What if you're doing all you can to maintain your own health and well-being but you have someone in your life who a consistent drain on your mental and emotional health? Can you rebuild your energy or do you have to accept that it may never stop and you may have to make tougher choices about the relationship?

How can you tell if your partner's affection is genuine or a manipulation tactic? Love bombing usually takes place at the beginning of a relationship to create a strong bond between an abusive person and their victim. But it can also be used to get away with bad behavior in long-term relationships as well. 

When you reach your breaking point with someone, you might make the decision to leave. During that time, you can regain your confidence and feel your power again. You might even decide to give the relationship a second chance, knowing that if you see any warning signs, you can address them right away. 

That is until you are once again coerced into staying in a situation that seems destined to go down the exact same path as before. Now what?  

When you are in love with the person mistreating you, is there a way to improve the relationship? Can you make them understand how much they're hurting you? And if you did, would it change the situation?

In this episode, I read an email from someone whose emotional abuse turned into physical abuse, but she doesn't want to leave him because she loves him so much.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

There are ways emotional abusers can make you feel crazy. They can tell you that you said something you didn't, and convince you that you did. They can tell you about a conversation you never had. They can move things on you and tell you nothing was moved.

Someone with an agenda can alter your reality so much that you might actually GO crazy. In this episode I talk about crazymaking, and also dealing with the narcissistic ex when you have shared custody of the children.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Emotional abuse victims have a very difficult time trying to explain what's happening to them to friends and family. Often, loving, supportive people may side with the abuser because they simply can't see or believe that they are bad people. This leaves the victim feeling alone, with no one to turn to because their support system slowly disappears around them.

This episode is meant to be given to family, friends, your attorney, your therapist, or anyone else that doesn't understand the depth of control and manipulation happening in your relationship. Think of it as an emotional abuse and manipulation translation guide.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on emotional abuse and manipulation, an assessment and healing guide for difficult relationships. 

When you're in the thick of a toxic relationship, all you can see is a dark future with no way out. This skewed reality can actually keep you in the relationship because you think it's the best you can get.

Flushing yourself of the toxicity will help you see the brighter future there is.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Trying work as hard as you can to fix things you didn't break is exhausting and demoralizing. The first step to healing is realizing you're in it.

The path to repairing the relationship is for the perpetrator to discover that they are being abusive and to care enough about you to want to change.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on emotional abuse and manipulation at https://loveandabuse.com

Judgment is the ultimate relationship destroyer. It is the key to creating a rift so wide that the relationship issues might get to the point of unresolvable.

Once you reach that stage, there's no turning back. This episode lays out some key factors in helping the judgmental person become self-aware and change their behavior before they completely destroy the relationship.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

It can be a challenge to see the signs of toxic behavior when you first start dating someone, especially if things seem to be going well. After all, who wouldn't want to be told they're wonderful and a dream come true?

The beginning of a relationship is a great time to assess the other person's behavior to make sure they are showing up as authentic instead of putting on an act to eventually take away your power.

Important episode no matter where you are in your relationship.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

When someone in your life claims to have changed and promises to stop behaving badly, have they truly changed or are they just pretending?

Telling the difference between the actor and the authentic person is a major step away from crazy making. Your sanity may depend on it.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

When the partner of a cheater carries guilt, thinking their own behavior caused the cheating, the relationship can disintegrate even further, destroying the very foundation of what's left.

The cheater works alone no matter what the partner has done. Accepting this means healing and moving on, whether the relationship survives the affair or not.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

The actor in the relationship can fool the best of us. When you can't tell what's an act and what's real, you soon start to question your own sanity.

The actor doesn't love, they control. A real partner shows empathy and wants to see you happy. It's easy to tell the difference looking at it from the outside in, but sometimes impossible to see it while you're in it.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Sometimes, you can't see the red flags before you're hurt. Emotional abuse can be like an infection that enters your body. You may not know it's there until a lot of time has passed, and you've invested a lot into the relationship.

In this episode, I share how emotional abuse acts like an infection entering your body and mind and help you understand the environment in which such an emotional infection thrives. 

Isolation occurs when someone wants to keep you from your friends, family and support structures. You will become more dependent on the one who is isolating you, causing you to seek all of your friendship, love, and support from that one person.

As you see other people less and less, control sinks in more and more. Soon, you will feel alone and completely shut out from the rest of the world.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Are you waiting for someone else to change so that you can get what you want?

In this episode, I talk about an email I received from a woman who fell in love with a man who went back with his wife. However, he now cheats on his wife to be with her. This has caused her to become obsessive, thinking about him all the time and waiting in pain for him to leave his wife and come back to her.

He has it both ways: A wife and family, and a mistress on the side. What is the incentive for him to change?

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Sometimes a conversation with a certain person always seems to lead down a path of misery. You end up feeling bad and can't figure out what happened.

These old patterns continue until you interrupt them and make sure you are reflecting on the behavior instead of blindly repeating them.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Many emotional abuse victims believe they are at fault for the abuse, as if there is behavior they did to bring it on. The short answer is there is nothing you can do to prevent it. You can't prevent a personality characteristic that is going to appear no matter what. Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

When you are kind, generous and caring and you get controlling and manipulative in return, you may be the very cause of perpetuating such behavior without even knowing it. Your kindness could be someone else's fuel to continue treating you badly. Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

We are often told that we can choose how to feel and that no one can actually control us. However, in emotional abuse and manipulation, that concept doesn't seem to hold true at all.

In fact, it seems that we can be conned by our own brain as the manipulator finds tiny ways to break us down from the inside out.

In this episode, I share the signs of control and what you can do about it when it starts. Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

How do you tell friends and family about the emotional abuse from the narcissist when they don't see that behavior in them at all. In fact, they have a very different view of the abusive person to the point where they may actually feel sorry for them and think you're the crazy one. I talk about that on today's episode.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Would you know if you were being manipulated? Do you know what the look for? Manipulative people are experts are toxic language to make you feel bad about yourself. It's time to learn just how to tell if you are being manipulated or not.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Some people have a strange way of showing they care by sending you small messages out of the blue to get you to think about them. In reality, this is a manipulative tactic to make sure you never get them out of your mind. Breadcrumbing can happen for many reasons, but the main two reasons are:

1. The person wants to keep you as a hookup for sex

2. The person wants to make sure you can't stop thinking about them for some narcissistic high.

A sex-only relationship can be maintained if both are very clear that it's only about sex and not about getting into a relationship, and as long as there are no hurt feelings.

But if the manipulative person is continually making you think of them through messages and texts knowing that you want to be in a relationship with them, but they have no intention of committing to one with you, you are being could be being led down a painful road of hope and disappointment.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com. #loveandabuse

Gaslighting and crazymaking are one in the same - they are both terms to describe a person that wants you to feel crazy. They do that by causing you to distrust your own decisions and make you think that you are wrong about almost everything.

They know how to turn you from a happy, assured individual with your own thoughts and ideas into a dependent, unsure and fragile person that can't take any steps without checking in with them first. Emotional abuse is insidious in nature, but crazymaking is the ultimate perception destroyer.

If you can't trust your own perceptions, you don't even know what reality is. After some time with the crazymaker, you'll come to trust the very person causing you to distrust yourself.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com

#loveandabuse

It can be hard to draw a line in a toxic relationship. Don't make your emotional resilience a prison of your own making. Your personal boundaries are there for a reason. Often, the only way things will change is if you do something because they won't 

Have you ever sat there feeling confused, frustrated or running out of patience listening to someone talk and talk? There is actually a method manipulators use to confuse you into compliance so that they can get their way with you. It is something you may not know is happening, but once you understand it, you can predict it and even get out of it before it's too late.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse at loveandabuse.com

It takes two humble people to work at the relationship, not one that's always blaming the other. When one person is always blaming and pointing the finger at the other, and the other person tries to do the right thing, there may be a deeper issue that is unfolding that needs to be addressed sooner than later.

If you've ever wondered why someone could be so cruel, it's time to accept that selfish people just don't care about you. Selfish people will slowly disintegrate your self-worth, self-esteem, self-trust, self-love and self-compassion, which is everything that makes up your power. They want what they want and don't care if you care.

https://loveandabuse.com

When you can't see the symptoms or manipulation or emotional abuse, do either actually exist? Is there a way to tell when you're being emotionally mistreated? Yes. This episode talks about what to look for when you don't see the signs.

Do you spend all your energy defending yourself with certain people? Can you never get ahead with them because they continue to paint you into a corner where you feel you have no choice but to correct them about what you've done or who you are? It may be time to stop defending yourself and start realizing exactly what the game is so you don't fall for it anymore.

What happens when you look at your relationships and think that perhaps you are the one causing the problems and that your partner or family are right about you? Are you the manipulative one? Do you need help? I think that's a great question to explore, and one to clear up too since I get this question about twice a month.

You can be "groomed" into becoming the victim of emotional abuse or manipulation. Just like a child predator will groom his or her victim for abuse, the "emotional predator" will set you up for their control so that you become whatever they want you to become. It's a dirty game. In this episode, I compare emotional grooming to child grooming to reveal the scary similarities.

When someone cares about you, they don't say things like "you're too sensitive" or "you're so emotional", they actually become more sensitive to your sensitivities. Don't fall for the "you're too sensitive" game, it is played by those who want to get away with their own bad behavior.

Have you noticed the red flags but decided not to say anything? What do you do when you catch someone red handed and the red flag of deception or manipulation rears its ugly head? Do you honor your boundaries and speak up or instead choose to dismiss it thinking you must be wrong. It's important to keep your red flag radar turned on so that you don't get sucked into an a bad situation.

Emotional abuse, manipulative communication, and lies and deception are so prevalent in the world today that it's almost impossible to go through life without meeting at least 10 people that are capable of making you into their victim. You do not have to fall prey to someone else's bad behavior and should not be subject to toxic communication without first arming yourself with knowledge. Love and Abuse is about helping you identify the poisonous behavior of people that don't have your best interest in mind. Learn to spot bad behavior so that you can make healthy decisions about the relationships in your life.

Love and Abuse is the official podcast of The M.E.A.N. Workbook: An Assessment and Healing Guide to Difficult Relationships.

When the emotionally abusive person goes silent in order to make you feel guilty and give them the attention they want, do they have a deeper motive of self-preservation? When abusers use silence to control you, there's a lot going on under the hood. In this episode, I share my personal history of using the silent treatment to control the people I claimed to love. 

Some people are so wrapped up in their need to control you that they completely overlook your worth and importance. They can be so busy keeping you focused on yourself and everything you're doing "wrong," that you might actually start to believe what they're saying about you. 

The emotionally abusive person can have a traumatic past. Their abusive behaviors can have an abusive origin. Is it better to help them address their past to stop their behaviors toward you? It's an important question that you should definitely want to know the answer to. 

The victim of hurtful or emotionally abusive behavior has a threshold. When they reach that threshold, their heart can seal permanently, never letting the hurtful person back in again. 

In this episode, I help identify when your heart is sealed permanently. Before that happens, there's always a chance to repair a relationship that's been damaged. After that, however, the relationship may never get another chance. 

The thought of breaking up or separating from a toxic person can be a difficult decision to make. But taking a break before a breakup can bring clarity and perspective in a problematic relationship, helping you rediscover something you lost and even help decide if you really want to make that difficult decision or take a different path. 

The language you use to describe your relationship and how you're getting along with the other person says a lot. If you've ever wondered if you are the hurtful one or they are, the words you use can reveal just what role you play in the dynamic of an emotionally abusive relationship. 

What would happen if you decided to write them a loving, supportive letter outlining all of their hurtful behaviors in hopes they'll read it and finally realize they need to change?

Will it backfire on you? I talk about that in this episode.

The victim of abusive behavior will eventually reach their breaking point. In that moment, they finally feel like they can take their life back. But they may still not be out of the woods yet during the transition from victim to empowered. 

The cycle of high ups and deep downs in a relationship is like being trapped in an emotional prison. There are moments of freedom and happiness, followed by a constant underlying fear or worry of being trapped again.

The emotional prison is created by the manipulative and controlling behavior of the person who wants to keep the person in a disempowered state. This cycle of ups and downs often forms a trauma bond, where the person seeks love and support from the same person who is causing them emotional harm.

Sometimes an abusive relationship changes into a non-abusive one. Sometimes the abusive person has an epiphany and stops the behavior. Often that happens when the other person reaches their breaking point, which may be too late. But if there's still love, there's a chance. The questions are, what are the chances that the healing emotional abuser will stop the behaviors? And can the relationship heal? 

Why do people who claim to care about us hurt us when they see that we're suffering? Shouldn't our suffering be enough for them to stop the behaviors? It's one of the most common questions I receive: If they really love me, why do they hurt me? 

Dealing with a hurtful person is often hard enough. When they have hurtful parents, however, it gets even harder. Especially when you thought you had a somewhat good relationship with them. When their parents can't see their own child being hurtful toward you, you may not get the compassion and support you're looking for. 

Your religious or spiritual beliefs are supposed to help uplift and inspire you, not make you feel oppressed and exhausted. Religious abuse happens when people who claim to love you use your own beliefs against you to keep their power over you. 

I get messages from those who are with someone who claims to have changed, but something doesn't feel right to them. What they feel is usually accurate. There are specific thoughts and feelings inside you that can help you tell if someone has actually changed and healed from being emotionally abusive, or if they still have a ways to go. 

When you've realized enough is enough but you're afraid that the kids will get a boatload of abusive behavior from a soon to be ex, knowing what to expect and how to respond to what happens next is the key to trying to maintain the healthiest relationship with your children.