Essay On Emotional Abuse

Emotional or Psychological abuse

Emotional abuse is usually is portrayed by lowering your spouse’s self esteem by judging their appearance or picking at their insecurities for example; “you look gross”,” you don’t understand anything ever” . In a study of 1,000 women 15 years of age or older, 36% had experienced emotional abuse while growing up (Reinberg, 2010). These statistics show how common emotional abuse can be. Psychologist Steven Stosny says “emotional abuse is more devastating than physical violence, due the greater likelihood that victims will blame themselves” (Stosny, 2013). It takes a great toll on someone mental state to feel that someone is at fault when they’ve done nothing wrong.

Physical abuse

Physical abuse is when physical contact starts to get involved. This doesn’t usually start till later in the relationship. Abuse begins to show with small actions for example; pushing/shoving/grabbing eventually will escalate to punching/slapping and to extreme cases sexual assault. Vera Mouradian who works for National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center says “…to cause temporary physical pain to the victim, and includes relatively "minor" acts like slapping with an open hand and severe acts of violence that lead to injury and/or death.”(Mourandian, 2000) Physical abuse is brought to drastic measures and not being able to walk away is the worst part.

Social Isolation

Social Isolation is when the spouse slowly takes the significant other away from their usual social life; such as family and friends. This could start with complaining about lack of privacy due to parents, avoiding them, accusing of hatred towards them. Also may state that friends are making a “bigger gap” between the relationship. Resulting in...

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...ic, and it escalates in frequency and severity over time.” (Mourandian, 2000) Abuse in relationships continues to get worse and with a cycle like this, victim becomes trapped.

Why do they stay?

People in abusive relationships tend to be trapped. The abuser has beaten down their confidence and left him or her isolated. The victim may feel as if without the abuser they have no one and is holding onto the promise that keeps being made after every cycle of abuse.

Warning Signs of Abuse

Signs that usually result into abuse are things such as; extreme jealousy for example you looking at another person and the early abuser acts out in an unnecessary manner, Controlling behavior, unrealistic expectations, and even verbal abuse. Signs that are more concerning are threats or breaking an object for example saying they will throw the lamp at you and smash it on the ground.