By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
If you are in danger now, call 999. If you are worried about how you are being treated in a relationship, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free, confidential and open at any time on 0808 2000 247. You do not need to be certain that what is happening is abuse before you ring. It is not your fault if you are unsure.
Emotional abuse is hard to name for a specific reason. The pattern often exists alongside real affection, so the same relationship contains both the warmth that makes you want to stay and the behaviour that is harming you. It also asks you to use your own judgement to assess something that is working to undermine that judgement, which is a strange position to think clearly from. And the word itself now gets used so loosely, for exes, for difficult partners and for ordinary bad behaviour, that it can be unclear whether it applies to what you are experiencing.
This piece is about untangling that. It looks at what emotional abuse looks like in specific and recognisable terms, and what it is not, because getting that distinction wrong in either direction tends to cost people something. Staying a long time in something harmful is one cost. Carrying a label into a relationship or a breakup that does not fit what happened is another.
What Emotional Abuse Is
Emotional abuse is a pattern and not an incident. A single unkind comment, a bad argument or a moment either of you handled badly is not, on its own, evidence of abuse. What defines emotional abuse is repetition with a direction to it, behaviour that consistently works to control, diminish or destabilise the other person over time, in a way that the person on the receiving end starts to organise their own behaviour around.
That last part matters clinically. In my experience abuse tends to produce a kind of adaptation. You find yourself managing someone's moods before they happen, editing what you say before you say it, or feeling a particular kind of relief when they are in a good mood that has nothing to do with anything you did. That adaptation is often a clearer signal than any single behaviour. It is also not a weakness. It is what a sensible person does to stay safe in a difficult environment.
The harm is well recognised. A systematic review and meta analysis of 194 studies found that psychological violence by a partner had strong associations with post traumatic stress, depression and anxiety, with the strongest link to post traumatic stress. The authors rated their certainty as low and asked for more research, so the exact size of the effect is uncertain (Dokkedahl et al., 2022). The direction of the finding matches what people tell me, which is that being repeatedly belittled or controlled by someone close to you leaves real marks, whether or not anyone else could see anything.
Gaslighting and the Erosion of Your Own Judgement
Gaslighting is probably the most recognisable term in this space, and also one of the most misused, so it helps to be precise. It describes a pattern where a partner repeatedly denies, distorts or contradicts your account of events and your feelings about them, to the point where you start doubting your own memory, perception or judgement rather than theirs.
A qualitative study of 65 people who identified as having experienced gaslighting in romantic relationships found that it occurred within relationships combining affectionate and abusive behaviour over time. Gaslighting was associated with a diminished sense of self and mistrust of others, and many who recovered stressed the value of separating from the person, prioritising healthier relationships and returning to meaningful activities (Klein et al., 2023). The sample was self selected and small, but the picture will be familiar to many, because the same person providing warmth is also the one undermining your grip on what is real. That is part of what makes it so disorientating.
Being told once that you are remembering something wrong is not gaslighting. Being told so consistently, about your own feelings and experiences, until you stop trusting your read of situations, is a different thing entirely.
Control That Does Not Look Like Control
Isolation from friends or family, monitoring of your phone, money or movements, and rules about who you can see and when are the more obvious signs people associate with control. A lot of emotional abuse is subtler than that. It can look like a partner who consistently makes you feel you need permission for ordinary things, who responds to your independence with sulking or withdrawal until you stop exercising it, or who reframes every boundary you set as evidence that you do not love them properly.
The behaviour does not have to be dramatic to be controlling. What makes it controlling is the direction it consistently pushes you in, towards less autonomy, less contact with people outside the relationship and less confidence in your own decisions.
Money, Technology and Other Quieter Forms of Control
Two patterns deserve their own mention, because they are common and often go unrecognised for a long time. The first is financial, with one partner controlling access to money, requiring receipts or explanations for ordinary spending, or arranging finances so the other person has no independent means and no real ability to leave. The second is technology facilitated, such as tracking a partner's location, reading their messages or monitoring their online activity, sometimes framed as care or transparency and not as surveillance.
Research on coercive control describes it as a form of violence made up of patterns of restrictive regulation, including isolation, threats, psychological manipulation, economic abuse and technology facilitated control. In a qualitative study of 15 women in Australia who had experienced it, participants described a specific emotional trauma shaped by threat and restraint, and the authors proposed the term coercive control trauma for the often under recognised psychological harm involved (Kassing and Collins, 2026). It was a small study of women, so it cannot tell us how common any one tactic is. What it does give is language for experiences that many people have struggled to describe.
Neither money control nor surveillance needs raised voices to do its work. Both tend to be presented at the time as reasonable, protective or simply practical, which is part of why they are so often missed until someone else names them from outside the relationship. If you want help telling controlling behaviour from ordinary conflict, this article on coercive control and conflict sets out the difference.
Contempt, Degradation and Walking on Eggshells
Some emotional abuse is delivered as humour, sarcasm you are told you are too sensitive to take, or public jokes at your expense that leave you unable to object without seeming humourless. Some of it is more direct, such as name calling, comparisons to other people designed to diminish you, or a consistent tone of contempt that treats your feelings, opinions or needs as less important than theirs.
A common effect is what is often described as walking on eggshells, a state where you are managing your own behaviour continuously to avoid an outburst, a mood or a punishment you can feel coming before it arrives. If a significant part of your energy in the relationship goes into anticipating your partner's reactions and not into expressing your own needs, take that seriously as a sign, whatever the behaviour ends up being called.
Blame That Never Lands Anywhere Else
One of the more reliable signs is what happens after conflict. In a relationship without abuse, both people generally end up holding some share of responsibility for a difficult moment, even if it is not split evenly. In an emotionally abusive dynamic, responsibility has a way of landing on the same person whatever happened. Raising a legitimate concern is met with a counteraccusation. Naming hurt is reframed as an attack. Over time this teaches the person on the receiving end to stop raising things at all, because raising something reliably costs more than it resolves.
I have written more generally about how blame operates in relationships and what tends to break the pattern, which is useful alongside this if the pattern sounds familiar. If you have started to believe the blame, that is a common result of living with it and it says nothing about what is true.
In an emotionally abusive dynamic, responsibility has a strange habit of always landing on the same person, regardless of what happened.
What Is Not Necessarily Abuse
Not every difficult, disappointing or even painful dynamic is abuse, and treating ordinary struggle as though it were can leave people feeling stuck, frightened or hopeless about situations that are workable.
Insecure attachment, for instance, can produce behaviour that looks alarming from the outside, such as jealousy, difficulty self soothing or a strong reaction to perceived distance, without any of it being a strategy to control or diminish the other person. Attachment patterns shape adult relationships in powerful ways, and much of what gets described online as red flags is closer to an anxious or avoidant style playing out under stress. In my experience the distinction that matters clinically is responsiveness. A person who panics when you do not reply to a text is doing something uncomfortable, and possibly something worth working on in therapy, but they can usually hear feedback, feel remorse and change the pattern once it is named. Someone who is controlling in the way described here tends not to, because the behaviour is serving a purpose they are not motivated to give up.
Ordinary conflict is not abuse either, even when it is frequent or painful. Contempt is one of the communication patterns that harm relationships, and it overlaps in appearance with some of what is described above. A couple who are simply caught in a cycle of criticising, defending and withdrawing, a cycle neither of them likes, are dealing with a communication problem and not necessarily a power and control problem. The two can coexist, but they are not the same thing, and the response to one is not the response to the other.
There is also something happening in the culture. Diagnosing an ex or a difficult partner with a clinical label, often after a short video, has become common. A well known paper describes a wider pattern it calls concept creep, in which words for harm, abuse among them, have gradually stretched to cover a broader and often milder range of experience than they once did, with the risk of pathologising everyday experience (Haslam, 2016). The point is not that people should doubt their own pain. It is that reaching for a label too quickly can flatten differences between situations that need very different responses. If the word narcissist has come up for you, an article on what is missed when someone reaches for that label about an ex explores it carefully, and a piece on the abuse cycle that can follow looks at repeated patterns that deserve to be taken seriously.
Why It Often Does Not Feel Constant
One thing that confuses people trying to work out whether this is abuse is that it rarely feels constant. Most accounts of emotionally abusive relationships involve a cycle and not a steady state, with periods of real warmth, affection and even generosity, followed by tension, then an incident, then remorse and a return to warmth. That warmth is not usually performed cynically. It is often sincere in the moment, which is what makes the pattern so hard to leave and so hard to describe to people outside it.
If you have found yourself explaining away a difficult pattern by pointing to how good things are most of the time, that is common and understandable, and it is a feature of the dynamic and not evidence against it. Friends and family often see only the good periods, which can leave the person inside feeling more isolated in trying to describe the harder ones.
These Dynamics Occur in Every Kind of Relationship
Emotional abuse is not confined to one gender, one sexuality or one relationship structure. It occurs between men and women, in same sex relationships, and in consensually non monogamous relationships and polycules, and the signs above apply in all of them. People in those relationships can face extra obstacles, including fear of not being believed, worry about outing themselves, or services that assume a heterosexual couple. Specialist services exist, including Galop for LGBTQ+ people and the Men's Advice Line for men, and the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 is open to everyone.
Why the Distinction Matters
Getting this wrong in either direction has a cost. Naming something as abuse when it is an attachment pattern or a communication problem can close down a relationship that had a workable path forward. Failing to name something as abuse when it is can leave someone minimising a pattern that is harming them, often because the behaviour does not match the more dramatic picture of abuse they have absorbed from films or headlines. Both errors are understandable and common. They are also the kind of thing that is easier to untangle with a professional than alone, especially when you are the person inside the relationship and least able to see it from a distance.
What Happens in a Session
You will not be asked to arrive with a diagnosis of your relationship, your partner or yourself. What I listen for is the actual pattern, what happens before, during and after conflict, who tends to end up apologising, and how safe each person feels raising something difficult. Where the pattern points towards control and diminishment, the work looks different from where it points towards two people with a communication problem or an attachment injury. Working out which one you are dealing with is usually the first and most useful thing therapy can do.
Couples therapy starts with both of you in the room together, from the first session. If you are not at the point of bringing your partner into a room, or you are still working out privately whether what is happening is abuse, that is a legitimate starting point, and individual therapy is often exactly where this process needs to begin. When both of you are attending, I watch how each responds when the other names something difficult, whether with curiosity and some willingness to take responsibility, or with immediate counteraccusation and denial. In my experience that single response tells me more than almost anything said in a first session about which kind of work this is.
If what you describe suggests a risk to your safety, couples therapy is not the right first step, and I will say so directly. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247, free and confidential, 24 hours) is a better first call than anything I have written here.
How Therapy Can Help
If what is happening turns out to be closer to an attachment injury, a communication breakdown or the ordinary difficulty that gets mislabelled online, couples therapy is where that gets worked on directly, with both of you together building the skills or repairing the injury involved.
If it turns out to be closer to a genuine pattern of control, my role is not to mediate between two equally responsible people, because that framing does not fit, and sitting the two of you down together as though it were an ordinary disagreement can make things worse. The right next step is usually individual work for the partner experiencing the pattern.
You do not need to have worked out which of these you are dealing with before you get in touch. That is part of what the first conversation is for. I offer a free 30 minute consultation in person in London or online, where we start working out together which situation you are in.
If anything in this article feels urgent or unsafe, please do not wait for that conversation. Call 999 in an emergency, or ring the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Dokkedahl, S. B., Kirubakaran, R., Bech Hansen, D., Kristensen, T. R., & Elklit, A. (2022). The psychological subtype of intimate partner violence and its effect on mental health: A systematic review with meta analyses. Systematic Reviews, 11, Article 163. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-022-02025-z
Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1 to 17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
Kassing, K., & Collins, A. (2026). “Slowly, over time, you completely lose yourself”: Conceptualizing coercive control trauma in intimate partner relationships. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 41(3 to 4), 662 to 684. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605251320998
Klein, W., Li, S., & Wood, S. (2023). A qualitative analysis of gaslighting in romantic relationships. Personal Relationships, 30(4), 1316 to 1340. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12510
