Effect of Domestic Abuse
Whilst being in a happy relationship is the aim of most human beings, you realize that being in a bad relationship with someone can do so much damage to our sense of worth, our self-esteem, self-respect and can often trigger a multitude of issues. Domestic violence is a pattern that involves violence or other abuse by the abuser and can happen to anyone ranging from a child/children or adults who are in a relationship or have been in a relationship in the past. The abuse can be physical, emotional, psychological, financial or sexual. Abusers are so manipulative using fear, guilt, shame, and intimidation to wear you down and keep you under his or her thumb. Your abuser may also threaten you, hurt you, or hurt those around you leaving the victim to the belief that they were somehow to blame.
Patterns of Emotional Abuse
Here is a list of emotionally abusive behaviours 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 she must stay with him because she needs him and she 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
