Everyone deserves healthy relationships! Whether with a friend, family member, partner, or colleague, healthy relationships are built on mutual respect, trust, and communication. Key elements include:
- Trust and Safety: Everyone should feel secure and valued.
- Open Communication: Honest dialogue and active listening help resolve conflicts and build understanding.
- Boundaries: Respecting each person’s space, needs, and individuality.
- Equality and Support: Ensuring everyone feels heard, valued, and able to contribute equally.
- Encouragement and Growth: Supporting each other’s goals and development.
- Kindness and Forgiveness: Fostering empathy and resolving issues with compassion.
These elements create a strong foundation for meaningful, positive connections.
Even healthy relationships can occasionally show extreme behaviors, but multiple warning signs may indicate abuse. Examples include:
- Jealousy: Demanding your full attention and getting angry when you spend time with others.
- Control: Dictating all aspects of your life, making you feel like a possession.
- Isolation: Limiting your contact with family and friends.
- Privacy invasion: Checking your phone, emails, and texts without permission.
- Disrespect: Blaming, shaming, and putting you down.
- Blame: Making you feel responsible for their bad behavior.
- Threats: Threatening harm to you or themselves.
- Destruction: Damaging your personal possessions.
- Lack of compassion: Showing no empathy for your feelings or situation.
- Self-serving: Forcing you to prioritize their interests over your own.
Recognizing these signs can help you identify and address unhealthy relationship dynamics.
If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, please seek out help from the sources listed on our Relationship and Sexual Abuse Support page.
Additional online resources:
Dedicated to eliminating abuse, One Love can help you identify healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors, know if it’s time to end your relationship, how to help a friend who may be in an abusive relationship, how to help to a friend who may be abusing their partner, safety-planning, and more.
Are you seeing red flags in your relationship or in your friends’ relationship(s)? MyPlan is a free app offered in English and Spanish to help with safety decisions if you, or someone you care about, may be experiencing abuse in an intimate relationship. It’s private, secure, personalized, backed by research, and informed by survivors of domestic violence.