People today suffer from many things they can’t take out. Some have personal while others have professional reasons. People have found temporary solutions to their problems. Some consume alcohol while others take products like kratom.
There are many different kinds of abuses, amongst which emotional abuse is one of them. Emotional abuse means undermining the self-worth and feelings of another person. Emotional abuse is one of the most not talked about forms of abuse since it is hard to recognize and then open up about it. Listed below are some signs that, if present in a relationship, friendship, household, or office, shows that people are getting emotionally abused.
1. Every action in your life is tried to be controlled
The biggest red flag of emotional abuse is to be controlled. Controlling can come in different forms such as making demands and expecting them to be completed in the given time, monitoring the whereabouts of the other individual, not letting you make a decision, requiring immediate responses on texts and calls. It can also be seen in your office when the abusive person wants to know your password, treats you as a child, shouts at you if you make a mistake, not allows you to do what you want, or use your fears against you so much more.
The abusive person will always try to control you because controlling makes them feel like they have all the power on you, which is wrong.
2. You are told to be shameful for your shortcomings
If you make a mistake, you are told to be shameful because you are a failure, and you can do nothing right. A person who continually abuses you can take out their anger on you through lectures, random outbursts, they can walk out on you while you are talking, they can ask you to shut up when you try to give your opinion, and they can trivialize you.
The power of an abusive person comes through the reaction that you give them. They can tell you that whatever you are feeling is nothing. They will tell you how your lousy behavior is negatively affecting them. But they will never talk about what they are doing to you. If you are a sensitive person, there are higher chances of you taking all of this personally, which is terrible for your mental health.
3. You are blamed for everything
There are many times in life where you achieve your dreams. But it must never be forgotten that to achieve those dreams, you had to go through a lot of setbacks and failures. An abusive person can make you feel worse by making you feel bad about those failures and delays. They can be doing so due to jealousy as they cannot see you doing better than them.
Another card that can be played by the abuser is that they can tell you whatever problems they have in their life is because you were always busy in your professional experience. This leaves no time for them, which makes them worried about you. Therefore, the abuser has the right to be cranky. Whatever bad is happening is because of you, your absence or your presence, and most of all, because of your poor decision-making skills.
4. Constant humiliation
The humiliation never stops, and shame comes in many different ways. Things such as name-calling where they call you mean names based on your color, weight, height, or any other weakness they can find on you. They constantly taunt you about your failures, joke about your insecurities, and have mean nicknames for you. They try to publicly humiliate you, patronize you, and most of all they can insult you on how you look, how you dress up, or how you eat.
The abuser can pick up anything from your life and start to humiliate you on it. When you decide to retaliate, they act in the worst ways possible and tell you that you were responsible for making them angry. An abuser can use the tactic of saying that they point out your flaws or make fun of you so you will improve and be better as a human being and in social situations. But this is wrong and just a bluff.
5. You are made to isolate yourself from everything
Since the abuser controls the majority of your life, there are chances that they will not let you do what they do not approve of.
For example, you are not allowed to stay late out of the house despite being an adult. You are not allowed to spend time with friends and family. An emotional abuser will try to hide your things to stop you from leaving their company. They even know your password and can add or delete people from your social media profiles.
An emotional abuser can make you feel bad for leaving them alone to spend time with your friends, family, or relatives. They can take all of your time, and lastly, they can lock you in a room so that you do what they want you to do. An abuser will always want to keep you to himself/herself, which shows their insecurity.
6. Harmful unpredictability
An abuser is unpredictable and dangerous. For example, they can be nice one second and meaner the next. An abuser will have many mood swings; they will have countless emotional outbursts. They can start arguments for no reason at all and can be self-contradicting and can deny facts. But most of all, they are the masters of being two-faced which means that they are fake.
An abuser is insecure, and they are scared of being lonely. This forces them to act this way so that they can keep the next person in their life, but this is the wrong behavior. Being nice one second and mean the next can confuse the other person. It can make them insecure or cause them to go into depression.
7. Emotional blackmailing
Emotional blackmail is one of the essential tools of an emotional abuser. They can blackmail you into feeling inadequate and miserable for them. The blackmail does not stop because once it starts, then it happens on everything.
An emotional abuser can blackmail you into feeling bad for them or can make you feel bad for your correct behavior. They can make you feel bad for feeling sick or for buying things without consulting them. They can even make you feel bad about your fantastic job or about you feeling happy or can make you feel bad for not being excited for them, and the list goes on.
Anything that does not feel right to them can be used against you; they can even point their failures at you and tell you that you are responsible for them.
To summarize, if an individual around you is going through emotional abuse, make sure to talk to them. Make them realize, and help them get back to a normal and healthy life.
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