“Wow, red flag…”
A list of behaviors and personality attributes commonly associated with toxic relationships.
PLEASE NOTE: This site offers general educational information, NOT a diagnosis or medical, mental-health, legal, or professional advice. Every relationship and situation is different.
Emotional manipulation
- Blame-shifting — Making their behavior your responsibility.
- DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender when confronted.
- Deflection — Redirecting a discussion away from their behavior; whataboutism is a common form.
- Double binds — Creating situations where either choice can be used against you.
- Emotional blackmail — Using fear, obligation, or guilt to force compliance.
- Emotional hostage-taking — Making you responsible for keeping them emotionally stable.
- Feigning helplessness — Weaponized incompetence: intentionally claiming or performing inability so responsibility shifts to another person.
- Gaslighting — Repeatedly undermining your confidence in your memory, perception, or judgment.
- Guilt-tripping — Making you feel selfish, cruel, or ungrateful for not doing what they want.
- Impossible standards — Expectations designed so you can never quite succeed.
- Manufactured urgency — Pressuring you to decide before you have time to think.
- Martyrdom — Conspicuously suffering or sacrificing so that you feel indebted.
- Moving the goalposts — Changing what is required of you after you meet an expectation.
- Playing the victim — Portraying themselves as the injured party to escape accountability or control your response.
- Scorekeeping — Treating favors and affection as debts you must repay.
- Threatening abandonment — Repeatedly threatening to leave, divorce, break up, etc. to obtain compliance.
- Threatening self-harm — Using threats of self-injury or suicide as leverage to prevent someone from leaving or setting a boundary.
- Ultimatums — Using threats of consequences to force a choice, particularly where ordinary negotiation would be possible.
- Weaponized vulnerability — Using disclosures, distress, trauma, or emotional crises to prevent you from setting boundaries.
Distorting reality
- Bad-faith interpretation — Consistently choosing the least charitable interpretation of what you say.
- Circular arguments — Keeping an argument going without allowing resolution.
- Conversation hijacking — Making every discussion about their feelings or grievances.
- Half-truths — Presenting selected facts in a way that creates a misleading impression.
- Interrogation — Demanding exhaustive explanations for ordinary behavior.
- Invalidation — Treating your feelings or experiences as illegitimate.
- Lying — Knowingly giving false information to mislead or avoid accountability.
- Lying by omission — Withholding material information so that someone reaches a false conclusion.
- Maintaining a secret committed relationship — Concealing another committed relationship or presenting an agreed-upon monogamous relationship as exclusive when it is not.
- Minimization — Portraying a concern, experience, or harm as insignificant, unimportant, or ridiculous.
- Plausible deniability — Behaving in ways that are deliberately difficult to call out or prove.
- Projection — Accusing you of motives or behaviors that are actually theirs.
- Putting words in your mouth — Straw-manning: misrepresenting what someone said or believes so it is easier to dismiss or attack.
- Revisionist history — Repeatedly rewriting what happened to favor their position.
- Sealioning — Relentless supposedly-reasonable questioning used to exhaust you rather than understand you.
- Selective memory — Conveniently “forgetting” agreements or incidents.
- Semantic arguments — Obsessing over wording to avoid addressing the substance of a complaint.
Affection as control
- Boundary testing — Making small violations to discover what you will tolerate.
- Breadcrumbing — Giving just enough attention or hope to keep someone invested.
- Conditional love — Communicating that affection depends upon compliance.
- Forced intimacy — Pushing emotional, sexual, financial, or practical closeness faster than you want.
- Future faking — Making grand promises about a shared future without genuine intention or follow-through.
- Grooming — Gradually establishing trust, dependency, secrecy, or normalized boundary violations in preparation for exploitation or abuse.
- Hoovering — Attempting to pull someone back into a harmful relationship after separation, often through affection, apologies, promises, or crises.
- Hot-and-cold behavior — Intermittent reinforcement: an unpredictable alternation between affection or reward and rejection or mistreatment.
- Idealization — Placing you on a pedestal in an intense or unrealistic way.
- Love bombing — Overwhelming someone with affection, attention, promises, gifts, or commitment, particularly to accelerate intimacy or create dependency.
- Mirroring — Strategically copying your interests, values, personality, or aspirations to manufacture a sense of extraordinary compatibility.
- Premature commitment — Aggressively pushing exclusivity, marriage, moving in, etc.
- Withholding affection — Deliberately removing warmth or intimacy as punishment or leverage.
Punishment and conflicts
- “Jokes” at your expense — Especially when objections are answered with “you're too sensitive.”
- Belittling — Belittling, mockery, or ridicule that makes someone feel small, incapable, or unworthy.
- Contempt — Treating someone with scorn, disgust, or a sense of superiority.
- Destroying property — Damaging belongings or surroundings to frighten, punish, or assert power.
- Humiliation — Causing shame or embarrassment to diminish someone or gain control over them, especially in public.
- Intimidation — Using fear, implied power, or threatening conduct to influence someone’s choices.
- Menacing body language — Using posture, proximity, gestures, or facial expressions to make someone feel afraid.
- Name-calling — Using insulting labels to demean someone or undermine their self-worth.
- Needling / baiting — Deliberately provoking a reaction and then criticizing the reaction.
- Punching walls / throwing objects — Violence around someone can function as intimidation even when they aren't physically struck.
- Rage episodes — Explosive anger that leaves others afraid, silenced, or focused on managing the outburst.
- Reactive-abuse baiting — Provoking someone toward an extreme response and then using it to characterize them as the aggressor.
- Silent treatment — Deliberately refusing communication as punishment or control.
- Stonewalling — Persistently shutting down attempts to discuss problems.
- Threats — Stating or implying harmful consequences to force compliance or create fear.
- Veiled threats — Hinting at harmful consequences without saying them directly.
- Withholding as punishment or leverage — Deliberately withholding contact, support, affection, information, or cooperation as punishment or leverage.
Control and coercion
- Coercive control — An ongoing pattern of restrictions, intimidation, and dependency that erodes another person’s autonomy.
- Controlling access to money — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling clothing or appearance — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling food — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling friendships — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling hobbies — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling medical care — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling sleep — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling transportation — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Controlling work or education — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Demanding constant updates — Continually demanding updates about someone's whereabouts or activities, including immediate response expectations.
- Demanding permission for ordinary independent decisions. — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Double standards — Freedoms for themselves that they deny you.
- Economic sabotage — Interfering with employment, credit, education, etc. to make independence harder.
- Excessive rule-making — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Financial abuse — Restricting, exploiting, or sabotaging finances to make someone dependent.
- Gatekeeping resources — Controlling access to essentials such as money, housing, transportation, or information.
- Household labor inequality — Consistently expecting one partner to carry an unfair share of domestic work, care work, or planning.
- Jealousy or possessiveness framed as care — Controlling conduct portrayed as protection, care, or love.
- Micromanagement — Excessively directing everyday decisions or tasks to reduce another person’s independence.
- Non-consensual location tracking — Demanding access to, placing, or using an app or device to track someone's movements or location without their agreement.
- Password demands — Restricting everyday choices, access, or freedom in ways that increase dependence and reduce autonomy.
- Reproductive coercion — Interfering with contraception, pregnancy decisions, or reproductive autonomy.
- Sexual coercion — Pressure, threats, guilt, persistence, or retaliation used to obtain sexual activity rather than freely given consent.
Social isolation
- Creating conflicts with your support network — Starting or escalating disputes with friends, family, or community, including picking fights before or after outings so socializing becomes difficult.
- Demanding constant availability and attention — Demanding so much availability and attention that other relationships, responsibilities, or rest are crowded out.
- Demanding loyalty tests — Requiring proofs of allegiance or testing your loyalty in ways that put relationships, values, or independence at risk.
- Dependency creation — Systematically making you more reliant on them financially, socially, practically, or emotionally.
- Discrediting friends and family — Convincing you that everyone close to you is bad for you.
- Punishing independence — Responding to independent choices with anger, withdrawal, or other punishment.
- Sabotaging plans — Disrupting arrangements that support someone’s goals, relationships, or autonomy.
- Social isolation — Progressively separating you from friends, family, coworkers, or community.
- Us against the world — Isolating someone from supportive people and outside viewpoints to increase dependency.
Jealousy & possessiveness
- Accusations of cheating without reasonable basis — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Checking your phone — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Competing with your friends/family for attention — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Demanding proof of fidelity — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Interrogating you about other people — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Jealousy tests — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Policing social media — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Possessive language or behavior — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Retroactive jealousy — Obsessive control, interrogation, or punishment concerning relationships that occurred before the current relationship.
- Treating ordinary interactions as flirting — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
- Treating privacy as evidence of dishonesty — Treating ordinary independence or social contact as evidence of disloyalty in order to justify control.
Social manipulation
- Comparison — Repeatedly comparing you unfavorably with exes, friends, siblings, etc.
- Jealousy induction — Intentionally making you jealous to increase your investment or insecurity.
- Playing people against one another — Creating rivalry or conflict between people to gain influence or control.
- Public/private personality switching — Behaving charmingly around others while treating you very differently in private.
- Recruiting allies — Bringing friends/family into a conflict to overwhelm you.
- Smear campaigns — Spreading damaging claims to undermine your reputation or credibility—often called character assassination—particularly after confrontation or separation.
- Splitting — Casting people as entirely good or bad and abruptly reversing that view in ways that create conflict, instability, or pressure.
- Third-party pressure or harassment — Using other people or shared contacts to pressure, monitor, intimidate, relay messages, or bypass boundaries.
- Triangulation — Involving a third person to create jealousy, pressure, rivalry, or validation.
- Using children as leverage — Using children, access to them, or concerns about them to pressure or control someone.
Undermining confidence
- Approval withholding — Keeping validation perpetually just out of reach.
- Attacking your identity — Targeting someone’s confidence, identity, or vulnerabilities to make them easier to control.
- Chronic criticism — Persistently finding fault in ways that erode confidence and make approval feel unattainable.
- Competence undermining — Repeatedly making you doubt your ability to handle things yourself.
- Devaluation — Shifting from idealizing you to treating you as inferior or worthless.
- Eroding self-trust — Repeatedly causing someone to doubt their judgment, feelings, or ability to make decisions.
- Goal sabotage — Interfering with things that would make you more confident or independent.
- Infantilization — Treating an adult partner like a child incapable of making decisions.
- Making you prove your worth — Keeping acceptance or affection conditional on continual demonstrations of value.
- Negging — Calculated backhanded compliments or insults intended to lower confidence and increase desire for approval.
- Pathologizing normal reactions — Describing reasonable anger, sadness, or disagreement as evidence that you're “crazy,” “unstable,” etc.
- Weaponizing diagnoses or therapy language — Targeting someone’s confidence, identity, or vulnerabilities to make them easier to control.
- Weaponizing insecurities — Targeting someone’s confidence, identity, or vulnerabilities to make them easier to control.
- Weaponizing past trauma — Targeting someone’s confidence, identity, or vulnerabilities to make them easier to control.
- Weaponizing secrets — Using private information to shame, threaten, or control someone.
Boundaries
- Deliberately creating “exceptions” — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Digital stalking — Using online accounts, devices, or digital activity to monitor someone without consent.
- Mocking boundaries — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Non-consensual intimate recordings — Photographing or recording someone in a vulnerable or intimate situation without their consent or after they have refused.
- Privacy invasion — Accessing personal space, information, or communications without permission.
- Punishing boundaries — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Reading private messages — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Refusing to accept ‘no’ — Repeatedly disregarding a clear refusal or boundary.
- Refusing to leave — Remaining in someone’s space after being asked to leave in order to intimidate or control.
- Repeated unwanted contact — Continuing contact after a clear request to stop, or engaging in conduct that creates fear or disruption.
- Sexual boundary violations — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Sharing private information without permission — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Showing up uninvited — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Stalking — Repeated unwanted monitoring, contact, or presence that causes fear or disrupts daily life.
- Treating boundaries as rejection — Disregarding clearly expressed limits, privacy, or consent to assert access or control.
- Unwanted physical contact — Touching someone without consent or after they have indicated they do not want it.
Physical safety
- Harming or threatening to harm children, pets, or loved ones — Using harm or threats against people or animals you care about to frighten, punish, or control you.
- Physical violence — Hitting, slapping, shoving, kicking, choking, restraining, or otherwise physically assaulting someone.
- Preventing emergency, medical, or legal help — Stopping someone from contacting emergency services, getting necessary care, reporting abuse, or seeking legal protection.
- Pressuring or forcing drug or alcohol use — Using pressure, coercion, or force to make someone consume drugs or alcohol, especially to lower their ability to choose or leave.
- Reckless or dangerous driving — Driving dangerously, threatening to crash, abandoning someone in an unsafe place, or using a vehicle to frighten or control them.
- Trapping or preventing you from leaving — Blocking exits, taking keys or transportation, locking someone in, or otherwise stopping them from leaving freely.
- Weapon intimidation or use — Displaying, threatening with, or using a weapon to frighten, harm, or control someone.
Accountability
- Avoiding meaningful support — Repeatedly refusing appropriate support or help while ongoing harmful behavior remains unaddressed.
- Demanding immediate forgiveness — Avoiding responsibility for harm through denial, delay, double standards, or empty gestures.
- Excuse-making — Offering justifications that minimize harm instead of taking responsibility for it.
- Externalizing blame — Attributing harmful choices to other people, circumstances, or forces outside oneself.
- Lack of self-reflection — Repeatedly avoiding honest reflection on how their behavior affects others or making excuses instead of engaging with feedback.
- Never apologizing — Refusing to acknowledge harm or offer a genuine apology when one is warranted.
- Non-apologies — Recognizable forms include “I'm sorry, but…,” “I'm sorry you feel that way,” apologies paired with blame, and apologies used to shut down discussion.
- Performative remorse — Displaying regret for appearance or to regain access without meaningful accountability.
- Promises without change — Apologies or commitments to improve that are not followed by sustained behavior change.
- Refusing repair — Declining to address harm, rebuild trust, or take steps to make amends.
- Retaliating when confronted — Responding to concerns with punishment, anger, or counterattacks instead of engagement.
- Treating consequences as persecution — Avoiding responsibility for harm through denial, delay, double standards, or empty gestures.
- Using an apology to end discussion — Avoiding responsibility for harm through denial, delay, double standards, or empty gestures.
Relationship destabilization
- Constant crisis mode — Keeping the relationship in a recurring state of emergency that consumes attention and resources.
- Creating problems and then becoming the rescuer — Creating recurring uncertainty, conflict, or crises that keep the relationship off balance.
- Crisis bonding — Repeatedly using emergencies or intense conflict/reconciliation cycles to create closeness.
- Demanding demonstrations of devotion — Creating recurring uncertainty, conflict, or crises that keep the relationship off balance.
- Manufactured chaos — Inventing or escalating crises or emergencies to gain attention, control, or compliance.
- Recurring harmful relationship patterns — A consistent pattern of conflict, disrespect, betrayal, or instability across close relationships that is not acknowledged or addressed.
- Repeated breakups and reunions — Creating recurring uncertainty, conflict, or crises that keep the relationship off balance.
- Sabotaging important events — Undermining birthdays, holidays, work events, or other important occasions, including by picking fights as a tactic.
- Sleep deprivation through conflict — Creating recurring uncertainty, conflict, or crises that keep the relationship off balance.
- Unpredictable punishment — Responding to ordinary behavior with inconsistent penalties that keep others anxious and guessing.
- Walking-on-eggshells dynamics — Creating an atmosphere where someone constantly monitors themselves to avoid an outburst or punishment.
Digital red flags
- Controlling what you post — Using technology or online access to monitor, pressure, impersonate, or control someone.
- Forcing digital isolation — Blocking or deleting contacts, or coercing someone to block people, to limit communication or social support.
- Image-based abuse — Sharing or threatening to share intimate images without consent.
- Impersonation — Pretending to be someone else online to deceive, monitor, or damage them.
- Online activity monitoring — Monitoring someone's online accounts, screen time, or digital activity to track or control them.
- Technology-facilitated coercive control — Using technology or online access to monitor, pressure, impersonate, or control someone.
- Unauthorized account access — Entering someone’s digital accounts without permission.
- Using read receipts as surveillance — Using technology or online access to monitor, pressure, impersonate, or control someone.