Overcoming Emotional Abuse

Surviving emotional abuse, abuse in marriage

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Get the Facts About Psychological Abuse

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Yes, psychological abuse is another way of talking about emotional abuse. However, using the term “psychological” can help us break down the facts about how this type of abuse occurs.

How is it psychological?

Psychological abuse is a repeated interaction between two people, in which one person attacks the other’s self worth, social competence (as a mother, child, sibling or worker), and makes that person believe that they are unwanted, unloved, and deeply flawed. When the psychological attacks become routine, the relationship can be defined as abusive.

Psychological abuse is then exactly what it sounds like: an attack on your psyche. Although some people will write this type of abuse off as “still better than being hit,” it is important to see how psychological abusers aim to twist how you see yourself, to the point that they tell you who and what you are. This is a terrible theft of identity, which can make it incredibly hard for you to break from the image of you that the abuser has created.

When overcoming psychological abuse in your life, you must identify this image of yourself and destroy it: if you don’t, you will continue to go through life seeing yourself through your abuser’s eyes, assuming that you are inadequate and undeserving, which can deeply hurt your future relationships.

It is also important to remember that it is the long term psychological effects that can be most damaging in a physically/sexually abusive relationship. Although physical damage eventually heals, the psychological damage that comes with it can take years to overcome.

Something else to keep in mind is that psychological abuse affects many households. According to Facts Court Watch, out of 504 children, 29% had been emotionally abused by caregivers compared to the 9% who had been sexually abused and the 14% who had been physically abused. Facts Court Watch also points out that children who are exposed to marital abuse in the home are affected as if they had been directly psychologically abused.

“Crazy Making” & “Gaslighting”

“Crazy making” is how many people describe an abuser’s tendency to mix abusive behavior with “breadcrumbs” of love and affection, which keeps the victim hanging on for better times by ensuring that the abuser is capable of love (conditional, of course, on the victim being “good”). Another aspect of psychological abuse to keep in mind is “gaslighting.” Here’s a definition from Facts Court Watch:

Perpetrators of emotional/psychological abuse often consciously employ a strategy called, “gaslighting”  in which they present an alternate reality to their victims, police, therapists and judges.  Gaslighting involves denying what occurred, offering plausible but untrue accounts of what occurred, or suggesting the victim is imagining things, exaggerating or lying.   Gaslighting strategies leave victims doubting their own perceptions, memory or sanity and serve to confuse police, judges and therapists into inaction or worse, supporting the abuser, while leaving the victims feeling helpless and alone against the abuse (Forward, 2003; Engel, 2002, Stern, 2007).

It is important that you educate yourself in the possibility of manipulation by other person. This will prevent you becoming a victim of other person’s abusive intentions…

WISHING YOU WELL!

Get a Peek At Our Course!

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Here you can find what each of the lessons in this course are about. Keep in mind that each of these lessons has extra tools to use, too, as well as a way of sharing your comments with others!

 

Lesson #1: Basic Ideas About Abuse

What if there was a new way of thinking about abuse that gave you power instead of taking it away? Of seeing yourself as a champion instead of a victim? Once you start talking about all that your abuser has taken away from you, you lose the critical skills you need to stop emotional abuse. What you instead need are the tools to see your life as yours, not your abuser’s, and that what he has taken from you is your confidence, not your power.


Lesson #2: Framing Abuse as Control

Why do people abuse others? Why does your abuser abuse you? These are questions you’ll need to answer as you begin thinking about how you’re going to put a stop to the emotional abuse in your relationship. There are some very simple concepts about an abuser’s mindset that will help you understand how little about you abuse is, and how insecure your abuser really is.

 

Lesson #3: The Price You Pay for Emotional Abuse

It’s also critical that you learn what can happen if you decide to “ride it out.” The time for passiveness has passed; now is your time to see your situation for what it is. You will understand what your abuser has tried to take from you, how he has tried to crush you, by taking a realistic look at what awaits anyone who stays under the toxic influence of emotional abuse.

 

Lesson #4: Do You Fight or Leave?

Many will tell you to just give up on your abuser. We don’t. We accept that many women will want to do all they can to stay with their abuser, whether out of love, loyalty, financial difficulty, or mutual children. What we give you here is a breakdown of how you can stop emotional abuse both in and out of a relationship (that is, whether you fight abuse in the home, or fight it by leaving). Each of these options is harder than it seems, and that’s why you need a checklist of the preparations and precautions you need to keep in mind.

 

Lesson #5: Recovering Your Best Self

Only you know how deeply hurtful emotional abuse has been for you. Your personality will determine how long it will take to recover from the shock of being abused by a loved one. Although each person’s recovery time is different, there is a process that each person must take in order to recover critical aspects like self-esteem, self-love, confidence, strength, and the ability to stop abuse when or if it occurs again.


Lesson #6: Fulfilling Your Life Mission

Your last task in overcoming emotional abuse is to halt the worst effect of abuse: the idea that you need your abuser to make you a real person. With a strong sense of what you want from life, and how you’re going to get it, you can become a person who is strong and tall as a castle wall – abuse can’t break through your protective barriers! You will no longer give any thought to those people who try to tell you that you’re nothing without them.

 

Would you like to sign up? Get comments from our clients first!

Overcoming Emotional Abuse Course

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This is a new course in overcoming emotional abuse, made specifically for women who are in emotionally abusive relationships, and don’t know where to turn for help. This course is the continuation (part 2) of our new book, called Healing from Emotional Abuse. If you have not read this book yet, we highly recommend that you read this book before taking the course, as it will introduce you to concepts that will be helpful to you.

When you register, this book is included in the price of your registration

In this course, you will receive in-depth lessons on both the basics of emotional abuse and the harder aspects, such as leaving and protecting your mental health. Each lesson is a way for you to both learn more about the toxic abuse in your life, and respond to us with your concerns, doubts and struggles (each lesson has a private survey at the end for you to participate in).

We made this course because we believe that no matter how strong a woman is, she can be crushed by emotional abuse’s toxic barrage of:


The six lessons you will cover in this course are:

Lesson #1: Basic Ideas About Abuse
Lesson #2: Framing Abuse as Control
Lesson #3: The Price You Pay for Emotional Abuse
Lesson #4: Do You Fight or Leave?
Lesson #5: Recovering Your Best Self
Lesson #6: Fulfilling Your Life Mission


Additional course materials:

  • Online videos
  • Membership in our forum, where you can support and be supported by other women taking the course
  • Online webinars given by Coach Nora.
  • Private phone coaching with Dr. Nora
  • New materials provided each month to keep you growing and thinking!

Through this course, you can take a deep look at your life and your abuse situation, and make the important decisions you need to make regarding the future of your marriage, your emotional well-being, and how you want to stop the emotional abuse in your life.

Are you wondering how Healing Emotional Abuse + the Overcoming Emotional Abuse course will help you? It’s simple.

You may start here…

But you can end up here!


Make no mistake: this course will change your relationship. If you’re willing to put this course into practice, you will have the tools you need to stop emotional abuse. You may decide to leave, or decide to stay, but you will no longer have the same attitude about your life. You will demand respect as a human being, deny humiliation and control attempts, and fulfill your need to be deeply appreciated and loved. You will be given the tools to seek out the life that you want, and happily pursue it! Here is the link to the Overcoming Emotional Abuse Course:

 

Is Emotional Bullying Bringing You Down?

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What is emotional bullying?

In general, we can understand emotional bullying as emotional abuse. Emotional abuse in the home is always emotional bullying. However, bullying can also be a more “social” form of abuse that doesn’t occur in your home. Perhaps you have been bullied at work or school, or are still emotionally wounded from being bullied as a child. Let’s see what Edel Jarboe says about emotional bullying in “I’m Rubber and You’re Glue: Handling Emotional Bullies”:


Emotional bullying is when someone tries to gain control by making others feel angry or afraid. It is characterized by verbal abuse such as name-calling, sarcasm, incessant teasing, threatening, mocking, putting down, belittling, ignoring, and lying.

It is also known as adult and workplace bullying, when emotional bullying includes such interpersonal and public abusive behavior  as purposeful exclusion from a group, ganging up on others, or open humiliation. Moreover, this type of bullying also extends to racially or sexually abusive comments and behavior.

Because emotional bullying can be the most difficult type of bullying to cope with or prove, its effects can be devastating. In a recent study, researchers at the University of South Australia found that for males and females, frequent peer victimization and low social support contributed significantly and independently to relatively poor mental health.

Any person being a victim may be forced to feel shame, embarrassment, guilt and fear which can result in depression, low self-esteem, shyness, poor academic or job performance, isolation, or threatened or attempted suicide.

Emotional bullying takes a tremendous toll on your health and self-esteem because such behavior and attacks are as damaging to the mind and body as if they were physical. In other words, emotional bullying is a form of social violence.

Read Jarboe’s entire article here.

Jarboe reminds us in her article that experts have found that over 50% of adults have experienced emotional bullying at work, home or other social places.

We know from working with our clients and from our own research that childhood experiences progress into adulthood. Thus, a child bully will often become an adult bully, and a victim of bullying childhood will often unconsciously put up walls to protect themselves from bullying in adulthood.

Our first recommendation for dealing with an emotional bullying situation is one that works for adults and children: it’s not about you. Studies have found that people who bully others have a lack of compassion and an internal pain that makes them aggressively hurt others. If you can remind yourself (or your children) that the bully in your life is acting on their own insecurity, the bully has less power. It may also help you set the situation straight if the bully is someone you care about and/or live with – you can get better insight into who that person is and how they are hurting. The best part of this way of seeing, however, is that you can remain neutral during a bully’s attempted attack – you no longer give him the reaction he’s looking for.

The second thing to remember is that you need to focus on changing yourself, not him. You can do this by becoming more assertive, strong and independent. This will send the message that you can’t be bullied and that you deserve a better life. Growing your self-esteem is the most important thing in this situation – of course, the other side is that you will usually help the bully to understand more about his behavior and how he needs to start treating you in a better way. But always remember that you can only control your life and your emotions – act as a model for treating others, but don’t spend your energy forcing him to follow your model.

How can you be assertive with a bully?

  • Recognize your situation for what it is (emotional bullying and thus emotional abuse)

  • Confront your bully by looking him in the eye and be honest about what you don’t like: “Please don’t make fun of me. My opinions are valid and I want to be treated with respect.”

  • Be confident about your self-worth. A bully will try to disarm you by taking away your confidence. Disarm your bully by changing the subject, using humor, or confidently stating why their attack of you doesn’t make any sense.

  • You can help this along by paying attention to what weak points your bully attacks. Work on improving your self-esteem in these areas so that you aren’t falling into the trap of believing what your bully says about you. In this way, you become stronger and more confident, which is both a defense against bullying and a way of healing bullying effects.

  • Always ask for help if physical violence has been used or becomes a possibility.

  • Don’t keep your situation quiet, but share your struggles with someone you can trust and who will be there to help you.

    WISHING YOU WELL!

How to Respond to an Abusive, Screaming Man

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You never married an screaming man, did you?

Oh, no, your boyfriend was a normal, caring person talking to you with respect…that is why you married him! So now, why is he transformed into this raging man? What happened to him that now you are shocked by his anger explosions?

To begin, we can say that part of the abuser’s mind frame is that he is always right (and if he has a suspicion that he’s not, it’s your “fault” and you’re “just out to get him”). If he perceives you as confronting or criticizing him, (or worst, putting him down!) his insecurity will demand a show of anger to put the sacred order of marriage in place again. He is always right, remember?

If confronted, he will transform a conversation in an offense, and will resort to yell and fight in messy anger explosions in order to get what he wants, especially when it seems like he is losing the battle to get it.

It is important to keep in mind that you may encounter this type of loud and angry attack, when trying to confront your abuser for the first time, setting some limits to his behaviors in order to preserve your integrity, or when trying to take a break from the relationship.

[ Want to learn more? “Overcoming Emotional Abuse Course“]

Many women are shocked the first time their husband screams, name calls or insults them. He is angry, shouting and facing her down with his entire wrath. Let’s remember this shock; it is the first indication that the promise of marriage (“to be together to love and respect each other”) was not taken seriously, but was only words.

As a spouse, you have to feel shocked, hurt and totally blindsided by his attack. There is no way we can cover up and deny the total effect of this aggression on us. It is sudden, unexpected, and leaves us with a sour taste afterwards. But how do we make sense of this aggression in the midst of a marriage we deem happy? How do we recover the lost sense of security being with him, when you don’t know if this terrible anger episode will repeat itself? Unfortunately, almost by mandate, we immediately run to forget the incident or make excuses for his behavior. We do this either because we fear the unknown aspects of his anger, or are unable to address them, and so we choose denial by saying: “he was stressed out; too tired; under a lot of pressure, etc.”

This is the first mistake: not taking this violation of interpersonal limits seriously, and so, absorbing rather than deflecting the abuse. Remember that you must respond to his anger, and never ignore it as if it is “ok.” If you ignore it and make excuses for your abuser, he will succeed in controlling you. An anger attack on an unsuspecting partner is abuse, and qualifies in the same line as either emotional or physical abuse. It is experienced as a violation of boundaries: as an abusive interaction. When crossing this boundary, your automatic trust in your partner is gone. It’s true that you get deeply emotional hurt with verbal violence, but there is not outside bodily mark of his anger on your body… “only” on your soul, which is a lot to suffer!


There are many ways that you can respond to an abusive and screaming man. Of course you can scream back, but this does not help you communicate past his defense of “make noise and hope it scares my enemy off.”Responding in a healthy way means being able to recognize his “anger cues”:

Physical: tensing muscles, clenching fists, jaw tightens, agitation;
Behavioral: raise voice, stand up tight, fix his eyes on you, breathe short and shallow, leave the room, yell, pound the walls, slam doors.
Emotional: feelings of being abandoned, discounted, disrespected, guilty, humiliated, impatient, insecure, jealous, afraid, or rejected.
Verbal: “righteous anger thinking,” repetitive claims about injustice, constant self-talk about victimization, “all the world” attacking him.

How do you react after seeing an anger attack coming (watching two or more of the above cues)?

1.- Leave the situation and/or house

Yes! Leaving sends the message that you’re not going to sit there and be a willing audience. The truth is that he needs you in a vital role: to be the intimidated spectator of his rage attack. If you leave, probably having this attack is not so much fun because the purpose, (to intimidate you into submission) will not be achieved. So, he needs you there, even if he needs to feign that he is ever-so-sorry about shouting and yelling at you.

Remember that if he has your undivided, scared attention, then he can go full blown into the attack: nostrils flaring, screaming and cursing you for all his problems, fixing his eyes on you so as to see how scared you are (meaning that he is successful, and you will not leave), and if you seem not scared enough, then escalating into slamming doors and pouncing against walls. He can make also a show of breaking things, probably the most cherished household things as to teach you a lesson and avoid having you “enraging him” in the future.

2.-Leave emotionally (detach)

You need to have a special mantra to protect you along this trial by fire. You need to repeat to yourself:

“He is choosing to have now an anger attack. It’s his decision and nothing of what I have done to him warrants this attack, directed to me but triggered by who knows what from his past. I can stand here, and wait until he is finished, because this is the safer spot in the house now. Once he is finished, I will make better plans to protect myself and the children.”

Meanwhile, if you have to hear his ranting along… try to detach yourself of his words and the content of the words he is saying. Keep repeating:

“Nothing of what I have done to him warrants this attack, directed to me but triggered by who knows what from his past,” several times.

Breath deeply and detach, trying to look at this unleashed fury as it you were in a theater watching a powerful, but alien performance. It’s not with you, has nothing to do with you and you’re better off watching without engagement. Watch out to any guilty feelings you can have, and decide to ignore them…you are not guilty of enraging him; he is doing it by himself.

3.- Stand up to him (if it’s safe)

There are varying opinions on whether to fight back (meaning confront/take a stand, not shouting back). Some people feel that it is important to stand up for yourself and show that you won’t be pushed around. Others claim that this may subject you to greater violence. You can say, in a normal voice:

“Please, lower your voice, I need to hear what is bothering you; if you shout, I can’t hear you.”

Knowing your own strength and your husband’s personality will tell you whether fighting back will benefit or harm you. Avoid screaming back or shouting back, because that will endanger you, and can prompt more violence.

There is no big win here, so select the behavior that will you help you be safer, not the most heroic. Remember, your aim is to survive this outburst with minimum damage, so let it go!

4.- Take care of the children

If you have kids pay attention to their behavior. Every child reacts differently to anger explosions. You could have even one imitating such behavior. It’s highly recommended to seek for professional help for them immediately. It’s not just your personal security and health which is at risk, but theirs as well. The impact on their emotional well being of being scared by anger attacks will not be activated perhaps until adulthood, but it will be there. And the consequences for them will be a general fear of life, and/or a permanent sense of insecurity in the world.

What is that you want for yourself:

  • A place of honor and respect?
  • A way to be appreciated and understood?

Only you can use the energy of that repressed wish to crawl from under abuse and recover your life! Do you want help with this life-saving project?

Here is my book: Healing Emotional Abuse

And remember that you can get connected here, tell your story and get responses also, because we care about you! Wishing you the best in life!