Ask Amanda: Can I Be Abused By My Roommate?

Q: I have the classic ‘roommate from hell.’ We connected through an online roommate matching site and I thought we would make a good match, but I was obviously wrong. We’ve lived together for about three months now. They seem to live to torture me. They never help clean up anything and ignore all my notes and texts. They make little disparaging comments whenever they see me, which makes me feel like they hate me for no reason. They tell me they know the landlord and won’t get kicked out no matter what they do, so I shouldn’t even try to complain. I’m pretty sure they’re going into my room when I’m not there and taking stuff. I don’t feel safe or comfortable at all when I’m in the apartment. We have nine months to go in the lease and I’m afraid I’m trapped. My friends and family are sympathetic but are telling me to chalk it up to one of those crappy “life experiences” that everyone has at some point. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s abuse. But when I told my roommate they were being abusive, they laughed at me and said I was crazy because we’re not dating. But doesn’t what they’re doing qualify as domestic abuse?

A: I can see how this can be confusing at first. You’re not in an intimate relationship, nor are you family or even close friends. Yet you share a home, cross paths regularly, are forced to interact daily and divvy up financial responsibility for living expenses. As a result, this can absolutely open up the possibility of a power imbalance where one person—if they so choose to—can exert control over the other in order to either get something they want or simply to torment their roommate.

Many of us have probably found ourselves in a difficult roommate situation at some point in our lives that we wish we could extricate ourselves from—the messy roommate, the roommate who never pays their share of rent on time, the roommate who suddenly takes up midnight drumming as a new hobby. These can be torturous traits, sure, but don’t necessarily constitute abuse. Unless, of course, the roommate begins using tactics like these, and others, as a deliberate means of intimidating or harming the person or people they’re living with, which it sounds like your roommate is doing.

“Although roommate abuse does not involve the emotional and romantic entanglements of intimate partner violence, it can still be traumatizing and incredibly difficult to navigate,” says Karina Barreto, licensed professional counselor with Blue Tansy, a trauma therapy practice out of San Francisco.

It may be helpful for you to look at the Power and Control Wheel, a visual aid created by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project back in 1984 through collaboration with survivors of domestic violence. The wheel identifies the most common tactics of abusive partners, and you may identify with some (or all) of them happening with your roommate. It may help to validate what your roommate is doing to you is, in fact, abuse, and not just “being difficult.”

The silent treatment it sounds like your roommate is employing can be classified as a type of emotional abuse. Degrading comments and putdowns are also emotional abuse. Threats that no one will believe you are a common tactic of abusers to try and keep a victim from reporting (don’t believe this—you absolutely can report this, and we’ll get to that in a second). And, of course, going into your room and taking things is just another way to keep you feeling on edge and unsafe at all times—a classic power move by an abusive person.

Also of note, gaslighting is a common tactic of abusers to make their victims doubt their own perception of things. Your roommate sounds like they’re either in denial of what they’re doing or are manipulating you into minimizing what’s happening—or both. Either way, this isn’t right. Your gut instinct that this is abuse is spot on. In fact, regardless of how you want to label it, you should never be made to feel unsafe in your own home, whether it’s by a partner, roommate, family member or anyone else. 

Your friends and family members, while they likely very much care for you, may not be aware that abuse can come in the form of a roommate relationship as well. It may be helpful to show them this article on supporting survivors or direct them to the over 2,000 other articles on the nuances of abuse at DomesticShelters.org. (Cue “The more you know” jingle from early ‘90s PSAs.)

What do you do?

Luckily, there are ways to break your lease legally, though it won’t be instant. The first thing you may want to do is file for an order of protection. In order to do that, you’ll need to create a paper trail, as Barretto advises, to show harassment by your roommate. 

Depending on the court’s order, one of you will have to move out if the order of protection is approved. If you have somewhere else to go until you can break your lease and find a new place to live, this might be the easiest and safest option. 

You’ll want to talk to your landlord next and explain what’s going on. Hopefully, you have one of those caring landlords that wants to work with you to find a solution. Perhaps they end the lease for both of you, or let you out of the lease for a nominal fee. If your landlord won’t work with you, you may want to reach out for legal help in your state and see what your options are. 

Here’s one thing you don’t want to do, says Barreto: Blame yourself for any of this.

“For a lot of people, their first impulse is to blame themselves, sadly. ‘I should have seen the red flags.’ It’s not always that clear cut. People are presenting themselves a certain way,” she says. 

Some abuse is rooted in trauma, she explains, and some abusers may not even recognize that their harmful behaviors are patterns they learned long ago as survival strategies. That doesn’t excuse the harm they cause. Abuse is still a choice. But those choices come from their own unresolved cycles—not because of anything you did.

Going forward, trust your gut instincts, but don’t distrust everyone you meet. Also, a studio apartment isn’t such a bad deal, from someone who has lived in several in her past. Look at it this way—the kitchen is really close to your bedroom, which is also your living room. Convenience.