Gaslighting?
Emotional abuse is a type of abuse that is often overlooked and dismissed as less serious than physical abuse. However, as mentioned in my previous post, the effects of emotional abuse have been proven to cause brain damage. The effects can be more long-lasting than physical abuse. Emotional abuse can take many forms, such as criticizing, belittling, insulting, threatening, gaslighting, and manipulating.
Today I would like to address depression. The effects of emotional abuse impacted my mental health, self-esteem, and relationships. I found that trusting people became very difficult. I was imploding and I didn't understand why I constantly felt anxious, hopeless, and believed I was not good enough. I even entertain the thought that I deserved to be treated poorly. My ex-husband often blamed me for a lot of the problems in the marriage. When you constantly hear something over and over again until you get a new truth, that lie becomes your reality.
Depression was a big issue for me. The emotional abuse came in the form of constant public belittling in a passive-aggressive joking way. This often insured that it almost went undetected. My ex often told his comments were meant as a joke. Personal things were made public to humiliate me.
Gaslighting was often used as a tool to belittle and control me. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse in which a person manipulates another individual to doubt their own memories, perceptions or sanity. It typically involves a pattern of deceptive or manipulative behavior with the goal of making the victim feel like they are losing their grip on reality.
The term ‘gaslighting’ comes from the 1938 play and later movie Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she is going insane by interfering with her environment and then denying that anything has changed.
The effects of gaslighting were devastating to me. In the marriage, I literally felt that I was going insane. This led to suicidal thoughts, ideations, and an attempt. I didn't have language for it at the time. I didn't know it was emotional abuse. When I got out of the marriage, I was suddenly flooded with anxiety, depression, self-doubt, confusion, and a loss of trust in myself.
It took a lot of counselling and therapy to get to a place where I could begin to understand what happened to me, heal, tell my story, and help others. I am still on that journey.
Emotional abuse it's not taken as seriously as physical. I intend to shed as much light on this subject from my own personal experience in the hopes that others who are suffering can be saved. There is education out there it's just not as prominent as physical abuse education.
As I mentioned from my other posts if there are warnings and red flags that you simply cannot ignore, please don't soldier through it. Please seek out help. Here are a few links below that can at least start you on your journey. Please speak to your GP they will also have other avenues of help which you can access.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/getting-help-for-domestic-violence/
https://mensadviceline.org.uk/
Please consider joining me to fight this problem and eradicate abuse from relationships once and for all. No one should ever have to suffer abuse in a relationship. There are no exceptions.
If you are able to, please can you consider donating to my go fund me campaign. The more people that are made aware the quicker we can stop this from happening in relationships. Please click the link below and thank you in advance for your support.
More from me soon.
