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There is a kind of violence that doesn’t involve physical pain — a type of abuse that doesn’t involve touching at all. Some clinicians call it emotional abuse.
The staff at the Cincinnati YWCA calls it emotional violence. Dr. Gary Dick, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Cincinnati, calls it soul murder. It can be every bit as devastating to a person’s well-being as domestic violence or sexual abuse.
The most common weapon in emotional abuse is words, according to Stuart Bassman, psychology professor at UC. But emotional abuse can take many forms, as Theresa Singleton explains. She is director of the Protection from Abuse Program for the Cincinnati YWCA.
“There was a woman in our shelter — this was 15 years ago,” Singleton says. “Her abuser never physically hit her but he did a lot of stuff to humiliate her, call her names, a lot of bad stuff.
“He knew that the only thing that she had left of her grandmother after she died was her china. This woman really loved her grandmother. She loved this china; it had so much sentimental value to her. He broke every piece intentionally — no accident. That’s extreme emotional abuse.”
Less extreme forms are more common. A little boy looks for hidden Christmas presents. He finds them and gets caught. His mother declares, “You’re a bad boy.” This is an attack on the child’s sense of self, Dick says.
“The child is not bad, he is curious. To squash enthusiasm and to attack the essence of the child is a form of soul murder. If this parent thinks peeking at a gift is bad, they need to put things in perspective.”
At Thanksgiving, a mother-in-law criticizes the food, the children’s behavior, the chaos of the household.
“Feedback that is constructive is one thing,” Dick says. “This kind of criticism, however, is emotionally abusive, rude and lacks empathy. Criticism is a form of emotional abuse, especially when it is relentless, intentional and done with the intention of hurting the feelings of another person.”
Emotional abuse — like all abuse — is a misuse of power.
“The definition, when you’re talking about abuse in any form, is that abuse happens when one person in a relationship attempts to gain power, control and domination over the other person by using a wide variety of tactics,” Singleton says.
Emotional abuse can happen between parents and children, between managers and employees, between spouses and partners and best friends. Sometimes it is a violation of law. Intentional infliction of emotional distress is often a cause for lawsuits. Emotional cruelty has been cited in many divorces. In recent years many states have passed laws forbidding stalking, which is essentially a kind of emotional abuse.
Scar on the inside
Social awareness of spousal abuse and child abuse grew in the late 20th century. A black eye or broken arm accompanied by explanations such as “I ran into a door” or “I fell off a swing” almost immediately raise the question of abuse. But emotional abuse doesn’t leave a visible mark, making it difficult to identify.
“The medium of emotional abuse is words,” Bassman says. “Because words are such an abstract representation of reality, how can words hurt you? ‘Sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never harm you’ — which is completely, absolutely wrong. That’s unfortunately what a lot of children are told.”
Emotional abuse is characterized by a pattern of behavior that occurs over time and erodes self-worth, self-confidence and self-esteem, leaving a person feeling worthless. A male spouse can be so effective at tearing down his female partner’s internal self-structure that he’ll never have to lay a hand on her to keep her under his control. He can leave her feeling incompetent, so that she’ll believe she doesn’t have the intelligence or skills she needs to break free or survive on her own. She becomes so damaged that she believes him more than she believes her own perceptions.
“He’s damaged her,” Dick says. “Her spirit has been squashed out of her. She’s become depressed as a result of the emotional abuse. She’s hopeless, has low self-esteem, feels inadequate.”
Singleton elaborates on what emotional abuse looks like in everyday life, using an example most people have experienced.
“If I go home tonight and I get into an argument and I say to my husband, ‘You’re a jerk’ or ‘You’re an asshole,’ it begs the question, am I an abuser?” she says. “We’re human. Human beings are flawed, and I don’t care how perfect you try to be and how nonviolent and you work on having the healthiest relationship you know how, we’re all going to sometimes say things that are unkind. However, when we say something that is unkind, we take responsibility for it and we make a concerted effort never to do it again.
“Abusers, on the other hand, don’t take responsibility and they don’t make an effort to stop the behavior. As a matter of fact, they create a pattern of abuse. The abuser might say, ‘Gee, I’m really sorry I called you a bitch. I won’t do it again. But then the next week he does it again. When talking about abuse, we’re always talking about a pattern of behavior that chips away at the other person’s self-worth. There’s a lack of respect for the other person’s emotional, spiritual, physical well-being, but it really comes down to a pattern of behavior.”
Sometimes the patterns show themselves only in private, according to SaraKay Smullens, author of Setting Yourself Free: Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Abuse in Family, Friendships, Work and Love.
“Some families appear respected, close, secure and loving in the world outside the home, while a step inside their homes will reveal the presence of insults, blame, ridicule, lies and humiliation,” she wrote. “In such families, members are coerced by ‘the silent treatment,’ threats, intimidation and bullying, all powerful but invisible weapons of psychological attack that inflict deep and lasting wounds.”
These weapons vary. What is abusive to one person might not bother another. They might be as overt as name-calling or as covert as hypercriticism.
Understanding how even seemingly innocuous remarks and behaviors can become abuse is challenging for professionals and the public alike. Dick regularly works with social workers and judges throughout Ohio to increase their awareness as a means to protect children, one of the largest and most vulnerable populations effected. He explains two distinct challenges faced by his students and the courts.
“One is, was there intent?” Dick says. “Intentional means you’ve got a cruel, wicked, cold, harsh, punitive, angry, criticizing parent who’s out to emotionally beat a kid up. The non-intentional kind might mean that the parent is unaware that they’re doing it. And yet the workers come in and see that the screaming at the child or the name calling of the child is very damaging emotionally. They may see the child cower down when the mother or father screams at the child. The parents are seeing that as, ‘I’m disciplining my child.’ They may not realize what they’re doing as emotional abuse.
“The other thing that becomes a controversy is that criticism is a form of emotional abuse. Everybody needs feedback about how to do it better. That’s wonderful. But when you begin to criticize, you begin to dampen the spirit of the other person. So what are we trying to do? Do you want to be critical and point out negative kinds of things because there’s something about that person that you want to squash? Or do you want to use feedback, where you point out strengths and areas of improvement? They’re two different things.”
Emotional abuse isn’t always obvious, nor can it be easily explained.
“The scar on the inside is much more difficult to see,” Bassman says, “and as a result of that emotional abuse is very difficult to determine because you’re dealing with things that have to do with self-esteem, self-worth and these are very intangible, abstract concepts.”
Gift that keeps on giving
When Robert Shuemak was 6, his father set up his first train set and made an impression that persists 30 years later.
“All I could do was watch,” he says. “I wasn’t allowed to set up the little houses or the barns or the trees or put the cars on the track. I wasn’t allowed to operate it. All I could do was sit in the chair with a little engineer hat on and watch.
“At the time I asked why, and he could never give me an answer. He’d say, ‘Well, because this is something that I need to do. You can do this later. You can’t do it, you’re too young.’ ”
Shuemak, who is pursuing a master’s degree in social work, says his father never got down on the floor with him to teach him how to operate the train or set up the tracks. Instead he ignored and ridiculed his child. Diagnosed with optic nerve atrophy, Shuemak was considered defective.
“My mother was fine,” he says. “I imagine she was disappointed, but she never expressed any disappointment to me. My father, on the other hand, he was devastated. I was the only child at the time. I was the first son, which, in the African-American community, the first son is like a gift from God, like the ultimate child. For the first child to be a boy, there were expectations I was supposed to live up to.
“In his mind, I was flawed because I was visually impaired. I think that the devastation of me being disabled or handicapped, or whatever he called it, blew him away. It just made him turn into himself, more than anything else.”
After his sister was born, Shuemak’s father spent all his time with her.
“They were like a father and son should be,” he says. “They were hanging together, they were wrestling, they were playing. I can remember them talking together. I felt left out, ignored.
“I don’t think he ever accepted the fact that I was visually impaired. I can remember times tripping over things and falling, and he would actually get mad. With a hostile voice, he’d say, ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going? Slow down!’ ”
This combination of neglect, unrealistic expectations and harsh words adds up to emotional abuse. The damage can be lifelong.
“Emotional maltreatment is the gift that keeps on giving,” Dick says. “If you tell a 5-year-old child who spills his milk, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you so stupid?’ those kinds of messages get internalized and the child begins to feel later on in life, ‘I’m stupid, what’s wrong with me?’
“One of the best phrases I ever heard about emotional maltreatment is that it’s ‘soul murder.’ ”
JoAnn Clifton agrees. A psychologist with the Center for Families and Children, she works with children and their parents or guardians and sees victims of emotional abuse every day. Clifton says the brain responds to negative words and reactions, so harsh words wear away at a person.
“You see the 10- and 11-year-olds who have been abused all these years and are so very angry,” she says. “Trying to turn that around is so very difficult, and sometimes not possible if they’re continuing to stay in an environment where that’s what the daily life is — where there’s everybody yelling and screaming and cussing and spitting at each other.”
‘I’m too sensitive’
Emotional abuse is perhaps easier to recognize when it happens to children. In adult relationships, the manipulation and control that are present in emotional abuse are sometimes akin to the programming used in a cult, Bassman says. A common result is that the victim of abuse blames herself.
“It’s called ‘identification with the aggressor,’ ” he says. “One way of dealing with emotional abuse is you internalize what the other person is saying, and in a sense you protect them. They say to you, ‘You’re too sensitive’ and you say, ‘I really am too sensitive. It really is my fault. Maybe if I was a good student, maybe if I would not complain, he would not get so angry with me. Obviously I’ve done something wrong.’
“You’ve identified with the thinking error of the person who’s intimidating you. You have been programmed to believe a falsehood, so you blame yourself, and that’s a core element of any type of abuse — that you identify with the aggressor. That abuser becomes so overwhelming that, even when self-preservation kicks in, a victim will second-guess her natural instincts. So when someone is emotionally abused, they think, ‘I’m too sensitive. What’s wrong with me that I can’t take it?’ ”
Bassman relates a frequent occurrence in his private practice.
“My secretary, Chris, will get a call about every other week from a woman who says, ‘Can Dr. Bassman go up to the jail and evaluate my husband?’
“Chris says, ‘What is he doing in jail?’
” ‘He beat me up’
” ‘So what do you want him out for?’
” ‘I love him. It was my fault, I was being too sensitive and I overreacted by calling the police. Could he please go there?’
“It’s the same thing with emotional abuse. They feel like they deserve it, they feel like it’s their fault.”
The onset of emotional abuse in adult relationships is usually gradual, Singleton says.
“We don’t get into relationships knowingly with people who abuse us,” she says. “If I go out on a date with someone and that someone says, ‘You fucking bitch, you look like a cow today,’ I’m going to run away, I’m going to get out. That’s not how it happens. Usually by the time a woman experiences violence, she’s emotionally invested in the relationship.
“So what happens the first time he calls her a bitch or smacks her or both? She’s shocked. What happens? She tries to reestablish the relationship on a nonviolent basis because she’ll look at herself and ask, ‘What did I do to cause this?’ She’ll try to reestablish the relationship by changing her own behavior. Maybe she works more or works less or keeps the kids quiet or doesn’t spend as much time with her friends or her family. It could be any number of things.
“Over time she will recognize that it doesn’t matter what she does or what she doesn’t do — she can’t stop the violence, whether it’s emotional, physical or both. She can’t make it any different.”
Watch what you say
Dick says community awareness and individual awareness go hand in hand. He wants to help people understand what emotional abuse is and what to look for in their own lives, in addition to how they relate to others.
“Self-awareness of always, always self-monitoring: ‘Where am I at this moment? I’m getting ready to give feedback to my kids, my wife, my husband, my partner. Where am I at?’ If I’m on the edge, then what I say may put other people in the edge,” he says. “It is critical for people to be aware of their inner life. You can manage it a little bit better when you know it. If you don’t know it, then you’re going off and you’re reacting and you’re projecting out.
“A key question in determining what is abusive is, ‘What is a person’s internal experience of something that was said to them?’ The other person can say, ‘Hey, I just said you need to clean up. You look like a slob. That’s real, I’m just being honest.’ But if the person’s internal experience of that is, ‘Now I’m depressed, I really feel inadequate,’ then their comments were not very helpful. Emotionally there was some damage there.”
Charlene Ventura, president of the YWCA, sees many parallels between physical and emotional abusers. She has been involved in building awareness about violence against women in Cincinnati for more than 30 years.
“People were in such denial about domestic violence. It was really an invisible crime, it wasn’t talked about,” she says. “They really didn’t believe domestic violence was a crime. It was a private matter and ought to stay in the family, that women who stayed deserved it. They believed women were masochistic. Getting through all those myths about domestic violence and putting a face on it was really quite a challenge. We’re still educating about it. This (emotional abuse) is another example.
“I do believe that child abuse and domestic violence lead to all the other crime that exists. It all starts in the home and it spills out into the street, whether it’s physical or emotional abuse. People are scarred from violence in the home.”
In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October, the YWCA Women’s Art Gallery presented Empty Chairs — Painful Windows. In addition to recognizing women who lost their lives to domestic violence, artists painted window shades with the illustrations of children staying in the shelters. The kids were simply asked to draw their families. The domestic violence they witnessed resulted in dramatic representations of how the experience damages their souls. Their feelings of “I’m not good enough” were represented in words and sinister images portraying destruction and devastation.
Singleton says that any woman who feels threatened is welcomed at any YWCA shelter. She says physical violence isn’t the only way one person can dominate another.
“We have women who come to the shelter who say, ‘I’m feeling crazy, I feel like I’m losing my mind,’ ” Singleton says. “Usually in a couple of days those feelings will subside. We tell women, ‘You’re responding normally to an abnormal situation. It’s not normal to live walking on eggshells. It’s not normal to live in fear. It’s not normal for someone you love to call you a bad name.’ That’s an ‘Aha!’ moment for a lot of women. They start to hear their story over and over again and they begin to realize they’re in an abusive relationship.”
Breaking the cycle
Identifying emotional abuse in the way a person is treated or in the way she treats others starts with looking for evidence of abusive behavior, such as humiliation, intimidation, volatile or unpredictable responses or sulking. The feelings or reactions elicited by a comment or behavior are also a good indicator.
Dick says we learn how to be in the world largely from our parents, through direct and indirect teaching during the first few years of our lives.
“If you grow up being criticized a lot, your struggle would be, ‘Do I criticize my own children? Or am I aware of how damaging that criticism was to me and I’m not going to do it,’ ” he says. “For the person who may be emotionally abusing another person but not aware of it, there’s a saying, ‘You want to level with the person, you don’t want to level them.’
“We’ve got to differentiate between whether it’s overt or it’s someone who is trying to help but doesn’t realize what they’re saying isn’t very useful. Wouldn’t it be great if, when we’re getting feedback — whether it’s from a boss or a spouse or anybody — if we could say, ‘That’s not very helpful.’ ”
Using the workplace as an example, Dick says emotional abuse that becomes normal behavior for children or adults gets played out in boss-subordinate and co-worker relationships. Making threats to coerce others into behaving a certain way or using performance as grounds for punitive responses, such as not getting a promotion or full-time employment, is viewed by the perpetrator as an acceptable style of management. That person will not see her behavior as terrorizing to staff.
The opposite, neglect, is equally devastating to individuals and morale because employees never know where they stand. They’re kept off balance and unsettled, thereby subject to the whims of another.
“The long-term solution lies in studying and changing the way we treat our children. It’s not the macho, hero-type of father that helps kids,” Dick says. “It’s the father who is emotionally available, who does things with their kids, a real, whole person, not a caricature like a staunch disciplinarian.
“The men I studied with high self-esteem had fathers who were highly involved in them. They had a high level of nurturing. They had fathers who understood them, praised them, encouraged them. They were very accessible.”
Parents who model empathy teach empathy to their children. They also learn from teachers and peers.
Clifton points to a disturbing trend among the patients she sees at the Center for Children and Families.
“I hear from them they don’t always feel safe at school,” she says. “How can anybody learn anything when you’re worried that you’re going to be hurt in some way? Bullying — that is emotional abuse. There have always been bullies. I’m not saying that is a new term or new idea, but it wasn’t the norm when I was in school, and I think today, in the schools, it has become the norm. That is not OK. Bullies can’t be allowed to do harm to other kids. That doesn’t make for a safe environment, and number one, our children have to be safe.”
The Center for Children and Families has 90 therapists placed in 70 schools throughout Cincinnati to help teachers, children and parents cope with all forms of abuse. The therapists work with teachers, who identify kids exhibiting signs of any kind of abuse, including emotional. By working with the children, the abusive environment in the home comes to light and results in the kind of intervention that can break the cycle of generations of abuse.
“I went through three years of counseling when I was 18 to deal with issues around my father,” Shuemak says. “I had a real problem with anger, the anger I felt toward my father because I felt like he shunned me and neglected me. All I knew was anger. I knew how to handle things by fighting. Those are all the things my father gave me. I took it out on other people, and it was getting me in trouble.”
“I had been to several different psychologists. They didn’t work until my mother found a black psychologist who was male, that role model that I missed all the way up until I was 10.”
The ultimate resolution is the development of a healthy relationship. Shuemak says he feels fortunate that his stepfather was the opposite of his father and credits him for providing the kind of experiences that showed him how to relate in a healthy way with an adult male.
“The bottom line is that no one deserves to be abused,” Singleton says. “We all have a right to live safely in a healthy environment. That’s what we have to strive for. We have to engage men. We can shelter women until the end of time, but you have to look at the big picture and try to address men who abuse women. If we don’t have men standing up and saying, ‘Hey, it’s not right to call your wife a bad name. It’s not right to humiliate your wife. It’s not right to isolate your wife or partner,’ it’s not going to change.”
Shuemak is proof that the cycle of emotional abuse can be broken.
“Being a social worker, I know it runs in the family,” he says. “I know that it’s a learned behavior — it’s something you pick up. It’s not a given that you’re not going to do it. It’s something you have to work at. I have worked very hard in the last three years to be very, very careful what I say and how I say it.”
He describes his own parenting style with his son.
“I have a deep voice,” he says. “When I get loud, it sounds like I’m yelling, when actually I’m not, and I have to be very careful how I say things. He makes mistakes. I point them out to him and let him know, ‘Hey, I don’t like that.’ I think that’s more impressionable than beating the crap out of a child.”
Bassman points to law and popular culture to show that the power of words is well known. Libel and slander are actionable in court, even though all that’s involved, he says, is words. He quotes the Bee Gees: “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away.”
“It’s the power of words to heal and to slay,” Bassman says. “Yes, to slay someone.” ©
Are You Being Emotionally Abused?
Emotional abuse takes many forms: screaming, “the silent treatment,” withholding affection, lying.
Emotional abuse sounds like:
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I love you, but …”
“I had a bad day at work.”
“I was upset with (my boss, my ex, the telephone company, etc.)”
“You know I don’t mean it when I …”
“If you weren’t so — (stupid, slow, incompetent, etc.)”
“If you didn’t — (provoke me, make me mad, do something so stupid, etc.)”
“You never do anything right. If I want it done right, obviously I’m the one who has to do it.”
“You’re stupid/a nag/mean/clueless.”
Some symptoms of emotional abuse
Doubting your judgment
Low self-confidence
Panic attacks
Poor self-image
Feeling of inadequacy/incompetence
Suicidal thoughts
Doubt about your own intelligence
Depression
Inability to protect yourself
Inability to trust others
Denying your own feelings
Problems with interpersonal relationships
Hostility
Stress illnesses (high blood pressure, ulcers, asthma, etc.)
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.