Why Do I Still Miss Someone Who Treated Me Badly?

You've deleted the messages. You've told your friends you're done. You can probably produce a reasonably comprehensive PowerPoint presentation on all the reasons this person was bad for you.

And yet you miss them.

Perhaps you check their social media. Maybe you replay old conversations or remember the good moments and temporarily forget the approximately 746 reasons you decided the relationship couldn't continue.

Then comes the shame: What is wrong with me? Why would I miss somebody who treated me like that?

Narcissistic abuse recovery is one of the areas I specialise in, alongside my work with disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent adults. It's also something I understand from more than one side of the therapy room — which is part of why I don't think the usual advice about "moving on" comes anywhere close to what missing someone actually involves.

Missing someone doesn't mean you should go back

This is probably the most important bit.

You can miss somebody and still know that having them in your life wasn't good for you.

Relationships are rarely experienced as one uninterrupted sequence of awful moments.

Often there was affection, humour, intimacy, excitement, companionship or a version of that person who made you feel incredibly important. Those memories don't disappear simply because you have subsequently recognised unhealthy or abusive behaviour.

Sometimes what you miss isn't even entirely the person. You might miss who they were at the beginning, how you felt around them, the future you thought you were going to have, or the feeling of finally being chosen or understood.

That's grief.

And unfortunately grief has very little respect for the spreadsheet you've created listing all of someone's red flags.

The good moments can make the bad ones harder to leave behind

In some unhealthy relationships there can be a confusing pattern of closeness and hurt.

Things are wonderful, then they're awful. There's criticism, withdrawal, manipulation or conflict, followed by affection, reassurance, apologies or promises that things will be different.

That unpredictability can make the relationship incredibly emotionally consuming.

You may find yourself spending more and more energy trying to get back to the good version of the relationship. When things improve, the relief can feel enormous — particularly after a period of distress or uncertainty.

People sometimes describe this using the term trauma bond. It's a useful description for some people's experience, but I think we have to be careful not to turn every difficult attachment into another internet diagnosis.

What matters is the pattern.

If somebody repeatedly hurts you, destabilises you or makes you question yourself, the fact that you also experienced powerful moments of connection doesn't cancel that out.

Equally, the fact that you miss them doesn't mean the harm wasn't real.

Sometimes you're grieving the possibility

One of the hardest things to let go of can be not what the relationship actually was, but what you kept believing it could become.

Perhaps you spent months or years thinking that if communication improved, if they dealt with their past, if you stopped upsetting them, if they finally understood how much they'd hurt you, things would return to how they were at the beginning.

That little word if can keep us emotionally invested for a very long time.

And when a relationship ends, you aren't only losing what existed. You may also be losing the future you'd been trying to rescue.

Sometimes that is the part that hurts most.

You don't necessarily need them to admit what happened

After emotionally manipulative relationships, people can become very focused on getting the other person to understand.

If I explain it properly, they'll finally see what they did.

So you draft the message. Then redraft it. Then mentally rehearse the imaginary conversation in which they suddenly develop extraordinary levels of insight, accountability and emotional maturity.

Annoyingly, this conversation doesn't always happen.

And sometimes continuing to seek acknowledgement from the person who repeatedly invalidated your experience keeps them at the centre of your recovery.

Healing may eventually involve trusting your own experience even if they never agree with your version of events.

You can decide that something hurt you without winning a court case about whether you were entitled to be hurt.

Recovery isn't about never thinking about them again

I don't think the goal has to be reaching some magical stage where you feel absolutely nothing and could pass them in Tesco with the emotional response you'd have to a packet of crumpets.

Recovery can look much quieter than that.

Maybe you still think about them, but you no longer check their profile. Maybe you miss them without contacting them. Maybe you can remember the good moments without using them to erase the painful ones. Maybe you begin to notice that your life is slowly becoming less organised around what they did, what they meant, what they might be thinking, or whether they will ever understand the impact they had on you.

And perhaps, over time, the questions change.

Instead of:

Were they really a narcissist? Did they ever love me? Why wasn't I enough? Will they ever realise what they did?

You might begin asking:

Why did I learn to doubt myself so quickly? What did I keep accepting because I was afraid to lose the relationship? What did I need from them that I wasn't giving myself? What would it feel like to trust my own perception again? What do I want love to feel like next time?

I think that's where something important can shift.

Because recovery doesn't necessarily happen when you finally understand them. Sometimes it starts when understanding them becomes less important than understanding you.

And maybe closure isn't the moment they finally say the right thing.

Maybe closure is the point where you realise you no longer need them to.

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I'm Emma, a BACP-accredited counsellor, EMDR practitioner and trained coach. I work with adults experiencing a range of difficulties, with particular interests in trauma, narcissistic and emotionally abusive relationships, neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness and self-esteem.

In counselling, I offer space to make sense of difficult relationship experiences without telling you how you should feel about the person involved. We can explore things like self-trust, boundaries, attachment, grief, shame and the impact the relationship has had on how you see yourself.

If you'd like to explore working with me, I offer online counselling. You can contact me through the contact page on my website to ask a question or arrange an initial conversation.