The most common types of psychological abuse are: Humiliation, negating, criticizing: name-calling, yelling, character discrimination, public embarrassment, belittling accomplishments, putting a person down, deliberately causing diminishment on a victim.
Mental abuse can be described as acts that can cause someone to feel insulted or demeaned or wear down someone's self-esteem. Examples include making unreasonable demands, being overly critical, wanting a partner to sacrifice needs for others, and causing them to doubt their perception (gaslighting).
Psychological abuse, often called emotional abuse, is a form of abuse characterized by a person subjecting or exposing another person to a behavior that may result in psychological trauma, including anxiety, chronic depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
This type of abuse can affect both your physical and your mental health. You may experience feelings of confusion, anxiety, shame, guilt, frequent crying, over-compliance, powerlessness, and more.
Emotional abuse targets a person's feelings, it uses emotions to manipulate, punish, and achieve control. Rather than personal sentiments, mental abuse focuses on questioning and influencing a person's way of thinking and views on reality. Psychological abuse can cause a person to question their environment.
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.
This may present in romantic relationships as threats, insults, constant monitoring, excessive jealousy, manipulation, humiliation, intimidation, dismissiveness, among others. Sometimes emotional abuse is more obvious, like a partner yelling at you or calling you names.
Verbal abuse is the most common form of emotional abuse.
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.
These are six key forms of subtle abusive behavior: Stonewalling, Gaslighting, Duplicity, Guilt, Memory Loss and Sarcasm.
Emotional abuse is a pattern of behavior in which the perpetrator insults, humiliates, and generally instills fear in an individual in order to control them. The individual's reality may become distorted as they internalize the abuse as their own failings.
In the long term, emotional abuse has been linked to several mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety. The chronic stress of severe emotional abuse can take a toll on physical health as well, leading to digestive issues, body aches, and other health problems.
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.)
For some, emotional abuse eventually leads to nervous breakdown. While there is no clinical definition of this phenomenon, it typically refers to the point at which psychological distress disrupts functionality. This loss of function occurs when the effects of emotional abuse become too much to bear.
Physical or sexual abuse may be easier to identify, as they often have physical evidence and a clear incident to reference. Emotional abuse is more often characterized by a pattern or collection of behaviors over time that can be difficult to recognize.
- Physical abuse: This type of abuse is the most easy to identify and to many it is also the first thing that comes to mind when a person hears the word 'abuse'. Physical abuse therefore can be in the form of hitting, slapping, punching, kicking, strangling or more.
Psychological abuse involves the regular and deliberate use of a range of words and non-physical actions used with the purpose to manipulate, hurt, weaken or frighten a person mentally and emotionally; and/or distort, confuse or influence a person's thoughts and actions within their everyday lives, changing their sense ...
Passive neglect – the failure by a caregiver to provide a person with the necessities of life including, but not limited to, food, clothing, shelter, or medical care, because of failure to understand the person's needs, lack of awareness of services to help meet needs, or lack of capacity to care for the person.
Alterations in cognition and mood: This includes being unable to remember important aspects of the traumatic event, negative thoughts and feelings that lead to distorted thoughts about oneself or others, distorted thoughts about the cause or consequences of the event, such as blaming themselves, persistent feelings of ...
A trauma bond is an unhealthy connection between an abuser and the abused person. Trauma bonds can happen in a family system, workplace, and even in religious groups, but we most commonly associate trauma bonds with toxic romantic relationships.
Emotional abuse may be the most damaging form of maltreatment due to causing damage to a child's developing brain affecting their emotional and physical health as well as their social and cognitive development (Heim et al.