• They find out your deepest desires, then slowly start implying they will give it to you in the future. When you start pulling away, they start delivering this just a little. Enough to stay, but not enough to feel satisfied. You need to keep wanting more. Otherwise, you might grow as a person and become more self-reliant.

Lots of implied communication, nothing concrete

• They hint at a lot of promises and meaning so that you create a false idea in your head, but they will not say it concretely because they could then be held accountable. The point is have the benefits of commitment without the commitment.

Celebration sabotage

• When you start feeling good or have an enjoyable event coming up, they can't let you be happy. They will create some form of disaster, even if apparently not within their control, to sabotage your joy. Every vacation, every birthday, every award, every holiday, etc. All sabotaged.

Relationship sabotage

• They will sabotage your relationships with anyone else not under their control. It's too scary to let you have your own will because if you decided to choose with whom to socialize and converse, you would clearly not pick them or people may point out how unhealthy the relationship is. They may even destroy your relationships with your own family or doctors. Anyone that would have your best interest.

Rug pulls

• Just when you need them most, they will abandon you. Oh, you're sick and need to go to the hospital? Not their problem, but they may do you a favor as long as you recognize their graciousness and effort.

Smear campaign

• They destroy your reputation with everyone else so that no one would even want to be associated with you. And if you ever try to talk to someone about your experience with the hijackal, no one would believe you because the hijackal already got to them first.

Categorizing people and hating

• They love the macro-social -isms. They categorize people into groups, find or make-up negative characteristics of those groups, then hate everyone within those groups. Examples: racism, sexism (includes homophobia), religious hatred, ageism, etc.

Focus on minute specifics rather than main message

• They attempt to find any possible implication of hypocrisy in your words or actions, then magnify that to make it the principle focus. "Oh, hijckals categorize people? Isn't calling people hijckals categorizing? Who's the hijackal now?"

Confusing grand gestures of affection

• They can tell when you're about to end the relationship. Then, they make these grand gestures of affection and give you what you had been hoping for all along. This will only last a little while, then it's back to the enslavement fields, breadcrumbs if you're good enough.

The relationship is transactional

• There's an underlying economical tab of who owes whom what, and they decide the value of the exchanges, so what they contribute is considered high value and what you contribute is worthless. You're lucky they even accepted it!

Arguments are emotional, not logical

• The arguments are not based on a collective reality. No matter how much logic you use, it will not work. They're simply saying things to get you to feel hurt.

Trap you and fight

• This is one of their favorites. They will wait until there is a situation in which you cannot escape, then fight with you.

They can't art

• They can't create deep meaningful art because of their shallow emotions and fear of criticism, disapproval, and rejection.

Hurtful confessions are implied or humorous

• They confess hurtful things they've done in a joking manner or though implications. This makes it so you don't believe it is what it is. However, when the truth eventually comes out, you can't get upset with them because technically they told you already and you technically agreed to it.

There's a forced personality exchange

• They see how you react to things. They then copy your reactions in front of others. At the same time, they learn how to make you react like they normally would, then cause you to react that way in front of others.

Their behaviors are justified; yours are indicative

• If they did anything hurtful, there was a very good reason that excuses it. Hell, they might still need even more sympathy. If you do anything hurtful, it's because you're a bad person.

Find a way to make you feel eternally guilty

• Either they will let you make a mistake or illicit an uncharacteristic response from you that will hurt them. After this, they will remind you of this experience for the rest of the relationship to make you feel guilty. The reason the relationship is terrible is because of that one thing you did, sinner! After this, every time you do anything that good for yourself, they will bring up this event to help you associate caring about yourself with feeling guilty like a Pavlovian dog.