Emotional Abuse

She was sitting on the floor, leaning against her bed in a defeated sort of way. She was trying to be strong, and while her façade was working better than she had expected, it still fell short of what was necessary. Then again, of course it fell short; nothing she did was ever good enough. Is that not exactly what they were fighting about downstairs? Usually during arguments like this she felt sad and hurt, but this time was different. She was angry: angry that they were always fighting, angry that it was always about her, and angry because of the effect this particular battle was having on someone else. She looked down at the innocent little girl sitting next to her, and tears began to form in her eyes. This is exactly what she never wanted to happen. She was used to shouldering the blame, used to falling apart when everything fell apart on top of her. She refused to let the pain fall onto someone else, especially onto the one person in the world who had never done anything to hurt her. And so, she smiled at her four-year-old sister, put down the book she was holding, and said everything she wished someone had told her. "You know everyone loves you, right? None of this has anything to do with you." The beautiful little girl looked up, her face wet from crying, nodded feebly, and scooted over to give her big sister a hug.

That little girl is six now, and I, the older sister, am 18 and handling my own problems. I have not seen my half-sister, or my dad's side of the family, in over two years, but the memories still haunt me. According to Felicia Romeo, an author with degrees in education and psychology, they always will. They effects of emotional abuse outlast those of all other types, and the consequences carry over far into adulthood (Romeo). This happens not only due to the severity of the abuse, but also because people have difficulty recognizing or acknowledging its existence; people often think, "it's only emotional abuse, they'll just get over it" (Vachss). Such ignorance is no one person's fault, but that state of mind could not be further from the truth.

While abuse can come from all directions, emotional abuse most frequently takes place in the home. Family environment is the key factor that plays in throughout everyone's life, and if that environment is tainted, the outcome could be disastrous. A good, healthy home for a child consists of love, approval, positivity, and encouragement. Parents need to make their children feel wanted, good, valued, and worth something; this leads to a positive self-image and strong self-esteem in the child's later years. In a bad, abusive home, however, unloved, unwanted, unguided, and unsupported children become prevalent. Their parents act cold, show no affection, deprive the child of psychological nurturing, reduce their self-concept, and enforce in their children the view that they are unworthy of respect, friendship, love, and affection; in other words, emotionally abusive parents "systematically diminish the victim" (Romeo). They hold unrealistic expectations for their children, repeatedly calling them names, and intentionally criticizing them in front of others. Beth Gollob, a reporter whose research extends far into the lives of emotionally abused children, says that those people who see the child being criticized are a selected few; most of the time, an abusive parents appears warm and kind (Gollob). No one would suspect that at home, they are injuring their child for life.

Just as it is hard to recognize an abusive parent, it is maybe even more difficult to identify an abused child. Without the physical evidence of other types of abuse, it takes deliberate thought and knowledge to suspect a child is being emotionally abused. Fortunately, visual symptoms do manifest themselves in many children, making it easier to pinpoint the ones who need help. As a child, I had no self-confidence, showed either too much emotion or not enough, was extremely shy, was made fun of by other kids, appeared lethargic, had a pessimistic attitude, and constantly put myself down. I felt helpless, hopeless, and completely inadequate, and as I grew older, I began to injure myself. My brother, on the other hand, took his feelings out on other people. He showed many of the aggressive symptoms (Romeo): he bullied and acted hostile towards everyone else, his favorite word was "no," and he was hyper-active and attention- seeking. Often, as in the case of my brother, these symptoms can be mistaken for normal childhood disabilities such as Attention Deficit Hyper-Active Disorder, or ADHD. These incorrect inclinations make finding the real problem an even bigger task.

Unfortunately, emotional abuse does not live only in childhood. Sometimes the abuse stops on its own and the now-adolescent simply has disturbing memories, but most of the time, the abuse goes unreported, the child does not get help, and the parents continue their destructive behaviors. Author Antonella Gambotto-Burke experienced this through her brother, who eventually committed suicide. She saw what happened to him and wanted to share it with the world. She saw the change in self-destructive behaviors as her brother grew older. Where the behaviors as a child were limited to hair pulling, nail biting, and accident proneness, in adolescence, the opportunities open up. Abused teenagers, and even formerly abused adults, habitually enter into abusive relationships. Many other negative things result from the abuse. For me, the chronic mild depression of my childhood turned into the worst kind of major depression, as well as anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Mixed Mood Disorder. Beyond the self-mutilation, I showed most of the "things to look for." I was withdrawn, severely anxious, paranoid and afraid, and emotionally unstable. I could not sleep, I ached all over, I called myself a "doormat," as I let people walk all over me, I cried all the time, and I always felt guilty for things that had nothing to do with me (Gambotto-Burke). Many of these symptoms will spring up in adulthood as well, even after a break with the abusers, something Marc Ramirez, a lifestyle reporter for the Seattle Times, has researched all about. He can confirm what I already know: the pain never goes away.

Joanna Saisan, Ellen Jaffe-Gill, and Jeanne Segal, all doctors, say that while child neglect is the most obvious form of emotional abuse, the abuse also reveals itself in verbal form. Such were the ways of my father and stepmom, as CJ Newton, a specialist in learning disabilities and found of findcounseling.com could have predicted. They followed word for word what scholars say are the key actions of a verbally abusive parent: I understood their feelings, but they never attempted to understand mine; they dismissed my problems as unimportant and an overreaction; they put their needs before mine; they manipulated me into thinking everything was my fault; they attempted to destroy any help I was trying to get; they refused to acknowledge that the problems I had were valid; and, worst of all, they saw themselves as the victims. Though the abuse did stop, everything had long-term effects, and many problems are still with me (Newton).

Every morning, I wake up from the same nightmare, only a few years ago, that nightmare was also reality. If I was at my dad's house, I would silently and diligently get ready for school, feed the cats, take part in the forced pleasantries of the morning, and practically hop out of the car as it pulled up to my school. I did not even like school, but anything was better than being home. If I was at my mom's house, my morning routine slowed slightly, as the thought of going to my dad's house made me sick. I would literally shake with terror, but there was nothing I could do. No matter where I was waking up, I knew it was only a matter of time before I found myself back in the battlefield, the target point of a war zone I would never understand. I could not escape it, so I would do the only thing I could think of: help my parents destroy me. They had the power to hurt me, and I wanted it back. I took matters into my own hands, or wrists, more accurately. I began cutting, and only then did I realize that I had been intentionally hurting myself all along. All my injuries throughout the years had been subconscious efforts to alleviate my emotional pain by feeling full force the physical pain. Once I started hurting myself deliberately, the accidents stopped, and strangely, so did the overflow of emotion. While I used to cry every day over the silliest things, I had suddenly become void of any emotion. I was numb, disassociated, and frighteningly apathetic. I hardly even felt the pain of the razor or the saw; I watched the blood drain the life out of me and smiled. They could not hurt me anymore. I had won. The overdose on painkillers was just a bonus, although the little orange pills would have helped more had they actually killed the pain.

That was the turning point in my life. I realized that I was only hurting the people who really did care about me. Besides, cutting was not going to make the yelling stop. In fact, I was berated more frequently once my dad and step-mom found out. This was not because they were worried about me, but because my actions were a bad reflection on them. Shortly after they found out how sick I really was, they left me. My dad had never really been there much anyway, but they actually moved and told the family to stop talking to me. The neglect began and the verbal cruelties ended, for the most part. Emotional abuse, however, is not just limited to those two things. According to the American Medical Association, "when a child is regularly threatened, yelled at, humiliated, ignored, blamed, or otherwise mistreated, made fun of, called names, and always found at fault," emotional abuse is present. More generally, the abuse can be broken up into eleven categories: belittling, coldness, corrupting, cruelty, extreme inconsistency, harassment, ignoring, inappropriate control, isolating, rejecting, and terrorizing (Newton). My parents sure were pros.

No one can fully understand the effects of abuse without experiencing it themselves. Andrew Vachss, however, was able to summarize the experience fairly well. "Emotional abuse scars the heart and damages the soul. Like cancer, it does its most deadly work internally. And, like cancer, it can metastasize if untreated" (Vachss). If anyone knows the effects of emotional abuse without having the actual experiences, it is Vachss. He is a child protection consultant, attorney who represents exclusively children in need, and is the founder of PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children. He has said that of all the abuses, emotional is the most brutal and has the longest lasting consequences. In his profession, where "a baby who dies early might be the luckiest child in the family," children are robbed of love and protection, the two things righted to them at birth. These children become conditioned to expect abuse, and will sometimes, later in life, go looking for it. It is designed to make the child feel guilty, so that when they think they are struggling in their search for love, what they are really looking for is acceptance; the two become synonymous. Vachss states that emotional abuse can be verbal or behavioral, active or passive, frequent or occasional. It is always, however, repeated; there is very rarely only one instance of it. He has found that often times, abuse is ubiquitous in matrimonial battles, such as the ones between all my parents. The children "become the battlefield," where both parents are demanding the child's unyielding loyalty and commitment. The abuse I suffered from my dad and step-mom was a direct result of the struggles my mom and dad have had for the past 13 years since their divorce.

Like the ones of Vachss' clients, my parents' "primary weapon is the deliberate infliction of guilt." This is something the child will never get over, and as an adult, the former victim of their parents' abuse will fall victim to themselves. Some people never want to have children, for fear that they will continue the cycle of abuse and ruin their children the way their parents ruined them. What they really need to do, Vachss advises, is to find the truth and to forgive themselves. They do not need to search for forgiveness from the abuser, but learn to forgive themselves. As I have finally learned, abuse is unwarranted and undeserved, and I did not do anything I need to apologize for (Vachss). That was a hard lesson to learn, though, as I have spent the majority of my life thus far believing that everything was my fault. My friends often yell at me for apologizing too often, but they do not understand that I grew up having to apologize for everything. For me, that was the worst part of the abuse, and the part nobody will ever understand.

Emotional abuse is often called "invisible abuse." It is hard to see because rather than physical actions, it is the effects taken on a psychological level that make the action abuse. All children, even when they are grown, need to feel unconditional love from their parents. When that desire, that necessity, is lost, the child can only think poorly of themselves, as their opinions are mirrored by those of their parents. "If your mom or dad tells you that you're stupid or ugly, you believe them, because they're God to you" (Ramirez). There is usually what is called a "target child" as well, which makes unconditional love even harder to come by. As reported in NewsRx_Science by specialists from the Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters, the target child is the "scapegoat," the one all or most of the abuse is aimed at. Because of this, any siblings see the abuse as the correct way to treat the child, and the victim can no longer rely on the love and support of their siblings. When parents target a child, as I was targeted, the other siblings become emotionally numb or hostile towards the victim. "Deliberately depriving children of the chance to love a brother or sister is emotionally abusive. The message to these siblings is that it isn't safe to identify with their brother or sister" ("Children's Hospital"). When this happens, the victim loses any love or support they may have had at home, leaving them completely on their own.

The little girl next to the bed, being held and comforted by someone who loves her, is an all too familiar scene to me. In that case, I brought the strength, but for many years, I was the little girl. The difference was, I did not have such a support to lean on. I had outside help before my dad took it away, but even while I saw professionals, no one really understood what I was going through. Even my brother struggled to relate to me. We were, and are, completely different people with completely different experiences. I was the target child, so his aggression towards me only grew worse. He also learned how to let things go; when I interviewed him about his experiences with emotional abuse, he found it hard to answer my questions. "Who cares? That was so long ago" (Feudo). Because he never got the brunt of the abuse, he was able to move on from it. The broken part of my mind thinks that it is because he is a stronger person than I am, but the developed part of me knows that I too am strong. I have had to be, or else I would not be here right now.

I was hoping the talk with my brother would bring me more answers, but since he failed to be of much help, I went to someone else. My ex-boyfriend of over three years has never been emotionally abused by his parents, but he listened relentlessly to stories of my childhood and he witnessed what I went through in high school. He knows me better than anyone else does, better even than I know myself. I asked him, as interviewer to interviewee rather than myself to him, about his experiences with people he knew who were emotionally abused. I wanted the truth, and he gave it to me. "They were unprepared for life. They focused on their emotions, and were unstable. They were physically and emotionally insecure, and a giant pain in the ass to deal with." I resented that. "But when they made a breakthrough, when they found a way to get through it...that was one of the best moments of my life. They were able to push through something they had been struggling with for so long" (Lawrence). Obviously, he was talking about me, and as much as I hate to admit it, he was right. I went through 12 years of abuse before I was finally able to start on my path to recovery.

I still struggle, but with a lot of help and a devastating but necessary break with the family who caused me so much pain, I have been able to move forward with my life. The pain is still there, popping up at random times during the day, but I no longer dwell on it. I have also overcome a few of the most debilitating symptoms I used to have. I pride myself on my ability to form strong bonds with people, like my ex-boyfriend and my closest and dearest friends. I also want to get married and have children someday. I used to be in the "I'm afraid I'll be like them" boat, but then I realized that my dad and step-mom have actually equipped me to be a great parent. Now I know exactly what not to do, and if I look to my mom for good advice, I will be all set. She was not the perfect person, and she certainly instigated many of the problems my parents had, but she never hurt me directly, and I never doubted her love for me. I do not worry that I will abuse my children, because I know that everything I have gone through and will continue to go through has made me an extremely loving person. I hope someday, too, that my little sister, who thankfully is not a target child, will come find me. Then, neither of us will be alone.