Sometimes your body senses something is off about a person long before your mind can explain exactly why.
Your body reacts first
Nothing outwardly alarming has occurred, but as soon as someone approaches, your stomach drops, your shoulders tense up, you get goosebumps, or you have no logical reason to want to walk away. Your mind is always picking up on tone of voice, facial microexpressions, body language, distance, and other social cues. You might not even realize it’s happening.
However, just because you feel that physical response doesn’t mean someone is bad. Life experiences and stress can create those feelings too. But if you find your body tensing up frequently around the same person, take note of it.
The invisible shield
In conversation with someone who makes you uncomfortable, things can go the other direction. You monitor your words carefully, withhold information about where you’re going, keep personal details general, or feel hypervigilant the entire time. You might not even consciously know why you’re doing it either.
Oftentimes, your subconscious picks up on slight transgressions or something about the conversation that makes you feel unsafe.
Too much, too soon
Most of the time, receiving compliments is a positive experience. However, sometimes they can feel manipulative. Someone you just met heaps praise on you, professes that you have a special connection right away, buys you expensive gifts, or tries to develop intimacy at a breakneck pace.
Excessive early attention isn’t necessarily manipulation, but it can be a component of love bombing. This can be used in instances where love is later used to induce guilt or a sense of obligation. If you ever feel guilty or owe someone for compliments they give you too soon, take a step back.
Something in the gaze
Maintaining eye contact while you talk to someone is easy for you. However, when you talk to this person, it makes you feel weird. Maybe their eyes feel intimidating, or maybe you just feel like looking away for no reason. Weird eye contact doesn’t necessarily mean anything about a person’s character.
Culture, introversion, social anxiety, personality, and neurodivergence all affect how we behave around eye contact. The suspicious thing is if you suddenly feel different around one person, especially if it seems to align with other red flags.
Twenty minutes feels like hours
You have a brief conversation with someone and walk away feeling mysteriously drained. Maybe you found yourself censoring yourself the whole time, waiting for them to jump down your throat, soothing their reaction to something you said, or forcing yourself to be pleasant even though you felt weird around them.
Paying that much attention is tiring work, which explains the exhaustion. Of course, being tired after spending time with someone doesn’t automatically make them a secretly toxic person. However, if you consistently find yourself feeling tense, fuzzy, or glad it’s over after talking to the same person, think about what you have to do emotionally every time they enter the room.
The performance feels off
They say all the right things, but something feels off. Their responses are too calculated; they have the perfect anecdote to paint themselves in the best light, or their demeanor shifts dramatically based on the person they’re with.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re faking it. But it can feel off when someone’s words, tone, actions, and the way they treat you/other people don’t line up. Before jumping to the conclusion that they’re fake, take your time and see if their actions align with who they say they are.
Reality starts feeling slippery
After conversations with them, you walk away questioning if you remembered the wrong thing. They’ll say you never said something you obviously did, move goalposts on significant details, or tell you that you’re imagining things over and over. We all misremember things people say sometimes, and one battle of who recalled correctly isn’t gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a pattern of doing this repeatedly, causing you to question yourself. Someone taking advantage of gaslighting will rewrite events over and over in ways that cause you to doubt yourself. If you suddenly feel the urge to screenshot everything or take notes because talking to one person makes you constantly confused, notice that.
The joke doesn’t land
While everyone else is laughing, their jokes make you cringe. They insult people’s insecurities, disguise attacks as jokes, share private information about others, or test limits on how far someone will allow them to push respect before they speak up. They hide behind “I was joking” if you call them out.
Not all dark humor or teasing is mean-spirited, and friends will joke crudely with each other because there is that understanding. You know it’s a problem when the jokes consistently violate boundaries and are only funny to the one saying them.
You’re writing their excuses
“They’re just tired.” “They’ve had a hard week.” “That’s just how they speak.” It’s good to give people the benefit of the doubt. But pay attention when you find yourself inventing excuses for someone over and over, excuses for behavior that continues to leave you feeling uneasy.
Maybe your friends have started to see it too, and you find yourself immediately coming to that person’s defense without the other person even saying something insulting.
If you have to work to preserve someone in a positive light by explaining away their behavior, your head may be telling you one thing, but your heart may know something else.
You feel strangely indebted
They give you something you didn’t ask for, do an inordinately big favor for you, or go super helpful way too early. Then later they act as if you owe them. Generosity between healthy people typically doesn’t come with a phantom invoice delivered later.
When someone’s “ generosity” regularly makes you feel more indebted than valued, your instinct may be picking up on an exchange dynamic: favors as currency to buy access, loyalty, attention, compliance.
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