Featured Imaged by Clive Barley Under Creative Commons License

Most relationship advice focuses on red flags in other people and how to spot predators and narcissists.

Those are good things to know but they aren’t airtight. Absolutely anything can be a red flag depending on the context, and some of these lists get so absurd it reads like the creator cares more about ad revenue than helping people – or worse, they want to sabotage their audience and make them dependent on them.

You should absolutely take a step back from people who have a problem with boundaries and who treat the things you do to keep yourself safe as offenses or barriers they need to break with a battering ram. They may or may not be predatory – a lot of people get labeled narcissists these days when they’re just fucked up. Fucked up can be fixed; narcissism can’t. It’s not up to you to fix fucked up, but it’s not right to sabotage somebody who has a chance at course correcting when you leave. (And most of the time you won’t know which-is-which until you’re looking back at the situation.)

You don’t need get super specific when you see red flags bright enough you want to leave. You are not a doctor and have no business diagnosing anyone. A lot of doctors have no business diagnosing anyone; words like “narcissist” have become so overused they’ve lost their punch. It’s hard to spot this stuff when you come from dysfunction, but once you’ve reached the point where the obvious flags scream at you when you’re getting to know somebody, just go.

When the obvious flags aren’t obvious to you or you’re dealing with subtle manipulations, that’s when you’ve got to go inward. That’s the point where most people are going to fall down a rabbithole of watching YouTube videos and reading books about psychopaths and narcissists and other abusive types. That can make you feel less alone and make it clear what is and isn’t okay for people to do, but it can only help you so much if you aren’t able to turn within and listen to the signals your mind and body are sending you.

Who Are You When You Are With Them?

That’s the question I asked myself when I got out of the relationship that led to writing Codependency is Not Enlightenment.

Looking at it now, there were all kinds of red flags waving large, bright and high from the very beginning of that relationship, but I was still acting the doormat and excusing a lot of things I wouldn’t tell anyone else to excuse until I looked at my own behavior. I was acting more narcissistic than I did with anybody else.

I didn’t feel safe. I was always on edge. The relationship quickly transitioned from the honeymoon phase to “I hope she doesn’t message me tonight.” I acted colder toward her. My inner world started changing.

I was at the point where all of this was subtle, but at that early stage I couldn’t stomach who I was and I didn’t see things getting better. I went into meditation and communed with my spirits and I felt into the future that awaited me down the road where I continued that relationship and I saw darkness and sensed death.

I didn’t believe that was literal, but it didn’t matter. If that’s what the future felt like, I didn’t want it.

I did see the alternate path where I was single and I was pretty happy as I was getting on with my life. That is more-or-less what I got on the path I chose. It was a messy ending I would’ve handled differently today, but I cut myself slack because that was one of the first times I stood up for myself like that and it was more important I followed through than it was I did everything cleanly.

Perfection Isn’t a Reason Not to Stand Up For Yourself

I know I’m not alone in saying that part of the reason I’ve gotten stuck in bad situations is because I felt a sense of loyalty to my own words or a need to be consistent that is entirely unreasonable in the face of other people’s actions.

For a very long time, if I promised something it didn’t matter if the other person didn’t hold up their end, I was going to do what I said. I saw it as a sign of bad character to go back on my word. I’m a liar and a backstabber. “It doesn’t matter what they do” I told myself. “My word is my bond and I’m gonna do what I said I’d do.”

I did this while holding down the rage inside me like I was a mobster drowning a guy who failed to pay his protection money. I destroyed myself and justified it by saying I wasn’t destroying the other person.

I learned to frame giving people the entirely deserved and reasonable consequences of their behaviors as some kind of betrayal.

I also internalized this idea it wasn’t enough to have one discussion and be done with things. They needed notice of what I was thinking and what I wanted to do. They needed as many chances as they wanted to correct their behavior before I could justify walking away. If they had any excuses whatsoever whether it was waking up in a bad mood or a family member that had mysteriously died three times since I first talked to them about what needed to change, well – I needed to take more abuse. It wasn’t fair to them to cut them off.

Ignoring Your Feelings, Needs and Intuition Isn’t Virtue

When you’re in a relationship with someone, it’s never just about you and them but who you are when you are with them.

How do you change when you’re talking or you’re in the same room? Is your sense of humor the same? Are you more emotionally balanced? Are you less emotionally balanced? Are you more prone to rumination? Do you feel at ease? Do you find yourself gossiping when you didn’t before? Do you become kinder or more cruel?

It’s important to realize that people can have you feeling all sorts of ways and it doesn’t always indicate there is something wrong with them or even with you. If someone brings out a bad side in you that can mean you’re triggered. You don’t have to figure out why you’re triggered if you’re acting in ways that you don’t like and that you think makes you unfit for the relationship or them unfit for a relationship with you. The important part is that you’re honest about it and do what you need to do. If something has you out of sorts, pull back, work on yourself, see a therapist, whatever you have to do – you can act in your best interest and the best interest of the other person without anyone being the villain.

But whether or not the other person is a villain – if you find your “humor” getting more cruel and you’re laughing at things you didn’t used to find funny – things that come at other people’s expense? That’s a good sign the other person has a lot of toxicity in them and you’re changing in ways you won’t like if you don’t put a stop to it.

Never Let Yourself Become Someone You Don’t Respect

If you feel like you should say something and you don’t, you’re going to respect yourself less. That’s a red flag. If they’ve given you good reason to think you shouldn’t speak up, that is a red flag within you about the situation and a red flag the other person is flying.

If you’re trying to figure out if you’re with a narcissist and you just can’t make the pieces fit but you can name the times you tried speaking up and you got gaslighted or silenced? You’ve got your answer. If not THE answer, a good enough answer to figure out what you need to do. If you feel like you need to hold your tongue you’ll lose respect for yourself and that is a red flag telling you the situation isn’t good for you.

Do I respect myself more or less after I spend time with this person? Do I love myself more or less after I spend time with this person? Do I feel more or less motivated to better myself and pursue what I want in life when I am around this person?

If you can get real about the effect your relationships have on you, what’s going on with the other person doesn’t matter as much. Learn how people tick – you should understand manipulation tactics and how needlessly cruel people can be just for your own education and protection. That knowledge helps you stop gaslighting yourself. But – proper application of that knowledge will always come back to how things impact you and how you navigate them when you understand it.

Proper self-focus is not making yourself the center of the universe but understanding how you relate to other people and how they relate to you and taking responsibility for your emotions and actions. If you wake up liking the person you see in the mirror, you’re making the right choices in your relationships. If you don’t? It’s time for some reflection.

You are a necessary aspect of every relationship that you are in. There is no relationship if you are not present and your needs are not accounted for. Complete self-sacrifice isn’t love on either side – it’s enabling the other person, and that person who says they love you is sacrificing you for their own gain. You can feel these dynamics at work in your body. You feel weaker; you look tired all the time; you can’t concentrate and nothing you do ever goes anywhere. No one who loves you would want that.

And that includes yourself. Work on loving yourself and respecting yourself and everything else gets a lot clearer.

Linktree