A Longitudinal Study Suggests Childhood Emotional Abuse Can Quietly Affect Romantic Relationships Years Later

A new longitudinal study suggests that childhood emotional abuse may quietly undermine a person's ability to build satisfying romantic relationships years later. The study, titled “How early psychological abuse predicts decreased relationship satisfaction via belongingness in adulthood: A longitudinal study,” found that a weakened sense of belonging appears to be a key pathway linking early psychological maltreatment with lower relationship satisfaction in adulthood.

The findings, published in Personality and Individual Differences, showed that adults who experienced psychological abuse as children were more likely to feel dissatisfied in their romantic relationships because they developed a weaker sense of social belonging. The research adds to growing evidence that emotional abuse can leave lasting psychological scars, even though it has received far less scientific attention than physical or sexual abuse.

How childhood emotional abuse shapes adult relationships

Psychological abuse includes behaviors such as persistent criticism, humiliation, emotional neglect, rejection, threats of abandonment, and consistently cold or dismissive parenting.

Repeated exposure to these experiences during childhood may influence how people view themselves and others, often weakening self-worth and making it more difficult to trust others or feel emotionally safe in close relationships.

According to attachment theory, early relationships with caregivers provide the foundation for future interpersonal relationships. Children whose caregivers are consistently supportive and emotionally responsive are more likely to develop secure attachment, allowing them to trust others and believe they deserve love and care.

In contrast, emotionally abusive parenting may contribute to insecure or disorganized attachment patterns. As adults, individuals may struggle to regulate emotions, become highly sensitive to perceived rejection, or alternate between seeking excessive closeness and distancing themselves from romantic partners.

Why belonging matters

Lead author Yakup İme, a researcher at Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey, investigated whether a person's sense of belonging could explain the connection between childhood emotional abuse and later relationship satisfaction.

Belongingness refers to feeling accepted, valued, and connected to other people. Previous research has shown that strong social relationships promote resilience, reduce stress, and lower the risk of depression and anxiety.

Conversely, persistent feelings of exclusion or disconnection have been associated with loneliness, poorer mental health, and greater difficulty maintaining close relationships, including romantic partnerships.

Inside the study

The researchers conducted a two-wave longitudinal study involving 346 university students in Konya, Turkey, including 213 women and 133 men between the ages of 20 and 36.

Participants completed questionnaires twice—once in February and again three months later during the same academic year. The repeated assessments allowed the researchers to examine how childhood experiences predicted later changes in belongingness and relationship satisfaction rather than simply identifying associations at a single point in time.

At both assessments, participants completed three paper-based questionnaires.

The first measured experiences of childhood psychological abuse by asking how frequently parents engaged in behaviors such as humiliation, emotional rejection, or persistent criticism.

The second assessed participants' current sense of belonging by measuring how accepted, valued, and socially connected they felt within their communities and peer relationships.

The third evaluated romantic relationship satisfaction by examining overall happiness, security, and fulfillment within participants' current romantic relationships.

To preserve anonymity while linking responses across both assessments, the researchers matched questionnaires using pseudonyms and partial telephone numbers. The data were analyzed using a cross-lagged statistical model designed to examine how each variable predicted changes in the others over time while accounting for participants' initial scores.

Emotional abuse predicted lower belonging and relationship satisfaction

The findings revealed a clear pattern connecting childhood emotional abuse with adult romantic difficulties.

Participants who reported higher levels of psychological abuse during childhood also reported a weaker sense of belonging at the first assessment.

Importantly, childhood emotional abuse continued to predict lower belongingness three months later even after accounting for participants' initial levels of social connectedness. This suggests that early psychological maltreatment may contribute to an ongoing reduction in feelings of social acceptance during adulthood.

Lower belongingness at the first assessment, in turn, predicted lower romantic relationship satisfaction three months later.

Taken together, the findings suggest that childhood psychological abuse contributes to relationship dissatisfaction indirectly by weakening a person's sense of belonging. Statistical analyses identified belongingness as a mediator linking early emotional abuse with later difficulties in romantic relationships.

The researchers suggest that people who repeatedly experienced rejection, criticism, or emotional neglect during childhood may internalize beliefs that they are unworthy of love or likely to be abandoned. These expectations may lead them to withdraw from social relationships, reducing the broader support networks that often help stabilize romantic partnerships.

Implications for therapy and prevention

The findings highlight the importance of addressing emotional abuse alongside physical and sexual trauma in mental health treatment and relationship counseling.

The researchers suggest that therapeutic approaches focused on rebuilding self-worth, strengthening trust, and improving social skills may help reduce some of the long-term relational effects associated with childhood psychological maltreatment.

Interventions specifically designed to strengthen belongingness—including group therapy, peer-support programs, community activities, and structured social skills training—may help survivors rebuild supportive social networks beyond a romantic relationship.

Expanding sources of emotional support may reduce dependence on a romantic partner to meet every emotional need, potentially contributing to greater relationship stability, security, and satisfaction.

The findings also reinforce the importance of prevention. Educating parents, teachers, and caregivers about the long-term psychological effects of emotional abuse may help reduce behaviors that are sometimes dismissed as strict discipline but can leave lasting emotional scars.

Study limitations

The researchers acknowledge several important limitations.

The study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which may be influenced by memory errors, participants' current mood, or a desire to present themselves in a socially favorable way.

The three-month follow-up period was relatively short for examining psychological processes rooted in childhood experiences. Longer-term longitudinal studies following participants for years would provide a clearer picture of how these patterns evolve across adulthood.

Because the participants were recruited from a single university in Turkey, the findings may not fully generalize to other countries or cultures where parenting styles, family relationships, and romantic expectations differ.

Future research could examine whether similar pathways operate across more diverse populations while also investigating additional factors such as attachment style, self-esteem, interpersonal trust, and emotion regulation, all of which may also help explain how childhood emotional abuse affects adult romantic relationships.

Article prepared by Victoria Caldwell.