“Picture-perfect relationships can harbour dark secrets. What seems beautiful on the outside may be in trouble behind closed doors. Sometimes, you may not even realize that you’re in trouble. Abuse doesn’t have to be physical – many emotionally abusive behaviours can threaten your relationships, friendships, career, and mental health, and you might not even recognize the signs.” Here are four emotionally abusive behaviours you probably think are normal.
- Justifying bad behaviour
“Fights often lead to aggressive verbal exchanges, full of personal attacks or other troubling comments. However, emotional abuse not only includes the unkind words themselves but also what happens after the argument. Your partner may try to excuse or justify their nastiness with their momentary anger. Furthermore, they may think that apologizing (or a terrible attempt at it) should fix everything. They expect quick forgiveness for their misdeeds and get annoyed with you when you remain upset. Ultimately, they don’t take responsibility for their actions and refuse to acknowledge that their anger is affecting the relationship.”
- Turning tables
Emotional abusers blame their bad behaviour on something you did or didn’t do. They find ingenious and unfortunately convincing ways to make their problems your fault. They will intentionally speak to you in a derogatory tone and then explain how you caused them to act that way. Beyond this, they will try to convince you that you deserve to be treated the way you are being treated – they’ll tell you that you don’t deserve anything more or better from them.
- Blame game
Healthy couples tend to put the blame on their partner, but it becomes abusive when one is constantly blaming the other for all of the relationship’s problems. They remind you day in and day out of what you are doing wrong and how it’s causing problems in your partnership. But they can never seem to come up with a negative contribution of their own – it always comes back to you. They may never say it, but there’s an apparent assumption of their infallibility or perfection.
- Throwing daggers
Throwing your issues, traumas, flaws, and failures in your face is a distasteful but common casualty in fighting. An abusive partner will undoubtedly claim they were only trying to hurt you to make a point and didn’t mean what they said. However, that doesn’t make their onslaught sting any less or help heal your emotional wounds. It also does nothing to repair the broken trust or bring down the wall you’ve put up to keep from feeling so vulnerable with them again.
Arguments and escalation can bring out the worst in anyone. But when your partner displays this kind of contempt toward you (even in these emotionally intense moments), it lets you know who they are deeper down. How someone acts under pressure says a lot about them. “If their goal is to tear you down instead of build you up, it’s not a healthy relationship. A good partner and relationship should support your self-esteem and peace of mind. Watch out for these common but completely unacceptable behaviours – you might not realize that emotional abuse is happening right in front of you.”
