According to the National Domestic Abuse Hotline, emotional abuse includes non-physical behaviors that are meant to control, isolate, or frighten you. It can be present in your romantic relations as well as familial relationships. It manifests itself as threats, insults, constant monitoring, manipulation, humiliation and intimidation. (www.thehotline.org/resources/what-is-emotional-abuse)
“You better dry your tears, or I’ll give you something to really cry about!” I used to dread those words, and I heard them all too often. While it may seem, at first blush, to be verbal abuse, it’s really emotional abuse because it humiliates you into thinking that what you are upset about isn’t bad enough to warrant you crying. You must be in pretty dire straits to let the waterworks open. We’ve all heard the saying “Are you bleeding? Well then, you’re fine.” Except sometimes I was actually bleeding! Doesn’t that warrant tears? Unfortunately for me, all it got me was humiliation for daring to bleed when they hit me, thereby creating yet another mess for them to clean up. Can’t I get anything right?
Did you know that there are at least 6 surprising types of emotional abuse? I’ll touch on just four here:
REJECTING
Parents who show rejecting behavior towards their child will teach them, in so many debilitating ways, that they are unwanted. I grew up feeling like my mother resented me because I was not only an accident, but my own father refused to marry her, and subsequently abandoned her for another woman. I remember when I was about 14 years old, I found out my sister and I had separate fathers. I had grown up believeing that my stepfather, who had died when I was only 5, was my own father, and I grieved for him. But one day my mother was admonishing me for teasing my younger sister about her weight. Something we siblings often do to one another. She told me “Your sister can’t help she’s overweight. Her dad was over 200 pounds, yours wasn’t.”
The world stopped for me right then and there. What do you mean mine wasn’t? I then proceeded to ask who my real father was and why I had never met him. She told me that I “couldn’t handle it mentally.” And that was the end of that discussion.
TERRORIZING
Excessive teasing or screaming at a child does serious psychological damage. Unpredictable, unreasonable, or even extreme reactions are terrifying to children. Such as when my mother’s girlfriend would yank my hair every time she walked past me. Once I forgot to brush my hair, so my mother took me immediately to the salon and had them cut all my hair off until I looked like a boy. Causing a child to be terrified is some of the worst emotional abuse.
I remember we had a toy poodle puppy, and, as all puppies tend to do, it started to chew on Sally’s work boot. So, she tied the boots (yes, both of them) together and hung them around the puppy’s neck and made her drag those boots around. If she could do that to a helpless puppy, what more damage could she do to me?
ISOLATING AND IGNORING
It’s one thing to be grounded and sent to your room to think about your transgressions. It’s something else entirely when a parent forces you to isolate to keep you away from family and friends.
I used to get locked out of the house for the day. My mother would be at work. Sally would lock me out of the house, completely ignoring me. I used to use an old coffee can in the barn to go to the bathroom because I wasn’t allowed inside. On one such occasion, Sally came outside to tell my sister that she had made lunch for her only and not to allow me to eat. She went to th grocery store and my sister took pity on me, inviting me to come into the house and eat while Sally was gone. We ate lunch in silence and then she left to go work her newspaper route. I retreated to my room to work on my homework, not knowing when Sally would be back. When she returned from the store, I stayed in my room. She had made a point of ignoring me all day, so why would I go out there? It was safer to stay in my room. Or so I thought. Sally came into my room, yanked me off the bed by my hair and said “You better get up and help me put the groceries away, you little b*tch! I was nice enough to bring you a hamburger from McDonalds!”
That type of emotional abuse can be very destructive to a young and impressionable child. I was left feeling bewildered, wondering why she would treat me so cruelly and desperately trying to figure out what was wrong with me? And at the end of that day, she expected—no, demanded—that I give her a kiss goodnight!
Emotional abuse is invisible, but far more punishing than any physical abuse. Because physical wounds heal over time. Emotional scars are with you your entire life. They invade every relationship and every aspect of your life, armed with triggers and flashbacks.
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