You can recognize abusers simply by the fact that they will always demand their feelings to be in the center of everything. Every event, action and word is relevant only by how it made them feel. What they’re doing to you is defined by how they felt while they were doing it, even how you should react becomes defined by how they feel you should.
Being around abusers will make you feel small, your feelings irrelevant, silly, not worth mentioning, even stupid and wrong, because how could you feel something that isn’t convenient to the abuser? How could you stupidly develop your whole inner world of thoughts and emotions when the abuser doesn’t even care that you’re a person? For them it’s almost like you don’t exist, except in the narrow frame of what they want from you.
If you start feeling like you don’t matter, like your thoughts and feelings are out of place, wrong, forbidden to express, that you would only humiliate yourself by speaking your mind, know that this is not normal. No human should make you feel this way. You are equally important as every single human being on this planet, and nobody’s feelings should take up so much space or importance that yours should shrink to make space.