What Is Verbal Abuse? Verbal abuse, also known as emotional abuse, is a range of words or behaviors used to manipulate, intimidate, and maintain power and control over someone. These include insults, humiliation and ridicule, the silent treatment, and attempts to scare, isolate, and control.
Sign of Verbal Abuse #3: Telling You to Shut-Up
Berit Brogaard, D.M. Sci., Ph. D. writes in Psychology Today, “15 Signs of Verbal Abuse,” a sign of verbal abuse called “abusive anger.” This is when your partner screams and yells at you, or tells you to “shut-up.” Being told to shut up is not just rude behavior.
Our body language and actions can lead to harassment. Some common examples of non-verbal harassment include staring or gawking, sending unsolicited pictures, and unwanted physical touch. Non-verbal harassment is a very prevalent form of harassment.
Verbal abuse involves using words to name call, bully, demean, frighten, intimidate, or control another person. This can include overt verbal abuse such as yelling, screaming, or swearing.
Some common examples of narcissistic abuse include:
When you don't do what an abuser wants, they may try to make you feel guilty or fearful. Insults: Verbal abuse like name-calling, harsh criticism, and other insults are ways for those with narcissistic personality disorder to chip away at a victim's self-esteem.
Mental abuse is gaslighting, silence, manipulation, and victimization. Verbal abuse is screaming, bullying, name calling, berating, and blaming. Sexual abuse is jealous rages, coercion, sexual withdraw, rape, and degrading acts.
The psychological effects of verbal abuse include: fear and anxiety, depression, stress and PTSD, intrusive memories, memory gap disorders, sleep or eating problems, hyper-vigilance and exaggerated startle responses, irritability, anger issues, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, self-harm, and assaultive behaviors.
It can be direct such as verbal abuse and exclusion or indirect such as gossip, rumors and put downs or through cyber means.
Red Flags When You're In a Relationship With a Narcissist
Downplays your emotions. Uses manipulative tactics to “win” arguments. Love bombing, especially after a fight. Makes you second-guess yourself constantly.
The four stages of the narcissistic abuse cycle are: Idealization, Devaluation, Repetition, and Discard. In this cycle, a narcissistic partner may love-bomb you, devalue your sense of self over time, repeat the pattern, and eventually, discard you and/or the relationship.
Victims often find themselves ruminating over the abuse and hearing the abuser's voice in their minds, amplifying their negative self-talk and tendency towards self-sabotage. Malignant narcissists program and condition their victims to self-destruct sometimes even to the point of driving them to suicide.
Insults and name-calling are common emotional abuse tactics. Abusive people can make nasty comments or use hurtful nicknames. When this behavior is confronted, the abuser often insists that they were being sarcastic or just making jokes. They may even belittle you for being so sensitive and taking offense.
Examples include intimidation, coercion, ridiculing, harassment, treating an adult like a child, isolating an adult from family, friends, or regular activity, use of silence to control behavior, and yelling or swearing which results in mental distress. Signs of emotional abuse.
Verbal abuse is a pattern of speaking with the intent to demean, humiliate, blame or threaten the victim. Though an abuser may raise their voice in mean and threatening ways, verbal abuse does not always include shouting.
Abusers verbally abuse because they've learned somewhere along the course of their lives that coercion and control work to their benefit. Mental illness and addictions may come out in court as excuses for verbally abusive men and women's bad behavior, but should not relieve them from the responsibility of it.
Being beaten down by verbal abuse is extremely traumatic. The trauma of abuse carries over into new relationships, romantic, platonic, professional, and familial because the trauma comes from the subsequent communication issues, self-doubt, and fear of rejection.