Healthy vs. Abusive Relationships

 

Here’s What Healthy and Abusive Relationships Look Like

Sometimes abusive relationships are easy to identify; other times the abuse may take subtle forms. The examples shown here can help you identify traits of abusive and healthy relationships. In general, abusive relationships have a serious power imbalance, with the abuser controlling or attempting to control most aspects of life. Healthy relationships share responsibility and decision-making tasks and reflect respect for all the people in the relationship, including children.

Healthy Relationships:

Non-Threatening Behavior

• Talking and acting so that your partner feels safe and comfortable doing and saying things.

Respect

• Listening to your partner non-judgmentally.
• Being emotionally affirming and understanding.
• Valuing opinions.

Trust and Support

• Supporting your partner’s goals in life.
• Respecting your partner’s right to his or her own feelings, friends, activities and opinions.

Honesty and Accountability

• Accepting responsibility for self.
• Acknowledging past use of violence and / or emotionally abusive behavior, changing the behavior.
• Acknowledging infidelity, changing the behavior.
• Admitting being wrong when it is appropriate.
• Communicating openly and truthfully, acknowledging past abuse, seeking help for abusive relationship patterns.

Responsible Parenting

• Sharing parental responsibilities.
• Being a positive, non-violent role model for children.

Shared Responsibility

• Mutually agreeing on a fair distribution of work.
• Making family decisions together.

Abusive Relationships:

Using Intimidation

• Making your partner afraid by using looks, actions, gestures.
• Smashing or destroying things.
• Destroying or confiscating your partner’s property.
• Abusing pets as a display of power and control.
• Silent or overt raging.
• Displaying weapons or threatening their use.
• Making physical threats.

Using Emotional Abuse

• Putting your partner down.
• Making your partner feel bad about himself or herself.
• Calling your partner names.
• Playing mind games.
• Interrogating your partner.
• Harassing or intimidating your partner.
• “Checking up on” your partner’s activities or whereabouts.
• Humiliating your partner, weather through direct attacks or “jokes”.
• Making your partner feel guilty.
• Shaming your partner.

Using Isolation

• Controlling what your partner does, who he or she sees and talks to, what he or she reads, where he or she goes.
• Limiting your partner’s outside involvement.
• Demanding your partner remain home when you are not with them.
• Cutting your partner off from prior friends, activities, and social interaction.
• Using jealousy to justify your actions.

(Jealousy is the primary symptom of abusive relationships; it is also a core component of  Love Addiction.)

Minimizing, Denying and Blame Shifting

• Making light of the abuse and not taking your partner’s concerns about it seriously.
• Saying the abuse did not happen, or wasn’t that bad.
• Shifting responsibility for your abusive behavior to your partner. (i.e: I did it because you ______.)
• Saying your partner caused it.

Using Children

• Making your partner feel guilty about the children.
• Using the children to relay messages.
• Using visitation to harass your partner.
• Threatening to take the children away.

Using Male Privilege

• Treating your partner like a servant.
• Making all the big decisions.
• Acting like the “master of the castle.”
• Being the one to define men’s and women’s or the relationship’s roles.

Using Economic Abuse

• Preventing your partner from getting or keeping a job.
• Making your partner ask for money.
• Giving your partner an allowance.
• Taking your partner’s money.
• Not letting your partner know about or have access to family income.