Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about helping you identify poisonous communication and toxic behavior.

You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

That's why it's important that you learn to pinpoint manipulative and controlling behavior so that you keep your power and your sanity.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

Thank you. power and your sanity. I'm your host, Paul Koliati. Hey, welcome back to Love and Abuse, the official podcast of the Mean Workbook at

Love and Abuse.com.

And I wanted to just quickly share with you some thought processes that some people have

when they're in a manipulative or an emotionally abusive relationship.

And that thought process is, am I the one that's manipulative?

Am I the one that's being emotionally abusive?

I get this letter, I don't know, maybe once every once or twice a month.

And it's usually from someone who's been quite victimized from an emotionally abusive standpoint.

So if they've been victimized in the sense where emotional abuse was taking place in the relationship,

often the partner who's experiencing emotional abuse will feel like maybe I was the emotional abuser.

Maybe I was the manipulator.

Maybe I was really doing these things to my

partner and they were right about me because that's what often happens is that the emotionally

abusive, manipulative, controlling person will make you feel like you're doing the things they're doing. They will even say the

things that they're doing that you're doing. I mean, they won't admit that they're doing these

things. They will push those things onto you and say you're the one doing these things to me.

And let me give you one gauge, one guide, one question that you can ask yourself to figure

out if you're the one that's being manipulative, or you have these tendencies, or you're

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