Leaving doesn’t always mean the abuse stops: a survivor’s experience of post separation abuse
Post Separation Abuse Awareness Week, 21 to 25 September 2026
“They’re not together any more, so he can’t hurt her.”
It is a belief that can be dangerously misleading. For some people experiencing domestic abuse, leaving a relationship does not mean the abuse ends. In some cases, separation can mark the beginning of a different and particularly dangerous phase, as perpetrators find new ways to maintain control, create fear and disrupt their former partner’s life.
Abuse can continue, or begin, after a relationship has ended, and that the period following separation can carry a heightened risk of violence. In a review of domestic homicides and suspected victim suicides in England and Wales between April 2021 and March 2022, the relationship had recently ended, or there was a threat of it ending, in almost 1 in 5 intimate partner homicide or suspected victim suicide case submissions.
Post separation abuse can take many forms. It can include stalking and harassment, financial abuse, manipulation through children and family court proceedings, unwanted contact, threats and intimidation. It can also involve seemingly small incidents that, when viewed together, form a pattern of behaviour intended to maintain control and create fear.
For Post Separation Abuse Awareness Week, a former Vale DAS service user and member of our Survivor Advocacy Panel has chosen to share her experience anonymously, in the hope that other survivors will recognise what is happening to them, know that they are not to blame, and know that support is available.
They know exactly what will cause fear and anxiety
“Four years after I left, and two years after the court proceedings began, I was still dealing with it. People can look at a situation and think, “They’re not together any more, so what can he do?” But they don’t understand that the person who has abused you knows you incredibly well. They know your vulnerabilities. They know your fears. They know what will make you anxious. Things that might look completely insignificant to somebody else can have a huge impact when they are deliberately chosen by someone who knows exactly what will frighten you. To the outside world, these things can look minor. But if someone knows that something is a trigger for you, they can use it. That’s one of the things that makes post separation abuse so difficult to explain.
I experienced stalking and harassment, but it wasn’t always obvious. There were things that could be explained away as coincidences. He would say, “Of course I’m not following her. It was a coincidence. She’s delusional.” If you raise concerns about those things, you can end up being made to look unreasonable or paranoid. But I knew the intent behind it.
Unless you’ve been there, it’s so hard to describe. You can see the pattern of behaviour and the intent behind it, but when you’re trying to explain individual incidents to somebody else, they can seem trivial.
When the abuse moves into your finances and the courts
Money became another way of maintaining control. He withheld money and child maintenance, which put me under unbelievable financial pressure. The mortgage wasn’t being paid. The house was being run into repossession fees. He was able to clear those fees in one day. He could have done it at any point. Instead, I had to deal with bailiffs and the fear of losing my home.
I wasn’t able to access the funds from the property either. It felt like the financial pressure was being used to make my life as difficult and stressful as possible, in the hope that I would eventually give in or go back.
Then there were the court proceedings. It took two years for my case to be heard. On one occasion, I had waited nine months for the court date. Five minutes before we were due to go in front of the judge, a sick note was sent to the court and the hearing had to be delayed. The same doctor’s note was used more than once to further delay proceedings. There was often no advance warning. A solicitor’s letter would arrive at the last minute asking for the court to be adjourned.
It felt like everything was being prolonged deliberately. I just wanted the case to end so I could move on with my life. Instead, I was constantly being pulled back into it.
I had five different court cases. None of them referred to the others, so nobody was seeing the whole pattern of behaviour. That was one of the hardest things. I knew what was happening because I was living it, but the different pieces were being dealt with separately.
When children become another route of control
The situation with the children was particularly difficult. I was accused of not allowing access. But I had never stopped him from seeing the children when the appropriate arrangements were in place.
There was a court order requiring supervised contact. He didn’t want that. Instead, he told other people that I was preventing him from seeing the children. He would demand things like two video calls a week and then not turn up for them. He called in sick every week when he was supposed to be speaking to the children.
There were also applications around the children, including a relocation order and a child abduction order. It felt like whichever route he couldn’t control, he would move onto another one. That’s what post separation abuse felt like to me.
They will use whichever tactic they can, and move on to the next when they’ve exhausted that avenue. When they don’t get what they want, you start to feel that something worse is going to happen.
It doesn’t always look like abuse
One of the things that people don’t understand is that post separation abuse doesn’t always look like someone being aggressive or threatening. Sometimes it looks like kindness.
As soon as he was arrested, his approach changed completely. Suddenly, money started appearing in my bank account. He changed the descriptions of the payments to things like “beautiful wife”.
He sent a present to the children with a letter to me inside that contained lots of compliments about me and a spa voucher for me.
It was supposedly for the children, but it felt like another way he would try to contact me. It was another way of getting into my life when I didn’t want contact.
That’s what makes it so difficult for other people to understand. Someone can look at that and think, “That’s nice. He’s sending money. He’s being kind.” But when you’ve experienced the abuse, you know that it’s not necessarily about the thing itself. It’s about the pattern.
They want you to feel alone
I also lost mutual friends. People didn’t necessarily want to believe that he was capable of what I was telling them. It was easier for them to see it as a “marital dispute”.
He sent a secret recording of the night he was arrested to my best friend at the time, to try and show he had nothing to hide and that I was making up problems. She was also feeding back information about where I was. He made her feel sorry for him by saying that I wasn’t allowing him to see the children.
But that wasn’t what was happening. I had never stopped him from seeing the children with supervised contact, for their safety. He needed to put the appropriate arrangements in place and he wouldn’t.
Nobody wanted to think badly of him. But the result was that I felt even more isolated. And it is incredibly lonely when you’re experiencing a constant, low level of contact that is against your wishes, but nobody else seems to understand why it is affecting you so much.
It’s like a game of chess
The best way I can describe it is that it’s like a game of chess. But it’s not about them winning. It’s about punishment. It’s about thinking, “How is this going to hurt her the most?”
If they can’t have you, how can they hurt you? Sometimes that means taking all the money. Sometimes it means trying to take full custody of the children. Sometimes it means leaving you homeless. They want you to come crawling back. It’s the ultimate submission.
I also felt that everything was a test of what I would tolerate. If I wouldn’t tolerate one thing, they would try something else. If I eventually gave in and went back, then the message was, “Oh, she will tolerate that.”
If you drop the charges, it’s another thing they have learned they can get away with. It’s about testing the boundaries and finding out what they can still control.
I knew in my gut that if he came back into the house, I wouldn’t make it out alive. I genuinely believed that he wasn’t going to let me get away with the arrest. I thought he was going to make me pay for it. It felt like life or death survival.
The effects don’t just disappear because you have left. I would completely freeze and have panic attacks if a door banged or I heard a noise. I’m still living with the effects. We talk a lot about the physical aspects of domestic abuse, but the psychological scars stay with you.
The person you feel safest with can be the person you are most unsafe with. And they can spend years making you feel fragile and dependent, so that when you finally leave, you don’t suddenly become the strong, independent person everyone expects you to be.
You can see the pattern
I wish people understood that you don’t have to experience one huge, obvious incident for it to be abuse. Sometimes it is the accumulation of hundreds of things: A message. A payment. A court application. A solicitor’s letter arriving at the last minute. ‘Coincidentally’ bumping into you somewhere. A take-away delivery arriving at midnight. A missed video call. A change in the way they speak to you. Something that looks completely insignificant to somebody else can be terrifying when you know the person behind it and you know what they are capable of.
That’s why recognising the pattern matters. I know that if somebody had explained post separation abuse to me in those terms, I might have understood sooner that what I was experiencing had a name. I might have felt less alone. And I might have understood that I wasn’t imagining it.
Specialist support can help you to safety
I am sharing my story because I want other people to know that if this is happening to them, they are not alone. If you have left an abusive relationship and the abuse has continued, changed or escalated, it doesn’t mean you have done something wrong. It doesn’t mean you are being difficult. It doesn’t mean you are overreacting. And it doesn’t mean that because the relationship has ended, you should be able to deal with everything that comes afterwards on your own.
There is support available. Vale DAS supported me to understand what I had been through, and begin to rebuild my life. I want other survivors to know that they deserve that support too. Leaving is not always the end of domestic abuse. But it can be the beginning of becoming safer, with the right support around you.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, including post separation abuse, Vale DAS can provide specialist support.
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