In fact, emotional abuse is among the subtlest forms of maltreatment which leave very deep, long-lasting scars as opposed to the glaring and physical attacks characterizing physical abuse, which occurs psychologically and usually leaves those affected struggling with problems of low self-esteem, trust, and mental health years after the maltreatment has ended. The intrinsic foundation for emotional abuse mainly depends upon the complex mental disorders of the abuser. It has been concentrated on the close relationship between emotional abuse and mental health issues. This section of writing tries to highlight why emotional abuse takes place and what effects it has on the victim, as well as the abuser.
What is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse means repeated behaviors for keeping someone away from another person through non-physical domination, belittling, isolation, or intimidation. Their forms include manipulation, humiliation, continued criticism, threats, and withholding love and affection. This abuse destroys the self-esteem and psychological capacity of a victim and it becomes difficult for such a person to leave such a toxic relationship or to even come to terms with its harm level.
Emotional abuse can occur in any relationship which may be romantic, friendship, parental or professional. The emotional abuse impact can range from anxiety to depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder in victims who have endured emotional abuse.
The Interrelationship Between Emotional Abuse and Mental Illness
Not all abusive people suffer from mental illnesses, but many emotional abusers have serious problems. Serious mental health problems create a toxic relationship that breeds the expression of fears, frustrations, and insecurities by the abuser on their victims.
1. Personality Disorders and Emotional Abuse
Most emotional abusers will either have personality disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, or even Antisocial Personality Disorder, which often reveal their entire character through manipulations and abuse.
- Those suffering from NPD often share characteristics of extreme self-importance and have little or no capacity for empathy. They employ other individuals to preserve their status of advantage over others; this helps them avoid the pain associated with vulnerability. Psychological cruelty can also be expressed in a manner to belittle or minimize one’s work, enact gaslighting, or make their victim feel worthless.
- Borderline Personality Disorder: Borderline Personality individuals are especially good fits of moods and extreme abandonment fears. Extreme anxiety about possibly being abandoned can lead to controlling and emotionally abusive behavior, which may include raging jealousy, manipulation, and constant accusations, all aimed at preventing the victim from leaving.
- Antisocial Personality Disorder: APD is characterized by an absence of respect for others’ feelings and rights. The individual afflicted with this disorder can perpetrate emotional abuse because they do not know or have not learned empathy as to what abuse is. They often are manipulative, lying, and charming, so victims do not understand that they are being abused until it is too late in stopping it.
2. Depression, Anxiety, and Emotional Instability
While personality disorders are indeed one other big component of emotionally abusive behaviors, depression and anxiety also lead to emotional abuse. Such patients may project their mental chaos on someone else.
- Depression: A depressed individual may turn emotional, cranky, or even aggressive. He could behave this way with those he loves in the hope that it may trigger some bell within his loved ones to help the inner self cope with such dark feelings. Example: He might refrain from cuddling, become hypercritical, and so on, blaming those people for his state of worthlessness.
- Anxiety: From chronic anxiety, one will develop control issues to deal with their fear of losing control. A person will become overly controlling, accusative, or paranoid and more than likely seek ways to emotionally abuse to help maintain control over their environment and the people who live within it.
3. Unacted Childhood Trauma
Many emotional abusers have unresolved traumatic experiences in their own childhood. Any form of childhood neglect, physical or emotional abuse, or worse, growing up in a dysfunctional home may intensely impact the adult.
These persons will never know how to communicate in some challenging situations, or how to solve misunderstandings. As such, they might respite to emotional abuse as a defense mechanism or form of protection since they would have learned some toxic manners while very young.
Effects on the Victims
Victims of emotional abuse tend to receive deeper psychological wounds. The constant criticism, belittling, and manipulation by the abuser over time can cause mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. Victims of this kind of abuse may also be affected in the following ways:
1. Low Self-Esteem
These persistent criticisms and influences in due course start to eliminate one’s self-confidence. Victims internalise terrible words coming from the abuser-they have usually been made to believe that they deserve so little good, no love, no respect, and that they are to be treated crudely-and can eventually come to hate themselves or become drowned in hopelessness.
2. Problem With Trusting People
Emotional abuse destroys one’s trust with others even outside the abusive relationship. Victims of emotional manipulation and betrayal tend to have bad relationships long after leaving the abusive relationship because, through fear of another hurt, they cannot forgive nor be close to anyone.
3. Emotional Detachment
Other victims of emotional abuse become numb to this emotional pain. Their emotions are suppressed as their self-protection against the stinging nature of abuse. As such, the victims of emotional abuse may never be able to express or feel happiness or intimacy with others.
4. Mental Health Disorders
Obviously, what triggers or triggers the onset of mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress is emotional abuse. Long after the emotional abuse has stopped, victims can still act out in flashbacks, nightmares, hyperarousability, or hopelessness.
Why Emotional Abusers Reluctantly Struggle To Seek Help
As cruel as emotional abuse sounds, abusers rarely want to seek therapeutic treatment for their underlying psychiatric condition. This reluctance is due to a combination of factors; beginning first and foremost with denial:
1. Denial
Most emotional abusers either deny the extent of the damage they are actually causing or are completely unaware that they are abusive. They might justify their abuse by saying the victim is abusive or that the abuse that does exist is minimal and very unlikely to take them to therapy sessions or any treatment
2. Fear of Vulnerability
Seeking help by nature is an emotionally vulnerable task, to say the least, that again, many abusers cannot attain. In the case of those with narcissistic or borderline tendencies, such people might fear that acceptance of needing help would only make them appear weak or flawed, further feeding into their resistance to therapy.
3. Lack of Accountability
An emotional abuser never owns what he does. They cannot confess that they practice a certain behavior and one of the reasons why is because they blame the victim. This also does not help the victim foremost in realizing his or her potential need for professional help.
Recovery from Emotional Abuse
Healing from emotional abuse is a long and complex process, yet absolutely achievable with the right support and resources. Victims often need therapy to work through that traumatic experience; they must rebuild their self-esteem, as well as new ways to cope. Support groups, close friends, and at times even family members can then all really be sources of help.
The need to counsel the person to make him realize what he has been giving his loved ones as abusive behavior, teaching him empathy and guiding him on healthier ways of relating to other people is also of prime importance.
Conclusion
Emotional abuse does not just interfere with relationships but intertwines deeply with other complex mental health issues. Recognizing the psychological basis underlying emotional abuse will seek a little healing for all individuals involved: victims, need to realize that they deserve better than emotional abuse and can never be at fault, while abusers need to come forward and get checked out on their mental problems-first towards healing from such patterns of abuse.
