I am using male pronouns here, but I have met quite a few women who meet the following criteria also:

An abusive guru will never tell you straight up he’s enlightened, but he will insinuate it. It is important to an abusive guru, because then he can always say “I never claimed that I’m enlightened”. An abusive guru is really afraid of responsibility, he wants to “help” everyone without being seen as “helping” or even admitting he is “helping”. So he often times speaks in hints and innuendo, and retreats from directness into word games.

An abusive guru will not answer direct questions about himself, he will always provide answers which aren’t really answers. He will answer a different question than the one which was asked, assuming that he knows the intention of the questioner better than the questioner does. Often times he will refuse to answer at all. He isn’t capable of building trust or demonstrating love, his communication is always “teaching something” or “showing something”, he is not capable of communicating with you without teaching you. He is a hammer who sees everyone as a nail.

An abusive guru sees accusations in questions, even those that don’t have them. He sees ignorance where there is none. He imputes ill-will onto your words and questions with great ease and fluency. It can be difficult to speak to him on any topic, he is sleazy, defensive, and often times insulting and degrading in his answers to the most innocuous questions.

An abusive guru will try to avoid direct interactions with you. The more he can hide from you, the better. An authentic guru will always prefer an in person interaction over any form of impersonal interactions, such as the Internet or phone. An authentic guru knows that presence is very important. An abusive guru wants to be able to run away at the first opportunity, when it is convenient for him, so he will prefer to stay anonymous, control the means of the interaction, insist to only speak over chat, refuse to meet, etc.

An abusive guru resorts to ridicule and superiority often, without any apparent need for it. An authentic guru will encourage vulnerability and authenticity and discourage pretense, violence, ridicule and cruelty. An abusive guru is often times cruel in response to authenticity, especially authentic expression of suffering, and gleeful and congratulatory in response to display of devil-may-care callousness to other people or even himself. He does not mind other people being cruel to him, in fact, he often times welcomes it, because he has a yearning to display to everyone how equanimous he is.

An abusive guru may resort to physical violence, threats of violence, inserting himself into your life or trying to affect it in some other way. Speaking to your relatives, publicizing negative things about you, smearing you, libeling you etc. An authentic guru will leave you alone the moment you left him alone. For an authentic guru, you disappear from his mind the moment you stop interacting with him, unless you’re going through something very difficult and in need of his support or guidance. If you don’t speak to or about an authentic guru, he has no need to be speaking to or about you, even if you hate him.

An abusive guru will act as if he knows what you think or what you feel. They use words like “sense”, “intuit”, “observe” to talk about their fantasies of your conscious experience. They love to speak about your lack of self-awareness and “point” you to your various flaws. An authentic guru knows that you aren’t perfectly self-aware (otherwise why would you be talking to him?), and he also knows there’s no reason to constantly bring it up. He also doesn’t “sense” anything about you. An authentic guru goes exclusively off of what you do or what you say when he’s speaking to you, and even though at times what he says won’t make much sense, he will not try to imply any sort of magical powers or cover it all up with blanket statements of your lack of self-awareness. If he says something that flies over your head, he knows that pushing it or repeating it ad nauseam won’t help you. An abusive guru, on the opposite, will often times try to “break” you in some way.

An abusive guru wants you to “realize something”, all the time. He really yearns to teach or show you something he understands. An authentic guru has no desire to teach you, and he wants the opposite - he wants you to see where you aren’t being completely honest with yourself, for yourself. He knows that he doesn’t have some “special sauce” that you do not have, it is the opposite - the only thing that differs you and him is your lack of self-honesty and self-love, not his special knowledge. He has none.

An abusive guru will speak very lightly of your life and of suicide. He doesn’t care if you live or die. To him, it’s all a big game, and it includes your life. An authentic guru will tell you that suicide is always a mistake. He wants you to live and he wants you to thrive in living. He wants you to be able to suffer through your pain and liberate yourself from your pain. It’s only possible if you stay alive, not if you commit suicide or do something similarly stupid.

An abusive guru will often times be polite in wording, but vile in intent. He has perfected the art of subtly degrading you whilst using nice words and “noble” language. For example, he could point you to your “lack of self-awareness” or “wrong thinking” when you are being vulnerable, honest, sincere, going through very difficult emotions or being judgmental towards others in anger. An authentic guru can be rude in wording, but loving in intent. He can say “don’t be an idiot” when you confess that you’re about to do something stupid, but will never judge you if you confess, for example, that you harbor hatred towards your father. He understands the difference between what you can and cannot control. An abusive guru does not, he lives in an enlightened haze, he is often times under the impression that he cannot control anything, and neither can you.

It is true that at times I can appear to act as an abusive guru, even though I am not, especially to very ignorant, proud and narcissistic egos. The ego is very deceitful and it’s very good at assigning one’s own faults and shortcomings to another person, doubly so when it speaks to an enlightened person. A very vain and narcissistic ego becomes especially vile in the presence of truth. So none of these items are actually possible to avoid in their entirety, at least on the level of your perception. What matters is consistency.

An authentic guru will consistently help you see something about yourself which you have been ignoring, or even was in denial of before. That’s the only measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. For that to happen, you have to place the focus of your exploration on yourself, not him, with the intent to know and understand yourself better. You have to become curious about yourself, and in this exploration, he is but your tool.

If it feels like you cannot have a real conversation with your guru, if he is always sleazy, weaselly, playing with words, accusing you all the time, chances are he is an abusive guru. If it feels like an ordinary conversation on a “human level” with your guru is simply not possible, if it’s always a struggle, never a relaxation, you should run away from him.

When you are dealing with an abusive guru, you feel like he has something to hide. When you are dealing with an authentic guru, you feel like you have something to hide. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to confuse the two if you’ve had a realization and are convinced you are enlightened now while continuing to suffer energetically or emotionally, describing your suffering as “appearances in awareness”. An authentic guru may feel somewhat weird, strange, maybe at times a little off-putting. But he doesn’t feel inauthentic or dishonest, if anything, he feels too honest, too direct for your liking.

Abusive gurus often times have made very shallow, mind-only realizations, but sometimes their realizations are relatively deep. So it’s not like they cannot bring you any value or take you to self-realization. Sometimes they can. They just do it inefficiently and crudely, and you will have to outgrow them on your spiritual path, see through their pretense and abuse, and leave them.

What separates authentic gurus from abusive gurus is the completeness of the spiritual path, which eliminates the yearning to teach, emotional cruelty, and the rest of egoic suffering.

Authentic gurus have minds that are truly equanimous. It doesn’t mean they will never be rude to you or appear to be cruel to you. Abusive gurus have minds which are still suffering, so they love to constantly smile inauthentically, close their eyes inappropriately, sigh voluptuously, and say things like “non-existent person”, “it’s all an illusion”, “apparent turmoil”, “nice story”, etc. They are still largely in denial of their own suffering, and their own suffering is exactly what makes them abusive towards you.