Emotional Abuse Can Happen to Anyone, Even You.
*Trigger Warning: this article contains detailed descriptions of emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse in intimate partner relationships*
Emotional abuse is an invisible form of violence that psychologically beats up its targets.
While all forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) are grotesque and deplorable, only some forms are more central to our understanding of abuse. Specifically, many people are seemingly aware of physical abuse and sexual assault in intimate partner relationships, but very little attention is paid to emotional abuse.
This is troubling as, according to some research studies, emotional abuse is the most common form of IPV.
In an effort to bring awareness to the realities of emotional abuse amongst women, I interviewed ten college-educated women in their twenties who had experienced emotionally abusive male partners. (Note: although emotional abuse can happen to any person regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, or relationship configuration–familial, professional, etc.–this piece focuses solely on the experiences of women in heterosexual relationships.)
This article addresses:
- What emotional abuse looks like
- Why it’s hard to leave emotionally abusive relationships
- The lasting effects of surviving emotional abuse
- Ways to prevent emotional abuse
It’s been an honor to safeguard the lived experiences of these women, and it’s my greatest undertaking to anonymously share aspects of their emotionally abusive relationships with you.
I’m forever changed from these women’s stories, and I hope you will be too.
What Emotional Abuse Looks Like:
Notably, there is no universal definition of emotional abuse, also known as psychological abuse, because these forms of abuse can present themselves in a myriad of manifestations.
One working definition provided by Psych Central states that the abuse occurs “when someone uses words and nonviolent behaviors to exert power and control over you. Emotional abuse can be any harmful behavior that may negatively affect your emotional state. You may find emotional abuse gradually takes away your freedom, individuality, and sense of self.”
Even though emotional abuse presentations can vary from relationship to relationship, nearly every woman I spoke with shared one universal experience: “really high highs and really low lows.”
One participant described her relationship as “very hot and cold” and added, “my mood was so dependent on him.” Similarly, another woman voiced that the relationship felt like a “roller coaster” because “it was very up and down, which was exhausting because when it was good it was good and when it was bad it was bad.”
In addition to providing inconsistent emotional security, emotional abusers can be verbally mean or angry, deploying tactics such as name-calling, shaming, or humiliation, and also forms of manipulation like gaslighting, breadcrumbing, belittling, or lying.
Emotional abusers may utilize overt actions of control or isolation, and can also instigate a lot of fighting, often until the powerless individual in the dynamic changes themselves to avoid confrontation, issue, or beratement. Emotional abuse can also escalate to either threats of physical violence or, in some cases, physical violence in the form of battery or sexual assault.
Verbally Mean or Angry
Many women I spoke with shared anecdotes of partners being verbally mean or belittling towards them.
One interviewee, who lived with her abusive male partner, shared that he said, “it made him depressed to see me asleep in bed when he was awake in the morning.” As a result, she stated that he would violently “rip the covers off me and scream at me to wake me up. Every. Single. Morning.”
A second woman recounted being called a “bitch” and “dumb” multiple times by her abusive partner, and another participant was often called a “slut” for not wearing a bra or for wearing clothes her partner deemed inappropriate.
Still, other participants mentioned being scared of their partners when they were angry.
One woman shared, “he would snap at me, and I had never really dealt with a partner who got mean and angry.” While another confessed that her partner almost hit her with his car when he had road rage. After this incident, she divulged to her partner, “I’m scared of you when you’re angry,” but he didn’t seem to mind.
Manipulation
In these abusive intimate partner dynamics, the women I spoke with also voiced that there was a lot of emotional manipulation.
During the interviews, one woman emphatically stated that she was “gaslit to no avail” and that her partner would tell her she was “crazy” all the time even though “he was the one driving me crazy.” Other women had similar experiences where their abuser always had to be right, with one interviewee describing her partner as someone that “couldn’t be wrong.”
Some women were manipulated by their partners into thinking that they weren’t of sound mind and that their judgment was inferior.
One woman shared that her partner “just had a way of making anything I said irrational or illogical in some way.” Another interviewee had a similar experience in which she said her partner would “manipulate me into thinking that I wasn’t valid or fair or logical.”
One participant explained that when she did express discomfort to her partner, he would say, “just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t matter. I need real evidence.” However, he completely disregarded her perspective in doing so, which left her feeling invalidated, confused, and voiceless.
“Feelings of rejection” were also common as multiple women shared that their partner’s manipulative behavior would include doing things to reject them, such as being emotionally unavailable, refusing a hug, or telling her the gifts she got him for his birthday were horrible.
Control
When it comes to emotional abuse, many of the abusers’ behaviors are rooted in aspects of control.
“Control is a big factor, and he was controlling me the whole time,” voiced one woman.
But, importantly, for the person experiencing the emotional abuse, “it is not as obvious that they are being controlled,” explained another.
Controlling behavior can present in many forms.
Some women I interviewed weren’t allowed to speak to men other than their partners. One woman, who was with her partner for around four years, shared that her partner was so jealous and distrusting that “if I ever got a text from someone that’s not a girl’s name, he would tell me to get out of his house and that he doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Another woman’s partner took control of her finances by forcing her to invest in bitcoin and using her money to buy his expensive groceries.
Additionally, one woman’s partner even took issue with her toiletries and forced her to change her products. She shared, “At first, it was my deodorant and then I changed my deodorant, but I hated it because my armpits smelled bad. I had to smell my own BO to please him.” But the control didn’t end there: she added, “at that point, he had also picked out my shampoo, conditioner, and perfumes. It was so crazy that I let him have control over something so personal as what I put on my body.”
For many of the women I spoke with, it was easier for them to accept their partner’s control than to continuously resist.
One participant articulated this sentiment by stating, “the more you struggle and resist it, the worse it is.” She explained, “in the short term, it benefits you to give up control. It makes your life easier at that time because you won’t have to deal with the wrath of trying to still be in control and struggling. So they [the abusers] incentivize you to lose control, which is really scary when you look back at all the time that has passed and how little control you had over your life.”
When I asked an interviewee to explain the relationship between emotional abuse and control, she decisively stated, “they are inextricable.”
Isolation
Many women I interviewed experienced feelings of isolation from friends and family, either by request from their partner or because they themselves felt like they couldn’t be honest with their support system.
One woman, whose parents didn’t like her partner, felt she could no longer confide in her parents because “they didn’t approve of him,” which left her feeling alone.
Similarly, a second woman, who moved across the country alone with her abuser, chose not to talk to her family about the distress she was in because she “felt so stuck” and “didn’t feel like there was a point to tell them because then they would just worry” about her as she wasn’t ready to leave the relationship yet. She solemnly expressed that this decision was hard for her because she had always been very close with her family.
A third participant was ordered by her partner not to share negative aspects of their relationship with her family. She recounted that he said, about a year into their two-year relationship, that “you can’t talk to them about me anymore or else we aren’t going to have a future because they will just dislike me more and more.” Because of this, she stopped discussing her relationship issues with her parents.
Other women felt isolated because their support system struggled to continue to see someone they love stay with someone that caused them pain. One interviewee, who initially felt safe confiding in her friends during college, explained, “my friends started to distance themselves from me after hearing what I was sharing and repeatedly having me not listen to their advice [to end the relationship].”
Fighting / Trying to Avoid Fighting
In emotionally abusive relationships, there can be a lot of fighting.
Fights can be over exceptionally small things like popping one’s pimples or taking too long of a break during one’s work-from-home schedule. Other times, fights can be on quite emotionally charged topics such as the longevity of the relationship or issues of jealousy.
One woman shared that there was so much verbal fighting with her partner that she “started not to feel safe” and was “walking on eggshells” because she never knew when she’d accidentally set her partner off. She added that he would express “every emotion in the form of anger.”
Other interviewees had partners who would “throw things across the rooms” and “break shit” during fights.
One participant, in particular, had experienced a great deal of verbal abuse and explained that “it wasn’t just at home that he was screaming at me.” She went on to share that her partner would “pick fights in the grocery store or on the street,” which she described as “really embarrassing” to be “constantly verbally assaulted by my partner in front of people.”
One time her partner was screaming at her so loudly, with the apartment door open on the balcony, that a neighbor called the police. She shared, through tears, how traumatic it was to see her boyfriend handcuffed while she talked to the police in only her underwear.
Many women I spoke with communicated that, as a byproduct of withstanding so much fighting, they developed the desperate coping mechanism of staying quiet or changing themselves to appease their partner in the hopes of preventing future fights.
One interviewee defeatedly voiced that “over the course of two years, I just stopped listening to myself more and more automatically because it was just easier to agree with him.” In order to hold many of these relationships together, the women I spoke with were shrinking themselves while silently unraveling on the inside.
Physical Abuse
While the definitions of emotional abuse do not include physical acts of violence, a few women I spoke with experienced threats of physical violence or physical manifestations of violence.
One woman shared that, although her partner never physically hurt her, there were times when he was so angry with her that he said things like, “I can’t see you right now; I don’t trust myself not to hit you.”
Another woman divulged that her partner said, “he hoped that someone would break into our house and stab me so that he could shoot them,” which left her feeling unsafe.
Other women experienced sexual violence in the form of questionably rough sex or partners that refused to wear condoms and “would not pull out.” One woman wearily recounted that her partner would wake her up “in the middle of the night demanding sex” and would not let her go back to sleep until sex was performed.
Still, another woman, who was with her abuser for around six months, shared shakily, “he did get physical with me one night during sex when he slapped me in the face, grabbed me by the throat, and violently dragged me across the room.”
It’s important to note that these relationships grew more and more abusive over time, with physical violence often being the last straw for these women in emotionally abusive relationships.
One interviewee very vulnerably shared, in tears, that her partner hit her in the face once during a fight and then said to her, “why did you make me do that?” After being struck, she thought, “this person’s fucking delusional, and now I know I’m unsafe, and I have to get out.”
Why It’s Really Hard to Leave Emotional Abuse:
From inside an emotionally abusive relationship, it can be very hard to get out.
Due to the insidious nature of emotional abuse, the abuse may go undetected at the beginning but grows more severe as the relationship progresses. Often, once the victim starts to feel a negative shift in the dynamic, the barriers to exit are already set in place by the abuser, making the individual feel trapped.
One woman I spoke with communicated that “people who have never experienced it [emotional abuse] are like ‘oh he’s so terrible, why don’t you just leave him?’” not realizing that leaving is “so difficult.”
“Leaving feels impossible,” expressed another woman. She explained, “it feels like you are really dependent upon this person and, if you leave, you are just not going to live. Life isn’t worth living if it’s not with this person, even if they are treating you like shit.”
Inside these emotionally abusive relationships, many women felt stuck in dynamics they didn’t know how to escape.
One interviewee shared that she “became trapped in this situation without even realizing it.” While another described her relationship as a prison: “I felt like I was in jail the whole time.”
A third woman, who was living with her abuser at the time, confessed that “the thought of getting out of it gave me so much anxiety. I was like, ‘I’m starting from scratch, I’m going to lose everything, I’m going to lose all this money, my parents are going to be so mad at me.’”
For some women, the longer they stayed in the relationship, the harder it was to leave. One participant stated that she stayed so long because “the deeper you get into something with someone, the harder you try to get it to work,” while another explained that she tried to break up with her partner multiple times, but he “wouldn’t let her.”
In fact, most women I spoke with didn’t even realize how bad their situation was until either the very end of the relationship or after they had gotten out of the relationship.
How can we expect those with abusive partners to leave the abuse if they can’t always identify or come to terms with the abuse while it’s happening?
One participant voiced that she “was not fully aware of how manipulative it was,” while another expressed that she “didn’t really process that he was being abusive and manipulative until it ended.”
When reflecting on how she knew it was time to end the relationship, one woman stated, “I literally wasn’t functioning anymore. I physically felt so depleted. I felt exhausted emotionally. I was just miserable most of the time and crying a lot of the time. Literally, my body and mind were just shutting down from all of the toxicity.”
4 Key Takeaways on Why it’s So Hard to Leave an Emotional Abusive Relationship:
- The partner breaks down your confidence and self-esteem
- The partner makes themselves the center of your world and admiration
- The partner isolates you from your previous support system (friends, family, etc.)
- The longer you stay, the more you may want to make it work
The Lasting Effects of Surviving Emotional Abuse:
While life on the other side of an emotionally abusive relationship is liberating, surviving the trauma of emotional abuse can leave lasting effects.
Many women I interviewed continue to deal with the trauma in everyday life, even years after the abuse occurred.
Experiencing emotional abuse has “affected everything” in one participant’s life. Another woman expressed that she couldn’t remember who she was before the relationship because the abuse changed her in so many ways.
Experiencing Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment
Importantly, and unfortunately, every woman I interviewed identified with feeling shame or embarrassment around experiencing emotionally abusive relationships.
While reflecting on her desperation to be loved in the way she loved her partner, one woman shared, in disbelief, “I literally would sob to him ‘why are you doing this to me? I love you so much.’ When I think about what I gave to this person and how I would literally beg him to stay with me or treat me better…I do feel ashamed.”
Another participant expressed, “After I had learned the nature of our relationship and how it was abusive, I would often ask myself, ‘how did you let this happen?’ And that would make me feel really ashamed of myself.” She added that so much of her internal monologue jumped to “putting the blame on myself” by thinking, “‘I should have known better. I should have ended it earlier. Why didn’t I? What was I possibly thinking?’”
Another woman, whose abuser was also unfaithful, shared that her experience made her wonder, “is there something wrong with me? Should I have been cheated on? Did I deserve it? Did I deserve the abuse?”
One interviewee, who happened to be a therapist, said that her training and occupation added to the shame she felt. “I definitely feel like I should have known better, especially since I’m a therapist,” she confessed.
Even though many women felt shame, they now resoundingly believe that there is no shame in surviving abuse and that you “can’t blame yourself.” One woman passionately stated, “you shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself because it’s not your fault even though it feels like it is.”
Learning To Trust Themselves and Others
In addition to feeling shame, guilt, and embarrassment from experiencing emotionally abusive relationships, many women had difficulty trusting themselves, their gut, and their needs.
One woman explained, “I couldn’t trust myself because he was gaslighting me by saying that I’m wrong and that my feelings are invalid.”
For multiple participants, learning to put themselves first was a big adjustment. One woman shared that it was hard for her to “think critically” about how she felt because she “had gotten so used to lying” to herself.
When it comes to seeking future partners, many of the women I spoke with are also fearful and distrusting of men.
A few women mentioned that potential new relationships can trigger them as it brings up “trust issues” and that they are afraid to fully let their guard down in fear of potentially “repeating the past.”
Seeking Out Therapy to Heal
In order to heal from emotionally abusive relationships, nearly all the women I spoke with sought professional help in the form of therapy to unpack and process their experiences.
“I honestly owe everything to therapy,” confessed one woman who identified as having dealt with issues of depression, suicidal ideation, and anxiety.
Talking about their former relationships in therapy is also how multiple women realized that their relationships were abusive.
During a therapy session, one woman’s therapist expressed that she believed the relationship sounded like emotional abuse. In reaction to this, the woman I interviewed explained, “I remember thinking ‘abuse’ sounds so serious; I wasn’t ‘abused.’” But once the denial subsided, she no longer felt alone or crazy, and she had a therapist who understood.
When I asked the women what they work on in therapy, multiple women brought up issues surrounding PTSD as well as heightened anxiety and depression.
Other women were working on re-learning how to trust themselves, set boundaries, and “have autonomy in dating and autonomy in a relationship.”
Knowing What They Don’t Want and Re-building Their Self Esteem
Many women I spoke with are also trying to use their knowledge of emotional abuse to their advantage when seeking future partners.
“I try so hard not to make the same mistakes,” expressed one participant who has been in not one but two emotionally abusive intimate partner relationships. Another woman shared that she’s “become more aware” of emotional abuse warning signs and uses her newfound awareness as a protective shield.
Similarly, another participant articulated that she has been “able to weed out people much more quickly” and is now able to better pursue a potential “healthy relationship with a really good person.”
Additionally, working on recovering from the trauma has empowered many women I conversed with to have higher standards for future partners and themselves.
“For me, getting out of the relationship is definitely my proudest accomplishment in life. By far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I think I’ll carry the strength that it gave me forever,” shared one woman. “I’m telling you I am a different person now that I have found my worth, and I know that I love myself,” voiced another with a proud smile.
One interviewee, who entered her relationship because she so badly wanted a partner, shared that she believes “there is nothing wrong with wanting companionship and partnership,” but to be careful because “if it’s coming from a place of loneliness or desperation, that is something that breeds emotional abuse.”
Many women felt empowered to finally put themselves first. One woman summarized this sentiment when she said, “I’m protecting myself, first and foremost. And I’m respecting my time, my needs, and my wants a lot more than I used to.”
Ways to Prevent Emotional Abuse:
As one woman effectively articulated, “Emotional abuse can happen to anyone. Even if you are very smart, Ivy-league educated, emotionally intelligent, and a good person with generally happy relationships. It can really happen to anyone. It’s insidious and what’s scary about it is you don’t really know it’s happening when it’s happening.”
Because of this, the women I spoke with stressed the importance of knowing the warning signs of emotional abuse as well as being formally educated and informally educated on the issue.
Learn The Warning Signs of Emotional Abuse
Everyone should know the red flags and warning signs of emotional abuse.
When I asked the women I interviewed about the red flags in their relationships, here is what a few of them shared with me.
The women divulged that a few red flags that are easy to remember are “a lot of lying,” “anything controlling,” “jealousy,” “anything misogynistic,” “double standards,” “taking advantage of your vulnerability,” “people who can’t compliment you,” and “never meeting their friends.”
When it comes to warning signs of emotional abuse specifically, the answers were more revealing.
One woman explained that it’s a warning sign “if someone is making you cry often or more than they are making you happy.” Similarly, another participant communicated that a sign she learned from her experience is “if someone is making you feel like you have to second guess yourself or that your intuition isn’t correct.”
Paying particular attention to any behaviors that might be forms of manipulation can also help prevent emotional abuse. “He always had to be right,” and “he would never apologize for anything,” warned one woman. A second interviewee added that it was a red flag when her partner tried convincing her that this kind of fighting and behavior was normal in romantic relationships.
Other women emphasized the importance of feeling safe emotionally, mentally, and physically in the relationship. One participant recounted, “the biggest red flag was his temper.” While another woman emphasized that the most significant takeaway from her experience is that “no one should ever feel unsafe in a relationship.”
Increase Formal Education on Emotional Abuse
Unfortunately, like many people in our country, the women I interviewed were largely unaware of what emotional abuse really looked like before being with an emotionally abusive partner. Nearly every woman I spoke with mentioned a complete gap in understanding or education on emotional abuse.
“I had never learned the signs of emotional abuse or even what that is,” explained one woman who continued by saying, “I wish people knew actually what it was, the signs of it, and how, unfortunately, common it is.”
Nearly everyone I interviewed underscored the need for emotional abuse awareness education in the curriculum of middle school health classes.
One interviewee stated, “I started having my first health class in 8th grade about sex and periods and all of that. But emotional abuse is something that anyone is capable of suffering from at any age, even before puberty. So I think it could even begin a bit earlier in middle school.”
Emotional abuse must be taken seriously as a form of IPV. If children are taught about physical forms of domestic abuse in class, they should also be informed about emotional forms of abuse as well. Simply put, one woman exasperatedly said, “I wish that people knew that emotionally abusive relationships are abusive relationships. That’s it.”
Many of the women I spoke with believe that had they been educated on emotional abuse in school, it would have helped them understand their relationship better, helped them get out of their relationship sooner, or helped them avoid certain relationships entirely. Importantly, educational intervention would also, ideally, guide individuals away from developing abusive tendencies, thereby decreasing the number of emotional abusers.
Education is a powerful tool, and increasing formal education on emotional abuse is a crucial step in helping the younger generation avoid this dangerous form of IPV.
Increase Cultural Awareness of and Digital Resources for Emotional Abuse
In addition to increasing formal education on emotional abuse, it’s also important to increase access to informal education on the issue. In the current absence of formal education on emotional abuse, the main resource of knowledge freely available on the topic seems to be in short diagnostic articles online.
A few interviewees either sought out or stumbled upon internet articles on emotional abuse and explained that these articles were pivotal resources in recognizing their abusive relationship.
One woman stated, “I started to identify signs of emotional abuse by a literal article online.”
While another shared, “I read this article that was like ‘32 Signs You Are in An Emotionally Abusive Relationship,’ and I remember that I just started crying because I think about ⅔ of them, definitely over 20, did resonate with me.” She went on to explain that reading the article was “so validating to be able to call it that and be able to call it as bad as it felt.”
All of the women I interviewed agreed that increasing the cultural awareness around the pervasiveness and deleteriousness of emotional abuse would help destigmatize the issue and, in so doing, would aid in removing some of the shame around emotional abuse.
But, even still, there are not enough articles, not enough people talking about emotional abuse, and not enough people that are informed and able to identify emotionally abusive partners.
Be Someone Who Cares About Emotional Abuse
It is not right that, seemingly, the majority of people who care about and understand emotional abuse are its victims.
Many of the interviewees wished that more people understood that those closest to them might be impacted by emotional abuse. One woman confessed, “I wish that more people would acknowledge that it can be one of your friends.”
Other participants wished that their new romantic partners could better understand what they went through in previous relationships and be more empathetic towards their past experiences with IPV.
When I asked one woman at the end of our conversation if she had anything she wanted to add, she explained that very few people understand emotional abuse, which is why she said, “I’m really happy you are writing on this.”
Understanding emotional abuse fosters both empathy and awareness. If people could understand the severity and prevalence of emotional abuse, they would be more empathetic to those who have experienced it firsthand and be more aware of how to avoid it for themselves.
I hope these narratives have spurred your interest in caring for these women, caring for all people who have experienced emotional abuse, and caring for yourself because this can happen to you.
“Nobody thinks they are going to be emotionally abused. I didn’t think that. I’m a smart person– how the fuck did I end up in that situation? But anyone can, and that’s the scary reality.”
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Domestic Violence HotLine Website or call 1–800–799-SAFE (7233)
