Stop Looking For Red Flags. Watch This Instead.
One of the most common questions I get asked, especially from people who have been through a painful relationship, is some version of this: "How do I spot the red flags? How do I know earlier? How do I protect myself next time?" It makes complete sense that this is the question. If you've been hurt, you want a detection system. You want to be smarter about it going forward. You want a list.
Here's the honest answer, and I say this with genuine care rather than to be deflating: most of us won't spot the red flags early. Not reliably, anyway.
The beginning of any relationship, whether romantic, a new friendship, or even a new colleague, involves a kind of natural performance. We all put forward our best selves. We're warmer, more generous, more patient than we might be six months down the track when the novelty has settled and the real texture of daily relating starts to show. This isn't dishonesty, it's just human. The brain is wired to seek connection, and in the early stages of forming one, it tends to smooth over the rough edges.
For most people, this is benign. But for some, particularly those who operate from a more manipulative or exploitative relational style, the early phase is not just natural charm but a deliberate strategy. Love bombing is the term used to describe the intense attention, affection, flattery and pursuit that can feel, when you're on the receiving end of it, like finally being truly seen. Research on coercive control has identified love bombing as a patterned tactic used to establish emotional dependence before control begins in earnest (Kassing & Collins, 2026). It is intoxicating precisely because it meets a very real human need for connection and attunement. By the time the dynamic shifts, the attachment is already formed. The red flags, in retrospect, were often there. But they were buried under a lot of warmth, and our nervous systems were busy enjoying it.
So if early red flags are unreliable, where does that leave us?
There is one thing that is remarkably consistent, across relationship types and regardless of how charming or attentive someone has been up to that point. How a person responds when you say no. When you disappoint them. When you put your own need or preference above theirs. When you set a limit that costs them something. That moment, more than almost anything else, will tell you something true about who you are dealing with.
Setting a boundary is not a test and you don't have to frame it as one. But it functions as one naturally, because it introduces friction into the dynamic. It creates a moment where the other person has to choose between their own comfort and your autonomy. Most people, most of the time, will absorb the disappointment. They might feel it. They might even say so. But they will ultimately respect it, and the relationship will continue. Some people, however, cannot or will not tolerate being told no. And the way that intolerance shows up is worth understanding.
One of the most disorienting responses, and one that is becoming more widely known, is what psychologist Jennifer Freyd termed DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. You raise something, and within minutes you find yourself defending your motives, apologising, and somehow comforting the very person you were trying to address. The original concern gets buried. A 2020 study confirmed that exposure to DARVO causes observers to rate the person raising the concern as less credible, more responsible for the situation, and more "abusive", even when the original complaint was entirely legitimate (Harsey & Freyd, 2020). The tactic works because it destabilises. You came into the conversation with a reasonable position, and you leave it wondering if you're the problem.
Another common pattern is gaslighting, a word that gets used loosely now but describes something quite specific: a sustained erosion of your confidence in your own perception. In the context of a boundary, it might look like being told that what happened didn't happen, or didn't happen the way you remember, or that your reaction to it is wildly disproportionate. A 2023 qualitative study of gaslighting in romantic relationships found it involves not a single argument but an accumulated pattern of having your perceptions consistently dismissed (Klein et al., 2023). Over time, you stop trusting yourself. You start checking your reactions against other people's before you'll allow yourself to feel them. A 2024 study developing a validated measure of gaslighting exposure identified the most damaging element as not the challenge itself but the loss of self-trust that follows (Tager-Shafrir et al., 2024). That loss follows you outside the relationship.
Then there is guilt. Guilt is one of the most powerful social tools we have; it evolved to motivate repair when we have genuinely caused harm. When someone weaponises it in response to a boundary, they are essentially borrowing the machinery of conscience and pointing it in the wrong direction. Research examining coercive control identified guilt induction as a core tactic for maintaining relational control (Lohmann et al., 2024). It doesn't always look dramatic. "Don't worry about me, I'll be fine" can carry exactly the same weight as "you're being selfish." It just makes you feel worse for noticing. The guilt activates your instinct to repair, and the repair involves abandoning the boundary. Every time.
Emotional withdrawal is quieter but equally effective. The silence, the coldness, the warmth that simply disappears until you relent. Researchers studying coercive control have described this as emotional withdrawal deployed as a lever; the implicit message being that your limit will cost you the relationship unless you reconsider (Kassing & Collins, 2026). What makes it so hard to hold against is that the discomfort is real. Someone withdrawing from you genuinely hurts. The instinct to close that gap is completely human. Recognising that the gap was created by their response to your boundary, not by any wrongdoing on your part, is what makes it possible to stay steady without immediately capitulating.
There is also a trap that many people fall into when their limits are challenged, and it is worth naming because it looks like the responsible thing to do. The more you try to explain your reasoning to someone who is not receiving your boundary well, the worse it typically goes. The concept known as JADE (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) describes this dynamic: you offer a boundary, they push back, you explain more, they push back again, you provide more context. You are now in a negotiation about whether your need is valid, and by entering that negotiation you have implied that its validity is up for debate. Research on social influence in interpersonal dialogue, a 2025 taxonomy published in the journal Social Influence, identified manipulative communication as distinct from persuasion precisely because it bypasses rational agency; it doesn't engage with your reasons, it just works to neutralise your position. More explanation feeds this. A boundary doesn't require a lengthy defence. "That doesn't work for me" is a complete sentence.
Now here is the part I want to be careful about, because context matters enormously.
Good people make mistakes. Good people can behave badly in moments of fear, insecurity, or feeling rejected. We have all, at some point, responded to disappointment in a way we're not proud of. A single clumsy or even hurtful response to a boundary does not make someone abusive or unsafe. What matters is pattern. Does it happen repeatedly? Does the person have any capacity for reflection afterwards? Can they come back and acknowledge how they responded, and do differently? Is there genuine accountability or just enough repair to reset the cycle?
The distinction between a pattern and a moment is important because collapsing the two leads to one of two unhelpful places. Either you pathologise ordinary human imperfection, or you excuse genuine harm by treating it as just another moment. The question worth sitting with is not "did this person respond badly once" but "what does it look like across time, and what happens when I bring it up."
That is a harder question to answer when you are in the middle of it. Patterns are much easier to see from outside, which is part of why these dynamics can persist for so long. Shame also plays a role. Many people don't tell anyone what is happening in their relationships, which means they lose access to the outside perspectives that could help them calibrate. The self-blame associated with DARVO exposure, for example, is linked to increased PTSD symptoms and maladaptive coping (Harsey & Freyd, 2020). The gaslighting erodes the self-trust that would normally allow someone to say "something is wrong here." By the time it's clearly a pattern, people are often already quite lost.
This is not a personal failing. It is what happens when the feedback you receive from a significant relationship is consistently at odds with your internal experience. The brain is a social organ; it takes relational input seriously. When the environment around you keeps saying "your perceptions are wrong," the brain starts to update accordingly.
Knowing that this is a documented, recognisable process is not a small thing. It means there's a way back, and that the confusion you feel is not evidence of your inadequacy. It's evidence of prolonged exposure to something disorienting.
Working with a psychologist when you're navigating these questions offers something genuinely hard to access on your own: a consistent, trustworthy outside perspective. Not someone who will tell you what to think, but someone who will help you think more clearly, in a space where your perceptions are taken seriously and examined without an agenda.
Therapy can help you identify what the patterns in your relationships actually look like, rather than how you've been told to see them. It can help you rebuild trust in your own perception, which is often the most important recovery. It can help you get clearer on what your limits actually are, and what it feels like in your body when they're being crossed, because many people who have been in these dynamics for a long time have stopped receiving those signals clearly. And it can help you understand the part of you that has stayed in or returned to these patterns, not with self-criticism, but with the kind of genuine curiosity that makes change actually possible.
Let me give you a concrete example from my own life, because I think it lands differently when it's not theoretical. I also want to provide an example which isn’t from a romantic relationship because less is said about these tactics in other interpersonal dynamics. Our cat recently went missing from our apartment. My children and I had been searching frantically, terrified he might have fallen from our balcony into the courtyard below. Tear-stained and distressed, we knocked on our neighbour's door and asked if we could check their garden. He wasn't there. As I turned to leave, I noticed she had pulled my teenage son aside and was getting him to set up her new sound bar. Not wanting to be rude, he was helping. I said, gently, "He might need to come back another time, we really should keep looking." Every minute felt precious. She smiled and said "It will only take a minute, I need a young one to help." Her husband stepped in and suggested she let us go, and she snapped at him: "It's just five minutes, I'm sure they have five minutes." At that point I held the boundary more firmly. "We really do need to keep looking. If you're still having trouble later, I can send him down." And we left.
Here's the thing I want to be honest about. If she had caught herself after my first gentle attempt and said "Oh gosh, of course, go! I'm so sorry, I hope you find him" I would have let it go completely. Because we are all human. We get caught up in our own worlds, miss the cues, and sometimes just don't read the room. That's not a red flag. That's a person. But she backed her choice up twice after I'd voiced our need clearly, in a context where our distress was visible. That pattern, the doubling down, the way her need remained centred while ours was treated as an inconvenience, is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm holding it lightly. I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt. But I've taken note, and I'll be paying attention to how she responds in future situations like this one. One moment doesn't define someone. But a pattern does.
What struck me later was the specific mechanism in "I'm sure they have five minutes." She had appointed herself as the authority on what we could afford to give, overriding our own assessment of our situation. We had already said we needed to go. By deciding for us that we didn't, she quietly removed us from the conversation about our own capacity. The word "just" in "it's just five minutes" was doing similar work; it reframed our resistance as disproportionate before we'd even made it. None of this was loud. But the effect was that holding our ground required pushing against not just her preference but the version of reality she had constructed around it.
You don't need to have it all worked out to make a start. If any of this has landed somewhere real for you, that's enough to begin. Please reach out to book an appointment here. Alternatively, you can access free resources including more examples of manipulation and what healthy responses look like here as well as scripts you can use to help reinforce boundaries here.
References
Harsey, S. J., & Freyd, J. J. (2020). Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (DARVO): What is the influence on perceived perpetrator and victim credibility? Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 29(8), 897–916. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2020.1774695
Kassing, K., & Collins, A. (2026). "Slowly, over time, you completely lose yourself": Conceptualizing coercive control trauma in intimate partner relationships. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605251320998
Klein, V., Wood, J., & Bartz, J. A. (2023). A qualitative analysis of gaslighting in romantic relationships. Personal Relationships, 30(4), 1046–1074. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12510
Lohmann, S., Cowlishaw, S., Ney, L., O'Donnell, M., & Felmingham, K. (2024). The trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231162972
Tager-Shafrir, T., Szepsenwol, O., Dvir, M., & Zamir, O. (2024). The gaslighting relationship exposure inventory: Reliability and validity in two cultures. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(11), 3368–3393. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075241266942
