Warning Signs: Does Your Partner...

• Ignore you or respond absentmindedly when you begin a conversation?
• Ignore your need for assistance when you're sick, tired, or over-scheduled?
• Make light of your triumphs, discourage your plans, or disparage your successes?
• Ignore, invalidate, or belittle your feelings, emotions, or needs as silly or unreasonable?
• Sneer, complain, groan, or ridicule you when you cry, worry, ask for emotional support, or attempt to express your feelings?
• Simply refuse to have dialogues with you about your needs or concerns?
• Trivialize your feelings so you end up feeling like you've been unreasonable, demanding, or too emotional?

Have You...

• Stopped asking your partner about his/her hopes, plans, or triumphs?
• Given up asking your partner for companionship?
• Stopped asking for empathy or emotional support?
• Given up asking, when you're sick, tired, or need your partner's help?
• Developed a habit of avoiding sex whenever possible, but enduring it in a tolerable routine, when it's unavoidable?
• Do you end up feeling frustrated, sad, or angry after expressing yourself to your partner?

Tactics of Emotional Abuse

ISOLATION... May include criticizing, or insulting family or friends; not allowing victims to work or other have other interests and activities; threatening to leave if a victim stays connected with others; controlling car or time or money; withdrawing emotionally. Isolation deprives a victim of social support, breaks down a victim's inner spirit, makes the victim dependent on the partner, and weakens a victim's ability to resist.

MONOPOLIZATION OF PERCEPTION... Involves not being interested in what is important to the victim; forcing sex when victim doesn't want it; making victims feel they are wrong and always to blame; negative attention to a victim's appearance. These tactics work to draw attention to the abuser's predicaments or feelings, and make victims lose confidence in their perceptions and decisions, while creating confusion and self-doubt.

HUMILIATION... Can involve name-calling; making a victim feel guilty; shaming or embarrassing a victim in public; devaluing a victim; using sex to hurt or control a victim. Humiliation creates and encourages shame in a victim, and often forces a victim to go against his/her own standards.

SUPERIORITY OF POWER, OMNIPOTENCE... May mean "I'll do it my way and in my time!"; retaliation is always a threat; victim is supposed to know all the abuser's moods and needs; no apologies ever given by abuser or apologies become meaningless. These tactics keep a victim in an inferior or vulnerable position, and at risk of being punished by the abuser.

ENFORCEMENT OF TRIVIAL DEMANDS... When a victim complies to pacify the abuser; the rituals/habits of abuser wear the victim down and instill compliance; victims give in to avoid punishment or escalation to further anger or violence. Effects of these tactics include regression and fear from having to live by petty rules.