Emotional Abuse is Abuse.

What is emotional abuse and what are the emotional abuse signs in a relationship? The signs of emotional abuse in marriage or any relationship can often be quite subtle and hard to recognize when you're experiencing it. 

Questions we discuss in this episode include:

• Is emotional abuse domestic violence?
• Is emotional abuse worse than physical? 
• Is emotional abuse grounds for divorce? 
• How emotional abuse affects you 
• What emotional abuse feels like 
• How emotional abuse works
• What emotional abuse really means 
• Why emotional abuse happens
• Why emotional abuse is ignored 
• Why emotional abuse is hard to detect
• Will emotional abuse become physical ? 
• Is it emotional abuse or am I overreacting? 
• How to deal with emotional abuse

Related episodes:
5 Self Worth Lessons Divorce Taught Me

Related articles: 
Identify & Cope With Emotional Abuse
What is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional Abuse 101
5 Signs of Emotional Abuse
How to Recognize the Signs of Emotional Abuse

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

You are listening to the Self-Worth. Edit the podcast inspiring South Asian women and beyond to quit playing small and start trusting the power and wisdom within. Join Me No Sheen on Mondays as I share insightful conversations, tips for healthier ways of thinking and lessons in healing our relationships with ourselves. Thanks for tuning in to the self-Worth edit. Here we go. Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Self-Worth Edit podcast. We're almost coming up on the end of our season here. A reminder, if you've been enjoying the show, to please leave a five star rating wherever you're listening, whether that's on Spotify, apple Podcast or anywhere else. It will only take a few seconds and means so much to me and for the growth of the show. If you're inspired to start a podcast of your own and add your voice, your perspective to the landscape, then you can find a link to my guide for how to start one. In the show notes, you can see what equipment I use, my tips for beginners all in that post. You'll also see guidance in show notes on how to schedule a one-on-one consultation if that's something that you're wanting as additional personalized support and as a reminder, you can access all the resources related to the show at self-worth edit.com/resources. Also linked in the show notes here you can see books recommended by our guests programs and discount codes. Some of them offer for you the listener and more. Today's topic, to be honest, is one that has been on my heart to share since before I even launched the podcast, so why has it taken me so long? Why are we in year two before this episode makes an appearance? I try never to force a topic. A lot of what I share on this podcast puts me out of my comfort zone. I've talked about it before. It's deeply personal. I aim to be intentional about processing first, thinking something through fully learning my own lessons best I can before sharing here. This approach I feel is best in service of me and you, and so here we are in year two ready to talk about today's topic. Before we go any further though, I'm going to put a trigger warning on this episode just to be safe. The topic of abuse is a difficult one and I am not going to step into it lightly. If this is a particularly sensitive topic for you, and even if it's not, please take a grounding breath and be aware that this may not be an easy listen all the way through. I'm not going to discourage you from listening altogether though because you might need to hear what is shared in this episode. So much of my inspiration for topics for this show comes from things I wish I had learned or known earlier, things I needed to hear, lessons I learned the really, really hard way, which is most of my life lessons honestly, so that you don't have to. So let's get into this episode. Here's where I want to start. In my experience, it's so common in our cultures around the topic of divorce, to hear a question like, but did he hit you? He hit you right? He must have hit you. I outright got this question as I pursued my divorce and I wasn't surprised knowing this would be the stick used to measure the validity of my divorce is in part what kept me in my relationship because no, there was no actual physical violence. There were times I felt we were very close to it, but there was absolutely no actual physical violence involved. To think of abuse only at the physical level is to really, really miss the point. Abuse can take many forms. Financial, verbal, psychological, emotional, and the focus on physical abuse because it's most visible has an invalidating effect on the rest is a problem because it's often these less visible forms of abuse that cause the most damage, the most long lasting harm, and on top of that can often be the least socially acceptable grounds to part ways in a relationship. Domestic violence is a difficult subject. Of course. For me, it remains one of my biggest triggers. I have a lot of healing left to do around this subject that goes far beyond my marriage and divorce in the last few years, and that's my work to do. I'm working to be ready to face it all, but what I do know and want to emphasize now with conviction is that abuse is abuse and it is never okay, never acceptable. When people say relationships are hard work, this does not include dealing with abuse. When people recommend couples therapy, this does not apply to situations of abuse. I have a whole other episode on this topic, not yet out, but one I've been meaning to do despite this being an especially difficult topic for me. The reason I wanna share about it today is in case you are experiencing or have ever experienced it, and by it I mean emotional abuse and you don't recognize it or want validation around it, I want to offer that to you. So much of my experience with emotional abuse, I only fully understood in hindsight often by the look on the face of the person. I shared an anecdote, a conversation, a situation with, and I'm still finding that I didn't realize how messed up some of the stuff was that was said to me until moments like these and those words, those feelings stay with you. I'm still working through some of them. I still hear them in my head and they still color some of my beliefs about myself. It's hard to rewrite. I'm a work in progress, so in this episode I'm going to give you some examples of emotional and verbal abuse. I'm going to assure you that just because things haven't turned physical doesn't mean it's not abuse. In fact, emotional and verbal abuse are often precursors to physical abuse. When I learned this, I found myself at times wishing things would just escalate to that point already because it would maybe help legitimize the abuse I was experiencing. I would have something to point to to prove I need out to myself as much as two others. I said , sorry, I knew this was going to be a difficult one to record and I ask you to bear with me. I know I'm not alone in that line of thinking, and I also know even if it had gotten to that point, it would have been easy to continue to rationalize staying. I want you to hear this. I want you to know you are not alone in these thoughts, these experiences, and I want you to feel 10,000 million percent justified in leaving. I want this for you so much. I also want us to put aside for a while this idea that emotional abuse and similar terms that fall under this umbrella are turning into buzzwords and being overused. While I do agree that we can say this is happening, I also worry, the more I see that, that we're going to further invalidate true cases of abuse. I'm referring to when it seems like everywhere, all over social media, we're calling people narcissists. Well, guess what? There are true narcissists out there. I'm not making a bold claim about that in this episode, but let's put all of that aside and let's you just think about you here. I wanna put an early exclamation point around the fact that whether you define your experience as abuse or not, if you are in a situation that makes you feel unhappy, unsafe, then it's not okay and you are not overreacting. Even if there is no abuse and you simply no longer feel a relationship, whether with a coworker , a romantic partner, a friend, a parent, whatever is right for you, do what you need to do for you. That's just me laying groundwork. I also recognize some of you listening may not be or have ever have been in this situation firsthand, which I am so glad for. For you, you may or may not have someone in your life who does experience this. I recognize that if you have not experienced this firsthand, it's not easy to understand why someone won't just leave, how someone could actually rationalize staying how someone could not see that these are obvious signs of an unhealthy relationship. I get it. I can't or rather don't have the energy to explain it, but I will acknowledge that it can be frustrating to see a loved one struggle with this. It's a whole other topic that I don't have the emotional energy to get into at this time, but I want to acknowledge it, especially because I also relate to aspects of it now that I am in a different place in my own life, emotional and verbal abuse are insidious. We already talked about how you might not even fully recognize it, especially the emotional piece , but the way it affects your self-esteem, how you view yourself, feel about yourself is very real, and even this is not always an obvious shift because it can happen so slowly over time. I do believe some of us are more prone to fall into it than others, though it can happen to anyone. I don't say this from any kind of blame or shame perspective, but from an awareness one, and because I recognize now with my shifts in mindset and self-love, why I was susceptible before, I already had low self-esteem. I was full of insecurities in a lot of ways. I was easy prey. What I wanna communicate to you next are signs and examples of emotional abuse because it can often be subtle, and if you don't have it called out for you, it can be hard to recognize and easy to push away and say to yourself, it's not so bad. I'm making a big deal out of nothing, so I wanna share what it looks, feels and sounds like. I'm going to also link to additional resources that will expand further on these or beyond these, and I encourage you to click through those resources too . As I go through these, maybe they'll resonate. Maybe they'll cause you to question something you've been minimizing is not a big deal. All I want you to do for now is listen, you don't have to worry about diagnosing abuse or not abuse. Just listen and let your intuition, your instincts, your gut, speak to you and guide you as you do for what I'm about to share, we're not talking about isolated instances of the below but patterns of behavior. So bear that in mind. Alright , one indicator of the presence of emotional abuse is minimizing your feelings and your accomplishments invalidating you. This can sound like you're being too sensitive or can't you take a joke or with regard to your achievements, I could do that too, or simply ignoring your accomplishments or if you've been recognized for something. This is subtle and tricky for me. I heard the first two regularly growing up from different people, including it's at school from you know, fellow classmates, so I assumed this feedback was valid in every situation, and that also plays into the subtlety here. Often emotional abuse plays upon your existing insecurities that you might have shared with someone, and these are then used against you. When you keep having phrases like this directed at you in response to you expressing a need or feelings of a boundary being crossed over and over again, you stop expressing it, you start to internalize that maybe you really are too sensitive and uptight and before you know it, you're tolerating increased levels of disrespect as a result. This is how I got to the point of not realizing how messed up things were until I recounted a conversation for someone and they verified with the shock on their face that what I had normalized was wrong, and to be fair, this whole thing goes beyond romantic relationships. I had a very similar experience with some friends in college. Experiences like this affect your ability to stand up for yourself because your gauge for when you should be standing up for yourself versus not gets completely distorted. You can't tell whether you are wrong or the other person is you usually believe it's the former. If you find yourself constantly second guessing yourself when it comes to whether or not you should speak up for yourself, if you find yourself thinking, oh, they're just joking, I'm being too sensitive over and over and over again, I urge you to reevaluate. If there's someone you feel comfortable gut checking with by sharing the story with them to get their perspective, someone you really trust and who knows you and loves you, well do it. If you find yourself not wanting to share the instances with anyone or distorting the truth when you do, that's also a data point for you. For so long I didn't share the details. I hid things from the people closest to me because I could feel something was off and not right and I was ashamed before I even rationally, consciously could put into words what was going on. If you find yourself rationalizing and editing the truth to protect your partner or whomever, and you think that if you restate something in truth, the other person just won't understand because they're not in your relationship and might interpret something the wrong way, reevaluate maybe their outsider perspective is actually more valuable than you think. After the last few years as a result of this indicator in particular, I now view sarcasm as a red flag. I used to love sarcasm myself. As I grew older, I increasingly realized how harmful it can be, and now I don't even mess around with the nuances of sarcasm for fun versus for harm. If I'm swiping on bumble or hinge and I see fluent in sarcasm, that's an immediate no for me. I don't want to ever again have someone say mean things to me in a sarcastic tone that when I express I don't appreciate it. They can just say, you're being too sensitive. It's just a joke. I was being sarcastic. Get outta here with that <laugh> literally F that. I find it so immature. Please communicate with me on a different and more real level. If you need to hide behind your sarcasm, I don't want any part of it, and if you're only skilled at being funny through sarcasm, you're not funny enough. For me, that's just facts. I wanna also go back to this minimization of your accomplishments and successes for a moment. If you have someone telling you that your job is easy and they could do it too, that your public recognition for something is no big deal and doesn't need to even be acknowledged that your hobbies and passions are dumb and a waste of time to the point where you find yourself holding back on even sharing good news with this person because you know they're just going to ignore it or bring you down and just don't wanna engage in that hassle . Recognize that I had a friend years ago in college who ended a relationship with her long-term boyfriend because he didn't celebrate her enough and at the time I didn't really understand to be honest, but after my own experience with this, not only not having my activities and my mind and my things celebrated, but having them actively put down, I completely get it. If someone is minimizing your interests and achievements, they are trying to bring you down and make themselves feel better in comparison, and I'm not even saying that , that they're doing this on a conscious level with conscious malicious intent. Although I've learned I tend to give people too much of the benefit of the doubt, so who knows, maybe they are <laugh> , but that's not to say either way, that it's not what's happening and you deserve better, you deserve more. You deserve to be celebrated and recognized and acknowledged, and it really is a big deal. It really is a big deal. You really should celebrate. It really is amazing what you did. Don't let someone else make you feel like you shouldn't be proud of the things you are proud of. There are billions of people on this earth. Surround yourself with the people who make you feel good about yourself and stop wasting energy on the ones who can't. I feel like I'm talking as much to myself right now as to you, which I think is a good thing. Another indicator of emotional abuse is a constant ignoring of your boundaries. If you have shared something you don't like a behavior or language, whatever, it doesn't even have to be you saying, Hey, I have a boundary against this, but if you've shared, Hey, I don't like when you do that to me or say that to me, if you've clearly shared that and had it either minimized or repeatedly ignored and had the behavior or language take place anyway, if someone tries to convince you to change your boundary or says your boundary doesn't make sense or even says something like, I do it because I love you, you should be worried if I ever stop doing it, not if I continue. All of that is trash, and yes, that's a quote throw with the F out. You deserve to have your boundaries respected. Your boundaries don't have to make sense to anyone else, but they absolutely must be honored, and when someone is incapable or refuses to honor your boundaries, words are meaningless. They may say they love and care for you, but if their actions cannot back it up by respecting your boundaries, it means nothing and you deserve to implement a next step based on this. Whether that's you cut them out of your life, you leave them or you see and talk to them less or you don't discuss certain topics with them anymore, whatever it is, don't compromise your boundaries. Moving on. Constant criticism and judgment is another indicator of abuse. If someone tells you or makes you feel like you are always in the wrong with how you do things, how you dress, how you speak, and that they are always right and just trying to give you feedback to improve, but that feedback is always about telling you how you're doing. Every little thing wrong, even inconsequential daily actions to the bigger things about like your relationships with friends and family. There's something wrong there and it's not something wrong with you like this person would like you to believe. This is very controlling behavior. Just because the person isn't physically forcing you to do or not do something does not mean this is not controlling highly manipulative behavior. If you feel like you can never do or say the right thing and find yourself walking on eggshells around this person red flag, please don't ignore this. Do you find yourself walking on eggshells? Do you find yourself hyper monitoring things you say or don't say or do or don't do just so you don't incur the wrath of this person or a barrage of criticism or judgment? This is not a healthy environment for you to be in. There are so many different ways to do things that is allowed, that is beautiful. If someone constantly makes you feel or even outright tells you that they're the ones who know how to do everything right and you and others always do things wrong, that's a them problem, not a you problem. Stop trying to satisfy their needs for how you do or say or move or dress or look. It's not possible and it's certainly not worth it, and again, this can apply to any type of relationship. This next one gets into the realm of psychological abuse, so psychological abuse is more about affecting how you think, whereas emotional is more about affecting how you feel, but there are of course a lot of overlaps between these. This next one is gaslighting. The term gaslighting comes from an old movie in which the husband tried to convince his wife that she was going crazy by slowly dimming the gaslights, but telling her she was imagining it essentially. I've never seen it, but I know that term and I know that's where it comes from, and I know what it feels like. It's frustrating as hell to experience it. It's confusing and maddening. You literally start to question your reality. You know you're right, but you can't prove it, so you start to wonder or you feel frustrated about it. Here's how this might show up in a relationship. Someone might tell you you are misremembering certain conversations or details that you definitely remember, but you're then being told repeatedly that you're not remembering correctly or regularly being told in conversation, that you took something out of context that you know for a fact was not, and again, it's when this stuff happens over and over and over again and it's a pattern at a certain point, it's actually not about miscommunication, which might be the problem that you decide you need to solve when this happens as I did, it's not about miscommunication, it's about lying and redirection. Another way this could show up could be in a discussion or argument. When you're talking about one thing, you start to make a lot of logical, rational sense and think you'll come to a point of clarity, but then instead the person says, that's not even what we've been talking about. Again, for a long time when I experienced this, I thought, oh, we just have vastly different communication styles and ways of interpreting the world and words and no. You know what recently reminded me of this and might be a good example, is if you watch selling Sunset, Christine , on the latest um season, I had some moments where you were watching her having a conversation on the screen and she would say one thing and then when she was almost about to be caught in, it would completely pivot and say, perfectly matter of factly. What do you mean that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this. What do you mean that didn't happen? I didn't say that this happened, this, I was watching this and I was like, oh my goodness. So there's a homework assignment. You can go watch selling Sunset to get one example on a related note when someone tries to tell you how you're being perceived by others. That's another example of this. So for instance, if you're all out with friends, you talk, you chill, whatever, and then later the person tells you that you totally misread everyone's facial expressions the whole time. They actually weren't on board with what you were contributing to the conversation. It was off-putting. Now, normally this can be really helpful feedback and even valid depending on the situation, who the feedback is coming from what reason, like if they genuinely wanna help you be a better human or communicator. That's different from planting seeds of self-doubt and making someone question their own sense of self-awareness. If someone ever starts to make you question your own level of self-awareness, what you should do is affirm or refute. You could follow up , for example, in this case with the group of friends themselves and say something like, Hey, I realize I might have come across as X, Y, Z the other evening. Is that right? Do I have a good read on that? Ask for verification outside of the person telling you this. Maybe they misread the situation themselves or maybe they want you to question your sense of self, and again, they may not be doing all of this at a conscious level, but they're doing it. So gaslighting is about getting you to question yourself. Your reality, your memory. If you're feeling confused or frustrated or like you can never remember things the right way anymore, or you used to be an excellent communicator and you've been giving that feedback your whole life, but all of a sudden you just can't seem to be understood or even understand the other person. Start documenting things that happen as they happen as clearly as you can journal about it. I look back at my journal entries from a few years ago now and I can read how confused I was. I wasn't doing it from the standpoint of trying to document like I'm now advising you to do because again, while I was in it, I didn't really grasp what was happening for a long time, hence the reason for this episode now, but when I do look back because I have journaled for so long, I find it very valuable in general. I can clearly see how all of this was happening for me and what it was doing to my thinking and my views and my sense of self, and it's honestly heartbreaking. Another indicator, and again, I've had this also happen with so-called friends in the past, is when someone uses your insecurities or your compassion, your values against you, I think this is pretty straightforward. If you share your fears and insecurities with someone who is obviously a close relationship to you and they throw it in your face when the opportunity arises, that is not okay, that is not your person. Those are not your people. Another perhaps more obvious indicator of verbal and emotional abuse is yelling and name calling . I say perhaps more obvious because even this was something I hate to say can be rationalized, right? You can chalk it up to different communication styles and I used to do a lot of research in forums and there would be people saying, Hey, this is just how I talk. I don't take it to heart, so I would just think, okay, some people communicate in these ways and don't mean anything harmful by it, it's just what they're used to. But then when you think back up to boundaries, if you express a boundary against a certain behavior or language and it's repeatedly ignored, that's something to look into Also, often yelling is an intimidation tactic. Also, words have meaning, and for me, my love language is words of affirmation. Having insults hurled at at you will hurt anyone, and for me it's like an active reversal of my love language. It demonstrates to such a lack of respect of self and the other. In my opinion, I don't ever wanna engage in any kind of relationship with any adult who does not have control over their own emotions and doesn't know how to emotionally regulate. The more subtle flip side of this that also falls under abuse is stonewalling more commonly known as giving someone the silent treatment, refusing to engage with them. A healthier approach to this is to communicate, to say, Hey, I need some time to cool down. Let's talk again in two hours, or let's talk again tomorrow or whatever time bound it . I'm going to take some space, but to just ignore someone and refuse to engage when they talk to you or not allowing them to talk about a specific incident or feeling to express, not allowing them to be heard pretending they don't exist. This is not emotionally safe behavior. Another layer of this is threatening threats. This can range to include everything you think of when that word comes up, but it can also include threatening to leave if there's a constant threat to the relationship. When someone expresses a need or has a differing opinion and the response is, let's break up, or let's get a divorce. These things can be really damaging in a relationship. So this brings us to a shift in our conversation. Why do people act this way? Why do abusers abuse? I said a couple times that they may not be doing it on a conscious level, likely, very likely they're operating from a place of their own unhealed traumas. That's often the hard reality of it for me and likely for many like me. This is yet another reason we rationalize away this behavior because we feel for this person who maybe can never feel this way for us, we feel their pain. We feel like we want to fix them and help them and heal them. We feel sad for them. We feel like it's unfair. The trauma they experienced that contributed to these reactions. We feel like it's not their fault. We feel like we understand them and are therefore overly forgiving of them at the expense of ourselves. We know we feel the words hurt people hurt people, and we minimize our own hurt to try to heal theirs, And we lose ourselves in the process. We make ourselves martyrs, and it's often fruitless because while the intentions are good, we're not facilitating their healing. We're not changing them By sticking around. If anything, we are just enabling them. It sucks. It sucks to realize this, but it's also so freeing because you can then shift from trying to heal their pain and changing their lives, to healing your own, to freeing yourself, to loving yourself. In fact, it was the moment I had this specific realization, oh, I thought by staying I was helping, but I'm actually enabling that everything seemed to crash down around me. It is the moment I realized that nothing was ever going to change because me staying there was enabling this behavior to continue, and the more I stayed and the more I tolerated and the more I forgave, what incentive does anyone have to actually change then none. Here's the thing, We're not responsible for the traumas we experienced growing up, but we as adults are responsible for our own healing. Some people get this, some people continue to live far too long with the victim mentality and refuse to engage in true healing and continue to blame others for their pain, for them being the way they are for their reactions. You cannot get through to a person like this. You can only change and heal yourself. You can only change and heal yourself, and you cannot do so stuck in the same environment that's keeping you stunted and causing you harm. I hope this episode gave you what you needed. I hope you know now that emotional abuse is real. It's a valid reason to rid yourself of a relationship that is unhealthy so you can create space for one that is healthy, ideally beginning with healing your relationship with yourself. I hope this gave you a better sense of or validated how emotional abuse can manifest what it sounds and feels like. I asked you to listen and to ultimately trust your gut. For so long, I ignored my own intuition. I didn't trust myself. I rationalized and rationalized. I guilted myself into staying. Even if you listen to this and think, Nope, this does not fit the description of what I'm experiencing. If you're unhappy in a friendship, a romantic relationship, a work relationship that is reason enough, that is reason enough to leave one more time, that is reason enough. Even abuse is not the only reason to move on to leave if you're not happy. If something doesn't fit, no matter how it looks on paper, please honor yourself, honor your needs, honor your wants, your desires. Life is so short. Life is too short to ignore or downplay what you want out of it. I'm sending you so much love and support. I'm including resources in the show notes. If you need help, please seek it out. If there's someone you know who needs to hear this episode, send it to them. Sometimes other people's voices can get through to our loved ones and resonate in a way that we just cannot directly. So share this. If you know someone who needs it, take care. Tune in for the next episode of this season. Remember, we're on an every other week cadence, so make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening, so you never miss an episode. Until next time.