First of all, if you are in a position to be asking whether you are experiencing emotional abuse, we’re sorry. We hope that you leave this blog knowing that you are not alone. We also hope we can offer some answer to the question, “Is lying emotional abuse?”
As frustrating as it might be to hear this, there is no clear-cut answer to this question. However, read through the 8 tips that we have included on this blog. Hopefully, they can help you identify whether the lie that your partner told was part of a pattern of abuse or the start of their journey to accountability.
This blog is all about answering the question, “Is lying emotional abuse?”
IS LYING EMOTIONAL ABUSE:
1. Identify whether you feel like you are in immediate danger
Above everything else, ask yourself if you think you’re in immediate danger. Immediate danger, in this situation, specifically refers to fear. It’s your emotions and your feelings.
If you take nothing else from this blog, please be aware that it does not hurt anyone for you to leave a situation that doesn’t make you feel good.
You may think your partner is abusive when they’re not, which is unlikely. In this case, leaving them because you suspect abusive behavior does not hurt them. False reports and things like that could be harmful.
When you are trying to identify if you are in immediate danger, that immediate danger just means that you feel uncomfortable in your current relationship. The rest of this blog will discuss various ways to identify whether your relationship is abusive.
You will also read about how to move forward from that. This first step is simply designed to get you out of a harmful situation regardless of how many signs of emotional abuse you can identify in your relationship. Listen to yourself and to your discomfort.
Leave your partner if they scare you at all. If you are afraid to talk to your partner, pick up the phone when they call, or go home to them in your bed, then leave them. Your safety and comfort always come first.
2. Look for persistent patterns of abuse or harmful behavior
Lying is a complicated thing in any relationship. It can be inherently harmful no matter what and should always be avoided. However, there are two main ways to identify whether your partner’s lies are actually patterns of abuse.
First, you need to zoom out a little bit and identify how often your partner lies (that you know of). Your partner may lie often enough that you have multiple instances where you found out about a lie they told. In this case, you also can assume there are more lies you don’t know about.
Second, you can look at the role that accountability plays in your relationship. If your partner has lied to you and they hurt you, then they need to show accountability and remorse.
This means that they see the emotional pain they caused you, they apologize for that pain, and they take steps to figure out how to avoid a similar difficult situation in the future. The key here is that you see them actually follow through.
They may tell you repeatedly, which is also another pattern to look for, that they are sorry and will change. But, if that isn’t backed up by real action, then it’s safe to say their lies are abusive.
It’s important to acknowledge that you can be in an emotionally abusive relationship without having a partner who is actively trying to abuse you.
There are definitely emotional abusers out there who are fully aware of their actions. Some potential partners don’t intend to abuse you and still do. An abusive partner is abusive even if they aren’t intending to abuse you.
3. Take care of your needs and prioritize your mental health first
Check in with yourself. Think about how you’ve been feeling in your relationship lately and how you’re feeling in the moment. It’s important that you show yourself that you value your well-being.
As silly as it might sound, it’s a big deal to check in with yourself. The simple act of checking in and valuing your well-being outside of your relationship matters.
By asking yourself how you are feeling and if you’ve felt the effects of psychological abuse, you are telling yourself that you believe in your own experience. This is powerful. So often, we tell ourselves that we believe in ourselves and we understand what we’re going through.
However, in cases of toxic relationships, it can be really difficult to accept the reality of what’s happening to us. It doesn’t matter what type of abuse you face, whether it’s physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, or mental abuse.
There are always ways that we can “excuse” an inherently inexcusable behavior. We can explain it away in a lot of ways. Maybe you say that the abusive person has been experiencing a lot of stress lately and that’s why they pushed us into the wall.
Or maybe you might say that there’s no “evidence” of the form of emotional abuse you’re facing, so there’s nothing to be done or there’s no real abuse happening. It’s difficult to accept that we’re being abused in intimate relationships.
We should be able to trust someone we have opened ourselves up to and loved deeply. Check in with yourself if this is what’s happening and make sure you listen to any sign of discomfort you find.
4. Identify signs of isolation or financial abuse
Often, abuse builds up gradually in intensity over a drawn-out period of time. People become accustomed to the small changes that almost appear imperceptible. This way, the abuse isn’t jarring and brutally obvious by happening all at once.
That way, when something major happens, you’re left wondering how you didn’t see it or where these forms of abuse came from. As we’ve discussed, lying is a complicated form of abuse and it doesn’t mean that a relationship has to end.
If your partner shows true accountability, changes the way they act to avoid hurting you again, and does not demonstrate a continued pattern of lies, then you might not have to leave your relationship.
However, if you notice any signs of isolation in your relationship, then you may want to talk it through with a trusted friend. Isolation is a key method for abusive people to use in relationships.
If you have lost the closeness with loved ones that you used to have, you’ve also lost the support group of loved ones who can help you leave an abusive relationship.
Your partner may convince you that they are all you have. They might argue your loved ones don’t understand or you wouldn’t be able to survive without your partner. Financial abuse can be a major part of an abusive relationship.
It can look like your partner taking care of everything money-related issues to keep you in the dark, refusing to let you have your bank accounts, and anything else that makes it that much harder to save an emergency fund for your own safety.
5. Keep in mind that lying is one of the common emotional abuse tactics
Lying can make you question everything. When we talk about the types of emotional abuse tactics, we refer to the use of a couple of the most common tactics in conjunction with one another.
In other words, it’s much easier to make you question your reality when you are isolated from people who can tell you that your sense of reality is accurate.
However, to separate you from other people, your partner must also be treating you poorly enough that they need to keep you isolated and in the dark about how abnormal and hurtful their behavior really is.
Lying is not a healthy way to maintain a relationship. It can ultimately hurt people quite easily. However, in abusive situations, people typically use in conjunction with other abuse tactics. That’s why it can be so hard to identify.
Lying, especially when combined with isolation and mistreatment, can easily lead to gaslighting. The difference between lying and gaslighting is that lying is not always gaslighting is always lying.
To better understand how lying plays a role in facilitating abuse, imagine the following scenario. Your partner lied to you about losing their job. They told you that the phone call with their boss was about a project they were working on.
Then, maybe they get mad that you questioned them or that you thought they’d get fired from their job, so you apologize and tell them that was not your intention.
Then, if this is brought up around a family member or friend, you’ll likely defend your partner because you thought you misjudged them.
Your partner further isolates you from your loved ones. In this case, we can see how easily lying fits into abusive patterns because it’s almost necessary to maintain abuse.
6. Avoid comparing your current relationship to past relationships
You’re currently asking yourself whether you’re relationship is abusive. So, it may seem odd not to compare this relationship to past relationships. However, the reason that we say this is because you don’t know how healthy your last relationship was.
You may have had a history of abusive relationships, and have no clue because they are designed to be very hard to recognize. Plus, it’s common to reminisce on the past or idealize the future as a way to cope with the present.
But, it’s important that you stay focused on what you’re experiencing right now. The best way to find out if you have unrealistic expectations when it comes to a healthy relationship is to talk to someone you trust. Get an outside perspective on your relationship.
It’s much easier to identify red flags in someone else’s relationship rather than being able to identify them in your own. We often can struggle to identify what a healthy relationship should look like because we didn’t always grow up with healthy relationships, all around us.
We may be used to one way of treaty, romantic partner, only to realize that that is not a healthy way to treat someone.
Therefore, instead of comparing your current relationship to past relationships, get an outside perspective and ask yourself what a healthy relationship feels like. Then, ask yourself if that’s how you think your relationship feels.
7. Remember that white lies can still hurt and be abusive
We’ve all heard the term white lies. The idea is that a white lie is supposed to cause less harm than other lies that are more intense. However, all lies can be manipulative and hurtful no matter what reason you have for lying. All lies make it hard for you to trust someone.
Even a white lie will make it a little harder for you to believe someone when they tell you something the next time. What’s worse is when you have to find out the hard way that someone lied to you.
Keep in mind that any form of lying is hurtful but finding out someone lied is ten times more hurtful than the original lie. Certainly, there are pathological liars, who lie enough that you’d think they need it to survive.
Strangely enough, once you lie for the first time, you start to realize that lying does become a form of survival. If you can’t be honest with the people around you, the lies will pile up and you’ll need more and more of them to maintain the original lie.
So, while there are certain lies that won’t cause as much harm as others, it’s still worth mentioning that all lies erode trust in a relationship.
All of the work that you’ve put into building the foundation of a loving relationship with someone will slowly dissipate after the first lie has been told in your relationship.
Even if the lie is something as simple as how you look in an outfit, the moment you find out they lied, you start to believe them a little bit less and less and less until you can’t believe anything they say anymore.
It sounds overdramatic to say it like that. But, little white lies will add up over a long time. The only way that lies do not corrode the foundation of a relationship is if the liar comes clean before their forced to.
In that case, the person who lied demonstrates remorse, which is crucial to accountability and ending the lying pattern.
8. Remind yourself of what healthy relationships look like
We’ve told you not to compare your current relationship to your last relationship for multiple reasons. One of those reasons was that you may not have a strong sense of what healthy relationships look like because you’ve never seen them.
That may be completely inaccurate to your experience, but it’s still worth asking yourself what a healthy relationship looks like. Imagine that one of the only reasons you stay in an abusive relationship is because you don’t realize how abusive it is.
In some ways, it can be life-saving to simply step back and ask yourself what feels good in your relationship and what doesn’t. There are a few different ways for you to identify what a healthy relationship looks like.
You can always look around you and identify what you think healthy looks like in the relationships that your friends and family members have with their partners. However, if you’re not sure that those are healthy relationships, then do some research.
Stay away from movies and shows because those interpretations of relationships are rarely healthy and very complicated.
You can find clear, insightful resources on websites like the National Domestic Violence Hotline to identify the difference between healthy and abusive relationships. Plus, you can find other blogs on our website that address the very same issues.
