Psychologically & Emotionally Abusive Parents

Help Us Help Others:

Psychologically and/or emotionally abusive parents have a way of cunningly turning the tables on their victim and making their attacks all about their target. The child isn’t being verbally battered, the parents imagine, they are being “put in their place.” A parent isn’t being unduly harsh; they’re merely “stating the obvious.” They’re not attacking a child’s self-esteem, the child is simply “too sensitive.” The parent isn’t acting abusively or irrationally, the child is a flawed vessel who draws the parent’s ire, and therefore, is deserving of such treatment. It’s the child’s own fault. “I wouldn’t be this way if you weren’t so…” is the general message.

The psychologically and emotionally abusive parent

“Parents cannot easily be charged with emotional and verbal abuse; interventions by teachers or social workers are often dismissed as overreactions to parenting style. ‘That’s how I grew up and it didn’t hurt me at all,’ or ‘He’s a bad kid. If I don’t tell him, who will?’  These are common responses from parents…”
– Andrew Slaby & Lili Frank Garfinkel (1994, pp. 88-9)

Only someone who’s endured such an environment can fully appreciate the psychology of it. It’s the same psychology that has women who are beaten by their husbands believing they deserved the abuse or brought it upon themselves. It warps a person’s social perspectives and redefines the individual according to what the abusive person says they are. If verbal abuse can cause such devastation to an adult’s reality and core assumptions about the world, imagine how much more so they affect the inexperienced child, who has little choice but to assimilate these beliefs into their core perceptions.

“In therapy, I really learned how much I disliked Carly. When we began, soon after her overdose, Carly, Will, and I went twice, sometimes three times a week. It was tough. Carly directed her anger only at me – how she could never please me, how I had never wanted her to be born. She said that I would rather have had an abortion than have her. Carly brought up fights we’d had when she was eleven or twelve, every painful word I’d said, no matter what she had done to provoke me. Months earlier we had talked about one of her friends who had gained a lot of weight. At the time, I commented to her on how unappealing she looked. It was after that, Carly said, that she decided to get thin so that I could never be critical of her weight. She believed the reason I didn’t want her to have a boyfriend was that I couldn’t stand it that anyone else would like her. It was all her interpretation, and in therapy I couldn’t defend myself. It brought out all my feelings of resentment toward her. I began to believe that I had failed her, that maybe I really didn’t love her.”

– Carly’s mother, quoted from Slaby & Garfinkel (1994, p. 40)

The quote above illustrates several of the principles discussed in this chapter. It’s an example of how children can remember a single crushing statement and be hurt by it even years later. It shows the powerful emotions that such verbal barbs can provoke. But most of all, it shows how clueless emotionally abusive parents can be when it comes to their behaviors.

There are several red flags in this woman’s statement that jump out to the trained eye and suggest a large degree of emotional abuse. First, she admits to disliking her daughter in one sentence and then in another seems surprised and appalled that the girl would direct all her anger towards her. No doubt Carly sensed her mother’s resentment and was deeply troubled by it, creating a dark cloud over the parent-child relationship. She seems surprised that her daughter should remember “every painful word I’ve said,” as though a parent figure should be able to abuse a child during a conflict and then have the child forget about it a moment later. Clearly, she doesn’t realize the power of her words. The way she brushes off critical statements about a friend’s weight and the extreme way Carly reacted to it (the girl developed an eating disorder, ever trying to earn the approval of her critical mother) suggest that A) She was probably a very critical parent, and B) She has no idea that this type of nagging criticism is anything harmful or unusual. It’s the classic profile of an emotional abuser – cutting their children to pieces while acting surprised that others should react to it in the way they do, and having very little comprehension about just how hurtful their statements can be.

So where is Carly today? After years of battling mental health problems, she killed herself as a teenager, her spirit having been cut down and shredded by verbal and emotional abuse. Sadly, this, too, is not an uncommon outcome for psychologically abused children.

Carly’s mom was not an evil person, and we don’t intend to pick on this woman personally. There’s a very good chance she grew up with such emotional abuse herself. But through her barbed tongue she did more damage than most physical abusers or child molesters ever could. It is absolutely critical that those close to such parents do everything they can to help them recognize the damage done by such statements and help them change their behavior. It is not “no big deal” or the child’s fault for being “too sensitive,” and a parent has no right to “speak their mind” if what’s on their mind is going to injure and abuse a child.

Verbal/emotional abuse is the most destructive type of child abuse, and we need to start intervening . . . in productive, non-condemning ways, of course. It’s doubtful you’d stand by and think it to be “no big deal” if a child was being viciously raped. Don’t turn your back if an adult is raping them emotionally.

See also:


Help Us Help Others: