What It Takes To Heal From Emotional Abuse
If you want to heal from emotional abuse, you may want to start with your childhood. Emotional abuse often has roots going all the way back to early development. Emotional abuse of children can result in serious emotional and behavioral problems, including depression, lack of attachment, low cognitive ability, and poor social skills – all things that affect adult life and especially adult relationships.
Some studies suggest that children who were emotionally abused are found to grow up into angry and uncooperative adults, lacking in creativity and enthusiasm.
Modeling is especially important here, because the child may either imitate violent behavior, or learn that being abused is normal. These learned roles are very hard to reverse, especially in adulthood, where they lay the foundation for adult relationships.
Angry and violent emotional abuse, such as blaming, ridiculing, insulting, swearing and humiliation contribute to feelings of uselessness, worthlessness and self-blame. Witnessing or experiencing emotional abuse in the household would have taught her how to react to abuse. It is important to recognize this behavior and learn how to reverse it.
Emotional abuse can result in serious physical and mental issues for the victim, including digestion problems, bone and muscle conditions, frequent migraines, and severe depression/anxiety.
In order to heal from emotional abuse we need to bear in mind the following:
- Become aware of your situation, call abuse as abuse and stop accepting his “tough love”.
- Change is like anything else in life; you have to earn it. Nobody is going to rescue you if you don't want to be.
- Gather information about abuse and what it looks like from books and websites.
- Research how and when abusive relationships occur so that you can avoid them later.
- Begin building a support system by reaching out to community resources.
- A professional advisor who is educated in abusive relationships is always your best resource.
What does it take to move forward after emotional abuse?
In order to live a happy and peaceful life, we need to learn ways to achieve and meet our needs and goals in an ethical and healthy manner; we need to receive sound affection, we need to be accepted and respected for who we are, we need to be able to meet our basic needs (material, emotional, spiritual, professional, etc.), we need to feel we can reach our goals in life successfully, and achieve every task we carry on (study, work, career, etc.) without feeling threatened by others.
Grown adults need to recognize and process childhood abuse in order to move forward and function in a normal, healthy relationship. If you don't know where you've been, and have come to terms with it, it is hard to move forward and know where you're going.
Nora Femenia, PH.D is passionate about supporting women’s recovery from emotional abuse once and for all. Nora has created a powerful set of tools for helping women break out of the mind-set that keeps them in a toxic relationship by first discovering unconscious beliefs and family blueprints.
To know more about her latest book “Recovering From Emotionally Abusive Relationships” please visit http://www.healingemotionalabuse.com
