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Home
Table of Contents
About The Domestic
Violence Unit
Test
Your Relationship
Educational
Info
Order of Protection
Information
Getting Help
Devise a
Safety Plan
Statistics
Why the
Victim Stays
Support
How to Help
Cycle of Violence
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Are You in a Healthy or an Unhealthy Relationship?
A Healthy Relationship Involves:
1. Negotiation and Fairness:
- Seeking mutually satisfying resolutions to conflict.
- Accepting Challenge
- Being Willing to compromise.
2. Non-Threatening Behavior
- Talking and acting so that you feel safe and comfortable expressing
yourself and doing things.
3. Respect
- Listening to you non-judgmentally
- Being emotionally affirming and understanding
- Valuing your opinions
4. Trust and Support
- Supporting your goals in life
- Respecting your right to your own feelings, friends, activities, and
opinions
5. Honesty and Accountability
- Accepting responsibility for self
- Acknowledging past use of violence (if that is the case)
- Admitting being wrong
- Communicating openly and truthfully
6. Responsible Parenting
- Sharing parental responsibilities
- Being a positive, nonviolent role model for the children
7. Shared Responsibility
- Mutually agreeing on a fair distribution of work
- Making family decisions together
8. Economic Partnership
- Making money decisions together
- Making sure both partners benefit from financial agreements
An Unhealthy Relationship Involves:
1. Coercion and Threats
- Making and/or carrying out threats to do something to hurt you
- Threatening not to love you, to commit suicide, or to report you to welfare
- Making you drop charges
- Making you do illegal things
2. Intimidation
- Making you afraid by using looks, actions, and gestures
- Smashing things, destroying your property
- Abusing pets
- Displaying weapons
3. Emotional Abuse
- Putting you down, calling you names, and making you feel bad about
yourself
- Making you think you're crazy, playing mind games
- Humiliating you
- Making you feel guilty
4. Isolation
- Controlling what you do, who you see and talk to, what you read, and where
you go
- Limiting your outside involvement
- Using jealousy to justify actions
5. Minimizing, denying, and blaming
- Making light of the abuse and not taking your concerns about it seriously
- Saying the abuse didn't happen
- Shifting responsibility for abusive behavior, saying you caused the
abusive behavior
6. Using Children
- Making you feel guilty about the children
- Using the children to relay messages
- Using visitation to harass you
- Threatening to take the children away
7. Economic Abuse
- Preventing you from getting or keeping a job
- Making you ask for money, or giving you and allowance
- Taking your money
- Not letting you know about or have access to family income
8. Male Privilege
- Treating you like a servant
- Making all the big decisions, acting like the "master of the castle"
- Being the one to define men's and women's roles
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