The tell-tale signs of a toxic self-centred partner

The abuse crept up on Angela, (not her real name). What started with her boyfriend making snarky comments about her sense of style loomed larger when he punched his fist against a wall after she got a nose piercing.

She was in college at the time, a soon-to-be graduate approaching her final exams.

“I enjoyed college, loved my friends, and I was pleasantly extroverted. I got along with lots of people and had so much going on,” she says.

“Mike was a bit quiet, geeky, and I enjoyed his company. However, a few years into our relationship, he started complaining about my dressing and friends. He wanted to change the things that I enjoyed and liked about myself.”

Throughout their five-year relationship, those separate events merged into a campaign of emotional and physical abuse and coercive control that, at its worst, threatened Angela’s very life.

By then, she was a shadow of her once-confident and vibrant self. She’d stopped caring about her appearance, withdrew from family and friends, and barely spoke in Mike’s presence.

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“I was an entirely different person,” she says. “It took me a long time after leaving him to get back to a quarter of who I was because everything had been crushed to dust; the self-worth, the confidence. He’d made me feel powerless, like I couldn’t do anything without him.

We often expect romantic love to be a fountain of our greatest joys. From when we are young, we are sold the picture of a happy ever after - tall, handsome protective man, his beautiful dainty wife, their lovely babies, house, dog and car.

Women are told that the man will be the protector, shield her and her younglings from harm, provide for them and be their ‘everything’.

But, in truth, marriage is one of the key and dependable routes to misery.

Few forms of suffering match the intensity of those experienced in relationships.

“If you are dealing with someone who is very overpowering, who cannot take no for an answer, who wants to stifle your voice, and is not willing to change, you do not have to continue dating this person.

“Knowing when to walk away is something that we need to be good at,” says Cathy Holden, a Psychotherapist at the Almond Tree Wellness Centre in Karen.

The tell-tale signs of a toxic self-centred partner are a lack of personal responsibility and remorse, manipulation to get what they want, being preoccupied with perfection, constantly steering the conversation towards themselves, less empathy, and not taking criticism.

Dr Eli Kimutai, a doctor and father of two, has been struggling with a partner who never relents dishing a piece of her mind whenever she has the chance.

He narrates, “when I first met my wife, I was attracted to her because she was confident and strong-willed. She can also be angry, but we attended couple’s therapy after three years of marriage, which helped us learn the art of better communication and compromise.

“However, after the birth of our children, she became overly opinionated and had frequent outbursts of anger.

“She now loses her cool over tiny things that either the kids or I do. She chooses harsh words to pass her points across and places ultimatums like a pharaoh of sorts. She may not know this yet, but each aggressive word withdraws me more from her. I’m starting to feel that my kids and I deserve better,” he says.

Highly opinionated and self-centred partners can become abusive when they cannot control their spouses.

A few weeks ago, a friend and chama partner, whose name is not Maria, but we will call her that to guard her privacy, opened up regarding her marital problems.

Maria said her overbearing and opinionated husband had placed the final straw on the camel’s back, and her marriage was surely buckling under the weight of a new reality.

She said, “I partake in weekly contributions with the girls, as you know. When I joined the chama, my husband had no idea about it, and frankly, I didn’t think that telling him about it was such a big deal. It was finally my turn to collect the total contribution over several months,” she said.

As Maria was counting the money, her husband walked into the room and demanded to know how she got all that money.

“Without even giving me a chance to answer his question, he began accusing me of stealing his money. He was in a full-on rage that I stopped trying to explain and ignored his subsequent questions and remarks,” she said.

The next thing she knew, he swung his fist towards her, threatening to hit her.

“I glared at him and threatened that the matter would not be settled easily any day he touched me because I would involve my father and brothers. He retreated, but the next thing took me by surprise. He began texting me…calling me “Thief. Dirty. Pig.” The emotional abuse is becoming too much,” she said.

“It is never, ever their fault. An extremely self-centred person never sees the other person’s side of the story and cannot admit that they played a role in something that went awry. They deny the reality that they cause much of their own problems,” says Nicoleta Mungai, a psychologist and family therapist at KMC Nairobi.

As the partner of an excessively self-absorbed and controlling person, your needs or independence will not likely ever cross their radar, let alone come first, says Mungai.

So if you are already in a relationship with these types of people, according to the psychologist, two things may happen: you will stay in the relationship and go through many more years of abuse, to a point where your self-worth is completely dependent on your toxic partner.

Or, as she says, you will finally snap and decide to leave the relationship for good.

Leaving will certainly feel difficult, and your highly-opinionated partner will make it twice as hard as typical breakups. Still, it probably will be a positive step towards establishing your boundaries.

“If you’re lucky and your partner is willing to change, then seeking counselling and therapy will help identify and deal with the issues ailing your relationship. Either way, you will learn something about yourself, and your subsequent relationship will be better,” says Ms Holden.