Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Rather than whacking a child with a belt or a hairbrush, emotional abuse is whacking a child with cruel words and looks. Verbal forms usually include blaming, shaming, humiliating, and threatening abandonment. Nonverbal forms include hateful looks, refusing to talk with a child, and behaviors that undermine a child’s sense of self-respect, such as providing only inappropriate clothing or sabotaging a child’s success.

Isn’t physical abuse worse?

Not true. According to a study reported by the American Psychological Association, “Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused.” It found that children who had been psychologically abused suffered from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, and were suicidal at the same or a greater rate than children who were physically or sexually abused.

10 effects of childhood emotional abuse

Since emotional abuse generally is found along with emotional neglect, this list is supplemental to my original list of effects of emotional neglect [link to blog preceding]. More can be found in the second edition of The Emotionally Absent Mother and in Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother.

1. High levels of anxiety. Anxiety is the feeling that something is not quite right, often with a foreboding that something bad is about to happen. It is easy to see why a child who is not safe from attack gets filled with anxiety.

Anxiety shows up in many ways. Sometimes it spills out as a panic attack. Or it takes the form of phobias or obsessive-compulsive patterns. Anxiety can also be involved in nervous behaviors like hair-pulling, in excessive worry or becoming overly cautious, or being irritable and restless. Feeling anxious and on guard makes it hard to relax, and the body is then deprived of much that it needs to maintain good health, including good sleep.

2. Deeply ingrained avoidance. When you don’t have good skills for regulating your emotions, you’ve got a big stake in avoiding having emotions set off. That can lead you to not venture out into life and also to avoid feeling what is going on inside. The need to avoid can also feed addictions.
 
3. Alienation from the body and degradation of health. The legacy of numbing, shame, and unprocessed trauma make it harder to occupy the body. And not fully occupying the body makes it harder for the body to thrive.

Adverse events in childhood are highly correlated with more disease in adulthood in the large-scale ACE study. Your immune and nervous systems, along with all the others, were burdened when they were developing.

A third reason “the body bears the burden” (also the title of a book on trauma) is that what has no other way to be worked out often expresses itself through somatic symptoms, a rather well-known phenomenon.

4. Difficulty trusting. Many times the person who has been emotionally abused as a child continues to expect to be used, hurt, manipulated, and dumped on. It generally feels too vulnerable to let down the walls you’ve erected to protect yourself. It also feels foreign when people act genuinely interested in you, and it’s hard to trust that any interest will last or not have an ulterior motive. There is also a fear that if you rely on someone they’ll leave.
 
5. Used and unhappy in relationships. Being mistreated in your first relationship with a parent makes you more vulnerable to getting involved with others who behave or make you feel a similar way. You may have learned to be compliant to minimize the other’s aggression, even becoming somewhat numb to it. Those who stay in abusive relationships often have a history of early abuse.

Another likely pattern is that of caretaking, becoming a doormat and giving too much to people who are “takers.” Because you desperately want relationship and don’t expect more parity, you may end up propping up people who need an audience.

6. Internal ceilings. Until we have worked through the deprivations that marked our childhood, they continue on inside of us in the form of beliefs often hidden under the surface. This results in a ceiling we bump up against. It may be the sense that “I’m not allowed” to feel certain emotions, make decisions, or succeed.

Even when we push past barriers to actually succeed, other residues remain. One is the feeling of being a fraud; another is a tendency to take away your own wins, just as your abusive parent did.

7. Internal perpetrators. While we all have an inner critic who pops up at times, those who were cruelly criticized when growing up often have a critic that is over the top. This inner perpetrator often holds the same judgments as your abusive parent: you are no-good, fat, lazy, stupid, and should be exposed.
 

8. Self-harming. Self-harming behaviors can range from subtle self-sabotage and lack of good self-care to cutting on your body, various kinds of self-punishment, and suicide.
 
9. Frequent or ongoing dissociation. As I wrote in Healing From Trauma, dissociation is when you are not all here. It is most often a disconnection from your body, your feelings, or your environment. Dissociation is a circuit breaker for a nervous system which has become overwhelmed. It is only somewhat successful in managing the overwhelm, as you usually feel like you’ve just lost your brain. In a severely dissociated state, you feel like you can’t do anything.
 
10. Not sure what is real. When you have suffered extreme emotional attack at a young age, and especially when that is denied or blamed on you and when you had no safe place to go but to retreat to an inner world, it may leave you with a sense that you’re not quite sure what actually happened and what you may have imagined or dreamed.

As you can see, living with the impacts of childhood emotional abuse is an enormous weight to carry. I wish you the best in finding the support needed—whether a skilled therapist, relevant recovery groups, people in your inner circle, or good self-help reading.