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What are the warning signs of emotional abuse?

Emotional abuse centers around control, manipulation, isolation, and demeaning or threatening behavior. 

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Signs of abuse include:

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• Monitoring and controlling a person’s behavior, such as who they spend time with or how they spend money. 

• Threatening a person’s safety, property, or loved ones

• Isolating a person from family, friends, and acquaintances

• Demeaning, shaming, or humiliating a person

• Extreme jealousy, accusations, and paranoia

• Delivering constant criticism

• Regular ridicule or teasing

• Making acceptance or care conditional on a person’s choices

• Refusing to allow a person to spend time alone

• Thwarting a person’s professional or personal goals

• Instilling self-doubt and worthlessness 

• Gaslighting: making a person question their competence and even their basic perceptual experiences.

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What are subtle signs of emotional abuse?

Sometimes emotional abuse doesn’t involve overt threats or vigilant monitoring. More subtle signals that emotional abuse may be occurring in an important relationship include regularly judging a person’s perspective without trying to understand it, relying on blame rather than improvement, regarding the other person as inferior, frequent sarcasm, and telling the other person how to feel in an attempt to be “helpful.”

• He speaks disrespectfully about his former partners.

• He is disrespectful toward you. 

• He does favors for you that you don't want or puts on such a show of generosity that it makes you uncomfortable. 

• He is controlling. 

• He is possessive. 

• Nothing is ever his fault. 

• He abuses drugs or alcohol. 

• He pressures you for sex. 

• he gets serious too quickly about the relationship. 

• He intimidates you when he's angry. 

• He has double standards. 

• He has negative attitudes toward women. 

• He treats you differently around other people. 

• He appears to be attracted to vulnerability. (Bancroft, 2003)

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