Toxic relationships don’t always start out so overtly destructive—rather, it’s usually a host of underlying issues that build up and up until one or both parties start feeling trapped, controlled, or drained. Perpetua Neo, DClinPsy, would agree: “It starts off with very tiny stuff that on the surface, when you look at them individually, they just seem so petty,” she notes on this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast. “We could think of them as microaggressions.”