A Deeper Look at Emotional Abuse and its Effects

Emotional Abuse and its effects are not irreversible. You can overcome them with help and much work.

Welcome to our website. We hope you find the answers you are looking for with this situation in your life or with your friends or family. In this section, we are going to talk about the general emotional Abuse and its effects and the various ways it remains in our lives. Pain and suffering do not end the second the abuser leaves us and the relationship ceases.

The terrible thing about this type of abuse is that the energy remains within us to abuse ourselves further the rest of our life. As our original abuser leaves and the first abuse setting fades away, we tend to replace it with another abuser and another setting of helplessness of our own creation. Emotional Abuse and its effects remain as a pattern for the majority of our life if we do not consciously change it.

This replication process happens for several reasons. The first reason is that is the way our own subconscious mind tries to finish its unfinished business. That which we try to escape and run away from, is exactly that which we build for ourselves to go into to escape! Second, it is a way for us to borrow virtue. When we feel that we have no virtue within ourselves, we can ‘borrow’ it by becoming a victim.

The popular perception of all victims is that they are innocent and without blame. By ourselves becoming victim to an abuser, we put ourselves on a platform where we deserve sympathy, and love, if only from within ourselves. By being a victim, we have a calling card of virtue we can reach out to the outside world around us with and plead for sympathy. “Look how cruelly my husband or boss is treating me!”

It is also a way to replicate the security and the boundaries of childhood, in which we felt very secure. While we feel secure as abused victims, we imprison ourselves in our worlds as adults. The end we hope for is that our abuser someday will break down, give us apologies, love, and finally give us the approval for which we seek. We hope someday they will understand how hurt we are, how much we need them to love us, so we can leave.

The very fact the abuser is withholding approval from us ties us ever stronger to the abuser because we feel we need their approval to go our own way on in life. They being a wise abuser know this, so they keep us in rejection and abuse so we cannot leave. For the victim the strongest effect is the need to replicate relationships in which abuse continues. These relationships may be our boyfriends, spouses, employers, church leaders, husbands, coaches, or our original parents themselves, by not ever leaving home, even into adulthood.

The strongest effect for the abuser is to seek out and find other victims to abuse. Abusers see victims as a way to balance justice for them selves as they right some wrong done to them earlier in life. Abusers need to control other people who they despise. They feel anger at something about which they are not supposed to feel angry. Where this unusual agenda comes from is their parents abusing them as children.

Feeling popular is big with abusers, for they need to be looked up to by their victims. Child abusers need someone to need them for approval, and for help in life. They need to exercise control over someone because they feel like ‘outsiders in life’ otherwise. All abusers desperately need a victim to need them, and oftentimes will expend their whole life’s energies making their victim need them to see, think, feel, make decisions, and carry out all daily tasks for them. The abuser’s life consists of living for their victims in the abusive relationship.

Emotional abuse primarily involves the dynamic of violation of boundaries. Abuse starts with the taking away of the primal boundaries of your personhood. Those boundaries are your rights to see things through your own eyes, to feel your own feelings, to think your own thoughts, and to make your own choices. Once this experience has happened to us in our childhood, either by abuse or by omission of a primal caregiver, such as lack of a parent, it tends to replicate in adulthood, unless we change the cycle ourselves.

We will replicate it by becoming either an abuser or a victim. The two postures are not exclusive of each other. At some point we may become abused by an employer or church leader, and be an abuser to our spouse or children as well, and at the same time.

The next effect of emotional abuse is that we seek out like-minded others in which to carry out our abuse cycles. We date, marry, parent, join churches and social groups with, seek employment, move into neighborhoods with, and carry out our business transactions with similar abusive personalities like our own. The result of this effect is that abusive tendency personalities all create their own world around them to suit their template of reality. That template is, ‘life is rough and we all need to stay together to survive’.

Have you ever driven through a community or a neighborhood and wondered why all the people there are the same? It is not just because of economic status that we all live in neighborhoods with neighbors similar to us. We seek out settings with the same emotional posture as we are. We seek out employment where as much as possible the bosses and co-workers mirror our own emotional health.

Emotionally abused persons do the exactly the same thing. They will seek out a repressed area with high crime to live in, even though they may be able to afford better, because they feel comfortable there. When you ask them why, they will make up something like, ‘the better neighborhood is to snobby’, or other excuse. What they mean is they do not feel they deserve the better neighborhood.

Sadly, the last characteristic of Emotional Abuse and its effects is its resistance to change. The strength of the denial posture and powerful feelings of shame that most victims hold within make it almost impossible to cure. There is one good thing, for over time, some of us mature out of the cycles of pain that we are bringing on our selves.

We get tired of our helplessness and poverty and slowly we reach out subconsciously. We start getting more intolerant of our abuser, and we back off from the possessiveness of our victims. The most important way we change is we start to find better relationships to help us with our life.

What this indicates is we are becoming more aware of who we are as a deified person and of the existence of our primal boundaries, and what they are. If you or some friend or family members are experiencing such changes, we rejoice with you.

Oftentimes change must be forced upon the abuser, and the victim to create change by the courts through legal action. However, rarely abusers may come forward on their own for no external reason and share their problems in a church or to friends in an attempt to make a change. This is always a good sign as it indicates an internal growth, if this happens.

If you have experienced emotional abuse, or are in the company of someone who has, we rejoice in you choosing to seek help. The first step in overcoming Emotional Abuse and its effects in your life is to share it with trusted others. Your desire to heal indicates your heart is changing, and this changed heart you are gaining has the power to locate other nurturing hearts that will help you to heal.

Trust your new choices of friends and reach out to others whom you seek. Trust your gut feelings about others and do not go back to old relationships, who may be poisoners. The effects of Emotional Abuse do not have to be a part of your future, as they have been a part of your past. Learn from that situation and move on.

We would love to hear from you and pray for your growth or that of your loved ones. We promise to answer each Email personally. We wish you every success in you or your loved ones’ journey back to wellness and empowerment.

We wish God blessings on you and yours.

For more on this subject please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch.

This book specifically addresses emotional abuse and relationship issues, and God's intended lessons behind it. This is the ultimate book on your type of situation.

Thank your for visiting!

Shayne and Lori North in Aurora, Colorado

Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book

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