Why Do I Miss Someone Who Hurt Me?
Research suggests attachment itself can become part of coercive control.
Posted May 18, 2026 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Many people assume that victims of abuse remain with perpetrators because they are financially dependent, physically trapped, or too afraid to leave. For many victims, these factors do play a role, but emotional attachment can also become a force binding victims to perpetrators. They may still long for the person harming them, miss them intensely after separation, or feel pulled back despite recognising the harm being done to them. This often leads to a painful and confusing question: Why do I miss someone who hurt me?
Research from the University of Cambridge suggests that perpetrators may actively shape and use emotional bonds as a form of coercive control. This process, termed weaponised attachment , describes how affection, intimacy , vulnerability, and emotional connection can be strategically used to bind victims to perpetrators and make disengagement increasingly difficult.
In collaboration with The Pixel Project, an international non-profit organisation dedicated to ending violence against women, this research is now being translated into a white paper and practical toolkit designed to help professionals to better recognise attachment-based coercive control, identify non-physical patterns of abuse earlier, and respond to victims without reinforcing harmful victim-blaming assumptions. The project aims to provide practical guidance for frontline practitioners. Groups working with victims of domestic abuse are being invited to join as partner organisations to help improve understanding of attachment-based coercive control and challenge victim-blaming narratives.
How Attachment Becomes a Tool of Control
Lisa was not the kind of woman people imagine when they talk about coercive control. She had a job, her own money, her own front door key, friends who loved her, and a life that looked ordinary from the outside. There was no locked room, no visible chain, no obvious reason she could not walk away.
When she first met him, he made her feel chosen. He listened with unusual attention . He remembered small things: how she took her coffee, the song she liked, the story she once told about feeling lonely as a child. He told her she was different from anyone he had ever met. He said he had never felt safe with anyone before.
He had his own wounds, too. A difficult childhood . A mother who never loved him properly. People who had abandoned him. When he told Lisa these things, she felt tenderness, then responsibility. His pain seemed to explain his moods. When he snapped, withdrew, or punished her with silence, she did not first think, “He is controlling me.” She thought, “He is hurt.”
Then came the switch.
Some days, he was everything she wanted: warm, funny, apologetic, almost childlike in his need for her. Other days, he was cruel. He mocked her, disappeared, accused her of not caring, and made her feel small. Then, just when she felt ready to pull away, he returned as the man from the beginning. Soft voice. Long message. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I do this. You’re the only person who understands me.”
Not because she was stupid. Not because she enjoyed pain. Not because she had nowhere else to go. She stayed because the relationship had begun to train her nervous system . His affection became the relief after distress. His tenderness became the reward after fear . The more unpredictable he became, the more intensely she waited for the good version of him to come back.
She checked her phone constantly. She replayed conversations, wondering what she had done wrong. She felt sick when he withdrew and euphoric when he came back. The same man who hurt her became the only person who could soothe the hurt. That was the trap.
Attachment had become control.
By the time Lisa understood she was being abused, leaving did not feel like freedom. It felt like withdrawal. Her mind knew he was dangerous; her body missed him. She could list the harm, but still ache for his voice. She could block him, then feel desperate to unblock him. She could tell herself, “This is abuse,” and still feel the pull of the person who had created the wound.
This is how attachment becomes a tool of control: not through constant violence, but through the careful alternation of love and cruelty. The perpetrator gives care, removes it, then offers it again as if it were proof of love. Over time, the victim becomes emotionally organised around regaining the affection that is being deliberately withheld.
Why Existing Understandings Often Miss This
When people try to explain why women like Lisa remain attached to abusive partners, the explanations often focus on what is supposedly wrong with her rather than what the perpetrator is doing. She is described as damaged, naïve, or psychologically defective. Questions such as “Why doesn’t she leave?” implicitly assume that the relationship is being sustained by some failure within her rather than by an active system of coercion operating through attachment itself.
Traditional explanations have frequently reflected this tendency. Earlier theories framed victims as “masochistic,” “ codependent ,” or “helpless,” suggesting that women remain with abusive people because they unconsciously desire suffering, lack agency, or have dysfunctional personalities. Yet many of these ideas emerged from weak empirical foundations rather than from careful research with victims themselves. More importantly, they often neglected the role of the perpetrator almost entirely.
Lisa’s experience does not fit these assumptions. She did not enjoy being humiliated. She was not financially trapped. She was not unable to function independently. In many areas of life, she was competent, intelligent, and capable. What existing understandings often fail to capture is that her attachment was not simply a pre-existing vulnerability emerging spontaneously. It was gradually manufactured within the relationship through grooming, emotional conditioning, and the strategic alternation of affection and harm.
The problem is that attachment is culturally associated with love, intimacy, and care. As a result, when perpetrators weaponise attachment, the abuse becomes harder to identify. A woman crying because she misses her abusive partner may be interpreted as evidence of genuine romance rather than evidence of coercive conditioning. The perpetrator’s apparent vulnerability may even generate sympathy, obscuring the manipulative function it serves within the relationship.
Consequently, existing frameworks often misread the victim’s attachment as evidence against coercion, when in reality the attachment may be one of coercive control’s most powerful products. The emotional bond is treated as proof of consent rather than something deliberately engineered through manipulation, instability, fear, and intermittent affection. In this way, the very mechanism that keeps the victim trapped becomes the mechanism through which her victimisation is doubted.
The Pixel Project. (2026). Introduction: Using the weaponised attachment white paper . The Pixel Project. https://www.thepixelproject.net/introduction-using-the-weaponised-attachment-white-paper/
Lesiak, M., & Loraine Gelsthorpe (2025). The invisible abuser: Attachment, victimization, and perpetrator perception in repeat abuse . Violence Against Women . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012251379423
Lesiak (2025). Trauma doesn’t explain away domestic abuse . ABC Religion & Ethics . https://www.abc.net.au/religion/mags-lesiak-why-trauma-doesn-t-explain-away-domestic-abuse/105981118
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Mags Lesiak, MPhil, is a psychological criminologist investigating how coercion, attachment, and structural pressure impact decision-making and consent.
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