If you’ve been through a divorce, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, or a toxic relationship with anyone — parent, boss, or partner, it’s safe to say you’ve experienced some emotional abuse.
As a divorced person, I’ve realized that emotional abuse sits between two opposite dimensions: Catastrophizing and diminishing.
Victims often catastrophize, while onlookers and people close to the victims diminish it.
Meaning the victim gives it too much emotional and mental energy (Hey, I’m not judging. I’ve been there too), and everyone else thinks,
“Okay, you’ve mulled on this for far too long. Is this the hill you will die on? Move on already.”
These two — catastrophizing and diminishing can make it incredibly difficult for a victim to heal quickly and completely.
This is a good place to break down what it means to go through emotional abuse.
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According to a team of experts who work with individuals struggling with depression and mental health, you’re emotionally abused if:
You feel confused, scared, and not like yourself when surrounded by a spouse or family member.
You doubt yourself whenever you have conversations with them.
You feel that without them, you are nothing and can’t accomplish anything.
You lose your sense of independence and self-worth.
You feel trapped in a relationship.
Thankfully, there are five things you can do to help yourself heal.
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Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash
Stop waiting for the person who hurt you to be responsible for your healing process.
I see too many people — women especially — trying to pin down their abusers to make them know how they made them feel.
They hold out the fragments of their heart and say,
“Do you see how you broke me when you did this and that? How you tore me into pieces every time you said this and this? Do you feel bad about it? Does it make you feel sorry?”
You know what I think,
For starters, get a grip. Pick yourself up, wipe out that snort, and reclaim your dignity.
I know closure is a powerful thing, but why seek healing/validation from the very person who ripped your heart to shreds?
You need to accept that they will never acknowledge the wrongs they did to you, no matter how many years fall off the calendar.
And in fact, opening yourself up this way can be the fuel that makes them feel good about themselves.
What’s the best way to show them that what they did was wrong?
No longer accept their behavior towards you. Draw boundaries and stick to them.
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Closure doesn’t come from seeing the person who hurt you go through pain.
It comes from accepting your own experience, however difficult that may be.
I still recall when the dark cloud hung over my life those many years ago. I was fresh out of a failed marriage with an infant straddled on my arm.
As I held him, I told myself that I needed to be emotionally strong for him because even then, I knew it was dangerous to bring up a baby when broken on the inside.
I had seen too many divorced parents infect their children with the effects of their trauma.
As I worked through my pain, I kept wishing my ex-husband could feel the sting of pain I felt at the time because it would give me closure.
If wishes were horses…
Then out of nowhere, I stumbled upon a book that shifted everything for me. And I mean everything. A beam of light suddenly cut through the darkness in my soul.
The author said the best way to get emotional healing is to stop trying to convince the mind of the person who hurt you and to change your own mind.
For me, this meant rather than wishing my husband could feel the pain I was feeling, I needed to focus more on my own healing process. I needed to change the way I looked at my situation.
The truth is, anyone who hurts you doesn’t care about you or how their actions affect you. They never did in the first place. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. They are immune to other people’s feelings.
So trying to make them feel what you’re feeling only pushes you deeper into the emotional black hole.
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Stop wasting time feeling jealous of the next person they end up with.
Every time a relationship breaks down, it chips away at something inside us and makes us feel inferior. We instantly start wondering how and what the next person our exes date will be. How different they will be from us.
We get this urge to want to compare ourselves with them to see where we fell short and why that person left us.
At times, victims of emotional abuse go so far as to stalk the new partners of their exes.
Here’s what I wish they understood: Your ex will repeat the same abusive and destructive cycle time and time again.
They are incapable of behaving differently with any other person because that’s just who they are.
So the emotion here shouldn’t be jealousy but sympathy for the next person. You know what I mean?
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Find a way to start trusting yourself again.
I’ve seen too many women get intertwined in string after string of messy relationships.
Initially, I thought they were ignorant of the harm they were causing themselves, but later I realized it wasn’t that at all.
The cycles repeated themselves mainly because these women had stopped trusting themselves.
They didn’t trust themselves to choose better partners.
They didn’t trust themselves enough to know what they wanted in a relationship.
They didn’t trust themselves to stay on their own if it came to that.
Abusers manipulate you into trusting them over yourself because they know the minute you start trusting yourself, it’s impossible to control you.
When you’ve been abused, you spend too much time believing it was your own fault. And the problem with guilt, when left unchecked, is that it transforms into self-doubt and spills over into other aspects of your life.
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Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash
Letting go doesn’t happen at once.
I wish I could say you’ll walk away and never remember that person ever again.
I wish I could tell you that their memory will remain dead and buried in a faraway land, and they’d never be able to slip through the walls you’ve created ever again.
But? I’d be lying.
You see, there’s letting go. And there’s the real letting go.
And crap is tough.
It latches on your heart, and just when you think it’s gone, you feel its claws again.
It’s insidious, and you must train yourself to combat it every day until things start to feel better.
You’ll need to let go every time past memories of your lovey-dovey days come floating to the shores of your conscience.
You’ll need to let go every time people ask you about the person who used to be in your life.
You have to let go each time you see other relationships still going strong.
But you have to remember that though it takes time, it gets easier.
So extend yourself some grace.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Kyle Cleveland on Unsplash