Demystifying Unhealthy Behavior: What Does it Look Like?
We hear terms like "gaslighting" and "love bombing" referenced in pop culture and social media often nowadays. But what do these terms actually mean? What does it look like? I'll give some definitions and examples in this post to help demystify these terms and hopefully, help you identify these behaviors in real time.
Teresa Strong
8/12/20262 min read
Unhealthy behavior can take many different forms! It can be useful to have words and language to define it. It's important to note that most people will use these strategies to get what they want sometimes.
To identify abusive behavior, look for repeated patterns aimed at gaining power and control, including a lack of remorse and accountability. It is also important to notice any of these patterns in ourselves for self-accountability.
Coercion: When someone wants to change someone else's mind who has already said no or otherwise expressed disinterest. They might use threats, persuasion, and other tactics to get the outcome they want.
Gaslighting: Specific patterns of behavior intended to make someone else question their reality, sanity, and their ability to make decisions and trust themselves.
Often mistaken for guilt-tripping, minimization, shaming, or lying. True gaslighting is a type of emotional abuse and involves repeated patterns of behavior. It can involve the aforementioned behaviors (minimization, shaming, etc.), but think about gaslighting as a repeated pattern intended specifically to make people question themselves long-term.
Patronizing: Comments that are passive-aggressive in nature and a way to give someone a verbal put-down while maintaining a facade of friendliness or reasonableness.
Projection: Displacing someone's feelings about themselves onto another person, it is often because they are unwilling to acknowledge their own feelings and behaviors.
Intimidation: Communicating threats to someone else by way of hidden, indirect, or non-verbal cues and comments.
Normalizing: A tactic used to desensitize someone to abusive, coercive, or inappropriate behaviors. Normalizing is essentially manipulating someone to get them to agree to or accept something that is harmful and abusive.
Love Bombing: A tactic used to lure or keep someone in a relationship, often involving intense displays of affection, admiration, and grand gestures. It can happen at any relationship stage but is more common when two people first meet. While all this attention may seem flattering, it can be dangerously manipulative.
Infantilization: Treating a child or individual as if they were much younger than their actual age.
Alienation: Cutting off or interfering the relationships of one person with others, specifically as a way to maintain control and power.
