My partner threatens to hurt themselves if I leave

You have tried to leave, or started to say the words, and your partner has told you what they will do to themselves if you go. Perhaps they have said it once, in despair. Perhaps it arrives every time the conversation gets close, and goes away when you stay. Either way it works. You cannot walk out of a room where someone has told you that your leaving will end them.

This page holds two things at once, because you have to. The threat may be real. The threat may be a lever. It is often both.

What tends to be going on

Real distress. People do hurt themselves at the end of relationships, and relationship breakdown is one of the risk factors the Samaritans name, for men in particular. If your partner is in a long stretch of being low, drinks heavily, has hurt themselves before, or has lost their footing in other parts of life, the threat deserves to be taken seriously as a statement about their state. That is a reason to involve other people, and no reason to stay.

A lever. The people who work with coercive control hear this threat constantly, and they hear it because it works better than almost anything else. It makes you the guardian of their life. It converts your wish to leave into a potential act of killing. It moves the conversation from what they have done to what you might cause. And it tends to have a shape: it appears when you talk about leaving, it recedes when you stay, it is not followed by any attempt to get help from anyone but you, and it may sit alongside other threats, about the children, about money, about telling people what you are really like.

Both at once. A person can be in real pain and also be using that pain to keep you. Those are not alternatives. Trying to decide which one is true before you act is the trap, because the answer is often "yes" to both and you will never be certain.

What you are responsible for. How you leave. With care, without contempt, having made sure someone else knows and can be near them. You are not responsible for what they then choose, and anyone in the UK who does this work will tell you so plainly. A person who makes their survival conditional on your staying has handed you a weight that was never yours.

Your own side. Have you ever said anything like this to keep someone? If so, it is worth sitting with how it felt to hear it, and the Respect Phoneline is there for that too.

What this might mean for you

Treat every threat as possibly real, by involving other people. This is the one move that answers both possibilities at once. If the risk is immediate, call 999. If it is not, tell someone in their life: a parent, a sibling, a close friend. Give them the Samaritans number, 116 123, free and 24 hours, and ring it with them if they will let you. Suggest their GP, or NHS 111. Once other people hold some of this, the threat is being taken seriously and it has also stopped being a private lever between the two of you.

Notice what happens when you do. Someone in real distress is usually relieved that others know. Someone using the threat often becomes angry that you told anyone.

Do not negotiate your leaving against their safety. "I'll stay until you're better" has no end date, because the condition is theirs to control.

Plan your leaving the way the people who do this work advise for any situation with control in it: quietly, with help, and then go. Separation is when threats of all kinds tend to escalate, including threats turned outward. The free module Is this danger? asks what services ask, and the threat to self-harm is one of its questions for a reason.

Afterwards, let other people be the ones who check on them. Your continued presence will be read as a reason to continue the pattern.

One next step

What's really holding you works through the blockers one at a time, and this is one of the heaviest. If the threat sits alongside other levers, When the problem is control goes through the pattern slowly. The free module Leaving safely is a plan you build yourself. The assessment begins with safety.

Samaritans 116 123, free, 24 hours, for anyone struggling to cope, including your partner and including you. National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247, 24 hours. Men's Advice Line 0808 801 0327. Galop, for LGBT+ people, 0800 999 5428. If you believe someone is in immediate danger, call 999. Pressing Escape twice leaves this site at once.