How Do You Know When a Relationship Is Changing You?

I think one of the hardest things about an unhealthy relationship is that you don’t always know you’re in one while it’s happening.

I used to think red flags would be obvious. That there would be some moment where you’d look at someone and think, Oh, this is bad. I need to leave.

But sometimes it happens so slowly that you don’t notice how much you’ve changed until you’re looking back.

Maybe you start choosing your words more carefully because you don’t want to set them off. You replay conversations afterward wondering if you said something wrong. You apologize just to end an argument, even when you’re not entirely sure what you’re apologizing for.

And eventually, the question stops being Why are they treating me this way? and becomes What am I doing wrong?

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

Because we hear words like narcissism, gaslighting and love bombing everywhere now, and sometimes I worry they’ve become so overused that we forget what they can actually feel like when you’re living through them.

Gaslighting doesn’t necessarily announce itself as gaslighting. It can just feel like having the same argument over and over until you’re no longer completely sure what happened.

Love bombing doesn’t necessarily feel manipulative. It can feel incredible. Someone is interested in you, attentive to you, excited about you. Especially if you’re dating again after a divorce or a major life change, why wouldn’t you want to believe you’ve finally found something good?

And a narcissistic person isn’t necessarily walking around telling everyone how wonderful they are. They can be charming. They can be successful. Other people may absolutely love them.

Which can make it even more confusing when your experience behind closed doors looks completely different.

I think that’s also why I have a problem with the question, How did you not see it?

Because it assumes the person you eventually left was exactly the person you met in the beginning.

And so often, they weren’t.

There’s another question I think is much more useful: Who were you becoming while you were with them?

Were you becoming less confident? Were you questioning your instincts? Were you making yourself smaller to keep the peace? Did you stop bringing things up because somehow every conversation ended with you defending yourself?

Those questions tell us something.

And I think they’re especially important for women as we get older. Our bodies are changing. We may be going through perimenopause or menopause. We may be dating again after divorce, navigating changes in our careers, watching our kids leave home, or trying to figure out who we are in a completely new chapter.

There can already be enough self-doubt in that transition without someone using it against you.

That’s why I wanted to bring back one of the most listened-to conversations we’ve ever had on The Tamsen Show, with Dr. Ramani Durvasula, one of the world’s leading experts on narcissism.

We talk about the red flags that are easy to miss, love bombing, gaslighting, why narcissistic relationships can be so difficult to leave, and what happens when someone slowly convinces you that your feelings are the problem.

Because sometimes understanding what happened isn’t about putting a label on another person.

It’s about learning to trust yourself again.

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