Non-Threatening Behaviour

• Talking and acting so that your partner feels safe and comfortable doing and saying things

Using Intimidation

• Making your partner afraid by using looks, actions and gestures.
• Smashing or destroying things
• Destroying or confiscating you partners property
• Abusing pets as a display of power and control
• Displaying weapons or threatening their use
• Making physical threats

Respect

• Listening to your partner non-judgmentally
• Being emotionally affirming and understanding
• Valuing opinions

Using Emotional Abuse

• Putting your partner down or calling them names
• Making your partner feel bad about him/herself
• Playing mind games
• Interrogating, harassing or intimidating partner
• “Checking up on” partner’s activities or whereabouts
• Humiliating, shaming or making your partner feel guilty

Trust and Support

• Supporting your partner’s goals in life
• Respecting your partner’s right to his or her feelings, friends, activities and opinions.

Using Isolation

• Controlling what your partner does, who they see, talk to, read or where they go
• Limiting partner’s outside involvement
• Demanding your partner remain home when you are not with them
• Cutting your partner off from prior friends, activities and social interaction
• Using jealousy to justify your actions

Honesty and Accountability

• Accepting responsibility
• Acknowledging past use of violence and/or non-violent abusive behavior, and changing that behavior
• Admitting to being wrong when it is appropriate
• Communicating openly and truthfully, acknowledging past abuse, seeking help for abusive relationship patterns.

Minimizing, Denying, and Blame Shifting

• Making light of the abuse and not taking your partner’s concerns about it seriously
• Saying the abuse did not happen, or wasn’t that bad
• Shifting responsibility for your abusive behavior to your partner, E.g. “I did it because you…
• Saying your partner caused it

Responsible Parenting

• Sharing parental responsibilities
• Being a positive, non-violent role model for children

Using Children

• Making your partner feel guilty about the children
• Using the children to relay messages
• Using visitation to harass you/your partner
• Threatening to take the children away

Shared Responsibility

• Mutually agreeing on a fair distribution of work in the household.
• Making family decisions TOGETHER.

Using Economic Abuse

• Preventing your partner from getting or keeping a job
• Making your partner ask for money
• Giving your partner an allowance
• Taking your partners money
• Not letting partner know about/have access to family income.

Your Relationship is Healthy if Both Partners:

• Talk about their feelings;
• Respect their partner’s friends and activities;
• Listen to and consider their partner’s opinions and feelings;
• Respect each other and work out differences;
• Have an equal say in the relationship.

Your Relationship May Be Unhealthy If:

• It often includes angry shouting/yelling;
• One partner regularly uses the silent treatment to punish the other;
• One partner has more rights than the other.

Your Relationship is Abusive if Either Partner:

• Dominates or controls the other;
• Keeps the other from seeing friends or family;
• Uses name-calling or putdowns;
• Damages the other’s property;
• Shows extreme jealousy/possessiveness;
• Pushes, hits or physically restrains the other;
• Forces sexual touching or sex.