Why Do I Still Love the People Who Hurt Me?
- Maria Niitepold
- Jul 3
- 17 min read
By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM
In my practice, this confession arrives more quietly than any other, and with more shame attached.
She can tell me what her mother did. She has the evidence organized, the memories, the patterns, sometimes the diagnosis read about at two in the morning. And then her voice drops, because here comes the part that feels like a betrayal of her own case: but I still love her. I miss her. When she called last week and was kind for ten minutes, my whole chest lifted, and then I hated myself for it. What is wrong with me?
Or it is a partner. He was controlling, demeaning, occasionally cruel, and she left, and she knows leaving was right, and some nights she misses him so specifically it frightens her. She has read enough to know what he was. The love did not get the memo. She concludes, privately, that the love must mean something terrible: that she is weak, that she is broken, that maybe it was not as bad as she remembers, because surely you cannot love someone who actually hurt you.
I want to take that conclusion apart, carefully, because it is wrong in a way that matters. Loving people who hurt you is not a malfunction, not weakness, and not evidence against your own memory. It is one of the most predictable outcomes in all of human psychology, and in the framework I use clinically it is significant enough to be its own category of trauma: the third of four truths, the conflict of needing, loving, and trusting the very people who hurt you. The full four-question framework lives in how to actually answer whether you have trauma. This post is about the third question, the one with the shame on it, and by the end I want the shame gone, because the love was never the problem. The position was.
Quick Answer: Why Do I Still Love Someone Who Hurt Me?
Because attachment is wiring, not a verdict. A child's survival system bonds to caregivers whether or not they are safe, and when love and harm share a face, the bond and the wound get built together. Your love is not evidence they were safe, and it is not an instruction to return. It is the oldest circuitry you have.
Table of Contents
The Impossible Position
To understand the love, you have to go back to where it was wired, and to one fact about children that adults consistently forget: attachment is not a preference. It is survival equipment.
A human infant is the most helpless creature in nature, and her nervous system knows it. Bonding to caregivers is not something she decides to do based on their merits; it is automatic, biological, and non-negotiable, because for a creature who cannot feed, warm, or protect herself, proximity to the big people is life itself. The attachment system does not run background checks. It bonds to whoever is there.
Now put that system in a home where the caregiver is also the source of fear or pain. The child's alarm goes off, and the alarm has one programmed response: go to your attachment figure. But the attachment figure is what set off the alarm. Attachment researchers have a name for this bind, fright without a solution, and it is worth sitting with what it means: every instinct the child has drives her toward the very person her body is warning her about. There is no move that works. She cannot flee the person she must stay near to survive. She cannot fight the person she depends on. She cannot stop needing the person who hurts her, because the needing is not optional. It is the machinery of staying alive.
That is the impossible position, and here is the sentence I most need you to take from this section: the love and the harm were installed on the same circuit, at the same time, by the same person, during the years your wiring was being laid. You did not choose to love someone dangerous. Your survival system did exactly what it was built to do, in conditions it was never designed for. The paradox you carry is not a flaw in you. It is the architecture of the position you were put in.
What a Child's Mind Does With Impossibility
A nervous system cannot hold this person is dangerous and I cannot survive without this person in open view at the same time. The contradiction is unbearable, so the child's mind, brilliantly, resolves it. There are three classic maneuvers, and you will recognize yours.
The first is editing reality. The caregiver must remain good, because the child must keep trusting her to survive, so the evidence gets revised on arrival. It wasn't that bad. She was tired. He didn't mean it. I'm too sensitive. The child becomes, of necessity, the defense attorney for the person hurting her, and that fluency, you may notice, never quite retired.
The second is relocating the badness. If the parent cannot be the problem, someone has to be, and the child is the only candidate she has authority over. So the harm gets explained by her own defectiveness: I made her angry, I'm too much, I deserved it. This solution is so durable and so consequential that I have written about it separately, in why self-blame feels safer than the truth. For now, just see it for what it was: not low self-esteem, but load-bearing architecture. The badness had to live somewhere, and she took it in to keep the person she needed clean.
The third is keeping two files. The mind stores the good parent and the hurting parent as if they were separate people: one file holds the bedtime stories, the laughter, the day at the beach; the other holds the rages, the cruelty, the fear. The files do not talk to each other, which is precisely the point, because if they merged, the impossible contradiction would come back. And this maneuver explains something you have probably never been able to account for: the whiplash. Why distance brings clarity and one phone call dissolves it. Why you can know everything on Tuesday and feel none of it on Sunday at her kitchen table. Contact opens the good file. Distance opens the other one. You are not flip-flopping. You are toggling between two archives that were built never to merge.
Why the Love Outlives the Evidence
So the wiring explains the origin. But you are an adult now, with the evidence organized. Why hasn't the love updated?
Because the love was installed before the part of you that evaluates evidence existed. Attachment wiring is laid in the first years of life, beneath language, beneath narrative memory, in the body's oldest systems, and adult cognition is a late addition built on top of it, not a replacement for it. Your thinking mind can reach a verdict; it cannot reach the basement. This is why insight changes so little here: you can know, completely and correctly, what someone is, and your chest still lifts when they are kind, because the chest is running code that predates your ability to know anything.
Two accelerants keep the old circuit live. The first is intermittent warmth. If the people who hurt you had been only cruel, the system might have managed a cleaner conclusion. But they weren't, almost no one is, and the good moments were real: the occasional tenderness, the holiday that went well, the glimpse of the parent or partner you needed. Unpredictable reward is, neurochemically, the most powerful bonding schedule that exists, far stronger than consistent kindness, and it is the engine of the bond I take apart in why smart, self-aware people stay in toxic relationships. The hope those good moments installed does not expire. It waits.
The second accelerant is that contact re-runs the program. Every visit, every call, every holiday performance reactivates the child circuitry in the adult body: the vigilance, the hope, the toggling files, the ten-year-old's longing wearing a forty-year-old's clothes. People are routinely bewildered by how regressed they feel around the original cast. There is no mystery. You are not weak around them. You are young around them, neurologically, and the love you feel in those rooms is partly the oldest version of you, still reaching.
The Both/And Feelings, Decoded
Now the feelings themselves, the ones that make you feel insane, each one translated.
You long for her and dread her calls, simultaneously. Both signals are accurate; they are just coming from different systems. The longing is the attachment circuit, doing its ancient job. The dread is the threat-detection circuit, doing its ancient job. They were both trained on the same person, so they both fire about the same person, and the simultaneity is not confusion. It is two true reports arriving at once.
You feel homesick for a place that hurt you. Of course you do. It was also the only home you had, and the attachment system files home under survival, not under quality review. Missing it is not an endorsement of what happened there. It is grief for the belonging that should have been safe and wasn't.
You defend them, fluently, when anyone else criticizes. The old defense-attorney program, still on retainer. For a child, protecting the attachment figure's goodness was protecting her own lifeline, so criticism of them registers, even now, as threat to you. There is also a lonelier reason: you may be the only person alive holding their good file, and some part of you fears that if you stop defending it, the good moments stop having ever been real.
Their smallest kindness can make you cry. Because the kindness is a glimpse of the parent or partner you actually needed, the one the good file has been waiting for. The tears are not weakness and not forgiveness. They are the original hunger, recognizing its food.
And the rage, when it finally comes, collapses almost instantly into guilt. Because the third truth installed a loyalty clause: your anger at them was never allowed to exist without penalty, so it learned to arrive pre-punished. The guilt is not your conscience speaking. It is the old contract enforcing itself.
None of these feelings is a mistake, and none of them is a contradiction you must resolve by killing one side. They are the complete, accurate emotional record of an impossible position. The problem was never that you feel both. The problem is that someone put you somewhere both were true.
Love Is Not the Verdict
Here is the centerpiece of this post, the reframe I build toward in session, because once it lands, everything downstream gets easier.
You have been treating your love as evidence in a case. If I still love her, maybe it wasn't abuse. If I miss him, maybe I should go back. If my heart lifts when she's kind, maybe I've been unfair. Notice the underlying assumption: that the love is a ruling, a verdict your deepest self has issued about what they were and what you should do.
It is not. Love, this kind, the kind wired in dependency and fed on intermittent hope, is not a judgment about the other person's safety. It is a record of your attachment history. It tells you that you bonded, which every child does, to whoever is there; it tells you the bond was built under the strongest reinforcement schedule that exists; it tells you the hunger for them was real. It tells you nothing, nothing at all, about whether they were safe, whether the harm happened, or whether you should return. Abusive parents are loved by their children at rates that would astonish you, which is to say, almost universally. The love is not exculpatory evidence. It is the wound's twin, made in the same place at the same time.
So let the two truths finally stand together, without one prosecuting the other: the love is real, and the harm was real. You do not have to annihilate the love to honor your own memory, and you do not have to deny your memory to keep the parts of the love that were ever nourishing. And one more release, the one that changes decisions: loving someone does not obligate you to give them access. Love is a feeling; access is a decision about safety, and they run on separate tracks. You can love someone completely and see them rarely, or never, and the love does not make the boundary a betrayal. If the access question is the one keeping you up at night, the decision has its own full territory, and I walk through it, including the guilt and the grief that come with it, in going no-contact with a narcissistic parent.
If you have spent years ashamed of a love you could not switch off, hear this: the love was never the pathology, and you were never weak for feeling it. You were a child in an impossible position, and the position is what therapy treats. I offer EMDR, Brainspotting, and CRM for adults healing from exactly this kind of complex relational trauma, across New York and Florida and throughout all PsyPact states. You can book a free 15-minute consultation whenever you are ready.
Or call or text (850) 696-7218
When the Paradox Echoes in Your Partners
The third truth rarely stays in childhood, because the wiring it laid becomes the template for adult love, and the template has a signature.
The familiar pull. The partners who eventually hurt you did not announce themselves as dangerous; they announced themselves as home. Something in their intensity, their unpredictability, their particular weather, matched the original circuit, and your system read the match as chemistry. I map this selection machinery fully in why you keep attracting toxic partners; the short version is that you were not choosing badly. You were choosing accurately, against a template that was installed before you could vote on it.
The staying, past all evidence. When the harm started, the old machinery knew exactly what to do, because it had trained for this its whole life: edit the reality, take the blame, keep the two files, hope through the intermittent warmth. Loving a hurtful partner did not require learning anything new. It required only remembering.
And the strangest echo of all: when someone safe finally arrives, the system balks. Consistent kindness does not match the template, so it reads as flat, as boring, as something off, the repulsion I take apart in why safe relationships feel repulsive to a traumatized nervous system. A nervous system that learned love with threat braided in can experience love without threat as love missing an ingredient. It is not. It is love missing the harm, and the difference takes the body, not the mind, time to learn.
What Resolution Actually Looks Like
So what is the way out, given that the love will not be argued away and you would not want the capacity for love destroyed even if it could be?
First, retire the verdict you have been trying to reach. Most people arrive believing resolution means finally choosing: indict them fully or forgive them fully, hate or absolve, file closed. That menu is the problem. Both options require deleting half the truth, which is why decades of trying have never produced a stable answer. Resolution is not a verdict. It is integration: the two files, the good parent and the hurting one, finally merging into one real, limited, accountable person about whom you feel several true things at once. Integration feels less like a gavel and more like a long exhale: the war between the files ends, because the files become one history.
Second, and this is the actual exit from the loop: grieve the parent you needed. Underneath the unresolvable love is almost always an unfinished hope, that the good file will win, that the parent in those best moments will someday arrive and stay. The hope is what keeps the circuit live. Grieving means letting that specific parent, the one you needed, who existed only in glimpses, be acknowledged as never coming, and mourning them like the real loss they are. This grief is the hardest work I do with people and the most liberating, because when the hope is finally grieved, the love quiets into something that no longer runs your decisions. It becomes a fact about your history instead of a live wire in your present.
Third, the work has to reach the basement, because everything described in this post lives below insight, in pre-verbal wiring, body memory, and a loyalty contract written before language. In my practice that means the Comprehensive Resource Model first and throughout: building an internal experience of attachment and safety that does not depend on anyone's unpredictable warmth, which is, for this wound, the missing nutrient delivered at last. On that ground, EMDR processes the specific scenes where love and fear were fused, and the verdicts that came with them, so the old contract loses its enforcement power. And Brainspotting reaches the layer underneath the scenes, the wordless, bodily knowing of reaching toward danger because there was nowhere else to reach, which has no memory attached because it predates memory itself.
What changes on the far side is not the disappearance of feeling. It is the demotion of feeling from command to information. Her call still arrives; your chest may still move; and you notice it, name it, the old circuit, doing its old job, and decide, from the adult, what actually happens next. That gap between the feeling and the decision is the whole prize. It is where your life comes back.
Checklist: Is the Third Truth Running in You?
Read slowly. The shame may argue. Let it.
I love, or miss, someone I can also accurately describe as having hurt me, and the coexistence makes me doubt myself
I have used my love as evidence against my own memory: if I still love them, maybe it wasn't that bad
I feel clear at a distance and confused after contact, as if a different file opens in their presence
I defend them reflexively when others criticize, even with things I have said myself
Their occasional kindness moves me out of proportion, and I am ashamed of how much
My anger at them collapses into guilt almost immediately
I feel homesick for a household I also feared
My adult relationships have repeated the pattern: intensity that felt like home, harm that felt familiar
Safe, consistent love has sometimes felt flat or wrong to me
I have spent years trying to reach a final verdict about them, and the case never closes
If most of these land, the third truth is live in you, and the love you have been ashamed of is not the disorder. It is the fingerprint of the position you survived.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal to love a parent who abused me?
It is nearly universal, and the shame about it is often heavier than the love itself. A child's attachment system bonds automatically to caregivers as a survival function; it does not audit them first, and abuse does not switch it off. In fact, fear can intensify attachment behavior, because the frightened child's only programmed move is toward her caregiver. So the adult who loves an abusive parent is not displaying weakness or denial. She is displaying intact, ordinary human wiring that was operated in conditions it was never designed for. The love needs no justification and no apology. What it needs is to stop being read as evidence about what they were.
Why do I miss someone who hurt me, even after I chose to leave?
Because the relationship installed real attachment, and attachment grieves when it loses its object, regardless of the object's quality. You are also missing things that genuinely existed: the good moments were real, intermittent warmth bonds more powerfully than consistent warmth, and the hope those moments planted does not dissolve on departure. Add the body's habituation, your nervous system organized itself around this person for years, and the missing is fully explained. What the missing is not: an instruction. It is withdrawal from a bond, not a message that the bond was safe, and it fades on the same schedule all grief does, faster when the underlying hope finally gets grieved too.
Does still loving them mean it wasn't really abuse?
No, and this may be the most important single correction in this post. Love and abuse are not mutually exclusive; they are, in abusive systems, standard companions, because the bond is what gives the harm its access and its cover. Victims of abuse routinely love their abusers, children almost universally so, and abusers are frequently genuinely loved at the very moments they are causing the most damage. Your love is a record of your attachment, not a character reference for them. Using it to overturn your own memory is the old editing program at work, the child's reflex to keep the needed person good. The accurate account has room for both: you loved them, and they hurt you. Neither cancels the other.
Why do I defend them when other people criticize them?
Three forces, usually braided. First, the original program: a child protects her attachment figure's goodness because that goodness is her lifeline, so criticism of them was wired to register as danger to you, and the defense fires before thought. Second, ownership of the good file: you may be the only one who witnessed their best moments, and defending them can feel like defending the reality of those moments, which were real. Third, exposure: if they were as bad as the critic says, then what happened to you was as bad as you fear, and the defense holds that recognition at bay. Noticing the reflex without obeying it is a meaningful early piece of this work.
Do I have to forgive them to heal?
No. Forgiveness is optional, private, and never a prerequisite for healing, and the pressure to forgive prematurely, from family, from culture, sometimes from therapy itself, frequently blocks the actual work, because it demands the verdict before the grief. What healing requires is truth and mourning: the integrated, accurate account of what they were and did, and the grieving of what you needed and never received. Some people arrive at something they call forgiveness on the far side of that work, organically, for their own peace; others arrive at a settled clarity that needs no name. Both are complete outcomes. The only wrong move is forcing either one before the truth has been allowed to stand.
Do I have to cut them off?
No. Contact is a safety and capacity decision, not a loyalty test or a measure of healing, and the options are a spectrum rather than a switch: full contact with strong internal boundaries, structured or limited contact, low contact around specific occasions, or none. The right answer depends on what they do with access, what contact costs your nervous system, and what you are protecting, including children. What I ask clients to drop is the idea that the love settles the question in either direction: loving them does not obligate access, and limiting access does not require you to stop loving them. If you are actively weighing estrangement, that decision deserves its own careful treatment, and I have written it out fully, including the guilt and grief that ambush people afterward.
Can therapy actually change something this old, and does it work online?
Yes, because the right modalities work at the level where the paradox lives, which insight alone cannot reach. The wiring is pre-verbal and somatic, so the work is too: CRM builds the internal attachment and felt safety the original position never provided, EMDR processes the fused scenes and the loyalty verdicts, and Brainspotting reaches the wordless layer underneath memory. The therapy relationship itself matters here more than almost anywhere, a sustained bond that is safe, consistent, and never weaponized is, for this wound, corrective experience and not just logistics. All of it translates fully to secure telehealth, and I describe who online trauma therapy works well for if that fits your life. The love does not have to be argued with. It has to be outgrown at the root, and that is exactly what this work does.
The Love Was Never the Problem
If you take one thing from this post, take the acquittal: you are not weak, you are not broken, and you are not betraying your own story by loving the people who hurt you. You were placed, before you could speak, in a position where love and harm arrived through the same door, and every feeling you have carried since is the accurate record of that position.
The love does not have to be killed. The hope underneath it has to be grieved, the files have to be allowed to merge, and the old contract has to be processed where it was written, in the body, below the argument. On the far side, the feelings remain human-sized: facts about your history, no longer commands in your present.
That work is what I do, every week, with people carrying exactly this. I see clients in person at my Gulf Breeze, Florida office and online across New York, Florida, and all PsyPact states, using CRM, EMDR, and Brainspotting. You can see the areas I serve or book a free 15-minute consultation. You can also call or text (850) 696-7218 anytime.
Or call or text (850) 696-7218
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Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD
EMDRIA-Trained Trauma & Somatic Therapist
Serving High-Achievers Across New York and Florida
(850) 696-7218. Call or text anytime.
Healing doesn't have to be hard. It just has to start.
(Disclaimer: This blog post is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice or a formal doctor-patient relationship. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact your local emergency services or call 988. If you are in an abusive relationship, you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or by texting START to 88788.)
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