Emotional abuse is any behavior that uses emotions to gain power and control over another person. The user abuses that power and authority to keep their partner in a vulnerable position or to control their actions. Emotional abuse includes but is not limited to criticism; attempts to manage finances, time spent with family/friends, education, or activities including gaslighting; isolation; belittling, insulting, and more. Emotional abuse is generally addressed by those experiencing the abuse, but how can you identify your abusive behaviors in a relationship?
What Is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse, sometimes called mental or psychological abuse, is used when someone attempts to gain power and control over another using emotions and words. Emotional abuse can occur as the only form of abuse but can also happen alongside other types of abuse like physical or sexual. This type of abuse can be harder to recognize because it can exist on a spectrum of severity. The abuser is usually unaware of their actions and can leave the inflicted party on their own to resolve the resulting grief associated with emotional abuse.
Am I Emotionally Abusive?
If you have ever asked yourself, “Am I abusive?” these examples may help you evaluate your behavior. Review your actions honestly, and check to see if you may be doing something that gives you power and control over your partner.
Here are 25 signs that you may be emotionally abusive:1,2
- Threatening to Withhold Love & Affection: By giving and providing respect, appreciation, and love conditionally, this may be a sign that you want to seek to control someone’s actions.
- Gaslighting: Gaslighting is when you tell someone that what they experienced is not valid. For example, they saw a text on your phone to another person, but you tell them they are wrong or crazy. Gaslighting can lead the other person to question their feelings and judgment when there may have been a good reason for their concern.
- Name Calling: Consistent name calling and insults are emotional abuse.
- Not Allowing Privacy: This may include monitoring someone’s phone activity, tracking their location, or using cameras/recordings to watch them. Or when you don’t let your partner have time to themselves.
- Preventing Them From Getting An Education: By not allowing someone to get an education, you limit their opportunities for independence.
- Controlling Finances: Financial abuse includes controlling someone else’s finances in a way that is not consistent with their best interests.
- Constant Criticizing: You can damage your partner’s self-esteem by constantly attacking someone with criticisms, making them easier to control.
- Isolating Your Partner From Family or Friends: This isolation is emotionally abusive to directly or indirectly prevent someone from accessing their social connections. Social isolation consists of forbidding someone to see certain people or driving a wedge between your partner and their loved ones.
- Monitoring Their Activities: Monitoring may occur via tracking devices, cameras, or demanding your partner report to you after they are away from you.
- Attempting to Control Their Appearance: This includes restricting a partner from dressing in specific ways, doing their hair in certain ways, wearing makeup, showing particular body parts, etc.
- Manipulating Their Understanding of Events: Similar to gaslighting, this refers to changing how a person understands events. This manipulation may be controlling the narrative or trying to convince someone that their experience or perception is inaccurate.
- Humiliating Them: Humiliation is similar to criticism as it can damage a person’s self-esteem and ability to think for themselves.
- Threatening to Hurt Family, Friends, or Pets: Even if you don’t follow through with the action, threats can create fear in people and are still considered abuse.
- Cheating to Show Power: Infidelity creates a separation in your relationship and sometimes becomes a means of control. It can send the message “I can do what I want” and be abusive when used in a manipulative fashion. Cheating may happen more than once, and you may consider repeatedly doing so to establish power.
- Telling Them They’ll Never Find Someone Better: This type of threat or insult can serve to create fear in your partner.
- Blaming the Other Person for Your Actions: Not taking responsibility for your own mistakes and wrongdoings can also be abusive. It can unfairly put all the blame on one person, which also perpetuates an imbalance of control. /li>
- Damaging Belongings: By damaging property or belongings during an argument, you may create fear and insinuate that you mean to hurt the other person.
- Using the Silent Treatment: This type of ineffective communication can be abusive and manipulative when done repeatedly and as a form of withholding love and affection.
- Exploiting Insecurities: By taking advantage of someone’s insecurities, you are manipulating them to benefit yourself.
- Threatening to Share/Expose Things: By threatening to share compromising photos or information, you create unfair leverage over the other person.
- Blackmailing: Blackmail refers to demanding something of someone in return for not taking action that would hurt them, for example, threatening to tell a boss about their theft if they break up with you.
- Love Bombing: Love-bombing refers to showering someone with a disproportionate amount of love and affection at the beginning of the relationship to suck them into a false sense of security. When done intentionally, this pretense is emotional abuse because it is manipulative and seeks to gain power.
- Making Yourself the Center of the Argument: If your significant other has brought up their concerns and you redirect the conversation to your concerns or needs, this robs the other person of the opportunity to process their problems. When done repeatedly and on purpose, it can lead to narcissistic abuse and prevent the person from having healthy coping.
- Belittling: By belittling someone and making them think they are less, feelings of inferiority prevents the person from making decisions in their best interest.
- Lying & Dishonesty: Consistent deception and dishonesty confuse a partner damaging their ability to trust those close to them. Lying can become even more abusive when you pair it with gaslighting.
If you find yourself engaging in the tactics above as a way of sucking up your partners time, energy, and attention just so they can’t disengage with you, you may be exhibiting hoovering behavior. It’s especially common among narcissists, but anyone anyone in fear of losing their partner and trying to maintain control over them may hoover.
Why Am I Abusive?
Many people wonder what causes someone to perpetrate abuse. While no reason excuses abuse, there are several common reasons people may be abusive, including childhood experiences or emotional predispositions. The more you may have experienced co-occurring reasons, the higher chances you will display abusive tendencies.
Here are several reasons people become abusive:
- Witnessing & Learning to Abuse: Abuse is a learned behavior, and you may have seen it in your home life growing up or witnessed it in your community. 3
- Childhood trauma: Similar to the previous point, adverse experiences or trauma during childhoodd may affect how you approach relationships, conflict, and power/control.
- An overwhelming need for control: Abuse is about getting and maintaining power and control, and having a deep need to control another at any cost can lead to abusive behaviors.
- Lack of Empathy: If a person lacks empathy and cannot understand how their actions affect another, that may also contribute to abusive behaviors.
- Difficulty With Vulnerability & Emotional Injury: If you cannot tolerate the idea of being wrong or being emotionally vulnerable, you may use emotional abuse to manage your fears by preventing harm from ever happening to you.
- Thinking That Control Is Love: If you grew up with highly controlling caregivers, you might assume that holding control over someone is expected in a relationship.
- Underlying Mental Illness: An underlying mental health condition may affect someone’s ability to control impulses. Again, this does not excuse the behavior but may be a factor in the actions.
How to Stop Being an Emotional Abuser
Reading this article is a significant first step that shows that you recognize your behavior may be problematic and abusive and want to explore how to make changes. Above all, getting professional help is necessary to acknowledge abusive patterns, heal the root cause of your behaviors, and ensure honesty with yourself about what actions you took towards another.
“This journey begins with challenging defensiveness and being willing to take responsibility for how your actions impact others. Remind yourself that the first steps towards change are acceptance and willingness. Your acknowledgment of your capacity for change and defining how the change will promote a healthier way of being is the first step into a new space. Doing so allows you to take ownership over what has been done while remaining hopeful that this will not totalize your identity. Externalize the shame and guilt; removing this as an indicator of who you are and just behavior that needs correcting. This process requires facing the fear of accountability and the courage to allow space for the abused stories to exist while re-writing your future.” – Dr. Nazneen Nizami, PsyD, LMFT
Here are six ways to stop being an emotional abuser:
1. Get Professional Help
Working with a licensed therapist or specialized program is the most critical step and is crucial to sustainable behavior change. Consider finding an intimate partner violence center for therapists and groups focused on shifting abusive behavior in your area. Working with an individual therapist may be helpful if they have the appropriate experience and training. Choosing Therapy provides a directory of therapists that is helpful for this task. Couples therapy is often not recommended for couples with abuse because it can create unsafe situations outside the therapy room.
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2. Recognize the Underlying Issue
It may be helpful to begin considering the root cause of your behavior. What need are you trying to meet when you act this way? Is there a history of trauma that needs more profound treatment and healing? Why is there a need for control? Is this what you expect in a relationship? By recognizing the cause, you can better address it when seeking treatment.
3. Take Yourself Out of the Situation
You can step back before taking an abusive action by having a robust set of skills to calm yourself and manage difficult emotions. This process helps you to have more time between a stimulus and your harsh response. Sometimes a break in the relationship is beneficial, but both parties may need to agree ahead of time if one person calls for it.
4. Learn to Communicate Better
Basic communication skills, such as “I feel” statements (I feel frustrated when I don’t hear from you), deep listening, and being direct yet kind, can assist in improving a relationship. Improved communication alone will not solve abusive patterns but is one piece of the puzzle.
5. Learn to Recognize & Label Difficult Emotions
The simple skill of being able to recognize, label, and perhaps communicate uncomfortable emotions is a helpful step. Often we have knee-jerk reactions to vulnerable feelings before we can make a conscious and wise choice about what we are doing or why. By learning to be more aware of the actual emotion present, you can start to slow down before you act and perhaps realize that certain emotions are triggering.
6. Address & Treat Underlying Mental Health
If you are dealing with an underlying mental health concern such as anxiety, depression, or a personality disorder, seek quality care for that concern as well. These may exacerbate the abusive tendencies and lead you to make decisions without realizing the conscience of your relationship.
Final Thoughts
Becoming aware of your abusive behaviors is a significant step. Recognition is powerful and can lead to readiness to make real change. It is possible to learn to act differently with the appropriate treatment. Without it, abusive behaviors may only worsen, leading to persistent relationship problems and harming your partner. Reading this article is only the first step to making lasting changes in your life and giving those you care for a happier and healthier life.
Am I Abusive? Infographics
