What Counts As Emotional Abuse?

Emotional abuse can be really hard to pin down sometimes – because there aren’t any physical marks to point to, and that absence is so often paired with a lack of belief. A lot can happen behind closed doors and nobody outside ever clocks it, and it’s often the people who mask the best in front of others, the ones who seem totally fine – you’d have absolutely no idea what’s going on underneath. There are so many examples I could give, and sometimes emotional abuse does sit in a grey area rather than something obvious, a good example for me is: that feeling of walking on eggshells, because there’s a level of submission baked into that, you’re managing someone else’s mood constantly to prevent the blowouts, the big arguments, the screaming and shouting matches, and you’ll do absolutely anything to keep the peace even when it costs you everything of yourself to do it.

Another example is: name-calling, being screamed at, insulted, mocked; sometimes it’s the words themselves, and sometimes it’s just the tone, the contempt underneath them. And then there’s being put down, and this can happen in an extremely public way in front of others, or it can happen constantly in private. A lot of the time it’s the private version, because that’s an isolation tactic; it’s designed to lower your self-worth bit by bit and pull you closer into the abuser’s orbit at the same time. Blame works the same way: being blamed for things that aren’t even your fault, things that are completely separate from you, made to feel like everything that goes wrong somehow lands on your shoulders and yours alone. A real world example could be: being blamed for an injury your partner sustained when you weren’t even present.

I touched on isolation a minute ago and it deserves its own moment – because isolating you from friends or family is so common, and it’s often paired with being made to feel guilty for spending time with the people who matter to you, and sometimes it goes further than that… turning friends or family against you through made up stories, which isolates you even more completely, until there’s genuinely nobody left to turn to.

A really common theme underneath a lot of this is: gaslighting, which is when someone makes you doubt your own grip on reality, and that can look like denying things that actually happened, things that were genuinely said or done, making you question your own memory or even your own sanity. A concrete example is someone taking your belongings and then accusing you of losing them, when you know full well, absolutely full well, that they had them the whole time.

Controlling behaviour sits alongside all of this too: rules about who you can see and when you can see them, your phone or your emails being checked without your consent, your location tracked so someone always knows exactly where you are. Things are rarely black and white with emotional abuse; you’re led to question your own sanity again and again, and you’re being worn down, not physically but mentally, over a really long stretch of time, and because you’re so often isolated at the same time, there’s nobody around to give you that outside, rational view on what’s actually going on. It tends to happen slowly, gradually, over a long period, so your baseline shifts and shifts until what’s abnormal starts to feel normal, and you don’t even realise how bad it’s got until it’s genuinely awful.

If any of this feels familiar, I’m here to listen and sit with you through this challenging time. You can get in touch with me here, or I offer a free (no obligation) 20-minute consultation.