How Does Emotional Abuse Affect You?
To understand how emotional abuse affects us, we must first understand what emotional abuse is.
What Is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse is a type of abuse that involves the emotional maltreatment of an individual such as a child, adolescent, adult, or elder. Emotional abuse is also termed psychological abuse or mental abuse. Emotional abuse is a form of abuse that affects the psyche (mental and emotional) without the physical abuse. You can visually see the signs of physical abuse, but, with emotional abuse, you cannot see the signs on the physical bod.
Emotional Abuse as a Loving Gesture
Emotional abuse is, typically, done in a very cunning and devious manner. Emotional abuse may not be obvious to you especially if you had suffered from emotional abuse as a child or adolescent. Emotional abuse can be difficult to identify because of its subtle nature. It may even be looked at as a loving behavior, such as when your spouse or partner explains to you that they were only looking out for you by yelling at you when you were talking to a stranger at the restaurant or when you came home later than what they expected of you. However, emotional abuse if far from a loving behavior. The abusers behavior is an act of control and manipulation trying to intimidate, isolate, scare, or threaten their victim.
Emotional Abuse As Manipulation
Emotional abuse can also look like bullying, passive-aggressive behavior (e.g., backhanded compliments, sulking, refusal to communicate), and negging (dismissive and degrading comments that undermines self-confidence).
Gaslighting Is An Aspect of Emotional Abuse
Gaslighting is also an aspect of emotional abuse. It is a tactic to gain power and make the person question their reality. It’s easy to get sucked into gaslighting because it is slow and progressive and, basically, you’re swallowed up by it before you even know it. Emotional abuse wears you down slowly. Eventually, you feel like you are walking on eggshells and you begin to doubt your self, your abilities, and your self-concept. The abuse is a critical feature of intimate partner violence.
some Signs of emotional abuse:
- The “unable to take a joke” when the joke is on you using sarcasm or mocking behavior.
- Making patronizing comments.
- Putting down your interests.
- Infantizing you or acting as though they know what’s best for you.
- Deliberately putting you in an uncomfortable position such as locking you out of your home.
- Telling you how you should feel. Dismissing your feelings.
- Telling you that you are overreacting (to all of the examples I mentioned above).
- Refusing to take responsibility for their actions even after you’ve made it clear about their behavior.
- Monitoring your whereabouts and/or how often you check in.
- Intimidating you to spend all of your time with them.
- Withholding affecting or communication as a form of punishment.
- Deliberately picking arguments.
- Hiding or destroying your belongings.
What are the Effects of Emotional Abuse?
Stress Disorders
Emotional abuse can lead to trauma which then shows up as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). If you experience PTSD, it usually means that you experienced emotional abuse or gaslighting for a shorter period of time; it’s more acute. If you have been diagnosed with C-PTSD, the trauma you experienced was chronic or over a longer period of time.