People will tell you that emotional abuse isn’t real and what you’re dealing with isn’t that big a deal and you’re just exaggerating, but let me tell you something.
If you’ve ever been wary of everyone you know, even people you trust, because you’re expecting them to get angry with you over literally anything, make fun of you, or start making threats, something’s wrong.
If you’ve ever had to plan things in anticipation of a potential tantrum that you fear will be taken out on you, something’s wrong.
If you succumb to someone’s demands because you’re never sure if their threats are empty or legit and you just want to play it on the safe side, something’s wrong.
If you find yourself jumping at smaller noises in anticipation that they’re a warning sign for a tantrum, something’s wrong.
If you hide things – especially things that make you happy – because you’re so afraid that they’ll make fun of you for liking them, scold you for liking something they don’t, take them away, destroy them, or that they’ll defile them and ruin that love you have for them, something’s wrong.
If you find yourself being silent in the face of mild disagreements or thinly-veiled insults, rather than standing up for yourself because you just don’t want to start an argument and make things worse, something’s wrong.
If that very lack of standing up for yourself eventually leads to you never offering your opinion in any sort of discussion out of fear of ridicule or being scolded because that’s what you’re so used to, something’s wrong.
If you end up spending a lot of your time in your room keeping to yourself and keeping any trip outside of your room to an absolute minimum because you don’t want to risk putting one toe out of line and setting off a tantrum, yet you’re also aware that hiding out will also cause an issue and you’re probably just minimizing the risk instead of erasing it entirely, something’s wrong.
If you ever habitually glance outside the window to keep watch for your supposed abuser’s car to return from their work, errand or trip, and then heading to your room or other hiding place to keep out of their way, erasing any obvious signs that you’ve been out and about in the rest of your living space, something’s wrong.
If one of your greatest fantasies involves not a dream career or winning the lottery but instead an escape plan succeeding, something’s wrong.
If you could basically summarize your life as living in constant, subtle fear, Something. Is. Wrong.
Emotional abuse is very, very real, and it has lasting consequences that can affect people’s relationships, their jobs, and their lives all-around.
Don’t you dare tell me it isn’t real.
Tag: abuse
Not to get controversial or anything but can we stop with making fun of women being abused by their husbands and playing it off as ‘straight culture’
I lost 10 followers for saying we shouldnt make fun of domestic abuse victims.
can we also please stop making fun of men being abused by their wives thanks
Good addition
Can we also stop acting that domestic abuse is just a “straight” thing?
It’s literally teaching our baby gays that any same sex relationship their going into is safe and they don’t need to be worried about being abused and controlled.
Another good addition
OKAY
Can we address the fact that people with good parents get super offended when you explain how awful yours were? Saying things like “your parents would do anything for you”, or “you’re lucky they gave you a roof. Be grateful”. Nope. No you are not going to guilt me into thinking abuse was okay just because they met the basic requirements for the care of a child.
It’s wonderful that your parents are great and would do anything for you. But that statistic does not apply to every parent, and it’s so invalidating and dangerous to imply that, so stop. Think, really deeply think about what I’m saying and why.
Totally agree that victim-shaming is disgusting and never okay!!!!
But just an important heads-up: people who get defensive, i.e. uncomfortable, in any way when you tell them about your abusive parents, are abused themselves without knowing it.
Someone who REALLY had good parents would have absolutely no reason to get angry at you for venting about your abuse. Why should they?
The only explanation for people saying things like this is that it makes them extremely uncomfortable, because it forces them to look at their own parents. Another person’s abuse always triggers an emotional flashback to your own abuse. For example, if someone complains how their parents got angry at them for crying, it would immediately make them think/feel of how they feel when they cry, i.e. what their parents taught them about crying through their reaction to them crying.
I know it’s a really unknown fact that most people suffer from emotional abuse, but it really is part of our culture. How people react to your trauma is a good way of telling how much they know about their own trauma (not saying that people who react compassionately to you aren’t traumatised – they either have experience in this (which might stem from their own abuse too!) and/or they already know about their own trauma. Only asking them directly will of course give you the truth.).
But yeah – people with good parents don’t say such things. It sounds like they are just repeating what their own abusive parents would say.
Trauma often messes with one’s ability to say “no”.
You either consciously or subconsciously think, “I don’t want to hurt this person’s feelings” or “If I say no, then they’ll hurt me” or “It won’t really be that bad” or “I can handle this” or “I need to do this to prove myself” or “I deserve this”, or you forget that “no” is even an option.
It’s still not your fault if you didn’t say “no”, even if you think maybe you could have. It’s still not your fault. You didn’t deserve what happened to you and you didn’t bring it upon yourself. It was never your fault.
Consistent experiences of boundary violations can also effect your ability to say no. Like getting misgendered all day and being unable to safely address it. Experiencing consistent racism microagressions and not being able to safely address is. Experiencing sexual harrassment in the workplace. Women, trans people, people of color, learn that ‘no’ is rude, unacceptable, dangerous.
If ‘no’ is not an option during everyday boundary violations and if the feeling of always having your boundaries violated is the backdrop of your emotional life, it becomes difficult to say ‘no’ at all, or to acknowledge that a significantly more serious boundary violations took place.
If you didn’t say ‘no’ or if you said ‘yes’ but had an experience you did not want or came away feeling violated, that is real. You are allowed to say that your boundaries were violated, because they were. You are allowed to call that experience non-consensual, because it was.
violence against people who are in psychiatric institutions is not lesser or somehow more deserved if the people who are in institutions “deserve” to be there or “belong” there
aka people who hear voices and and communicate with angels and demons and God and ufos and who don’t feed or clothe themselves don’t deserve ANY form of abuse even the tiniest, slightest, faintest fraction more than someone who was “really sane” and ended up in an institution “by mistake”
furthermore, the ability to institutionalize and abuse “innocent” people wouldn’t exist if the ability to institutionalize and abuse “actually crazy” people didn’t exist
but my bottom line is being “crazy” does not make you worthy or deserving of abuse in any way
Native American women still have the highest rates of rape and assault
One night several years ago, a man on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana held his partner against her will, beat her, and then choked her until she passed out.
After she came to, she escaped and informed law enforcement about what happened. This incident wasn’t the first; the man had a history of domestic violence and abuse. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
The woman found help at the Blackfeet Domestic Violence Program and tried to move on with her life. But this year, her ex was released from prison and returned to his home on the reservation.
He was told to stay away from her, says the program’s lead advocate Marilyn Gobert, but the woman still fears for her life.
This case is not unique – it’s one of hundreds Gobert sees a year, a small glimpse into the sexual violence epidemic that has plagued tribal communities for as long as she can remember.
A new Department of Justice study shows that of over 2,000 women surveyed, 84 percent of Native American and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence, 56 percent have experienced sexual violence, and, of that second group, over 90 percent have experienced violence at the hands of a non-tribal member.
Most women reported they were concerned for their safety, and around half said they had experienced physical violence like pushing, shoving, or being beaten.
Over 60 percent had experienced psychological aggression or coercive control. Experts say these record numbers still underestimate the number of women affected by violence, and the infrastructure for women to report and handle incidents is underfunded.
Currently, tribal courts do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute non-tribal members for many crimes like sexual assault and rape, even if they occur on tribal land. This is a huge issue, because non-Native American men commit the majority of assaults against Native American women.
Native American women still have the highest rates of rape and assault
Disabled children struggle to get through to their parents all the time. When a disabled child struggles with something, they usually have to jump through hoops to convince their parents to believe them. Many times, nothing ever works. But they’re expected to have perfect self control. If they become violent whenever their parents refuse to accept them, they’ll be locked up. If they so much as yell, roll their eyes, or simply look angry, they’ll most likely be punished.
But when parents assault their children because “it’s the only way to get through to them”, I’m supposed to sympathize with the parents?
“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on..”
— David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Years ago, when I was going through a really rough time my English teacher sent me the speech at Kenyon College he gave that includes this and it’s been burned in my mind ever since.
If I had a nickel for every time a Christian told me I wasn’t really an atheist..
No, I don’t worship anything. Certainly not in a theological sense. I just straight up don’t believe in a supernatural power, and I don’t bow down before it. Wanting to make money, wanting to find love, etc. That’s not worship, that’s a fucking goal.
I feel like “some infrangible set of ethical principles” is SUPPOSED to cover that, but the quoted individual is missing that… that’s an atheist.
This is abusive rhetoric, straight-up.
I mean, ffs, a Cartoonishly Abusive Partner outright tells you stuff that sounds like this without the religion veneer. “If you leave me, you’ll die ugly and weak and stupid and alone. You will never be happy, and you will never feel like you have enough. I’m the only thing that can make you happy.”
Abusers don’t want you to have anything in their lives but the abuser. Abusers don’t want you to have friends, or family, or meaningful hobbies, or ethical principles, or goals, or anything that gives your life meaning. They want you to be completely obsessed with them, and only them.
I don’t think David Foster Wallace is an abuser- I’m sure he’s a lovely person- but he’s definitely stanning for abusive!Jesus right now.
David Foster Wallace physically abused his girlfriend and stalked her after she broke up with him. (Not directly related to the quote above, but he was definitely an abuser.)
Abusers usually start off by challenging small boundaries. (A
boundary = you saying “no” to something the other person wants.)At
first they’ll often try to coax, cajole, tease, playfully mock, or
convince you to agree to something small that you don’t want to, or set
up a situation where you feel like it would be rude to say no, or they’ll just do things without permission and make you feel like it would be rude to ask them to stop.Over
time you’ll find yourself with fewer and fewer choices, and saying no
will come at higher and higher costs. At first, saying no might just be a
hassle because you have to convince them to accept it and maybe
reassure them that you do like them or things along those lines.Then
it might reach a point where saying no starts a fight that you’d just
rather not deal with, and/or where you know your boundary will just be
ignored or you’ll be steamrolled into “changing your mind”.Eventually
saying no just isn’t worth it because you know you’ll be punished for
hours/days/weeks and forced to give concessions to “make up for how much
you hurt them” by saying no – even if you gave in later and said yes.This progression usually happens so gradually that it’s hard to notice, and often it’s not so much that they’re physically forcing you
to do things you don’t like as it is them making your life absolutely
miserable if they don’t get their way 100% of the time, and making you feel guilty for being bothered by that.That’s abuse. There are some choices that should be yours and yours alone, and in a healthy relationship your boundaries are important.
Forcing people to diet is abusive.
It’s wrong.
It’s wrong when people do it to their kids, and it’s wrong when people do it to their partners.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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