So I once worked as a prison warden in a prison for men who had abused their s.o.
During lunch breaks I used to read their court trials, the legal reasoning interest me.
During one lunch break I said to a more experienced colleague
-*Well, from working here and reading about all these trials I've learnt the importance of telling my *daughter (she was in her early teens back then*) to walk out after the first strike.*
-*No*, said my colleague, *you tell her to walk out when he starts to always pick her up from work. You tell her to walk out when she wants to go out with her friends and he insists on her staying at home by saying " but honey, I had planned to make you dinner and then we can cuddle in the sofa and watch a movie. That's where it begins. When the first strike hits she has been controlled for a long, long time*.

Norman3 Report

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When you find yourself not telling friends or family about things your SO has done/ the way you're being treated because "they wouldn't understand" and you don't want to make your SO look bad.

ThingerBees Report

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He choked me. Then he got mad at me for crying because "it's not like I actually died.".

CheerMom Report

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Looking back, there were so many red flags earlier, but the one I first realised at the time was when we had gone shopping and it had started pouring down rain out of nowhere. Everything is your fault if you're in an abusive relationship, according to your abuser.

Neither of us had an umbrella or anything because the weather had changed so rapidly, he then started screaming at me in the train station so badly one of the security guards had to intervene. I realised I was 18 years old, in the prime of my life and was stood here, crying and apologising to a man for the weather while strangers attempted to diffuse his anger at me fearing the consequences. That same night a woman sat next to me on the busy train held my hand quietly as he screamed at me across the aisle.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for your concern and well wishes!

I'm totally out of it now, after being pushed down stairs and losing weight rapidly from anxiety one of my school teachers intervened and got me the help I needed, now I've moved city to the university of my dreams and have the most gentle loving partner I could ever ask for.

widemec Report

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There were all of these unspoken "rules" I didn't know about until I would incur his wrath for breaking them.

badly_behaved Report

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When they dislike your friends for no reason. When they try and isolate you. When they insist on knowing your Facebook password. Poor mel.

DirtySingh Report

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For me, the first red flag was when we were joking around with one another on the couch. She threw a playful insult at me, I threw one back, and then she hauled off and slapped me in the face. There was no indication before-hand that she was like that.

I had grown up getting abused physically, and I didn't want to go back to that, so I called the evening off early and broke up with her the next day.

cyrus_hunter Report

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When they start using your emotions to manipulate you. It's very subtle at first, but then it gets worse and worse. My ex girlfriend from a few years ago was abusive. I think people often overlook it when women treat men that way, and it's unfortunate because it exists more often than people think.

nag404239 Report

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When I finally broke down and asked for help with my depression. Not for her to fix it, but for understanding and loving me while I tried to get help. She responded with, 'I don't care, just let me know when it's over with.'

brandnamenerd Report

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When she went through my phone and facebook and removed my female friends. I knew that normally, that'd be grounds for leaving her, but I took pity on her because she'd been abused in the past. That was a mistake.

III-V Report

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The need for my undivided attention every day in my every waking hour. Seriously people, clingers are bad news.

anon Report

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That they do things that hurt you emotionally and don't seem to care.

Throwaway90578 Report

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He "broke up" with me and said we could only get back together if I cut off my two best friends who were guys I had known since I was 2 years old.

He then continued to break up with me every time he wanted me to cut someone out of my life.

I was 15 at the time. By the time I was 18 I barely had anyone left in my life. Thank god for my family.

sooriza Report

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Any form of gas lighting no matter how small.

Also pre-blaming you for things they know will happen because of them. He'd tell me on vacation "that drink is too strong you're just going to pass out later and we won't be able to go out and do anything," but in reality it was him passing out from drinking at 9pm forcing us to stay in. Or saying "yeah I want to see the sunrise but you're never going to get out of bed that early," yet I went and saw it and he slept until 2 hours later when I finally got him up.

When I realized it, I saw he was basically trying to make me give up on doing things so he could blame me for us not doing it, even though if I held up my end he wouldn't hold up his. Between that and making me think my emotions were invalid when he'd upset me just made for a super manipulative relationship.

madguins Report

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When he started trying to isolate me from my family. I had already moved out of the house to live with him, but my family lived just a couple exits up the highway so I still saw them frequently. He would make snide comments about my little sister and always try to find ways to put my father down (my dad is a colonel in the army, my ex was an enlisted soldier and he always had a bit of an insecurity complex about officers vs enlisted.) If he had plans to go out, I would make plans to see my family and then he would cancel his plans and urge me to cancel mine. He never wanted me to go to their house anymore or see them at all. And when I met him, I had just moved to the area and was a recent 17 year old graduate who was taking a year off before starting college so I didn't know anyone but my family, wasn't in any position to meet anyone,and had no other connections. But he never wanted me to find other connections or continue the ones I had.

That was when I first started to think "yick, what is with this guy?" but I made excuses for him. As young fools in abusive relationships often do.

Shark-Farts Report

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The casual passive-aggressive comments he would drop in normal conversation. Then the comments would become more direct, then mean, and finally just cruel. And once he saw that I would accept those, well, the floodgates of abuse just burst open.

reddit.com Report

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Two things made me uneasy and really stand out in retrospect.

* He had nothing positive to say about any woman he had ever dated, or even met. All ex-girlfriends were "mentally ill" and hateful. All his friend's girlfriends/wives were mean and overbearing. He liked his mom, but no other women.

* He isolated me from my friends. He kept saying how nice it was to stay in alone and kept asking me to break established plans with friends.

victorontonian Report

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Went with a friend to dinner that lasted longer than usual because we were catching up. Left the restaurant to tons of text and calls. When I called back he was fuming. We had only been seeing each other about a month at that point.

laurenashley7774 Report

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She used to find things to criticize...even though she had no business commenting on...

for example, she would ridicule my driving, yet at the time she had already lost her licence and had gotten into numerous accidents...

She would criticize my cooking because she liked to do thing her way and stand over my shoulder while doing so....

Criticize my work hours while having no job and no income and expect that we could do anything if I just worked less...

jaytrade21 Report

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Having to justify every opinion.

"I don't like *specific movie*"

Tell me what you don't like about it.

"I just didn't like it"

That's stupid to not like things without a reason...

- -

This turned into me having to try to explain feelings and emotions...

All were invalidated until the point where I felt I was incapable of making a decision.

kelazma Report

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Never admitting fault, full of lies, gas lighting...becomes aggressive when you checkmate them in arguments.

anon Report

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I didn't see the red flags until 15 years later.

So, going back in time, the first BIG red flag was after he grilled me about some phantom affair he thought I was having, it turned out he was cheating on me. I didn't find out the truth until after we already married, though.

anon Report

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"Yes, I veer to the right a lot, so when I lose control of the wheel it'll be you who will hit the tree before me." She had a lot of undiagnosed mental issues. Her lapses in logic were too much for me to handle in the end.

BladeofSilver Report

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Every single text message I got (even from family) resulted in me hiding things from her and cheating on her because I wasn't ONLY texting her. When we broke up, I did it over text out of spite.

legit_muffins Report

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