[A first draft sample from my book, Facing Abuse]

Emotional abuse is often thought of as a lesser kind of abuse. An article about domestic violence from insurance provider Prudential, for example, states that “When a partner wants to leave the home and you stand in the doorway to prevent it, that is domestic violence. When people fear for their safety even though there has been no concrete incident, that indicates that at least emotional abuse is taking place.” Physical abuse is often cited as next worst, followed by sexual abuse, which is often regarded as the worst possible kind of abuse that anyone could experience.

Yet, beyond the inadvisability of ranking abuse experiences like that, and the various forms it leaves out, abuse is also not so easy to separate. Sexual abuse always occurs on either a physical or emotional level or both; physical abuse causes deep emotional wounds; and I am not sure it is even possible for sexual or physical abuse to occur in a relationship without emotional abuse first paving the way for it. Lawyer Andrew Vachss, who specializes in litigation against child abuse of all kinds, stated in an article for Parade magazine that “of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all” because it is “the systematic diminishment of another.”

One of the worst aspects of emotional abuse is its invisibility. Even with physical forms of abuse, it is hard for many people to accept that anything but the clearest and most extreme examples are abuse. They often simply have too much invested in believing that anything less is not abusive, maybe not even harmful. With emotional abuse, there are no physical scars left: there is nothing visibly damaging enough for some people to accept. It is much easier to minimize it, because the moment that the words are out of the abuser’s mouth, they are gone. We can begin immediately to tell ourselves that we deserved it, they didn’t mean it, it didn’t bother us, they are right, or simply to distract ourselves from what is happening.

The concept of freedom of speech, for all its importance to society, can also confuse us. We can understand that someone’s right to move their fist ends where our skin begins, but it is harder to draw that line when the weapon is psychological. Here, then, is a series of examples of emotional abuse, which may also be called psychological or verbal abuse. This is not intended as a comprehensive list: it is only meant to help people understand what emotional abuse looks like. Like art, we may not be able to explain what it is, but we can at least come to know it when we see it.

“Crazy-Making” Behavior

In Stop, You’re Driving Me Crazy, Dr. George R. Bach posits four rights that everyone has in relationships, which are violated by emotionally abusive behavior: (More....)