Signs you are in an abusive relationship

It takes a lot of courage and strength to leave an abusive relationship. But a lot of the battle is identifying for yourself what is and isn’t ok. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, you might be on the fence about how bad your situation really is, and this makes it all the more difficult to leave an abusive partner. If you couple this with the fact that many abusive partners are very manipulative, it’s no wonder many people end up living in abusive relationships for years or even decades before they decide its not ok and eventually break free.

I’m going to share some signs that I’ve seen which should raise red flags for you about your partner and the state of your relationship. Some of these signs are internal, e.g. “I feel crap about myself more than I don’t because of the things my partner says to me and about me”, and some are external e.g. “my partner is constantly asking me what I’m doing, and I don’t know how much checking is normal”.

1. Your partner makes you feel like crap

This happens a lot more to women than it does to men but men in abusive relationships can experience it too. Your partner might try to pretend that they were “just joking” when they make comments. But the idea is to sow a seed of self-deprecation in your mind. They want you feel like less, so that you appreciate them more. They are probably even compensating for how they don’t feel good about themselves, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for their malicious behaviour.

They are belittling you and ruining your self confidence, which you need to tell yourself isn’t ok, and you shouldn’t have to tolerate this behaviour. Some people are born sadistic or they have those tendencies where they enjoy watching people suffer when they are young and they never grow out of it. These tendencies coupled with a manipulative nature grow into narcissism in adulthood, and it is ugly.

If you’re unfortunate enough, you’ll meet someone who has main character syndrome. To them you are just a blip in their otherwise universally important life and they truly believe that the world has carved them out at the centre of this universe. They are unable and unwilling to merit that maybe they see themselves as so central, because they lack the empathy and personal growth to be able to view the world through any other lens than their own.

I’m going to share a few examples of unacceptable comments that come from my own experience. For context during the years with my ex-wife, I put on a little bit of weight but I was mostly “in shape” as far as society was concerned e.g. I would run and lift weights and had a mostly flat chest and belly. For the majority of my time with my ex-wife because of her excessive control over what we were allowed to eat and drink, I would be considered of “athletic build”.

Aside from that, growing up and all through my relationship with my ex-wife, I had crooked teeth.

Anyway, here are some examples:

And the list goes on. Something which I can’t quote very well in these examples is the ability of your partner to hit places which target your biggest insecurities. People who are abusive in these ways often know how to really bring you to your knees. If for example they know how much your crooked teeth bother you, telling you how you look inbred or unattractive because of it, is targeting your deepest insecurities and enhancing them. Suffocating you ever so slightly only to relieve you by saying “I’m just joking” or “I love you anyway”, doesn’t take away the pain they’ve already inflicted. Because they’ve got what they wanted the seed of doubt.

You tell yourself: “they said that for a reason”, and your internal spiral begins. The insecurity is meant to make you feel grateful that they have chosen to stay with you despite “all your flaws”.

2. Your partner isolates you

This one can be very dangerous. Human beings are social creatures by nature, and developing ways to isolate people and train them to behave themselves in the presence of others is peak abusive behaviour. When it happens between adults and children in abduction cases, we are in despair for how angry we feel that such a depraved situation has occurred.

But between two supposedly consenting adults, people either can be too awkward to intervene or turn a blind eye to the behaviour. Sometimes after a break up, a close relative will admit that they thought something was wrong, but this is exactly the worst outcome because we really want relatives to notice abuse in a relationship before it gets out of hand, not once a victim somehow break themselves free.

We have a lot of societal and social concerns in play. Some are about alienation e.g. if the abuser has a deep hook in the victim’s mind, a loved one may be concerned that asking too many questions will lead the victim to isolate further. Other concerns are about overstepping boundaries in general.

The bottom line here is: isolation is a tactic to exert further control.

The less external threats to that control, the better as far as an abuser is concerned.

My ex-wife would tell me things like:

“You can’t talk about our relationship with your friends because that’s private”

or

“Your mum just wants to talk to you now because you’re becoming more successful, she doesn’t really care about you”

or

“They weren’t really good friends anyway”

All of these things are again meant to sow seeds of doubt. They have your mind swirling. Enough correlations can seed these deep in your mind. For example if a close friend forgets your birthday and your partner uses this as a point for pivoting about how your friends don’t care about you, this can cause you to spiral.

3. Your partner puts themselves first

If you find yourself feeling your partner is always putting you second then something isn’t right.

As a man, this manifested itself probably differently than it does for women (or at least slightly).

If I think about my mother-in-law for example, she is married to a man who drinks like he wants to die tomorrow. He expects dinner on the table when he gets home. He gets her to pick him up from the pub. He makes derogatory comments about women including my own wife who is technically his step daughter. He smokes indoors when she asks him not to. He does anything and everything against his wifes will including wrecking all her nice linen because he’s a mechanic and is unapologetic about ruining her stuff.

In my mother-in-laws case, to me the oppression is a very dominant and submissive action. Her husband does what he wants and waltzs around being “the man” and she obeys. In my own personal experience, my ex-wife would push her own agenda at all costs in a different way.

It felt like I was living so that she could have a good life. If I could imagine an image of what I felt was, I was metaphorically the shoulders or the carpet of which she stood on, so that she could see further or stop her feet from getting wet. That was in every aspect of life.

4. Your partner micromanages you

This can be as extreme as your partners controls your accounts, money and your schedule or as simple as your partner tells you how you should respond to an email because they don’t expect you can do such things yourself.

The micromanagement is control no matter which way you spin it, and often abuse is about control. Your partner enjoys having you submit to their own agenda and so being able to tell you what to do, is a part of their sadistic pleasure.

In my case, my ex-wife wanted to control my social media. She especially wanted to control what I wrote about her. To that end on her birthday or special occasions she’d write her own posts, and be overly generous with the text e.g. “to my gorgeous gf on her birthday, you are my rock..” type of content. In the 10 years I ran those social media accounts I made two posts myself, and my ex-wife made over 300 on my behalf by logging in and submitting them when she felt like.

She also controlled my contact list, she’d told me I can’t have friends of the opposite gender so she’d mostly purged my friends list of females. One weekend she let me attend a gathering with friends near a beach, she gave an enormous golf-sized hickey so that girls knew I had a gf, which was quite embarrassing to brandish for a whole weekend, especially since my ex-wife and I barely had sex so people were commenting as if I’d been “so lucky”. Woohoo for me.

This leads on well to the topic of meeting with friends. My ex-wife would tell me I had to play sick or make excuses for why I couldn’t go out with my friends. If I was unhappy about it she’d manipulate me and tell me she was very upset that I didn’t care about her feelings in the matter. In all cases, I turned down meeting with friends or going out on special occasions more than 90% of the time to appease her.

As with all things of this nature, I regret what I missed even though I should be grateful for my life now and my freedom, I wish I’d got to live and enjoy my 20s for which she took from me.

5. Your partner is fake

This might seem like a trivial issue, but if your partner never seems to be themselves in any circumstance, you’re with a potential psychopath. If they’re swinging their hair and nodding yes to everything and smiling and laughing obnoxiously about nothing, they could very well be concocting something.

I see this as a big issue because transparency starts with you feeling like you have access to the real person. If you’re with someone, you should feel like you have front row seats to their personality. Everyone has their own liberties and their own secrets and rights of course, but think about when you go home with your spouse, are they still talking like they’re out at a party or are you getting the unfiltered version?

Maybe you think you’re getting the unfiltered version, but sometimes they’re holding it back. I was with my ex-wife for 11 years. In that time, I thought I knew who she was and what kind of morals she had. Then imagine my disbelief as everytime I’m telling my solicitor during the divorce “no she wouldn’t do that, I know her she’s a good person” and she does something 5 times as heinous, I was beside myself with how much of a fool I was.

Eventually when I met my second wife and I explained everything, she couldn’t believe my naivete. Especially, when she eventually met my ex-wife and experienced how insane and manipulative she is first hand. The point I’m making here is, often abusive partners dissociate every single day. They are one person at work, one person to a stranger and one person to their spouse. But the 4th person, is their true self and that person is never present, because they’re so used to presenting themselves to others they’re unable to switch it off. Ever.

6. Your partner lies without conscience

This is my last one, and its not necessarily in all circumstances because predominantly the traits 1 through 4 are the msot common. But if your partner is a compulsive liar, and is willing to lie to save their own skin which I guess goes kind of hand in hand with trait 3, then you’re in a pretty dire situation. You couple this with someone who has social status and charisma and it is a terrifying combination.

My ex-wife would lie to enrich her life and status. This could be so that she could make conversation that would otherwise be dull with details of her real life, or to tell people attributes about me that weren’t true but weren’t so harmful. She would tell stories around a table about things I’d done that I’d never done and I couldn’t work out why it would make sense to tell such a story.

I always had the concern that if she’s making up wild stories about my behaviour now without batting an eyelid even if just to make conversation, what would she do one day when I decide enough is enough and walk out. Its one of the key reasons I didn’t leave sooner, I was paralyzed with the thought of her lying about me and alienating me from friends and family and her using her wealth and privilege to sink a working class boy as I was.

I wasn’t wrong in the end.

Conclusion

Being in an abusive relationship sucks. After 11 years of it, I completely lost my own personality. I was moulded into who my ex-wife wanted me to be. I’d become well built, I ate what she wanted to me to eat, I had the friends she wanted me to have, I transferred her my paycheck and she gave me an allowance, I responded in conversation the way I knew she wanted me to. I lied when people asked about my life and my relationship and I perpetuated the image of “we are this successful couple and we’re happy together”.

Until I couldn’t take it anymore.

The thing is people don’t understand, but if you put an electric collar on a dog and everyday when you open the front door and he wants to go outside, but you buzz your dog until he’s on his side twitching, one day you’ll open that door, and he won’t try to go out of it or move. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to, you’ve just sucked the joy out of your dog and he knows there is no point in trying. That depression is deep, and people who have been brought up with strong self determinate principles find it difficult to understand why someone would continue to live through such a sad situation.

I hear the usual: “why didn’t you just leave!?” or “you could have left whenever you wanted”, neglects the fact that people in abusive relationships don’t feel like they can, otherwise yes, they would. This feeling of fear towards their abuser for both men and women who are victims of abuse is rooted in an uncertainty. For me it was “I grew up poor and I’m socially a bit awkward, my wife is rich and socially very outgoing, if I leave she’ll spread lies about me, and I don’t have much of a life outside of the life I’ve built with her in the picture”.

You have other anxieties like what do you tell people who have known you as a couple for so long, or you don’t want to look like a failure because your relationship didn’t work. But really we should be putting our own wellbeing and happiness above all that nonsense. When I finally left, my ex-wife did all the worst things to ruin my life, and she leveraged all her privilege and power. Telling people who trusted her social status that I was a useless father and spouse. It hurt, and it hurt that the people she seconded to her pact who some of which had been my friends first, didn’t question what she was saying before making their mind up.

But to all those who are thinking of leaving I say do it. Stay strong as you take the plunge and put yourself first for once. God bless you wherever you are.