Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse always accompanies, and in most cases precedes, physical battering. Targeted, repeated emotional abuse can severely affect the victim’s sense of self and of reality. Here is a list of emotionally abusive behaviors abusers use against their partners:
- Abuser makes hostile jokes about the habits and faults of women
- Ignores the victim’s feelings
- Withholds approval as a form of punishment
- Yells at the victim
- Labels the victim with generally insulting terms: crazy, bitch, stupid
- Repeatedly delivers a series of insults specific to the victim and designed to inflict
maximum psychological damage - Repeatedly humiliates the victim in front of family members and others
- Isolates the victim socially, perhaps geographically as well (for example, by moving the family to a remote location)
- Blames the victim for all the abuser’s troubles and failures
- Threatens physical violence and retaliation against the victim, children or other family members
- Puts down the victim’s abilities as a mother, lover, worker, etc.
- Demands all the victim’s attention and resents the children
- Tells the victim about his sexual affairs
- Constantly accuses her of having affairs, even when she does not have the desire or freedom to have affairs
- Gives the victim the “silent treatment”
- Threatens to abuse the children and/or get custody of them
- Tells the victim he must stay with her because she needs him and couldn’t make it
without him - Accuses the victim of being violent if she acts in any way to protect herself
- Questions her sense of reality
- Forces economic dependency: He prevents the victim from working – either by forbidding her to get a job or by making her life so chaotic that she gets fired – and/or he takes her money
- Puts down or denies the victim’s history, heritage, faith, values
- Hits the wall, not her, to display his power
- Breaks personal items that have sentimental value to her as a message that he can
break her too - Threatens, tortures or kills her/their pets
- Threatens suicide if the victim doesn’t stay with him or do what he wants
- Spends hours cleaning guns or knives in front of the victim
- Threatens to kill her or her children
- Destroys victim’s self esteem