Perhaps the most painful phrase after a relationship that destroyed a part of your life isn't: "I didn't know. " Perhaps it’s exactly the opposite. The signs were there.
I saw them. I just didn't want to believe what the signs meant. At first, he was jealous, but you thought it was because he liked you so much.
He wanted to know where you were, but it seemed like concern. He didn't like some of your friends, but maybe he was just trying to protect you. He would get annoyed when you went out without him, then apologized.
He’d say he was afraid of losing you and then do something wonderful. One day he criticized your outfit, another day he made a humiliating joke and said you couldn't take a joke. Maybe he spoke ill of your family, questioned a friend, or asked for your password.
Or got bothered by something completely normal. Separately, each of these episodes seemed too small to justify a big decision. So, you explained it away , you justified it.
Perhaps that is exactly how some deeply destructive relationships begin. Not with something scary enough to make you leave, but with small things for which you can still find an explanation. When we look at a relationship from the outside, especially after it's all over, it's very easy to ask, how did she not notice?
But that question ignores something fundamental. The person living the story doesn't have the information we have when we know the ending. In the beginning, that person can also be affectionate, fun, present, generous; they can be all of that at the start.
There might be desire, plans , trips, late-night conversations, and the feeling of having finally found someone who really cares. It is within this experience that the first signs appear. Maybe you aren't choosing between a wonderful person and a cruel person.
Maybe you are trying to understand how both seem to exist in the same place. Freud helps us realize that our emotional life is not governed only by what we consciously know. We rationalize, repeat, and try to give coherence to contradictory experiences.
When an attitude doesn't match the image we've built of someone, there is a human tendency to look for an explanation to preserve the image of the person we created. He is going through a difficult time. She suffered a lot in her previous relationship.
Oh, he only did that because he had been drinking. He had never done that before . Some of these explanations may even be true.
The problem is when the explanation starts to have a very specific function: allowing me not to have to take what I am seeing seriously . To disregard signs. Maybe that is why a red flag should not be understood simply as something bad that someone did.
Healthy people also make mistakes, feel jealous, lose their patience, or say things they regret. What deserves attention is the pattern, especially what happens when you try to set a boundary. One person might feel jealous and acknowledge that the feeling belongs to them.
Another might turn their own jealousy into a justification to control you. One person might dislike a friend of yours; another progressively begins to create conflict . Every time you meet that friend, until to avoid problems, you distance yourself.
And that is when some things that seemed like a show of love start to produce a very different effect. Your life starts to get smaller. You start managing information to avoid creating conflict.
You wonder if it is worth mentioning that you talked to someone. You pick out an outfit and imagine what the reaction will be. You turn down an invitation because you know the argument that will happen later.
Maybe you stop seeing a friend because your partner doesn't like her. Then another. Maybe your family starts saying you are changing, but you believe they simply don't understand your relationship.
Little by little, what started as a conflict between you two begins to also change your relationships with the world. Bowlby, by studying attachment bonds, showed how much our affective relationships are linked to the experience of security and the threat of loss. This helps to understand why simply realizing that a relationship hurts us does not mean we will be able to leave it immediately.
The more important that bond becomes, the more threatening the possibility of losing it can seem. And when affection, security, and suffering start to coexist in the same relationship, the experience can become even more confusing. The person who causes distress can also be the one from whom you expect relief.
That is why I would like to change the question . Instead of asking only: "Does this person love me? " Try asking what has been happening to my freedom since I started this relationship?
Because maybe someone can say they love you and at the same time build a dynamic in which you have less and less space to exist. And there is a moment when we also need to talk about money, because control within a relationship does not appear only in emotions. In some situations, it starts to reach material autonomy.
Maybe someone wants to control how much you spend, demands explanations for every purchase, withholds money, or prevents or hinders you from working. They put assets exclusively in their own name. They rack up debts using your resources.
Destroys objects or uses your assets and money as instruments to limit your choices. This can constitute what we call economic abuse. And it is important to name it because many people live in such situations for years believing they are just a couple's financial problems.
Notice how the issue becomes more serious. First, you started to doubt whether a certain attitude was really a problem. Then you started to modify your behavior to avoid conflicts.
And in some cases, external ties diminish. Financial autonomy may decrease. The smaller the world around a person becomes, the harder it can be to imagine a life outside of that relationship.
But I want to get to the most important part of this video now, because maybe you are hearing all of this and still thinking, but he never laid a finger on me. I want you to understand why this sentence deserves attention. Physical violence is not the only criterion by which a relationship can be considered abusive.
Humiliation, threats, coercion , isolation, control, and economic abuse are serious forms of violence, and not every emotionally abusive relationship will necessarily evolve into physical aggression. It would be irresponsible to claim that, but it would also be irresponsible to wait for the first physical assault to consider what came before serious enough. Because when physical violence appears, it often does not initiate the fear.
Fear had already been inside the relationship for a long time. Perhaps before the first push, there was already a wall punched during an argument. The broken object, the veiled threat, dangerous driving during a fight, blocking the door to keep you from leaving, physical proximity used to intimidate.
Perhaps there was that feeling that you needed to carefully choose your words because you didn't know how far an argument might go. And here we need to completely abandon any romanticization. Fear is not proof of love.
Control is not care. Preventing someone from leaving is not intensity. Destroying things to scare someone is not simply having a strong temper.
And physical violence should never be treated as a problem that you need to learn to manage better within a relationship. The most painful thing is that when someone reaches this point, they can look back and finally see a sequence that previously seemed to be made of disconnected episodes. Then that devastating question arises.
Why didn't I leave when I noticed the first signs? Perhaps this is where psychoanalysis can help without turning understanding into guilt. Freud realized that we repeat relationship patterns that we don't always choose consciously.
That which is familiar can exert an enormous force over us, even when it is not healthy. If you grew up in an environment where love and fear coexisted, where you had to anticipate someone's mood, where jealousy was treated as a sign of affection, or where boundaries were interpreted as rejection, certain behaviors may not seem immediately strange in your adult life. This does not mean you sought out an abusive relationship.
It means that our emotional radar is built by our own history. That is why noticing a red flag, a sign, does not just require learning a list of dangerous behaviors; it requires learning to take seriously what happens inside you when those behaviors appear. Are you starting to feel afraid of someone you love?
Are you hiding perfectly normal things to avoid their reaction? Are you distancing yourself from important people? Is your autonomy diminishing?
Do you feel you need to ask permission for things you used to decide on your own? Are you starting to constantly doubt your own perception? These questions are much more important than trying to figure out if someone fits perfectly into the label of a toxic person.
If this kind of conversation helps you recognize patterns that are often difficult to perceive while we are inside them, I would like to invite you to subscribe to our channel. Every week, we use psychoanalysis and the thoughts of great authors to understand our relationships and what happens to us beyond the surface. Subscribe and stay here with me, because I want to finish by returning precisely to the phrase we started with: "The signs were there.
" If you have already left an abusive relationship and today can see things you could not perceive back then , do not turn this late clarity into a weapon against yourself. You are looking at the beginning, knowing the end. At that moment, there was affection, expectation, hope, and information you did not yet possess.
But if you are living this right now, there is an important difference. This video might be naming things that, until yesterday, seemed like isolated episodes. And naming them does not force you to make a hasty decision.
It can stop you from continuing to tell yourself that what is happening does not matter, because it does. If there is a threat, coercion, physical aggression, or if you fear for your safety, do not treat this situation merely as a relationship problem to be worked out in a conversation between two people. Seek safe, specialized support, and in the face of immediate risk, call your local emergency services.
In contexts of violence, even the moment of leaving may require planning and protection. Because a sign is not a prophecy saying someone will inevitably do something terrible in the future. A sign is information about what is already happening in the present.
Perhaps you cannot know at the start of a relationship who that person will be in 10 years, but you can observe who you are needing to become to stay by that person's side today. And if to love someone you must progressively give up your freedom, the people you love, your autonomy, your safety, and finally the right to not feel fear inside your own home, perhaps the problem was never that you didn't see the signs. Perhaps the problem was having learned for too long not to trust what the signs were trying to show you.
Stay alert.
