It’s incredibly admirable that you dedicate yourself to helping individuals and couples rebuild their relationships, even after significant challenges. You’re absolutely right that many relationships can recover and thrive, even after seismic fallouts, if both parties are willing to work together in good faith. However, when one person continues to cause harm, perpetuate conflict, or sabotage progress—even from a distance—it raises profound questions about their underlying motivations and emotional state.

What Drives a Person to Act This Way?

1. Unresolved Trauma and Pain
   People who inflict ongoing harm often carry deep emotional wounds. If they haven’t processed their own pain or trauma, they may externalize it by lashing out at others. Their destructive behavior becomes a reflection of their inner turmoil—a way to avoid facing their own feelings by blaming or punishing others.
2. Need for Control
   For some, control is a way to feel safe or powerful. If they believe the relationship is slipping out of their grasp, they might resort to manipulative or harmful actions to reassert dominance. Even from a distance, they may seek to control the narrative, the emotions, or the lives of those they perceive as having wronged them.
3. Inability to Accept Responsibility
   Admitting fault or accepting their role in the breakdown of the relationship may feel unbearable. Instead of owning up to their actions, they project blame outward, using abuse or sabotage to deflect attention from their own shortcomings.
4. Fear of Irrelevance or Rejection
   For some, the end of a relationship triggers a profound fear of being forgotten, rejected, or irrelevant. They might resort to extreme behavior—good or bad—to remain a focal point in the other person’s life, ensuring they’re not “erased” or “replaced.”
5. Vindictiveness and the Desire for Revenge
   If they perceive themselves as the victim, even if they’re the one causing harm, they may justify their behavior as payback. This warped sense of justice can drive them to destroy the relationship further, believing it’s “deserved.”
6. Narcissistic Tendencies
   People with narcissistic traits often struggle to tolerate situations that don’t revolve around their desires or image. If they feel their “control” or “power” in the relationship is threatened, they may escalate abuse to reassert their superiority.
7. Lack of Emotional Regulation
   Some individuals struggle to regulate intense emotions like anger, jealousy, or resentment. Instead of processing these feelings constructively, they act impulsively, doing damage without fully understanding the consequences—or worse, not caring.
8. Deep-Seated Insecurity
   A fragile sense of self-worth can lead someone to destroy relationships as a way of masking their inadequacies. If they can’t be “loved,” they might settle for being feared or hated, which still provides them with a sense of importance.
9. Sabotage as a Coping Mechanism
   Ironically, some people destroy relationships because they fear closeness, vulnerability, or intimacy. They may subconsciously push others away as a preemptive strike, ensuring they can’t be hurt first.

Why Is Moving Forward Impossible in These Cases?

For any relationship to heal, mutual effort, trust, and accountability are essential. When one person remains stuck in a destructive cycle, the foundation needed for repair and growth becomes impossible to build. Their refusal to stop “throwing fuel on the fire” keeps the other person in a state of defense and emotional exhaustion, preventing any chance of healing.

Additionally, their ongoing actions can retraumatize the other party, reinforcing the pain and making it increasingly difficult to move forward—either together or apart.

How Can You Approach This?

When working with individuals dealing with a person like this, it’s important to:

• Help Them Set Boundaries: Encourage them to protect their emotional and physical space from further harm.
• Empower Them: Remind them of their worth and their right to peace, even if it means disengaging from the toxic individual.
• Recognize the Limits of Change: Some people will not—or cannot—change. Acknowledging this can free someone from the false hope of reconciliation.
• Focus on Healing: Encourage them to prioritize their own healing and growth, rather than waiting for the other person to change.

Final Thoughts

The need to destroy a relationship often stems from unresolved internal issues within the destructive individual. While understanding their motivations can foster compassion, it doesn’t mean tolerating the behavior. True healing—whether for the individual or the relationship—requires safety, accountability, and mutual willingness to move forward. Sometimes, the healthiest choice is to walk away and build a life free from their influence.