Weren't Crazy. You Were Reacting: Understanding Reactionary Abuse
There's a moment I remember clearly. I was shaking. I had said something I wasn't proud of — yelled something, maybe thrown words I couldn't take back. And in that moment, the person across from me looked at me like I was the problem. Like I was the unstable one. Like everything that had led to that moment, the gaslighting, the silent treatments, the slow erosion of my reality — didn't exist.
I walked away believing I was the abuser.
It took me years to understand what had actually happened to me. What had actually happened in me. And if you're reading this, I want you to know: if you've ever snapped, screamed, cried hysterically, or completely lost yourself in a relationship — you might not have been the problem. You might have been reacting.
This is what we need to talk about. This is reactionary abuse
What Is Reactionary Abuse?
Reactionary abuse, sometimes called induced conversation, reactive abuse, or triggered response abuse, is a psychological dynamic where an abuser deliberately provokes their partner until the partner reacts in a way that appears abusive, irrational, or unstable.
The reaction becomes the abuser's evidence.
"See? You're crazy." "See? You're the one with the anger problem." "See? I'm the victim here."
It's one of the most insidious forms of psychological manipulation because it turns your nervous system against you. It weaponizes your humanity. And it leaves you questioning everything, including yourself.
How It Happens: The Anatomy of Provocation
Reactionary abuse doesn't start with a scream. It starts with a whisper. A look. A pattern so subtle you don't see it forming until you're already trapped inside it.
Here's how it unfolds:
1. The Setup The abuser creates a low-grade atmosphere of tension — chronic criticism, dismissiveness, stonewalling, or unpredictable moods. You're always slightly on edge. Always trying to read the room.
2. The Provocation This can look many ways: gaslighting ("that never happened"), minimizing your feelings ("you're so sensitive"), triangulation (bringing in a third party to create jealousy or insecurity), love bombing followed by sudden withdrawal, or outright cruelty disguised as a "joke."
3. Your Nervous System Activates Here's what no one tells you: your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do. When you are chronically triggered in a relationship, your nervous system goes into survival mode, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. You are not overreacting. You are responding to a threat.
4. The Reaction After sustained provocation, you finally break. You yell. You cry. You say something cutting. You slam a door. You become someone you don't recognize.
5. The Flip Now the abuser has what they needed. They document your reaction, minimize the provocation, and paint themselves as the victim. In the outside world, they tell people you're unstable. In your relationship, they use this moment as leverage for months, sometimes years.
This is not an accident. This is a strategy.
Why It's So Confusing
This is the part that kept me up at night. Why couldn't I see it while I was in it?
Because your brain is lying to you.
Trauma does something extraordinary and devastating to the mind. It reorganizes your perception of reality. When you are in a trauma-bonded relationship, your nervous system is so dysregulated that you literally cannot access the prefrontal cortex, the rational, reasoning part of your brain, during conflict. You are operating from your amygdala. From pure survival.
So when the abuse happens and you react, you feel shame immediately. The rational brain comes back after and says, "What did I do?" But it doesn't go back far enough to see what was done to you first.
The confusion deepens because:
Love is real. You genuinely care for this person. That makes every harmful moment feel like an anomaly, not a pattern.
Good moments exist. The cycle of abuse includes periods of warmth, affection, and connection. Your brain holds onto these as the "real" relationship.
Your reactions feel disproportionate. Because you don't see the full accumulation, the thousand small cuts before the scream, your reaction looks outsized to you too.
Shame silences you. You stop telling people what's happening because you're embarrassed by your own behavior. This isolation is exactly what the abuser wants.
Trauma Bonds: Why You Can't Just Leave
I need to pause here and talk about trauma bonds, because this is where most people, friends, family, even therapists who don't specialize in relational trauma, get it wrong.
They say: "Why don't you just leave?"
As if love and fear and neurochemistry are a choice.
A trauma bond is not weakness. It is not stupidity. It is a biological attachment response formed through intermittent reinforcement, the unpredictable alternation between pain and pleasure.
Think about it like this: slot machines are the most addictive form of gambling because the reward is unpredictable. Your nervous system works the same way. When love is consistent, the brain habituates. When love is unpredictable, sometimes euphoric, sometimes devastating, the brain becomes obsessed. It fixates on getting the next hit of connection.
Biologically, you are experiencing:
Elevated cortisol (stress hormone) during the abuse phases
Dopamine and oxytocin surges during the love bombing phases
Adrenaline that keeps you in a state of hypervigilance
This is a chemical cocktail that mimics addiction. Leaving doesn't just mean walking out the door. It means going through withdrawal from a person your nervous system has encoded as survival.
I lived this. I stayed longer than I should have because part of me believed the warmth was real, and it was, sometimes. That's what makes it so cruel.
The Role of Trauma, Triggers, and Attachment Style
Here's where it gets personal. And where I want you to see yourself, not just a clinical framework.
We don't enter relationships as blank slates. We arrive carrying everything, every wound, every learned behavior, every story we were told about love, safety, and our own worth.
Your attachment style was formed in childhood. It's the blueprint your nervous system uses to navigate closeness and threat in relationships.
Anxious attachment → you fear abandonment, you over-function, you chase, you people-please, and you are incredibly easy to provoke because withdrawal feels like death.
Avoidant attachment → you shut down, you disappear emotionally, and your withdrawal can trigger an anxiously attached partner into reactive behavior, without you ever raising your voice.
Disorganized attachment → you want closeness and are terrified of it simultaneously. You are both the person running toward and away. This is often forged in early trauma and abuse.
When two people with incompatible or wounded attachment styles come together, especially when unhealed trauma is present, the relationship becomes a mirror. A very painful one.
Your triggers are the doorways back to old wounds. When your partner does something that activates an old fear, abandonment, betrayal, being unseen, being controlled, you don't just react to them. You react to every person who ever made you feel that way before.
Your partner pushes. Old wounds open. The nervous system floods. You react. They document the reaction.
The cycle begins again.
My own triggers were forged in abandonment, in learning early that love was conditional, that I had to perform and prove my worth to be kept. So when I encountered someone who used withdrawal as a weapon, something primal in me ignited. I became someone I didn't recognize. Not because I was broken, but because an old wound had been pressed.
Communication Breakdown: Where Toxicity Takes Root
Healthy relationships require what trauma robs us of: nervous system regulation, emotional safety, and the ability to be vulnerable without it being weaponized.
In toxic relationships, communication degrades through predictable stages:
Shutdown: feelings aren't safe to express, so they go underground
Resentment: what isn't spoken festers
Contempt: the relationship shifts from two partners to adversaries
Manipulation: when direct communication is unsafe, indirect control takes over: guilt, gaslighting, silent treatment, playing the victim
Explosion: all that suppressed pain finally surfaces, and it looks ugly
This is the breeding ground for reactionary abuse. When you cannot speak your truth safely, when every attempt at honest communication is used against you, you stop communicating and start surviving.
The Psychological Abuse Underneath
Let's name what's underneath the reactionary abuse dynamic. Because provoking someone to react doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's part of a larger architecture of psychological abuse that may include:
Gaslighting: making you question your own memory, perception, and sanity
DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender (this is the flip)
Coercive control: using fear, isolation, or financial dependence to maintain power
Emotional withholding: love and affection (including sex) as a punishment-reward system
Triangulation: using other people to destabilize your sense of security
Smear campaigns: telling others about your reactions while omitting the provocations
The goal, whether conscious or not, is to destabilize your sense of reality so completely that you become dependent on the abuser to define it for you.
You Are Not the Abuser
I need to say this clearly, because I needed someone to say it to me:
Reacting to abuse is not the same as being abusive.
A person who has been poked, prodded, gaslit, and pushed to the edge and finally breaks, that is not the same as a person who orchestrates suffering for control.
Your reaction was information. It was your body saying: I am not safe. I am not okay. Something is very wrong here.
The shame you feel about how you showed up in that relationship? I want you to hold it gently. Not to excuse harm if harm was caused, accountability matters, always. But to understand that you were responding to a war you didn't even know you were in.
The Path Forward: Breaking the Cycle
Healing from reactionary abuse is not about becoming someone who never reacts. It's about building such a deep relationship with yourself that no one can use your wounds against you.
Here's what helped me, and what I offer through the Inspired Warrior Project:
1. Somatic Healing The trauma lives in the body. Breathwork, sound healing, and Reiki are not luxuries, they are medicine for a nervous system that has been at war.
2. Attachment Work Understanding your attachment style is not about labeling yourself. It's about seeing the pattern so you can interrupt it. Trauma-informed coaching can help you build the secure base within yourself that you've been searching for in others.
3. Nervous System Regulation Learning to recognize when you're activated, and having tools to come back to your body, changes everything. You cannot access your wisdom from inside a trauma response.
4. Radical Truth-Telling Speaking what happened. Not the sanitized version. Not the version that protects the person who hurt you. The full, ugly, complicated truth, in a space that can hold it.
5. Community You cannot heal in isolation. The Inspired Warrior Project exists because warriors need each other. The Break the Cycle community, The Unbroken, these are spaces where your story doesn't have to be wrapped up neatly to belong.
A Final Word
If you saw yourself in any of this, if you've been carrying shame about the way you showed up in a relationship where you were slowly being dismantled, I want you to know:
You were not crazy. You were not the problem. You were reacting.
And now, warrior, it's time to heal.
Kass Gomez is the founder of the Inspired Warrior Project, a trauma-informed holistic healing platform offering 1:1 coaching, breathwork and cacao ceremonies, sound healing, tuning forks and Reiki. If this resonated with you, come find your people at the Inspired Warrior Project, and join the Break the Cycle community.
You don't have to keep carrying this alone.
