A Few Signs of Emotional Abuse

Is some of my earlier articles on abuse I describe some of the warning signs to look for in an abusive relationship. In this one I would like to give you some signs of emotional abuse that you can look for and flag.Some of these descriptions come from the Health Canada website which I have included as a link in the resources section of this article and I have expanded them somewhat to highlight my own views on the subject..

What follows are some of the ways people can abuse each other emotionally:

1. Rejection - not what you might think. This is a clear, consistent pattern of behavior in which the victim is made to feel invisible. In other words, if someone flat-out refuses to acknowledge your existence, you are as rejected as if someone rejected you outright. Also, look for verbal statements, "body language" and other ways for others to show that you are not valuable or do not deserve to be in their presence.

2. Degrading - insulting, name calling and other tactics which obviously denigrate the victim. Treating a mentally-alert senior citizen as if he or she were incompetent. Mimicking a person's disability (especially if the victim is already mentally ill). In short, any behavior pattern which deliberately downgrades the inherent dignity of the victim - yelling, bullying, the tactics named above, public humiliation, and so forth.

3. Terrorizing - here, even the common tactic many parents use against children (saying "goodbye" in a public place if a child dawdles or wishes to stay, playing on the child's fear of abandonment to insure compliance and insure that the child comes along with you to go home from a public place) is a form of terrorization, if you think about it. In short, any tactic deliberately designed to induce fear or outright terror in another individual counts here. I'm not talking about times we all experience where others UNINTENTIONALLY make us fearful; I mean only those times when terror is deliberately induced in the victim by the abuser.