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.

Music power and your sanity. I'm your host, Paul Koliani. I want to welcome you to another episode of love and abuse, and today I want to discuss isolation.

Isolation in the sense that when you're with someone that maybe doesn't have your best interest in mind and wants to control you in some way.

It may not feel like control.

You may not recognize it as control.

But when you're with someone that wants to make sure that there are no

or less outside influences that could affect your decision making, that could influence you in a

way that takes away their power over you, that takes away their control over you.

And so isolation is one of those behaviors that allows the person that's trying to isolate

you to have more control over you because you have less of a support system out there.

And a good example of this is the couple who is married and one spouse is more

controlling, more dominating and emotionally abusive or whatever they're doing and wants to control

the other spouse. And what they'll do is come up with ways to isolate them from friends and family and support structures.

And that can sometimes include moving to a new city or telling stories about their friends

and family in a way that makes their friends and family sound like they're not supportive or even against them.

And so we have to be careful when we meet someone that says anything about someone else in your life

that seems to want to isolate you from them.

Now here's the tricky part. What the controller will do doesn't always

appear to be malicious. It doesn't appear to be unkind. In fact, often the isolator will appear to be

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