The Untold Story of Emotional Abuse

Although little mentioned, emotional abuse is one of the more common types of abuse in adults and children.  It can also be one of the more traumatic and long-lasting types of abuse.  This is a type of abuse that can affect men, women and children of all ages.

The emotional abuse of children often begins early in childhood.  Children are meant to feel useless or bad about themselves.  The household contains a lot of yelling and belittling of its members so that children grow up with a very poor sense of self esteem.  They may feel worthless or feel like they have no future.  They may not seek out friendships and may be fairly shy in front of others because they don’t feel valuable enough to have reasonable friendships or relationships.

Children of emotional abuse can easily grow up and get into abusive relationships when they get older.  They may marry an individual who treats them similar to how they were treated as children.  Women who suffered emotional abuse as children can become victims of domestic violence which also includes emotional abuse and emotional battering.  Again, the woman often has few friends and does not talk about their abuse to anyone, believing that their ill-treatment is normal.  In many relationships, there is an escalation of emotional abuse to other forms of abuse, like physical or sexual abuse.

Believe it or not, men can suffer emotional abuse almost as much as women do.  They have almost always been victims of childhood emotional abuse as well.  They often marry strong women who devalue them and confirm their belief that they are not worthy of being with anyone better. They work in workplaces that reinforce how they feel about themselves.  This abuse often carries forth to their children, innocent victims of the cycle of emotional abuse.  The household is often chaotic, with a great deal of yelling and belittling of one another.

The biggest problem with emotional abuse is recognizing that it happens.  Because it is not talked about as much as other kinds of abuse, its victims often feel that how they are being treated is normal. The victims are often isolated from others and don’t know that they are being treated poorly. As adults, they go through relationship after relationship, wondering why things are going wrong and deciding that there must be something wrong with them to suffer from so many failed relationships.

Once a victim of emotional abuse enters therapy, he or she must learn that all of the bad things they thought about themselves over the years were wrong.  They must reframe a picture of themselves that includes a positive self image and they must create friendships and relationships with those who treat them as they need to be treated.  This is such deeply imbedded stuff that it often takes several years of therapy to both undo the damage that was done to them in disruptive relationships as well as stopping the cycle of emotional abuse that carries forth to subsequent generations.