When we talk about violence within relationships, thought automatically turns towards forms of physical or sexual aggression.
Yet violence can occur in many forms, some of which are not visible. Just think of the offenses, the criticisms, the accusations, the lack of respect, the devaluation, the lie, the blackmail, the control of personal freedom. These are some of the forms with which the psychological violence.
For psychological violence, in fact, a subtle form of mistreatment is meant which has as its common element a mechanism of abuse that over time undermines the personal value, the sense of identity, dignity and self -esteem of another person.
There psychological violence It is something real: a real emotional abuse.
It often happens to us psychotherapists to meet people who live the profound suffering of what can mean certain words said by a partner, a employer, a parent or who for them. Yet in the collective imagination there is the idea that psychological violence is something more admissible, or in any case a violence of lower severity.
Differences between physical and psychological violence
It is true that who exercises psychological violence It is not used to affect or get to other forms of physical damage. It can also use these forms, but not necessarily.
Psychological violence mostly uses words as a weapon. Since words are not a weapon in the strict sense, people who exercise psychological violence believe either not to make violence or in any case to use a form of violence very different from the physical one.
If physical violence is objective to the point of often leaving visible damage on the body, the psychological violence enters the area of subjectivity. This can represent fertile ground for non -recognition and non -validation of how much a relational model genres anguish and suffering in victims.
How to recognize psychological violence
Psychological violence does not have a specifically defined aspect: behaviors, in addition to being disparate, may vary in intensity, frequency, are more manifest or more hidden.
One thing is certain: It is not a single episode. In fact, it presents itself over time as a model of recursive behavior and the characteristic of repetitiveness justifies the psychological impact on the victim. This feels more and more harnessed in the adult network.
Let’s try below to provide a list of psychologically violent behaviors in order to identify the various forms with which psychological violence is agitated:
Humiliation and criticism
- Continuous devaluation of work, studies, interests, results achieved as if they meant nothing or were considered something not relevant;
- From negative comments on clothing we move to real insults to the person by resorting to a language aimed at diminishing the other and making him feel small and insignificant;
- Constant attempts to act in a higher and better way than the other also by resorting to sarcasm and ridiculed in social situations.
Check
- movements and claim to an immediate response to calls or messages;
- Internet, social networks, emails, messages and calls to monitor social interactions;
- tendency to give orders and lessons on what is right to do in different areas, for example from dressing to eating, choosing the clothes to wear when it comes out or saying that you do not eat something because not greet;
- unpredictability of behavior: moments of great affectivity and kindness alternate with explosions of anger that leave the victim confused and disoriented;
- Pathological jealousy: tendency to exercise a domain and possession of the other.
Accusations and denial
- tendency to attribute to the victim the cause of their anger and their behavior;
- destabilization of the victim through the denial of facts that really happened (Gaslighing): The victim pushes himself to doubt herself through a communicative strategy aimed at making her believe she is crazy;
- NEXT OF THE OBUSE: every time the victim tries to complain about their treatment and their attacks, they will deny or in any case accuse of having reacted excessively, accusing her of taking everything too seriously or of not having any sense of humor.
Emotional neglect and isolation
- Tactic of silence: tendency to stop communication ignoring the attempts to dialogue;
- indifference to suffering and the need for help because he was judged as excessive;
- tendency to isolate the victim through a discredit of all nearby people (family or friends), or by putting them against him by appealing to his psychological instability.
What are the consequences of psychological violence
You feel like physically affected every time the other uses words against us. It often happens that the other acts his anger by annihilating the victim with the only force of words.
He speaks and this is sufficient to let his power break out, leaving the victim in silence, flooded by fear. Defense and silent, the victim finds himself listening to the other ending up tracing every detail of what he says to how wrong there is in what he is, as a person.
It feels impotent recognizing that he has no necessary weapon to face that battle. All that remains is to wait for it to end as soon as possible.
Yet the one who exercises psychological violence It seems not to show signs of end by perpetrating in a relational model tirelessly. In fact, the abusant continues aggressively to shout poison while the victim remains paralyzed, witness of those constant accusations and the mistakes made.
All that remains is to bow your head even if this seems to strengthen the vulnerability and sense of inferiority of the victim. Once again, yet another, the victim memorizes every detail of the way in which the other expresses those words and every time it survives this experience dies a little inside.
You feel helpless, without exit, trampled in your identity, dignity and personal value. Hence the emotions of anxiety, fault and shame that can evolve up to pathologies such as greater depressive disorder, sleep disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Psychological violence and self -esteem of the victim
One of the main consequences of psychological violence concerns thenegative impact on self -esteem and on the sense of self.
The victim tends to feel guilty, as if he was constantly doing something wrong or, worse still, as if there was something deeply wrong in her to receive similar treatment.
Try shame, he feels in the lack, as if it were something that is up to her. This makes it difficult to talk about it and ask for help. Often the words of the abusant resonate inside the victims as something known, familiar. As an expression of what has been learned in their life history.
Here the meeting with someone who abuses emotionally of them will represent the confirmation that it is all they deserve.
The growing insecurity due to the violence suffered and the constant erosion of self -esteem It makes it difficult to question the relationship. Thus triggers a spiral that makes the victim more and more dependent on the abusant.
Hence the tendency to diminish the psychologically violent behavior and to change the victim’s behavior in order to avoid certain consequences by feeding the emotional abuse that will be increasingly an integral part of the relationship.
How to react to psychological violence
Why let the effects of similar attacks be part of one’s life? How long to continue to bear? How long to continue allowing to fill your self -esteem of offenses, criticisms, humiliations?
These are some of the questions that we usually ask ourselves when we deal with people victims of psychological violence. The people around them tend to admonish them also ending them to make them feel wrong in not being able to distance these people. As if the victims intentionally chose to bind themselves to people who want to destroy them!
Emotional abuse, like any other form of violence, thrives in darkness when no one understands it, speaks or recognizes it.
To get out of these difficult relational situations, the most complicated part is to recognize that what is experiencing is something toxic to free yourself from which it is necessary to ask for help.
React to psychological violence It is not easy, especially when many deep emotions are involved. But it is a necessary step to find serenity and happiness and get out of a psychological trap disguised as love.
