According to psychology today the list of emotional and psychological abuse are defined below.
What are the warning signs of emotional abuse?
Emotional abuse centers around control, manipulation, isolation, and demeaning or threatening behavior. Signs of abuse include:
• Monitoring and controlling a person’s behavior, such as who they spend time with or how they spend money.
• Threatening a person’s safety, property, or loved ones
• Isolating a person from family, friends, and acquaintances
• Demeaning, shaming, or humiliating a person
• Extreme jealousy, accusations, and paranoia
• Delivering constant criticism
• Regular ridicule or teasing
• Making acceptance or care conditional on a person’s choices
• Refusing to allow a person to spend time alone
• Thwarting a person’s professional or personal goals
• Instilling self-doubt and worthlessness
• Gaslighting: making a person question their competence and even their basic perceptual experiences.
What are subtle signs of emotional abuse?
Sometimes emotional abuse doesn’t involve overt threats or vigilant monitoring. More subtle signals that emotional abuse may be occurring in an important relationship include regularly judging a person’s perspective without trying to understand it, relying on blame rather than improvement, regarding the other person as inferior, frequent sarcasm, and telling the other person how to feel in an attempt to be “helpful.”
Perpetrators of emotional abuse consistently criticize, shame, and humiliate in order to gain control and power in a relationship. They may yell at their victim, call them names, or level baseless accusations against them. They may act jealous and possessive, monitoring the person’s whereabouts and communication by checking their phone.
An emotional abuser may gaslight their victim into believing that their unhappiness is their own fault. And they often seek to isolate their victim from friends and family, to prevent the person from getting a reality check or broader perspective.
Gaslighting constitutes a form of emotional abuse. By manipulating the victim to doubt his or her own sense of reality—continually saying things like, “That’s not how it happened,” or “You’re crazy,”—the gaslighter asserts control over the relationship, leading the victim to rely on the perpetrator for a sense of reality. Gaslighting can instill confusion, self-doubt, anxiety, and depression.
Research suggests that over 50 percent of adults may experience emotional abuse in their lifetime, although the concept is difficult to reliably measure. Emotional abuse is designated as an adverse childhood experience, one experienced by 11 percent of children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What are the consequences of having emotionally abusive parents?
Childhood verbal abuse can include constant criticism, put-downs, and rejection. Parents may stop the child from expressing anger or sadness, thereby stifling their range of emotions. The brain also inflates the prominence of negative experiences compared to positive experiences, which renders parental abuse deeply ingrained. (It also makes it nearly impossible for an affectionate parent to counter the effects of an abusive parent.) Childhood abuse can lead to emotional pain, anxiety, depression, self-criticism, low self-esteem, and difficulty forming stable and trusting relationships. But therapy can help individuals process parental abuse and abandon the maladaptive coping mechanisms they developed in childhood.
Although turbulent childhoods can produce substantial challenges, research suggests they can also yield great strengths. People raised in a stressful household—whether due to poverty, abuse, neglect, or other circumstances—may have enhanced cognitive flexibility, showcasing the ability to adapt, take risks, and tolerate ambiguity.
Therapy can help survivors move forward by processing the experience, rebuilding self-esteem, and addressing symptoms such as anxiety or insomnia. In the context of a new relationship, survivors can continue healing from emotional abuse by acknowledging the past abuse with their partner, resolving to prioritize oneself over any potential abuse in the future, and then responding to triggers of past pain with self-compassion.
Stockholm Syndrome is defined as a condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity. It pertains to the power imbalances of contained in kidnapping, hostage taking, and/or abusive relationships.