You’re at brunch with your friend Sarah, excitedly sharing news about a promotion you’ve been working toward for months. Instead of celebrating with you, she responds with, “Oh, that’s nice. I guess they needed someone to fill that spot quickly.” The comment stings, but you brush it off—maybe she’s having a bad day. Later, when the conversation shifts to her recent vacation, her entire demeanor changes. She lights up, speaks animatedly, and expects you to match her enthusiasm. You find yourself wondering why your good news doesn’t seem to warrant the same energy.
Or maybe it’s your longtime friend Mike, who has a way of making you feel like you’re walking on eggshells. One day he’s your biggest supporter, laughing at your jokes and making plans together. The next day, he’s distant and critical, making subtle digs about your choices or rolling his eyes at your comments. When you try to address the inconsistency, he acts confused and says you’re being “too sensitive” or “reading too much into things.” You start questioning your own perception of the relationship.
These scenarios might seem minor—just off moments in otherwise solid friendships. But research in psychology reveals that these seemingly small interactions often point to deeper patterns that can significantly impact your mental health and wellbeing. The challenge is that unlike obvious red flags such as outright abuse or betrayal, subtle toxic behaviors fly under the radar, accumulating over time until they create substantial emotional damage.
The Hidden Cost of Subtle Toxic Friendships
Before we dive into the specific warning signs, it’s crucial to understand what research tells us about the profound impact friendship quality has on our psychological wellbeing. In general, adult friendship was found to predict or at least be positively correlated with wellbeing and its components. In particular, the results showed that friendship quality and socializing with friends predict wellbeing levels, according to a systematic review published in 2023.
However, the inverse is equally true—poor quality friendships don’t just fail to support our wellbeing; they actively undermine it. The current study substantiates the hypothesis that social support, emanating from diverse sources such as family, friends, and significant others, is positively correlated with positive affect and inversely associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. When friendships lack genuine support or involve subtle manipulation and negativity, they become sources of stress rather than sources of comfort.
What makes subtle toxic behavior particularly damaging is how it operates beneath conscious awareness. Psychological manipulation, also referred to as emotional manipulation, is a tactic employed by individuals to exploit the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of others for personal gain or control. This behavior often leaves victims feeling powerless, as manipulators typically operate in subtle ways that make the target question their own perceptions.
The research on friendship betrayal reveals just how profound these impacts can be. Psychological research has suggested that the effects of such betrayals include shock, damaged self-esteem, self-doubt, and anger. Not only that, researchers noted that betrayal can actually cause what they called “life-altering changes,” such as anxiety disorders. These findings underscore why recognizing subtle red flags early is so crucial for protecting your mental health.
Among these variables, friendship quality has been found to facilitate increased positive emotions, self-worth, happiness, social competence, accomplishments, meaning in life, and psychological adjustment. When friendships fail to provide these benefits—or worse, actively undermine them—it’s time to pay attention to the warning signs.
Understanding Manipulation in Friendships
Research on manipulation provides crucial insight into how subtle toxic behaviors operate in friendships. In psychology, manipulation is defined as an action designed to influence or control another person, usually in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one’s personal aims. Methods someone may use to manipulate another person may include seduction, suggestion, coercion, and blackmail.
In friendships, manipulation rarely looks like the dramatic scenarios we see in movies. Instead, it manifests through seemingly caring behaviors that actually serve to control or diminish you. Previous research suggests that emotional manipulation is likely to be deployed by women with higher Machiavellianism scores in their close friendships with other women. These women may also report that they are targeted in this way by their close female friends.
The challenge is that manipulative friends often don’t see themselves as manipulative. “Some people who experience abuse develop manipulative behaviors because their abusers punished them for trying to express their needs in healthy, direct ways,” she points out. “Other people act manipulative because they grew up in households where that was routine behavior, and they” learned these patterns as normal ways of relating.
Understanding this background helps us approach friendship red flags with both awareness and compassion—for ourselves and for friends who may be struggling with their own learned patterns of unhealthy relating.
The 7 Subtle Red Flags You Shouldn’t Ignore
1. They Consistently Minimize Your Achievements While Amplifying Their Own
One of the most insidious patterns in toxic friendships is the subtle but consistent minimization of your successes paired with the expectation that you celebrate theirs enthusiastically. This behavior stems from what researchers identify as competitive dynamics that undermine the supportive foundation healthy friendships require.
This red flag often manifests as dampening responses to your good news. When you share an achievement, they might respond with lukewarm congratulations followed immediately by redirecting the conversation to themselves, comparing their situation to yours in a way that diminishes your accomplishment, or finding subtle ways to point out potential negatives about your success. The pattern becomes clear when you notice that conversations about your achievements feel deflating rather than celebratory, while conversations about their achievements are animated and lengthy.
Research on friendship quality emphasizes the importance of mutual support and celebration in healthy relationships. They found that in terms of quality, the more emotional support, in particular for girls, an adolescent perceives from their friends, the healthier their friendship outcomes and the lower their psychological distress in the future. When a friend consistently fails to provide emotional support for your successes, it signals a fundamental imbalance in the relationship dynamic.
Pay attention to how you feel after sharing good news with this friend. Healthy friendships should leave you feeling more celebrated and supported, not deflated or questioning whether your achievements matter. If you find yourself hesitating to share positive developments in your life because you anticipate a lackluster or competitive response, this is a significant warning sign that the friendship may be undermining rather than supporting your wellbeing.
The impact of this pattern extends beyond individual conversations. Over time, having your achievements consistently minimized can erode your self-confidence and make you doubt the value of your accomplishments. You might find yourself seeking validation elsewhere or, conversely, downplaying your successes before sharing them to avoid disappointing reactions.
2. They Use Emotional Volatility to Control Interactions and Outcomes
Emotional unpredictability in friendships creates an environment where you constantly monitor and adjust your behavior to manage someone else’s reactions. This pattern involves friends whose emotional responses seem disproportionate to situations, whose moods shift dramatically without clear cause, or who use emotional intensity to get their way in social situations.
This red flag might look like a friend who becomes dramatically upset when plans don’t go their way, who gives you the silent treatment when they’re dissatisfied with something you’ve said or done, or who has emotional outbursts that leave you feeling responsible for managing their feelings. The key indicator is that their emotional reactions seem designed—consciously or unconsciously—to influence your behavior and choices.
Common manipulation tactics include gaslighting and seeking control, but an abuser can use many other tactics to control their victims. These tactics are used to control a person by eroding their self-confidence and cultivating a deep dependence on the abuser that makes leaving the relationship difficult. In friendships, emotional volatility serves a similar function, making you hyper-aware of their emotional state and likely to modify your behavior to avoid triggering negative reactions.
The psychological impact of walking on eggshells around a friend is significant. You might find yourself rehearsing conversations before having them, avoiding certain topics that might upset them, or feeling anxious about how they’ll respond to normal social interactions. This dynamic transforms what should be a supportive relationship into a source of stress and emotional labor.
Healthy friendships involve emotional reciprocity and the ability to navigate disagreements without dramatic emotional manipulation. While everyone has bad days and emotional moments, the pattern to watch for is the consistent use of emotional intensity to control social dynamics. If you notice that group activities, personal conversations, or even casual interactions frequently become about managing one person’s emotional reactions, this indicates an unhealthy power dynamic that can be emotionally exhausting over time.
3. They Gossip About Others to You, Then Violate Your Trust
This red flag operates on the principle that someone who talks negatively about others to you will likely talk negatively about you to others. The following is a list of friendship red flags to keep an eye out for: 1. They talk badly about others in front of you. If your friend frequently talks badly or is judgmental about their friends or people in their life, what is stopping them from doing the same with you?
The pattern often begins with what feels like intimacy—your friend shares private information about mutual acquaintances or speaks critically about other people in their life. Initially, this might feel like closeness or being “in their confidence.” However, research shows that this behavior reveals important information about how they handle relationships and boundaries more broadly.
They throw you under the bus and humiliate you to make other people laugh. They pick on you in public settings and randomly reveal secrets they swore they would keep. Research published in the American Journal of Sociology suggests that bullying and aggression are actually more common within established social relationships than between strangers, making this pattern particularly concerning in close friendships.
The violation of trust often happens gradually. You might discover that something you shared in confidence has been discussed with others, or you might hear through mutual friends that this person has shared private information about your life. Sometimes you learn about this indirectly—through changed behavior from other people who have clearly heard information that you only shared with this friend.
What makes this pattern particularly harmful is how it erodes your sense of safety in relationships. Trust is fundamental to friendship quality, and when it’s violated, it affects not just your relationship with that person but your overall willingness to be vulnerable in friendships. You might find yourself becoming more guarded in all your relationships, which can interfere with your ability to form deep, supportive connections.
The research on betrayal effects is particularly relevant here. Feeling betrayed, defined explicitly as “harmed by intentional actions of people we trust,” can include several friendship behaviors. The impact of having your trust violated by someone you considered a friend can be profound and long-lasting, affecting your ability to trust others and your overall sense of security in social relationships.
4. They Practice Subtle One-Upsmanship That Leaves You Feeling Inadequate
This red flag involves friends who consistently find ways to position themselves as superior in conversations, often through seemingly innocent comparisons or corrections that leave you feeling diminished. Unlike obvious bragging, this behavior is often disguised as helpfulness, concern, or casual conversation.
The pattern might manifest as a friend who always has a bigger problem when you’re struggling, a more impressive version of whatever you’ve accomplished, or a correction to something you’ve said that makes you feel foolish. They might offer unsolicited advice that implies you’re handling situations incorrectly, make subtle comparisons that highlight their advantages, or share stories that coincidentally showcase their superior knowledge, connections, or experiences.
Research on social comparison theory helps explain why this pattern is so psychologically damaging. Humans naturally engage in social comparison to understand their place in the world, and close friendships provide frequent opportunities for such comparisons. When a friend consistently positions themselves as superior, it can trigger feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt that extend beyond the friendship itself.
The subtlety of this behavior makes it particularly difficult to address. When you try to point out the pattern, the friend might genuinely seem confused or might reframe their behavior as being helpful or caring. They might say things like “I was just trying to help” or “I didn’t mean it that way,” which can make you question whether you’re overreacting to normal friendship interactions.
The impact of constant subtle one-upsmanship on your self-esteem can be significant. You might find yourself feeling increasingly inadequate or competitive in the friendship, doubting your own experiences and accomplishments, or feeling like you need to prove yourself constantly. These feelings can spill over into other areas of your life, affecting your confidence in work, other relationships, or personal pursuits.
Healthy friendships involve mutual support and celebration, where friends can be genuinely happy about each other’s successes without needing to establish superiority. If you consistently leave conversations with a friend feeling less confident about yourself or your life, this suggests an unhealthy dynamic that’s worth examining more closely.
5. They Give Backhanded Compliments and Passive-Aggressive Communication
Passive-aggressive communication in friendships creates confusion and emotional discomfort because it delivers negative messages through seemingly positive or neutral interactions. This red flag involves friends who express criticism, jealousy, or displeasure indirectly, making it difficult to address their actual concerns.
Backhanded compliments are a common manifestation of this pattern. Comments like “You’re so lucky you don’t have to worry about how you look,” “I wish I could be as carefree about money as you are,” or “It must be nice to have such low standards for yourself” deliver criticism disguised as compliments or observations. These statements leave you feeling bad but make it difficult to respond because addressing them directly can make you seem oversensitive.
Passive-aggressive behavior also includes indirect expressions of displeasure, such as making sarcastic comments when they’re upset, using humor to deliver criticism, giving you the silent treatment without explaining why, or expressing anger through subtle sabotage of plans or activities. This communication style prevents direct conflict resolution while still expressing negative emotions.
Covert abuse happens in all types of relationships: friendship, family, romantic, and business. In this article, we will share what covert abuse is, help you identify it by teaching you its signs and tactics, and help you learn what it does to various types of relationships. While not all passive-aggressive communication rises to the level of abuse, it shares the characteristic of being indirect and undermining, which can be emotionally destabilizing over time.
The psychological impact of regular passive-aggressive communication includes increased anxiety in the relationship, confusion about where you stand with this friend, and difficulty trusting your own perceptions of social interactions. You might find yourself constantly analyzing their comments for hidden meanings or feeling uncertain about whether you’ve done something to upset them.
This pattern prevents the open, honest communication that healthy friendships require. When concerns can’t be addressed directly, problems accumulate and relationships become increasingly strained. If you notice that you’re regularly trying to decode what a friend “really means” by their comments, or if you feel like you’re constantly defending yourself against subtle criticisms, this indicates a communication pattern that’s unlikely to support genuine intimacy or mutual respect.
6. They’re Available for Your Support During Their Crises but Absent During Yours
This red flag involves friends who expect and receive emotional support when they’re struggling but become unavailable, dismissive, or uninterested when you need support. The imbalance creates a relationship where you’re consistently giving more emotional energy than you’re receiving, which can be draining and lonely over time.
The pattern might be obvious—they call frequently when dealing with relationship problems, work stress, or family issues, expecting long conversations and detailed advice, but when you’re facing challenges, they seem busy, distracted, or quick to change the subject. Sometimes the imbalance is more subtle. They might offer brief sympathy when you’re struggling but not follow up to see how you’re doing, or they might listen to your problems but immediately redirect the conversation to their own similar experiences without fully engaging with your situation.
Research on social support emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in healthy relationships. The results showed that a social support-family fully mediated the relationship between the quality of companionship-friendship, the quality of conflict-friendship, and psychological well-being; a social support-special person fully mediated the relationship between companionship and psychological wellbeing, highlighting how crucial mutual support is for friendship quality and individual mental health.
This imbalance often develops gradually. You might initially feel good about being someone others turn to for support, interpreting it as a sign that you’re a good friend and that others trust you. However, over time, the lack of reciprocity becomes emotionally depleting. You might notice that you feel hesitant to share your own struggles because you anticipate a lukewarm response, or you might find yourself providing support even when you’re struggling yourself because the friend seems unaware of your needs.
The impact of one-sided emotional support can be significant. You might begin to feel like your problems don’t matter as much as others’, develop resentment about always being the helper but never the helped, or start to feel isolated even within your social connections. This dynamic can also affect your willingness to seek support in other relationships, as you learn to expect that your emotional needs are less important than others’.
Healthy friendships involve mutual support where both people feel comfortable sharing struggles and both people invest emotional energy in helping each other. The support doesn’t need to be perfectly equal in every moment, but there should be an overall sense that both people’s wellbeing matters to the other person.
7. They Make You Question Your Reality Through Subtle Gaslighting
Perhaps the most psychologically damaging red flag in friendships is subtle gaslighting—the practice of making you doubt your own perceptions, memories, or interpretations of events. This behavior is particularly insidious because it targets your ability to trust yourself, which is fundamental to psychological health and effective decision-making.
Subtle gaslighting in friendships might include denying conversations or events that you clearly remember, reinterpreting situations to make you appear overly sensitive or dramatic, claiming they “never said” things you distinctly remember them saying, or consistently suggesting that your emotional reactions are inappropriate or exaggerated. They might say things like “That’s not what happened,” “You’re being too sensitive,” “I never said that,” or “You’re reading too much into this.”
Examples including feeding you lies, twisting the truth to their version of reality, or blaming you for the problems in your friendship. All these can affect your sense of reality and create an enormous sense of confusion and self doubt. Dr. Cortney S. Warren, a board-certified psychologist, identifies these behaviors as particularly harmful because they undermine your trust in your own perceptions.
The cumulative effect of subtle gaslighting is profound. You might find yourself constantly second-guessing your memory of conversations, feeling confused about what actually happened in social situations, or beginning to doubt your own emotional responses to events. This self-doubt can extend beyond the friendship itself, affecting your confidence in other relationships and life decisions.
What makes this behavior particularly difficult to address is that gaslighting often involves denying the very behavior you’re trying to confront. When you attempt to discuss feeling confused or manipulated, the gaslighting friend might respond with more gaslighting, claiming you’re imagining things or being overly dramatic. This creates a circular dynamic where your attempts to address the problem become further evidence, in their mind, that you’re the one with the problem.
The research on manipulation emphasizes how these tactics work by creating dependency and self-doubt. When you can’t trust your own perceptions, you become more reliant on others to interpret reality for you, which gives manipulative individuals more control over your thoughts and actions. In friendships, this dynamic prevents authentic connection and mutual respect.
If you notice that interactions with a particular friend frequently leave you feeling confused about what actually happened, questioning your own memory or emotional responses, or feeling like you’re “going crazy,” this is a serious red flag that warrants careful consideration. Trust in your own perceptions is crucial for mental health and healthy relationships.
The Cumulative Impact of Subtle Toxic Patterns
While any single instance of these behaviors might be excusable—everyone has bad days or moments of poor judgment—the concern arises when these patterns become consistent features of a friendship. While most of us know at some level that a relationship has turned toxic, we may have a hard time admitting that we have made a poor choice in placing our trust in another.
Research shows that the quality of our friendships has profound implications for our mental health and overall life satisfaction. The present study focused on three specific features of quality (intimacy, reliable alliance, and conflict) for their central importance in the definition of friendship and key functions in this relationship, as well as to measure both the positive and negative valence of friendship. When friendships consistently involve subtle toxic behaviors, they fail to provide the intimacy and reliable alliance that characterize healthy relationships.
The psychological impact of maintaining toxic friendships can be far-reaching. You might experience increased anxiety in social situations, difficulty trusting your own judgment, decreased self-esteem, or a general sense that relationships are more work than they’re worth. These effects can spill over into other areas of life, affecting work performance, romantic relationships, and family dynamics.
What makes subtle toxic behavior particularly damaging is how it operates below conscious awareness, gradually eroding your sense of self-worth and your trust in relationships. Unlike obvious abuse or betrayal, which can be clearly identified and addressed, subtle patterns accumulate slowly, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly when a friendship became unhealthy.
Moving Forward: Protecting Your Mental Health in Friendships
Recognizing these red flags is the first step in protecting your psychological wellbeing and cultivating healthier relationships. This doesn’t necessarily mean immediately ending friendships where you notice these patterns, but it does mean approaching those relationships with greater awareness and clearer boundaries.
Consider whether these patterns are temporary responses to stress or long-standing features of how this person relates to others. Sometimes friends go through difficult periods where they’re not their best selves, but supportive relationships involve the ability to acknowledge problems and work toward positive change. If you’ve attempted to address concerning patterns and they persist or worsen, this suggests deeper issues with the relationship dynamic.
Trust your instincts about how friendships make you feel. Research consistently shows that healthy relationships should enhance rather than diminish your sense of well-being. They might say or do things that upset you when you spend time together, for example. Even when you aren’t with them, you might spend a lot of time thinking back to your negative interactions, which can make you feel tense, irritable, even downright awful. True friends offer support when you need it and contribute positively to your life.
Setting boundaries becomes crucial when dealing with subtle toxic behaviors. This might involve limiting how much personal information you share, reducing the frequency of contact, declining certain types of activities, or being direct about behaviors that make you uncomfortable. Healthy friends will respect reasonable boundaries; those who respond to boundaries with anger or manipulation reveal important information about their investment in the relationship’s health.
Remember that ending friendships that consistently undermine your wellbeing isn’t selfish—it’s an act of self-care that protects your mental health and creates space for more supportive relationships. Jealousy, competition, inconsistency,” Meyer tells me. A couple decades later, in your 40s, the red flags get quieter but more impactful: “friends who don’t respect your time, ignore your healing, or can’t hold space for your joy. When you’re building a life that’s aligned, you don’t” have energy for relationships that consistently drain rather than nourish you.
The goal isn’t to find perfect friends—everyone has flaws and makes mistakes in relationships. The goal is to cultivate friendships characterized by mutual respect, genuine support, honest communication, and the kind of trust that allows both people to be authentic. When you notice patterns of subtle toxicity, you’re gathering important information about whether a particular friendship serves your overall wellbeing and personal growth.
Understanding these red flags empowers you to make conscious choices about your relationships rather than simply accepting whatever dynamics develop. Your mental health and happiness matter, and the friendships you maintain should reflect and support the kind of life you want to create.
I’d love to hear from you! Have you recognized any of these subtle red flags in your own friendships? How did you handle situations where you realized a friendship wasn’t serving your wellbeing? Share your experiences in the comments below—your insights might help someone else recognize important patterns in their relationships.
And if this post helped you identify concerning patterns in your friendships, please share it with someone who might benefit. Sometimes just having language for subtle toxic behaviors is the first step toward protecting our mental health and building healthier relationships.