Staying in an emotionally or verbally abusive relationship can have long-lasting effects on your physical and mental health, including leading to chronic pain, depression, or anxiety. Read more about the effects on your health. You may also: Question your memory of events: “Did that really happen?” (See Gaslighting.)
If you're dealing with severe and ongoing emotional abuse, it's possible to lose your entire sense of self and begin to doubt your self-worth or your abilities, which may make it even harder to leave the relationship.
Long-term emotional abuse can make you feel as if your needs don't matter as much as everyone else's. This can lead to codependent behaviors or ignoring your own needs and boundaries. You might also engage in people-pleasing behaviors or tend to establish relationships with abusive partners. Fear of abandonment.
In some cases, though, abuse may go through a cycle of four stages: tension, incident, reconciliation, and calm. Abuse may be evident or subtle, but its effects are real. It's OK if you haven't found the ways to exit the situation, but ending the cycle of abuse is possible.
Children who have been subjected to emotional abuse may continue to feel its effects into adulthood. These effects could include extremely low self-esteem, seeking bad relationships, and other physical or mental effects. There are resources available for people who experience emotional abuse to seek help.
Verbal abuse is the most common form of emotional abuse.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is commonly associated with physical sources of trauma, such as war, physical assault, or sexual assault. But mental health experts have come to realize that emotional abuse can lead to PTSD as well.
Victims may put aside their own needs to please a narcissistic abuser. Chronic stress triggered by emotional and psychological abuse can create physical health issues such as premature aging, weight gain or loss, and a suppressed immune system.
Experiencing abuse or other trauma puts people at risk of developing mental health conditions, such as: Anxiety disorders. Depression. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
What Does Escalation Look Like? According to The National Domestic Violence Hotline, escalation can happen either gradually or all of a sudden. Gradual Escalation: Verbal abuse, like insults, slowly become more harmful and degrading.
Exposure to abuse, be it physical or psychological, has been found to not only put us at risk of developing mental illness, but it also negatively impacts our quality of life and self-view in a lot of ways, especially our personality (Green, et al., 2010).
While physically violent people might be able to recognize that their actions were wrong, at least in the eyes of the law, psychological abusers may really believe their reality to be the truth.
Emotional or psychological abuse
Emotional abuse often coexists with other forms of abuse, and it is the most difficult to identify. Many of its potential consequences, such as learning and speech problems and delays in physical development, can also occur in children who are not being emotionally abused.
Common examples of narcissistic abuse include: Withholding: This may include withholding such things as money, sex, communication, or affection from you. Emotional blackmail: Emotional blackmail is another form of manipulation to make you feel fear, guilt, or doubt.
You may feel hopeless, or you might believe that you'll never feel better. Although the path to healing can be challenging, it's important to remember that an abuse survivor can recover and even thrive. You might feel lost and overwhelmed, but this isn't something that you have to deal with on your own.
There is no timeline on a recovery; every journey is different. It could take you 2 months, 2 years, or 20 years to recover. There are some severe relationships that have such serious effects that survivors may never recover, but psychological help can assist in easing the pain and speed up the recovery process.
The challenge is, that all abuse causes you to feel broken. Someone has treated you badly, making you feel inferior, weak, and tortured from the inside out. Emotional abuse causes you to stew in your own mental torment, until you can find help to work through it.
Parental emotional abuse can take many forms, including verbally abusing, terrorizing, exploiting, isolating, rejecting, neglecting, and parentifying1. It occurs when parents repeatedly interact with their children in a harmful way.
Emotional abuse can involve any of the following: Verbal abuse: yelling at you, insulting you or swearing at you. Rejection: constantly rejecting your thoughts, ideas and opinions. Gaslighting: making you doubt your own feelings and thoughts, and even your sanity, by manipulating the truth.
While staying in an abusive relationship the victim uses coping strategies. These coping strategies tend to be self-protective in nature; they include denial, minimization, addictions, arguing, defensiveness, rationalization, compliance, detachment, and dissociation.