long term effects of emotional abuse and scapegoating

Hi there,

Just joined!

Am in my 40s and have had an extremely traumatic life due to long term emotional abuse as a child. I cannot understand why it look me well into my 40s, and the death of my own child, to confront and face my family and how they had treated me. I am an intelligent and insightful person and am so angry with myself that i did not fight back sooner. In my heart I knew that if I ever did fight back, my family would reject and turn their back on me. This is what happened even though I lost my child three years ago. They do not even acknowledge the anniversary of her death. I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has suffered extreme emotional abuse. Somehow this is harden to define and therefore less spoken about than sexual and physical abuse.

Hi,


I am not in a similar situation but I was just interested in your post. I understand your frustration at having not confronted the problem of abuse sooner but you have a clear life ahead of you now. Just try to rebuild a solid and happy life and use your experience to help others in similar problems that you had.

Hi Michelle,

I'm 29 and I suffered emotional abuse from my stepfather as a child. I was just in fact browsing the web to find the elusive answers to my questions and stumbled across this web site and saw your post.

Emotional abuse is a hard one to carry because all our scars are on the inside and such is the nature of the abuse it makes you question yourself to whether it even really happened or whether you deserved what happened.

I thought I'd pretty much put it out of my mind and put it down to me being a child from a previous marriage until my half sister, who's nine years younger began to tell me at the end of last year some of the things that happened to her and that then blew all my reasoning out of the window and also brought back and confirmed the things that happened to me. Plus anger and wanting to confront him (which I still haven't yet managed, although I have many dreams about it!)

I then decided I should seek professional advice. I went for an initial consulation with a NHS counseller and she told me it was rare to find emotional abuse without either suffering sexual or physical abuse. I often thought to myself before that people experiencing the later were far worse, especially as I've seen my partner try to come to terms with sexual abuse as a child. The counseller reasurred me that despite being less common emotional abuse is on an equal par and can be more damaging. She informed me that abuse like ours manifests itself later in life often by significant events such as the birth of a child. I am so sorry to hear of your loss and it must be hard to not only deal with this but to deal with your past issues as well.

I did not follow up my counselling because the waiting list was so long but I'm thinking now I should go privately I think it'll be hard but just from that initial consultation it made me feel I could learn to cope better. The one thing she said that stuck in my mind was when she said "Remember you were the child and they were the adults" which helps me cope sometimes when I'm trying to answer the "why?" question.

So it does exist, just it's not that common. I hope this has in some way helped.

Philomena
x

Hi Michelle, Welcome to PsychForums.

No matter what age you were abused, or how long it's affected you etc you will never forget it hon. I'm sorry for your loss and what you have been through abuse wise.

Have you ever gone and sought out therapy to deal with this?

Thank you so much for your reply and support. I am working through everything at the moment, and trying to make sense of, and understand exactly what was done to me and how it made me feel and affected me over my life. It is not an easy thing to do or to understand. We DO question ourselves - are we oversensitive? did we imagine it? is what happened normal behavoiur etc etc. it is like finding out the most shocking secret about something or someone that you have known for years, and suddenly you find out that the person was not the person you thought they were. Except in this case the person is your mother and sister (in my case), or brother, father whatever. I am just beginning to understand the capacity of the human mind to block things - it is quite amazing and makes me see things in such a different light. The mind is such a complex and complicated thing. My mother, herself was the product of an alcoholic father and a cold, hard mother. i understand that she (my mother) has probably got no understanding whatsoever of how that must have affected her, so how can i possibly expect her to admit (let alone understand) what she did to me? Yet I am not excusing her and will never forgive her - I loathe and despise her in fact. The difference between her and me is that I love my children unconditionally, and would do ANYTHING within my capacity to make them happy and safe. She did the opposite.

Finding a good therapist is, I believe imperative. I wish I had seen one years ago because it is far too difficult to unravel something like this on your own. Please get help.

It is interesting that your therapist said that emotional abuse is less common. I wonder if that is true or it is just that it is harder to recognise and articulate.

I wish you strength and support. There is another good website but I think I need permission before posting it. Watch this space!

Love Michelle