Emotional Abuse
Emotional Abuse
If you have never experience emotional abuse, perhaps you doubt its validity. It is real. It is prevalent. It breeds new generations of abusers. The child of an emotional abuser, asked why he would emulate such behavior, said that the behavior was wrong, but it got the abuser whatever he wanted. That's frightening. Perhaps we all need to learn about emotional abuse, what it is and what it does to you.
It is not like physical abuse. Emotional abusers are often seen as really nice people by all except the people who live with them. They are the good guys, the ones everyone likes. And they treat their captives as less than human. They have a really strange set of values. Somehow there seems to be a built-in excuse that everything bad that happens to such a person is someone else's fault. They are blameless. They see the opinion and good will of strangers as much more important than that of the people they profess to love. Spouses and children are just people to be controlled by them.
You cannot recognize them so you cannot avoid them. They show you their public persona until it is too late. Often they don't even show it until you have been married for a period of time and have children. Once they feel you are well tied, they change. They begin to be critical of everything you do. You are not good enough. In fact you are pretty bad ... you are so bad you are lucky they put up with you because it is darn certain that no one else on the planet would. At first it seems like you just need to adjust to living with someone else; maybe learn to do things in a way that is familiar to them. You try harder to please. No matter how hard you try, you cannot please. Because if you don't do something to set them off, you will still be punished for something that happened on the job; for the waitress who was rude to them; or for the driver who cut them off on the freeway. You bear the brunt of every disappointment and bad thing that happens to them. YOU are to blame and YOU deserve to be punished.
After enough of this negative conditioning, you begin to feel like it might be true. Your self esteem gets lower and lower. You find it hard to cope with anything. Everything your abuser said is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You wonder why you should go on. And no one understands. No on realizes that you are being abused. After all, your bruises and gaping wounds are not visible. But they hurt just the same. You are alone with your agony and your shame.
If you are really lucky, something happens to break the chain. You get help. But the road back is long and hard. You need a lot of courage to climb out of the pit you are in. If you find the right counseling, you learn what has been happening and begin to rebuild yourself. It takes tremendous courage. Some days you don't think you have the energy. But knowing that you are not the only one who had gone through such an experience is liberating. You begin to take baby steps back to a healthy outlook. You start doing things (GASP!) for yourself!
This doesn't begin to describe how horrible the experience really is, but perhaps it will give some understanding to those who have been fortunate enough to have never experienced this. Healing takes time, counseling and positive reinforcement. And getting away from the abuser.
It doesn't make me happy that I have this knowledge, but I am not ashamed to share it with you. You will note that I was careful to say "they" and "them" rather than he. It is true that most of these abusers are presently men, but I have been hearing some disturbing statistics about abusive women. I think of that and I look at my children and wonder if one of them could become abusive in a relationship. And I worry because I know the answer. So I watch and hope I can use the knowledge I got so unwillingly to help them.
Peggy Erickson
05/12/01
Discuss Emotional Abuse and a variety of other subjects in The Forums at Xisti.com. Not registered? Click on the Register Now icon in the left column to join the community.