May 2024,
Over time emotional abuse can wear down your mental andemotional strength making you less confident and destroying your self-worth.It’s difficult to feel sure of yourself when someone is demeaning, dismissing, and second-guessing you constantly. When you care about someone and have invested time in them, you want to believe the best of them and convince yourself that you are overreacting in how you interpreted their hurtful words. Your partner may gaslight you saying that you are overreacting, being dramatic, being too emotional, or that you can’t take a joke. It’s hard to recognize that this is emotional abuse, and you should be concerned about it. It’s easy to buy in when they tell you that you are this or that, and you question yourself. Even then, survivors of emotional abuse are often hesitant to seek help or tell friends and family about their relationship concerns because they fear they will not be believed or taken seriously, or called stupid to be with them in the first place and tell you could have prevented it.
Nonetheless, emotional abuse is serious, and it is not uncommon for emotional abuse to escalate to physical violence. In some relationships, this escalation to physical abuse is slow, and in others, it can happen rapidly.
Here are some red flags: An emotional abuser might :
Call you names, demean you, or make you feel silly or ignorant.
Tell you what to do or how to dress. They don’t trust you and act possessively.
Question your reality and say that things that you are true, didn’t happen. This is called gaslighting
Be critical of your appearance and jealous of time spent with friends and family.
Punish you and withhold affection, make threats to hurt you to get what they want, and accuse you of cheating.
Make you ask for permission for what you want to do,
Stalk you and call you constantly even if you are with your family.
Embarrass you in public and blame you for their abusive behavior.
Threaten to break up or divorce to manipulate you in an argument.
Want access to your phone, and passwords, or your social media.
Threaten suicide during arguments.
Make you feel guilty or immature for not wanting to have sex, Mine called me a whore.
Compliment and give you gifts to manipulate you, then later tell you that you owe them.
Do you have more information you would like to share about emotional abuse ?, Post it in the Comments.
Lauraina Bashir