 6 unusual tips to win back your peace when it’s always your fault.

3. You stay with him because you’ve lost your confidence.

Having diagnosed everything that’s wrong with you, your boyfriend has set himself up as your personality fixer.

At this point, he doesn’t even need a reason to pick at you, often picking up where he last left off. And when he starts in on something, he doesn’t leave it alone until he’s torn you to shreds and you’re questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself.

He’s so confident in his relentless arguments, which you find near impossible to refute, that he’s browbeaten you into believing he’s right. That you’re sub-standard and you’re lucky to have him.

I was exactly there. Plus, I believed he knew me better than I knew myself. Otherwise, I’d have seen my faults before he did. And I’d have fixed them before he had to tell me to do it.

You see, as I had, you’ve lost your self-confidence because of your boyfriend’s nonstop emotional wounds.

The truth: You still love your boyfriend because your confidence has eroded under his constant hurtful criticism, and you’re not sure anymore that you deserve better.

3 Steps to Take When Your Boyfriend Keeps Hurting You Emotionally

Hiding in all of these reasons why you still love him—even though he keeps hurting you emotionally—is the fact that you’re a product of conditioning.

Your boyfriend or your past experiences have conditioned you to believe that you don’t deserve better. So although you feel like you go through hell every day, you don’t think you deserve to be in a place that feels like heaven.

Or maybe you’re conditioned to believe that love should look and act a certain way. And even though your relationship doesn’t reflect it, you keep waiting, expecting, and wishing that it somehow will.

So how do you break out of your conditioning, especially when you still love a man who keeps hurting you emotionally?

How do you escape the cycle of negativity and start feeling good again?

1. Know your standards for yourself.

You love your man, and one of the many reasons why you stay with him, even though he hurts your feelings all the time, is because you’re committed to him.

As a Christian woman, you want to hold yourself to the biblical standard of love—bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things

But is he doing the same?

I assume your answer is no, or you wouldn’t be here. So how do you feel about that?

Don’t misunderstand; this isn’t an immature game of tit-for-tat. But if you don’t know what you want—if you have no standard for what you’ll accept—you’ll take any old thing.

If you can’t articulate your standards, these journaling exercises will help.

• Close your eyes and picture your ideal man. Then write about him in detail. You can list traits that are the exact opposite of your boyfriend’s if you want but go beyond that. Think about what you hunger and thirst for. Describe your ideal man’s beliefs, personality, attitudes, and how he demonstrates his love for you.
• Close your eyes and think about Jesus. Then journal about what you believe He thinks and feels about you.

Related: 9 Important But Forgotten Traits (Who I Am In Christ List)

• Read this passage from Solomon. Then journal how you think God wants the man He has for you to treat you.

You have captured my heart, my treasure, my bride.  You hold it hostage with one glance of your eyes, with a single jewel of your necklace.  Your love delights me, my treasure, my bride. Your love is better than wine, your perfume more fragrant than spices.  Your lips are as sweet as nectar, my bride. Honey and milk are under your tongue. Your clothes are scented like the cedars of Lebanon.

Solomon 4:9-11 (NLT)

Based on what you’ve journaled, make a list of your non-negotiable standards.

Now ask yourself: Is my man living up to my non-negotiable standards? If yes, how? If not, where is he missing the mark? Then decide how you want to move forward.

The step: Get clear on your standards so you know what you’re willing to accept and what’s not OK for you.

2. Know what real love will and won’t do.

I trusted my ex-boyfriend’s good intentions until the day he told me that he withheld compliments from me on purpose because I wanted them too much. When he said those words, I saw deliberate cruelty in him that I hadn’t recognized before.

You see, just because you wouldn’t intentionally hurt someone you love, doesn’t mean he won’t.

Here’s the thing, though. He may genuinely believe he’s hurting for your own good. Kinda like the old-school way of house training a puppy by sticking its nose into its own poop.

But you’re a grown woman, not a puppy. And if your boyfriend swears he loves you but spends most of his time hurting your feelings on purpose, you need to look more closely at what’s happening.

Because he’s probably not hurting you for your own good. He’s doing it to make his life better in some way.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (ESV)

The step: Recognize that real love will challenge you to step up your game and tighten up your weak areas. But it will never intentionally undermine your confidence and self-worth.

3. Know yourself better than he thinks he knows you.

A person may come across as confident about what they’re saying. But that doesn’t make what they’re saying right.

So although you struggle to argue against your boyfriend’s endless fault-finding, you still don’t have to agree with him. Especially if your gut (not your ego or pride) is screaming, “He’s wrong!”

Still, this is a wonderful opportunity to get to know yourself better. When you do, your self-confidence is rock solid and unshakeable, no matter what your boyfriend says.

Related: 31 Journaling Prompts When You Need To Know, “Who Am I?”

The secret: Know who you are in Christ so you can build your self-confidence and cushion your heart when your boyfriend hurts you emotionally.

My Boyfriend Hurt My Feelings and I Can’t Get Over It. Now What?

When your man has hurt you emotionally—once or as a habit—moving past the pain can be hard.

Of course, you feel angry about the situation. Who wouldn’t? Deep down, you may even think staying angry gives you the upper hand and punishes him for hurting you.

If so, then ask yourself these 2 questions and answer them honestly:

• As far as it’s within your control, do you want to make your relationship a battlefield where you’re always in power struggles and conflicts?
• Do you want to be the kind of woman who gets satisfaction from hurting someone the way they hurt you?

Hard questions, I know, but necessary ones if you want to heal from your hurt feelings. They’re even more important if you want to reap God’s promised blessing:

Don’t repay evil for evil. Don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do, and he will grant you his blessing.

1 Peter 3:9 (NLT)

Easier said than done though, am I right?

How do you handle your feelings after your boyfriend has emotionally hurt you? So you can ditch the role of being his victim and feel good again.

The secret lies in understanding 4 truths.

1. Acknowledge your hurt feelings to yourself.

When your boyfriend has hurt you emotionally, you may be in the habit of telling yourself to get over it. Heck, he probably says so.

But dismissing or ignoring your feelings is a guaranteed way to feel worse.

Plus, those minutes, days, or months that you spend trying to deny your feelings? That’s how much longer it’ll take for you to feel good again.

Instead of pretending you’re A-OK and there’s nothing to see here, allow your negative feelings—your hurt, anger, betrayal, grief, and sadness—to come up.

Journal them all out and think, along with why you feel this way.

The truth: Ignoring your hurt feelings will only make you feel worse. Acknowledging and dealing with them will put you on the road to feeling better faster.

2. Tell your man about your hurt feelings.

Open, honest communication is key in any healthy relationship. So once you’ve started unraveling your tangle of emotions and have a better handle on what you’re feeling and why, consider sharing it with your boyfriend.

A word of warning: go into this conversation with no expectations of your boyfriend. He may not feel bad about hurting you and he may not apologize.

But here’s the thing that makes all the difference for you: How he receives what you have to say is really none of your business. What he does with the information you share is completely up to him.

Once you’ve shared your feelings, your work is to forgive him. Not for him, but for you.

Because, as you may have noticed by now, harboring unforgiveness feels terrible. And you’re only hurting yourself by hanging onto it.

But remember, forgiveness is a process, not a one-time thing. So you’ll have to keep doing the internal work to achieve it.

The truth: Sharing your hurt feelings with your boyfriend and starting the process of forgiveness is for your benefit and healing. So don’t impose expectations on him. His response is his business, not yours.

3. Don’t let your hurt feelings swallow you whole.

Letting yourself feel all the negative feelings doesn’t mean wallowing in them. Wallowing feels just as bad as what your boyfriend said to hurt you in the first place. Plus, it can lead you into a downward spiral that’s the devil to get out of.

Even as you acknowledge and feel all your feelings, you can still find ways to uplift yourself. For example, immerse yourself in encouraging Bible verses.

The Lord is my strength and my song; he has given me victory. This is my God, and I will praise him—my father’s God, and I will exalt him!

Exodus 15:2 (NLT)

See? You can feel good even while you still feel emotionally hurt by your man.

The truth: Acknowledging your hurt feelings doesn’t mean wallowing or staying stuck in them. You can start feeling good again, even as you process your pain.

4. Take control of your hurt feelings when they come back.

Forgiving your man doesn’t mean you have to forget what he’s done. Unless you get amnesia, a memory wipe is impossible anyway.

But as time passes and as you work on forgiving him, you can release the pain until the sting is almost non-existent.

The key is to loosen up your grip on your anger and hurt, no matter how justified you think they are.

I know this feels impossible but it comes down to what you want for yourself. Would you rather nurse your righteous anger? Or would you rather be happy? You get to choose.

If you decide you’d rather be happy, then get proactive and follow this 4-step plan whenever the pain comes back:

1. Examine what triggered the pain. What thought or circumstance caused you to feel it all over again?
2. Get curious about why that thought came up or why that circumstance triggered you.
3. Even as you accept the hurt and pain, decide how you’d rather feel instead.
4. Come up with a few new thoughts to help you feel this way, and spend a few minutes practicing them.

When you do this, you short-circuit your habit of being his victim.

Eventually, the emotional hurt your man inflicted on you will loosen its chokehold and you’ll feel worlds better.

The truth: You’re the boss of your feelings. You can break the habit of feeling like a victim whenever you’re ready.

My Boyfriend Kept Hurting My Feelings until I Made a New Choice

Will you keep sliding out of bed like a ninja every morning? Hiding in the bathroom as you perform Olympic gymnastics to get ready for the day without making a sound? Sneaking out of your own home with your heart in your throat, praying you don’t make a wrong step and shatter your chance at having a semi-peaceful day?

The choice is yours.

One day, several years later than I would have liked, I made the choice to love myself enough to step away from my emotionally abusive, ungodly relationship.

I decided I didn’t want to worry anymore about when I’d be good enough for his love.

I decided I didn’t want to keep giving a man I wasn’t married to the power to pull my emotional strings.

And I decided on new Bible-based standards for myself, and I enforced them—and keep doing so every day.

Plus, I decided I didn’t want to be with a man whose main role in our relationship was rubbing my nose in all the ways he thought I sucked.

So I chose to do what was right for me and not let my boyfriend keep hurting me emotionally. And I chose to obey God’s word and stop giving myself away to a man who wasn’t my God-selected husband.

Now, you have some decisions to make.

You Get To Decide If Your Boyfriend Will Keep Hurting You Emotionally

You love your man with all your heart. Of course, you do!

This is why you’re so torn up over him keep hurting your feelings every chance he gets. Otherwise, you wouldn’t care.

But you now need to decide how much you love yourself.

Loving yourself—as God’s daughter who’s infinitely loved by the Creator of the universe—and putting a stop to him hurting you emotionally means:

• Getting clear about your standards, and being ready and willing to enforce them.
• Not imposing your expectations and assumptions on your man. He doesn’t have to love you the way you want him to, and you get to decide if you’re OK with that.
• Build your self-confidence by getting to know yourself. Then when your boyfriend starts throwing hurtful, critical words at you, you can separate truth from manipulation.

Notice how you don’t need your boyfriend to do or be different so you can feel better, even when he hurts you emotionally.

Because ultimately, the choice of how you’ll feel is always yours.

Like the finest apple tree in the orchard is my lover among other young men. I sit in his delightful shade and taste his delicious fruit. He escorts me to the banquet hall; it’s obvious how much he loves me. Strengthen me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am weak with love. His left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me.

Song of Solomon 2:3-6 (NLT)

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