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Childhood Emotional Abuse
How it affects you today
On this site, and many others, the emphasis when talking about childhood trauma is usually on sexual or physical abuse. However, children also face another type of harm, emotional abuse.
This article shall focus on emotional abuse, what it is, how it affects your life today, and how to cope.
What is Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse occurs when a perpetrator insults, humiliates and makes their victim afraid of them to control a child. Because children do not have the emotional tools or experience with other people, they may have a distorted sense of reality blaming themselves for what is happening to them.
The child may also have a severe change in that they internalize the abuse, and in the case of children forming dissociative identity disorder, they might splinter off to be able to handle the trauma.
There are many ways a child can experience emotional abuse, including:
Being criticized
Being threatened
Experiencing name calling
Having their perpetrator making jokes about them or using sarcasm to hurt them
Being forced to do demeaning things
Experiencing a lack of recognized individuality
Not having their limits recognized
Not having their boundaries, if they have formed any, taken seriously and ignored…
