Dealing with Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is often normalized and minimized in unhealthy relationships. Dismissing this behavior can have a significant impact on those experiencing emotional abuse, including physical symptoms, mental health issues, and even an inability to function in daily life. Long term exposure to emotional abuse can impact how someone sees themselves and/or others, and results in them being reluctant to trust others or form relationships later in life. Sadly, many people minimize the impact of emotional abuse. However, research tells us it has a significant impact. Let’s explore what emotional abuse looks like, and why we struggle with recognizing and labelling these behaviors. Finally, once we recognize and label emotional abuse, how can we protect ourselves and move on?
What is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse is a behavior used with the intent to hurt or punish someone as a means of controlling or modifying their actions, thoughts, or emotions. It often activates the punishment/reward system of the brain by eliciting a sense of rejection or abandonment by the abuser, if the victim doesn’t do what they want. The perpetrator intends to hurt the victim as a means of coercively forcing them to behave in the way the perpetrator wants. It is not a behavior of love, correction, or even protection. Many perpetrators justify or excuse their actions as love, protecting you from others, or helping you in some way. What is important to remember is that if it feels “off” or hurts, trust that feeling telling you something is wrong.
Emotional manipulation is undertaken with the explicit goal of hurting someone using guilt, shame, or attacking someone’s worth, in order to gain and keep power and control over the other person. The only individual who is prioritized is the abuser and their needs, never the victim. In fact, they know they are hurting the victim, and continue to do so to get their own way. These are not actions of love, protection, or help.
Common Emotionally Abusive Strategies
Toxic withdrawing or withholding is often cited as the most destructive form of emotional abuse. It impacts an individual’s attachment system and the reward/punishment system, which have a tremendous impact on the victim. Intentional withholding elicits a sense of rejection and/or abandonment anytime the victim acts in a way the perpetrator does not like. Emotionally withholding or withdrawing time, love, or affection for the purpose of control or punishment is abusive.
This is not the same as someone who retreats to defuse a conflict and prevent it from escalating or tries to protect themselves from harm and returns to discuss matters when things calm down. Intentional withholding is where trauma bonds form and reinforce the cycle of emotional abuse. Typically, when the victim concedes or placates the perpetrator they are rewarded with positive emotional experiences, love-bombing, or attention which reinforce and strengthen the trauma bond.
Devaluing makes the individual feel inadequate or not good enough. This can be humiliating comments, attacks on their character, family, friends, values, goals, or abilities. The intent is to put the victim down while the perpetrator feels superior in some way. It can be as simple as them stating they are a better cook, or their family/friends are somehow better than yours. Consistent experiences of devaluing erode an individual’s self-esteem and can eventually impact how they see themselves or others. They may no longer trust their own judgment about themselves or others as the abuser’s perspective is so much different than their own, so they are manipulated into believing they cannot trust themselves.
Isolating victims from friends or family is extremely common. Abusers often claim “they don’t like me” as a way to drive a wedge between you and significant sources of support in your life. They can exhibit jealousy when you spend time with others or require that you make them your top priority to “prove” your love for them, forcing you to choose them over everyone else in your life, even your own children. This is different from healthy relationships where partners do not feel threatened by you spending time with others and recognize this as important for both your own and your partner’s well-being.
Gaslighting ensures you question your perception and experiences until you rely on the abuser to “help” you make sense of things. This results in one of the most distressing symptoms of trauma, when victims lose the ability to trust themselves and their own perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.
Gaslighting can look like “joking” that is hurtful but dismissed away. They may deny things you know they did or said and make you question your memory. They will frequently blame you for their behavior, especially their rage or inappropriate actions. When you question them, they attack you by calling you overly sensitive, paranoid, dramatic, unstable, or just accuse you of making things up. All of these strategies are intended to have you doubt yourself and accept their version of events, especially when they are wrong or are dishonest.
Many survivors overcome this by making specific notes of conversations immediately afterwards or even recording conversations they are participating in so the content cannot later be denied by the abuser. This can help eliminate self-doubt and draw attention to their lies. Should you ever play the recording for them, they may deny its authenticity, say it is out of context, or it is not real. They simply cannot take ANY accountability or responsibility for their behavior.
Threats can be explicit or implied. They may threaten to harm you, children, pets, others, or even themselves as a means of holding power and control over you. Explicit threats of physical violence, where they blame you for making them angry are common. Implicit threats can include angry outbursts, rages that breach your personal space, making the victim fearful for their own safety or the safety of others. Implicit threats also include hitting walls, slamming doors, throwing things, or other forms of physical violence that may lead someone to believe they are at risk of being attacked or hurt.
Dismissing or disregarding your thoughts, feelings, or opinions as insignificant, unimportant, or otherwise “wrong” when you disagree with them is another form of abuse. Everyone is entitled to their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs or experiences. We don’t always have to agree with others, and they do not always have to agree with us. In fact, healthy married couples disagree 67% of the time – it is HOW they agree to disagree they makes their relationship healthy! If you are routinely dismissed, devalued, disregarded, ridiculed, or otherwise made to feel bad for having a different view of something, this could be a sign of emotional abuse.
Manipulation is a common technique for emotional abusers. They frequently use guilt, shame, ridicule, or projection to make you question yourself. Projecting their actions and intentions onto you or others, ensures you question other people’s motives or assign incorrect intent to others in favor of the abuser. This makes you feel guilty or unworthy about having your own needs, thoughts, feelings, experiences, or opinions. Victims often learn they cannot trust their own perceptions and defer to the abuser for how they should respond giving them ultimate control over every narrative.
Projection is when they accuse you or others of doing exactly what they are doing. They project the same intent on others that they have, when this is often not the case. Their only motivation is to get their way at any cost! They will accuse others of being selfish, cruel, manipulative, or narcissistic, assigning their own values, beliefs and motivations to others. They act this way, so they believe everyone else acts the same way! If you kept your distance because you were hurt, and they accuse you of intentionally and cruelly hurting them, pay very close attention to what they say. This is their unintentional confession of their own motivations for when they act that way. Projection acts as disclosure of their motivations and behaviors.
How Do We Protect Ourselves From Emotional Abuse?
The most important first step is identifying emotional abuse for what it is and not making excuses for it. We cannot fix or love someone “better”. If they have these destructive patterns of behavior, it needs to be professionally addressed. Some individuals learn this behavior as children who themselves grew up in dysfunctional homes, but not everyone has the ability to reflect on how their actions hurt others. There are some individuals who know exactly what they are doing and take great sadistic pleasure in wielding power and control over others. Dr. Emma Katz is a world leading expert on coercive controllers. Dr. Karen Mitchell has spent decades studying dark personalities, cluster B personalities, narcissists, psychopaths, and coercive controllers.
Individuals who are capable of self-reflection, self-awareness, and empathy, genuinely feel bad when they hurt others and want to learn to do better. They will recognize their behavior as problematic, take responsibility for their actions, and engage in change. They may seek therapy, get self-help books, attend groups, and generally make an effort to improve their interpersonal functioning. Gently identifying and discussing scenarios as they come up and together finding new and better strategies can support both partners in healthy recovery. These are people who hold themselves accountable for their own behavior and for improving their relationships.
However, dark personalities, coercive controllers, and those who thrive on power and control are not motivated to change. The only effective strategy with them is to disengage and get help for yourself. So-called dark personalities will immediately go on the offensive when you see them for who they are. When they can no longer control or manipulate you, they often engage in a smear campaign to influence how others see you. As you see this new side of them, it may feel like you never really knew them at all. You are correct – you didn’t know them. You saw the mask they wanted you to see – while they hid their true selves. Once you see past the mask, you can never unsee the truth of who they are. This is truly devastating for people. Just like they project their harmful behavior and malicious intent onto others, good people project their own kindness and good intent as well, often believing everyone is redeemable, has goodness, and can be “saved.” The sad reality is that we cannot “save” anyone! They have to want to change. Dark personalities only want power and control over others. There is no motivation to change. If they lose control over you, they often engage in post-separation abuse while they quickly find a new victim. This is a smoke screen meant to send the message that if they were “so bad” they wouldn’t be able to find someone new so quickly! Alas, the cycle of abuse starts again, with the next victim, while they continue with their campaign of post-separation abuse against you for years, or until they lose interest. The only way out is to leave, get professional help, and learn how to recognize the red flags to protect yourself in the future.