Signs of a toxic relationship

You check their mood before you raise anything. Arguments end with the subject dropped rather than resolved, so nothing is ever actually settled. Your circle has narrowed without a decision being made about it. And the defending has started — to friends, to family, to people who love you and have begun to ask.

Any one of these can happen in a good relationship under strain. Several of them, consistently, is a pattern.

Every relationship has conflict, and conflict is not the diagnostic. Repair is. In a difficult but healthy relationship, both people come back, acknowledge the harm and change something.

Where repair never happens, small injuries accumulate, and the accumulation does the damage rather than any single incident.

Start by writing down what happened, in plain language, while you are clear. Patterns are hard to see from inside and easy to see on a page.

Then decide what you are testing. If you want to try, couples counselling with both people present is the fastest test of whether repair is possible. If your partner will not attend, individual work is still worth doing — it changes the pattern and clarifies the decision. If you are frightened at any point, that is a safety matter: call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.