There’s a subtle type of emotional abuse that it could take you years to uncover.
Supposing in your lifetime that literally 456 people have told you that you are pretty. Yes, the first two were your parents. But there were 454 others that were less biased in your favor. In fact, to help defray the costs of college while you went for a degree in biochemistry, you did a little modeling. It was fun and you made a few dollars.
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION from the Florida Jewish Journal
“Boy, what he did to me infuriates me,” Jack told me as his face turned red. “No, that isn’t enough,” he went on, “I want to do him one better. He deserves it. Getting even isn’t good enough for him.”
Perpetrators don't always want to be. I cannot begin to tell you how many parents, for example, say, "I would never want to hurt my child." Then they do it anyway. It takes FOUR steps to recover from being a perpetrator:
Part I: Admitting you have done wrong Part II: Hating what you've done Part III: Resolving never to do it again, no matter what Part IV: Recovering from your own abuse
If I had a dollar for every time a frightened woman said, "It's when he gets a certain look in his eye that I become really frightened," well, then, I'd be rich.
If you have wandered around this website, you will notice that there are links to a bunch of other websites all of which represent possible results of having been verbally, emotionally, sexually, or physically abused: substance abuse, borderline disorder, post traumatic stress, and there's more too. An abused person could become both a victim (say of a spouse or boss at work) and an abuser (say of a child. A victim could turn to eating disorders or even multiple personalities (now known as "dissociative identity disorder") as a way of hiding from the pain.
Have you ever thought about who in your family is in charge and how they got that way? When that person speaks, others listen. You might say that this item is political. Who has the power? Who gets to decide what happens? Who decides what is said, to whom, and when? And how did that happen? Did everyone agree that the one with the voice was better, smarter, more capable? Or was he/she just more intimidating? Or was there some very subtle stuff going on that somehow gave one person the power while robbing everyone else? If there was, that's emotional abuse.
There’s a subtle type of emotional abuse that it could take you years to uncover.