This one goes out to all my ladies and genteel men out there. I'm going to talk about emotionally/psychologically abusive relationships, which are a lot more insidious and in many opinions more damaging than physical abuse. Four years ago, some guy took a swing at me and that was the easiest thing in the world to walk away from with my self-respect intact. The flag doesn't get any more red than that. So what I'm going to discuss here are the pink flags, the not so black-and-white signs that may trigger your instinct that "something's not right here..."
A minute later, you're rationalizing it away, making excuses for the misbehavior, or most commonly, putting the blame on yourself. "Well he never hit me," you may be thinking. "I can stop this if I stay strong and do everything else right." Or, "this is normal for men." Sorry folks, it isn't. While it's definitely more common than the outright wife-beater scenario, it's still far from the norm and nothing you should ever settle for. The fatal flaws and insecurities you believe you have do not disqualify you from a healthy relationship and you should never date a loser just because you think it excuses your own shortcomings. It doesn't, and he will make you feel a thousand times worse about yourself than one of those "boring" nice guys you turned down before you met Mr. Excitement.
If you're wondering whether this may apply to you, here’s an intriguing fact that may facilitate an understanding of the situation. There is a very wide range of behaviors and personality traits that are considered "healthy" and "normal" for people today. We’re all snowflakes, right? Well, some of us are. Peculiarly, prototypical abusive men tend to be surprisingly uniform and synchronized in their methods, motivations, and dominant personality traits. I am reminded of a quote from a group of several married women who described their husbands in this light, "It’s as though we were all married to the same exact man." Knowing how eerily similar the reigning traits of these men are should ease the burden of distinguishing ordinary idiosyncrasy from the tried-and-true standard hallmarks of an abuser. Not all abusers will overlap 100% but there is enough general similarity that if enough of these signs hit close to home with you, you may want to examine your circumstances more carefully.
I am not a licensed psychologist nor do I purport to be one. Psychological abuse is however an area that I’ve studied thoroughly and I have worked with several abuse victims in the past. I also have some serious firsthand experience with these situations and many friends who have gone through the same. Not every sign listed below will apply to all relationships, but they are some of the most salient and repeating that I’ve seen over the past several years. I hope they are helpful but only intend that they serve as a starting point to get the wheels turning. There is a lot of information out there and I encourage anyone who suspects they may be in this type of relationship to get informed.
Signs You May Be in a Psychologically Abusive Relationship
In the most extreme cases, he hits you, threatens to hit you, screams at you, or scolds and belittles you frequently. Physical abuse is the easiest trait to identify and every bit as damning as it seems. If he’s hitting you, get help. Verbal abuse is easier to excuse ("he’s only joking"; "he’s trying to help me with tough love"; "it’s normal") but also conspicuous in its own right. A few exchanges of put-downs are ordinary and to be expected in any long term relationship. But if you’re wondering whether your partner has crossed the line, ask yourself whether the things he says are particularly cruel. Are they kind of things your best friend would ever say to you? Are they the kind of things you would ever say to anyone else? Would you find them too hurtful? Do they sting you on a deep base level? Does he keep repeating them despite your increasingly determined efforts to make him stop? If the answers are "no, no, yes, yes, yes" in that order, you may want to keep reading...
Know however that verbal abuse is only a small part of a much larger comprehensive abusive profile. The actual psychological abuse (aka "emotional abuse") is much greater than a few unkind words. Verbal abuse is simply the easiest component to spot. The rest can be more subtle, particularly if you don’t know what to look for. Here are some warning signs:
He instinctively tries to control or change aspects of your schedule, interests, values, social network, career choices, or living situation.
He makes light of any suggestion that he could be mistreating or abusing you.
He comes from an unusually dysfunctional family unit and/or had or has major acceptance and esteem issues.
He treats his mother, sister, or pets in a way that you would never want to be treated.
When he apologizes, and that’s if he apologizes, it’s quick and mechanical, leaving you with the sinking impression that it lacked any sincerity. You’re just happy he said he was sorry.
You feel that you’re the only one who really understands him and believe that with enough concentrated effort, you will rescue him from his misery and have his eternal gratitude.
He left another guy/woman callously, suddenly, and without remorse to be with you. You found it aggrandizing and organic because you were naturally "so much better" than his prior. The other shoe is waiting to drop.
He’s not friends with any of his exes and has nothing but horrible things to say about them. According to him, they all victimized and wronged him somehow. If you ever meet his exes, you may find they are much calmer and nicer than his description; sometimes you may feel they are trying to tell you something.
Drug abuse. Alcohol, cocaine, prescription drugs, marijuana, others. He may tell you he has "never been addicted." You should believe him because an addict would never lie to a loved one. And if you believe that, I have some land to sell you in South Florida.
You are a perfectionist, a workaholic, or you’re anorexic.
He doesn’t listen to you or seem to care about your interests. He (half-jokingly, of course) puts down your hobbies or favorite music/films/books and makes you feel you should be grateful to him for even taking a few seconds to indulge your enthusiasm.
Conversation is hollow and objective-oriented. He interrogates you but makes no concerted effort to know you better as a person. While he’s apt at charming, he’s neither a good communicator nor is he interested in becoming one. Once the courtship phase is over, you have a hard time picturing yourself really enjoying musing over a cup of coffee or tea with this guy.
The sex is really good. It’s secretly one of the main reasons you justified being with him.
He whines a lot. In fact, he complains about almost everything under the sun, including you. The world is a cruel place for your man. He’s very plaintive and very negative. He doesn’t like to be "patronized" when you point out the brighter side. The glass is always 2% empty.
He embarrasses you in private and in front of friends. When you speak up, he claims you are oversensitive and overreacting. Men communicate through humor and sarcasm, so if your guy is busting you viciously but then laughing about it like it’s all in "good fun," he doesn’t think too highly of you.
He takes pride in manipulating others and may boast at how skilled he is at this. He uses his friends or co-workers for their own favors (or to acquire new friends) or adoration but has no use for them otherwise. You might think you’re the single lucky guy/gal that this man never manipulates because he "loves" you more than anyone in the world. I wish that were true.
He’s strangely gleeful when misfortune strikes his ex-partners, ex-friends, or family members with whom he doesn’t get along.
He changes residences, friendships, interests, and jobs more often than a regular guy.
He exaggerates accomplishments and minimizes his past negative behavior as the consequence of someone else (a partner or employer) wronging him. He’s fooling himself as much as he’s trying to fool you.
He insists on managing both of your finances and dislikes your spending without his approval.
When you first started dating, he put you on a pedestal. He showed you that hidden softer and vulnerable side that he doesn’t show anyone else in the world. He made you feel you could open up likewise. It won you over. Somehow, the tables have turned and now he’s the one on the pedestal. You can’t criticize him for his faults because he "already told you about them! And he’s working on it!" or he outright denies them but he has no qualms gratuitously reminding you of your own.
He’s an aggressive (albeit skilled) driver who drives with a peculiar masculine sense of entitlement. You find it sexy.
He withholds approval, affection, and compliments. He tells you he doesn’t give them out easily or that they must be earned. He has unrealistic expectations, bizarrely high standards, and is highly judgmental and critical. Over the long term, nothing you do is ever quite good enough.
He’s uncomfortable receiving compliments. He’s a fraud and he knows that the basis for any compliment received is the false self he’s shown you. Your opinion is meaningless to him.
He limits or monitors your contact with friends & family. Healthy guys don’t do this.
If you don’t spend "enough" time with him, he insists that you don’t love him enough.
He has little respect for boundaries. You may find him snooping in your purse or text messages but somehow think this is ok. You may find him pushing boundaries with others in ways that flout their comfort zone. For instance, I have an ex who started talking about my penis size in front of my conservative friends from law school and it was awkward and embarrassing as hell for all of us. An abuser probably pressured you to spend time with him early on in the relationship and if you said "no," he wanted to know why and whether you would change your plans for him. He wanted your time, all the time. Abusers are self-trained kleptomaniacs, both literally and figuratively.
You always feel guilty about something. You blame yourself for disappointing him.
He has mild or serious bipolar traits or family history. Cycling mood. Cycling appearance (extraordinary degree, from piercingly handsome to looking like a burned out washed up former child superstar). Sleeping problems. Changes plans frequently. Says on Wednesday, "We’re going to have so much fun at the party on Saturday" but on Saturday says, "Meh... I don’t feel like going." For an extreme case of the bipolar/abusive dynamic, check out avowed bipolar abuser Bobby Brown’s relationship with his now well-known deteriorated victim (and survivor), Whitney Houston. Note however that since the bipolar phenomenon exists on more of a continuum than in two black and white categories, much of it is undiagnosed. I encourage anyone interested to research more low-grade forms of bipolar to detect how they relate to the degree of abuse in your relationship. You’ll probably find they are directly proportionate.
You had a gut instinct in the early stages that something was not quite right with him but you trained yourself to ignore it. Occasionally, you still notice behaviors that you’re entirely not comfortable with, but you explain them away, deny them, or resign yourself to "taking the good with the bad."
He puts you down in the guise of the helpful critic. You should "lose weight," take care of your "acne," or get a better job, and he’s telling you that "for your own good." He may buy you gifts that implicate your perceived defects, like diet pills, nutrition magazines, anti-wrinkle cream, or other flaw-fixers. He may offer to accompany you to parties to help you get over your social "awkwardness." Nice as it seems though, the effect is deliberate; you feel like shit and he comes across as the noble willing helper.
He has a strong unhealthy affinity for gambling, masturbation, pornography, or prostitutes. Abusive men are usually attracted to young-looking skinny delicate mates and if you deviate from the script, he’ll make sure you feel inadequate.
He has no real respect for women, ethnic minorities, gays/lesbians, or the elderly. If you hear words like "cunt," "nigger," "faggot," "bitch," or "whore" every week, watch out.
Brutal honesty. You might find it admirable, but that’s better left for film critics. Anyone who sees something in you that they would genuinely like you to improve knows how to communicate the message without scathing you. Brutal honesty in a relationship is lazy disregard; the equally important half is communicating like a responsible caring adult.
You find that you’ve changed a lot during your relationship with him. You’ve set aside a lot of dreams and expectations, deciding to "get realistic" since you’re not getting any younger and Prince Charming is only a myth (if not a wolf in sheep’s clothing). You compromise more now than you ever have in your life. You’ve invested so much in this man that you feel you couldn’t possibly revert back to square one. Surprisingly though, you can.
He’s unduly hard on himself. You tell him to love himself for who he is but he’s just losing too much hair, and never athletic enough, trim enough, social enough, or making enough money to be happy. He’s even harder on you though.
You walk on eggshells to accommodate him. When he’s upset, you internalize it and it ruins your day. When things are going well, you’re buoyed. He affects you strongly... too strongly and you know it. And guess who else knows? He does.
His friends are unhealthy, maladjusted, or downright shallow. You are sometimes amazed and embarrassed that he bends over backwards and kisses up pathetically to other people (who often don’t seem worth the effort) but can’t seem to muster up the slightest crumb of kindness for you.
He tells you that you’re crazy. A lot.
He tells himself that you are crazy too. Otherwise, he would have to acknowledge that you’ve noticed something real which he doesn’t ever want to face.
Cycle of Violence. For over three decades, studies of abusive relationships have focused heavily on the concept of the "cycle of violence." At its simplest, this means that the relationship is more fluctuating and turbulent than constantly negative. Generally, three stages are recognized, those being the "honeymoon" phase, the tension build-up, and the abuse itself. If you find your life undulating from apologies, gifts, and extreme love, to normalcy, to abuse and then back again and again, you have a serious warning sign on your hands.
Disproportionate response. Your abuser is very sensitive and defensive. He doesn’t like to be bothered when "you should know" he’s not in the mood for whatever is on your mind. There’s never a good time for you to speak up. You say you’d like to talk, he chides "not now." You give him a puzzled look, he calls you a name. You call him a name, he threatens you. You threaten him back, he hits you. He escalates the conflict but afterwards insists it was all your doing because you "provoked" him. Don’t believe him.
Projection. When we first meet someone, we know so little that we can only begin to comprehend them fully. We glean a small subset of information from what they tell and show us, but we tend to assimilate that with what we know generally about "people" and thereby fill in the blanks. Much of what we know about people stems from what we know about ourselves. Hence projection, the concept of taking one’s own traits and reflexively applying them to other people. Good people project good traits and "see the good" in others. Abusers on the other hand, writhing in a perpetual abyss of fear and envy, tend to project motivations as base and sadistic as their own onto everyone around them. To an abuser, everyone else in the universe is a similarly cornered rat. Conversation is not a pastime; it is a survival skill. If your abuser is arrogant, he assumes you are as well. If he’s unfaithful, he will impute that trait onto you and question you relentlessly. If his life is in disarray, then so is yours. If he lies pathologically, then he hears everything you say as part of an identical tapestry of deceit. If he wants to hurt and control others (which he does) he will assume those directives motivate you as well. He will also assume that you cover them up as well as he does. A passive-aggressive abuser reads harm into your most seemingly innocuous words and actions because those are the exact covert cowardly means he prefers to transmit his own negativity. For instance, my ex believed that every time I ordered something with mushrooms I was doing it solely to prevent him from sharing my food because he hated mushrooms. Actually, I just really like mushrooms. I couldn’t fathom he would infer something so vindictive from a food selection until I realized that he was a man entirely accustomed to generating passive-aggressive signals of condemnation. Naturally, he assumed I was the same. He was wrong. That’s projection folks. The hardest part is realizing that the good intentions we project onto our abusers, and even others in our lives, are often equally imaginary.
Silent treatment. He sulks or ignores you for days or weeks on end when he’s displeased. He knows how much you care for him and how much it will hurt you to be shut out in the cold. That’s why he does it.
Jekyll and Hyde. Your guy is charming to the whole world and the whole world could never imagine how cruel and degrading he is when it’s just the two of you together. In fact, the world probably won’t believe you at first because he has discredited you in advance: you are crazy, he tells you. You may believe him. The news gets worse: he has probably told all of your mutual friends you are nuts too and confessed all of your intimate worries & shortcomings that you thought were "private" to them, mixed with some very fancy half-truths and outright lies. Your friends, at first, won’t believe anything you say. The smarter ones may see what’s going on with their own eyes and eventually come around but it takes time. Your abuser has the upper hand because while you were busy loving and encouraging him, he was sowing seeds of distrust throughout as much of your social network as he could find. If you ask him about it, he will deny it and remind you that you and he have some unprecedented inviolable trust that he would "never betray" because he loves you so much. It’s called hot air.
Hence, abusers do not like it at all when you talk about your relationship with other people. "A relationship is between two people; you don’t talk about it!" he may stress. (And yes, that is a verbatim quote). They want to sever your lifelines of communication so that you don’t have a friendly ear to help disperse your own self doubt when you’re at your weakest. Frankly, they’re also ashamed of how they treat you because on a gut level, they know it’s wrong and don’t want others to find out. Here are the three main methods abusers utilize to cut you off from your support network:
- Discredit through Insult: Your partner may belittle your friends (in private, with you) either with insults or jokes. He may make fun of them in ways that you actually find funny, even if the comments are a bit harsh for your own tastes. Ultimately, you begin to adopt your abuser’s ill appraisals of your own friends and you begin to doubt their worth yourself. Because your abuser has convinced implicitly you that those people are losers, you won’t turn to them in times of need because you likewise devalue them.
- Forging Independent Relationships with Your Friends/Family: Healthy men usually have their own close friends and don’t need to leech onto yours. By contrast, abusers do not have strong honest bonds with others and view friends and acquaintances as material acquisitions. He’s still trying to win that popularity contest that he flunked out of in high school. "Look mom, I have fifteen friends now!" Initially, it seems flattering. "Oh wow, he’s taking a real interest in me and wants to be involved in my social life." It may begin with a group going out for drinks or other activities. You may like the fact that your boyfriend/husband/fiancé gets along so well with your close ones. But once he starts regularly calling your friends and spending time with them, without you present, he has crossed the line. As innocent as the behavior seems, it is highly abnormal. Your abuser does not want "mutual friends," he wants to cut you off from your own friends and more often than not, he will succeed. As your abuser and your friends’ rapport evolves, he will slowly trickle out information carefully crafted to paint himself as a martyr or victim in a horribly "unfair" relationship with you. Commonly, he will paint you as mentally disturbed, abusive (the irony!), or obsessive so that you have no credibility and he’ll mix fact with fiction in a way that garners your friends’ utmost sympathy. The effect is two-fold. He now has a strong relationship with your friends and you now have no support network when he violates you. After any disagreement or break-up, these friends will feel "caught in the middle" and won’t want to "get involved" and if anything, they will be more sympathetic to the abuser than to the victim. How convenient. Don’t let it happen.
- Sexualizing Your Friends: This is another really common method of limiting your outside contacts. Your abuser may flirt heavily with your friends (either in your presence or behind your back), may have sex with them, or may propel an uncomfortable pattern of joking that insinuates he is having an "affair" with them. Your friends mean no harm and they may actually feel flattered that they are "so attractive" that your boyfriend/husband finds them desirable. They might not even tell you because they find the attention delicious in a guilty kind of way. But the effect is deliberate. If you’re abused by a man who has fucked your sister or your best friend, your sister or best friend are going to be the last people you can turn to for help when you need it most. He’s rendered you even more helpless and that was the goal all along.
So there are some signs. If a good portion of the above hits a little close to home, I encourage you to get informed and get help. While some theorize that an abuser can be rehabilitated with the precise combination of victim’s survival skills, nurturing, honesty, and counseling, the general consensus is that it’s not worth your time or effort to waste your life taming a viper. You deserve better.
Don’t be surprised if after the break-up, he’s found new prey faster than you can say "rollercoaster rebound." His new toy girlfriend/boyfriend may surprisingly remind you of yourself: kind gracious demeanor, similar music tastes, similar spirits, delicate, vulnerable, loving, deferential, insecure. In fact, you probably have more in common with your abuser’s exes and new victims than you ever imagined.
While it’s natural to feel some jealousy, instead be thankful that your ex has a new object for his attention. Otherwise, he’d be preoccupied with the gaping hole in his universe: your absence. Contrary to common knowledge, approximately 75% of victims murdered by their abusers are killed after the relationship ends. Here, the abuser’s total loss of control is a psychic shock akin to losing one’s mind. Emotional abuse may translate into assaults. Threats may have consequences. Protect yourself, your pets, and your loved ones; they are fair game. Use every legal option available and play by the rules.
Note that the above isn’t strictly construed to male abusers. Lesbian women and straight women may also be psychologically abusive but for simplicity’s sake and ease of reading, I’ve confined the above to instances of the male pronoun. Also, many traits above may apply to familial relationships, employment relationships, and even abusive friendships.
If you find yourself in this situation, do not hate or blame yourself. It’s hard because he may have violated you so deeply and reduced you to a shell or parody of your former self. But remember that abusers are attracted to you initially for your radiant strengths, not your weaknesses. Your vulnerabilities are simply the tools they utilize to acquire and enslave your beauty, intelligence, sociability, and good heart. They feed off your positive essence to fill a void within themselves. In time, you will regenerate. But the first step is finding the fangs and not until they are identified can the process of tweezing them out commence. Don’t doubt yourself.
I hope that the above has been helpful.