Here is a list of behaviour patterns (in a domestic relationship in particular) that might be classified as non-boundaried, controlling, or bullying, depending on their accumulation, severity, frequency, and duration:
- Criticising them or their character / personality and listing their defects.
- Criticising what they’ve done or said in an accusatory fashion.
- Criticising any aspect of their personal or private life.
- Criticising their weight, musculature, fitness, appearance, clothes, make-up, etc.
- Controlling their diet (encouraging or pressurising to eat, over-feeding, restricting, starving).
- Controlling what they wear and how they look generally.
- Centring discussions on what is wrong with them and what needs to change in them.
- Comparing them unfavourably to others, stressing others’ virtues.
- Complaining in a blaming manner, e.g. ‘I don’t feel heard / seen’.
- Keeping count of one’s virtues and their sins and of one’s sacrifices and their negligence and reporting the counts.
- Blaming them for how one feels.
- Blaming them for one’s thinking, actions, physical ailments, and life.
- Telling them what you think they think or feel and challenging or criticising that.
- Attributing their actions to faithlessness, neglect, malice, or cruelty.
- Labelling them with psychiatric terms.
- Describing them as ‘abusive’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘toxic’, etc.
- Telling them what to do.
- Telling them off if them don’t do it.
- Being moody, sullen, cold, or hostile.
- Ignoring, cold-shouldering, ‘sending them to Coventry’, etc.
- Playing the game, ‘If you loved me, you’d know what you did wrong.’
- Shouting or screaming.
- Being actively violent or threatening violence.
- Being noisy with physical objects, including doors and car doors; breaking or smashing things in anger.
- Defacing or damaging their property.
- Causing their property to ‘disappear’.
- Threatening separation or divorce as a tactic in arguments.
- Making other threats, include suicide, and implicating them in this.
- Locking the car doors unnecessarily; not letting them out of the car; not putting them as a second driver on a rental car contract.
- Unreasonably refusing to take them somewhere when you’re the only driver of the two.
- Other methods of controlling their movements.
- Taking other physical actions to control their behaviour (hiding keys, destroying papers, locking doors).
- Expressing regret that one met or married them and explaining how one would be better off if one hadn’t.
- Escalating individual problems by saying ‘This is like the time you ...’, ‘You always ...’.
- Escalating and expanding by discussions raising other points of criticism or attack.
- Refusing to forgive or make peace in order to punish, particularly overnight.
- Demanding to know everything about their movements, their interactions, and their outer and inner life.
- Demanding exclusivity of information or attention.
- Expressing jealousy of other activities or (non-sexual / non-romantic) relationships in their life.
- Demanding that they restrict, halt, or alter interactions or relationships with some or all other people.
- Demanding to see their phone, email, or social media accounts.
- Snooping in their phone, email, or social media accounts.
- Hacking their phone or computer and looking at photos, files, etc.
- Demanding to know or hacking their passwords.
- Snooping about them behind their back.
- Construing their closeness to others as an attack or betrayal.
- Badmouthing their friends, their associates, or others in their life.
- Communicating with their friends, their associates, or others in their life in a negative or conspiratorial way about them.
- If they say they’re leaving, changing tack, becoming contrite, kind, forgiving, and generous, but only until they decide to stay after all, and then resuming the above behaviours.