Ten Questions to ask yourself
The Pain Test: Has Your Relationship Crossed the Line?
Emotional pain is sometimes part of every intimate relationship — healthy or not. Every couple has hard weeks. If difficulty is the background hum of your life together, that is not normal. The questions are what kind of hard, how often, and what happens next.
One of the clearest signs you’re in an unhealthy relationship is being in deep emotional pain much of the time. Pain and confusion are warning signs — your body is sounding an alarm. Good relationships have ups and downs, but they don’t leave you stuck: turning the same problem over and over, confused, unable to decide, unable to act.
Something is wrong when good times never last long. You hold on to them as tightly as you can, but before long, something painful, confusing, or distressing happens again. And it’s never actually addressed — you’re just expected to move on, quiet your emotions, damp down your reactions, or even apologise for someone else’s actions, to keep the peace.
One of the biggest tells is how conflict gets handled — do issues get resolved, or do they get recycled, in a pattern of very high ‘highs’ and miserably low ‘lows’? Perhaps the most glaring warning sign of all is when expressing your normal relational needs is treated as a ‘problem’.
Does your partner listen to what you need and try to honour that — even if negotiating details gets hard? Or does every attempt to ask for your basic needs for connection, care, or respect get met with a brick wall of opposition, distraction, avoidance, blame-shifting, anger, or silence? Does chaos erupt, no matter what you try to do to prevent it?
The ten diagnostic questions below draw on common threads in books, articles, blogs and first-person accounts of unhealthy relationships. If you recognise your relationship in several points, know this: none of them feature in a relationship where your wellbeing matters as much as it should.
Ten questions to ‘safety check’ your relationship
1. Instability and unpredictability. Does your partner provoke jealousy on purpose, withdraw (physically or emotionally) without warning or explanation, behave inconsistently, or make threats to leave — somehow they regularly keep you off-balance and unsure what version of them you’ll get next?
2. Avoiding accountability. When you raise issues, are you met with contempt or dismissal? Do conversations involving ‘baiting’ you (provoking anger) so that they dissolve into major arguments, or loop endlessly, without ever reaching resolution. Is there an absence of lasting changes.
3. Dishonesty and boundary violations. Are there secrecy, lies, and stories that don’t add up or keep shifting in your relationship? Is there infidelity — emotional or physical — lots of exes, or “complicated” friendships that keep popping up?
4. More intensity and chemistry than intimacy. Does your relationship consist of tumultuous breakups and happy reunions, with strong chemistry, and emotional intensity — but not real intimacy or a dependable bond? Do you feel torn between how bad you often feel and how badly you want to stay connected, even as you know that there is damage being done. In an actual crisis, could you count on them?
5. Non-commitment and ambiguity. Despite time invested, your partner resists any conversation that would define the relationship clearly — leaving you in a permanent limbo. Does your relationship status change, depending on who is around, or your partners mood?
6. Punishment tactics. Does your partner use silent treatments, stonewalling, withdrawing, going no-contact for a day or more, or threats to discard you for someone “less difficult” to get their way? Or are their angry attacks aimed at who you are rather than what you did.
7. Invalidation. Are your feelings dismissed or your needs minimised by your partner? Instead of trying to understand what you need, do they respond with anger or defensiveness? Are your perceptions of events, or even of your own feelings, constantly questioned?
8. Shaming and blaming for normal reactions. Are you made to feel ashamed, or at fault for reacting — in ordinary, human ways — to behaviour that shows a lack of love, respect or care?
9. Control or isolation. Are your movements, your choices or other aspects of how your live your life subject to scrutiny, or to ‘rules’ that your partner has? Do they criticise your friends or family, or make problems for you at work? These are major red flags.
10. Fighting for the basics. Have you found yourself repeatedly trying to explain the basics of decent human behaviour to your partner – and failing to get through?
If you’re still unsure, try this final gut check: if a loved one described being in your exact relationship to you, would you want them to leave?
Navigating Emotionally Abusive Relationships
These patterns of behaviour describe emotional abuse. Naming that is painful. There’s embarrassment, or even shame in admitting — even to yourself — that someone you love is hurting you. For many people, that is one of the harder steps in the process of finding a way back to emotional safety.
However, such relationships are compelling to many, many people, for reasons that have nothing to do with their intelligence, personal “willpower”, or “low self-esteem”, but instead reflect our early history, capacity for empathy, and capacity to forgive. Emotional abuse itself creates a particularly hard to break bond (called a trauma bond).
There are as many possible reasons you are in this relationship as there are people in the world. Addiction, mental illness, difficult childhoods, hard circumstances — may all play a role on your partner’s side. But chasing explanations for their behaviour is a dead end. What matters isn’t why it’s happening. What matters is the impact it’s having on you. What matters most right now is getting the support you need to reduce that impact. Speak to a trusted friend, or reach out to a counsellor, GP or psychologist.
The stakes can be very high. This post focuses on emotional abuse — but emotional abuse can and does escalate into physical abuse. Sometimes these relationships become fatal. If you are in physical danger, please get help: talk to your GP, go to your local hospital, or contact a domestic violence support line (1800 RESPECT).