What Is Emotional Abuse & How To Deal With It?

It doesn’t matter if you love your friend, partner or work colleague, no one is allowed to root you with emotional abuse. Emotional abuse plays a major role in degrading your self-confidence and igniting depression within. Before anything else, let’s figure out what is emotional abuse followed by coping strategies.

What Is Emotional Abuse?

As the name suggests, controlling or abusing the emotions of another person is called emotional abuse. It includes embarrassing, shaming, criticizing or blaming someone in order to manipulate them. Such behavior along with abusive words could hamper the mental health of the listener.

Emotional abuse is most common in relationships, dating or marriages but it can also prevail with the wrong company of people. The victim tries to isolate himself, maintains silence and forgets about his own self-esteem.

How Emotional Abuse Looks Like?

When someone close to you or you love abuses you emotionally, it gets tough to figure out a lot of things. In fact, many people get confused whether it is even emotional abuse or not or is it just the short term anger. Well, there are signs that one must keep in check:

• Emotional Blackmail: Your abuser could try to humiliate you in public or privately, use your personal trigger points to make you do unreasonable things, always talk about your flaws so that all the good signs hide or simply give you silent treatment.
• Acting Superior: Such people can try to make others feel inferior, blame them every instance, doubt them, don’t consider their side of thoughts, apply sarcasm in the discussion and make sure that they are smarter than you.
• Impractical Expectations: An emotional abuser tries to manipulate you for doing something which you are not comfortable with, expects you to work for them, demands all your attention and time, doesn’t let you have your own opinion or criticize you for not matching up to the expectations.
• Create Unnecessary Chaos: Emotional abusers don’t leave a chance to create chaos like sudden arguments, use contradictory statements, behave unpredictably and face mood swings by themselves.
• Control Your Activities: They try to control your circle of friends, try to find out who are connected through social networks, accuse you of cheating, track your location through GPS, always feel jealous of other friends, make fun of your friends or even treat you like a trophy.

Emotional Abuse Effects On The Victim

Even though an emotional abuser doesn’t realize how much his or her words are creating an impact on the listener, it is in the best interest of the victim to find out what could be the consequences of emotional abuse on their mental health.

• Overall health of the victim goes down.
• Increase psychological problems like stress, depression, etc. along and physical problems.
• The victim isolates himself and maintains silence.
• Constant guilt lingers in heart and mind.
• Difficulty with meeting new people or forming new relationships
• Concentration problems
• Feeling of worthlessness
• Belief that they are neither good for their partner nor for anyone else.

Every effect has a negative consequence on the person’s emotional, mental and physical well-being.

Coping With Emotional Abuse

There are two basic steps to survive emotional abuse. First, acknowledge or realize that you are being emotionally abused and second is to trust yourself. Once you are honest and understand the aspect of emotional abuse, below are methods to exit from a tough situation.

1. Take Care Of Yourself

It is understandable that your self-esteem has gone down but it’s time to take a step for yourself by not pleasing the other person. Push away all the negative emotions and realize who you are in real. With that, start eating healthy, go for regular exercise, give yourself a daily dose of meditation and a lot of mental rest.

With that, give yourself a treat of mental health activities that are superbly calming and easy to perform.

 2. Make Boundaries

If you have made up your mind to stand up for yourself, make sure you communicate your boundaries to the other person. Tell them that they are not allowed to engage in any rude behavior or else give them the consequence. Even if they do, ignore them completely and enjoy your life.

3. Don’t Feel Guilty Or Blame Yourself

After hearing everything negative about yourself, you tend to blame yourself and feel guilty about it. Let us remind you that we all are human beings and mistakes are part of our lives. There is no need to blame yourself for the choices you make or actions that you have taken. However, if you are still choosing to be abused, it is definitely not right.

4. You Can’t Change Someone

When you communicate your problem to the person and they are not taking any action to control this emotional abuse, it’s better to realize you can’t change them. The only thing you can control is your mindfulness towards their situation, their reaction and further decisions to correct the problem.

5. Talk To Your Friends/Family

You must vent out your feelings to someone close to you or for the matter, to a counselor. Take some time away from the abuser and speak out your problems. There is always someone who could be your support system. If you are still facing trouble, drop us a message at info@calmsage.com to connect you with a professional counselor.

Wrap-Up

Emotional abuse is not something that you leave it loose. Get up, learn your situation and ask for help rather than getting consumed in your own thoughts. Fuel your brain with a lot of positive affirmations and breathe deep with calmness.