There are a lot of myths surrounding vulnerability in our culture. Many people think of it as weakness, and take your vulnerability as an immediate license to mistreat you. Other people, on the contrary, know that vulnerability is a brave choice, and they actively encourage you to be vulnerable with them – only to then use your vulnerability against you. Now, this is the definition of emotional abuse for me.

Throughout my life, I’ve experienced many abusive relationships – from friendships to romantic relationships to professional relationships. In many cases, the imbalance of power enabling abuse to happen resulted from the circumstances and social positionality I had no control over. In other cases, abuse resulted from my own poor boundary-setting skills – as those weren’t modeled for me growing up, I acquired them quite lately in my life. I saw emotional abuse happen to many people around me as well, and with years I saw increasingly clearer how most of it was enabled and normalized by long-lived systems of oppression, like misogyny and racism and classism and homophobia and nativism. I saw how much of it directly resulted from corruption and power over. I saw what kind of trauma it wreaked in people’s lives, and why it literally created a threat to their survival. But most of all, I saw that although emotional abuse becomes clearly visible in hindsight, it’s hard to detect while it’s happening to you. And hard as it is, this detection is critical. Emotional abuse works like a trap – the sooner you see it, the sooner you break free from it, and the less damage you end up with – especially when you know that societal systems will not hold the abuser accountable for they did because of their power, money, or other privileges.

So over the years of research and tough personal experiences, I found three signs of emotional abuse that remain readily observable and measurable – yes, even when your perception of reality is distorted by the typical gaslighting effects of abusive relationship dynamics. Once you see these signs, you can be quite sure that abuse is happening.

Compassion, clarity, and closure are three things that we have in healthy relationships that we never get in abusive relationships — and in this episode, we'll see how they can be tracked as reliable indicators of abuse.

We’ll also discuss the particular reasons why detecting abuse is difficult at the time when it’s happening to you. We’ll address the common question of whether emotional abuse is always intentional. Finally, we’ll see what to do when you cannot end a relationship with your abuser – two radically different scenarios here.