9 Signs You Had An Emotionally Abusive Parent (According to Mayra Mendez — a Psychotherapist)
You can come out of your childhood traumas and live a happier and better life.
“Emotional abuse is behaviors by caregivers that include verbal and emotional assault such as continually criticizing, humiliating, belittling or berating a child, as well as isolating, ignoring, or rejecting a child. Emotional abuse results in injury to a child’s self-esteem and damages a child’s emotional or psychological well-being.” — Mayra Mendez- psychotherapist
Have you got the love of your parents?
Blessed are those who get the love of their parents. There are millions of people who have parents but haven’t seen the love of parents. They have seen no blessing in the shape of parents, rather they have experienced the horrors at the hands of their abusive parents.
Unfortunately, some parents do more harm to their children's mental and physical health than any good. Parents' harsh and indifferent behavior leads to their low-self esteem and lack of confidence in their children.
Throughout their lives, they never know how to react to certain relations, as they trust no one. They are often confused when they see parents love their children. They find it unreal because the reality of parental love for them has always been a false dream and a nightmare in reality.
A study conducted by the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences in 2014 finds that abusive parents have caused mental problems in adolescence and young adults. Another study conducted by Child Abuse & Neglect in 2015 linked impulsive behavior and addiction with childhood emotional abuse.
I don’t blame parents for their abusive behavior. Maybe they were treated similarly, and they unknowingly exposed their abusive behavior, thinking it’s the right way to treat children. Some parents aren’t educated, and they don’t know what they are doing.
However, not all children exhibit are affected in the same way. Some children are more flexible and accommodative. They quickly get out of that mental prison and heal themselves when they reach an age. But others dwell in their past, and the abusive memories shape their entire personality. They can’t get out of it.
If you also think you lack confidence and self-esteem, read these 15 signs to determine if your parents were abusive. However, these signs are not presented here to tell how your parents were abusive alone but also to give you a new perspective to avoid dealing with others, especially your children, in an abusive manner.
1. You view things pessimistically
Childhood negativity affects your perception of life as you grow old. You develop a pessimistic view about things, and you always focus on the dark aspects of things. This is because your parents have shown the bleak aspects of things to you.
Mendez says about this as:
“Long-term exposure to negativity and personal attacks damages the foundation of hope. A negative self-perception is created and solidified over time.”
2. You find it difficult to have healthy relations with others
We develop our first relations with parents. If they are aggressive and unable to keep their relation smooth, it affects us the whole life. We grew up in a passive-aggressive house where our parents fought and never compromised with each other.
Their simmering tension creeps into our life indirectly because we grow up seeing them thus. Their unhealthy relationship has a ripple effect on our life that makes us averse to relationships.
If it’s hard for you to keep a healthy relationship, it’s because you have lived with abusive parents. You have learned it from their behavior.
“The ability to engage in healthy relationship patterns is informed by strength in social-emotional competence. When children experience emotionally abusive caregiving, trust is compromised, and the ability to engage in and maintain healthy relationships is impaired.” — Mendez
3. You have learned to repress your emotions
Children develop emotional repression from their parents to deal with their abusers. They develop emotional repression through coping mechanisms to ignore the certain feelings they don’t want to experience. And they do it to bring balance to their lives, but this repression mechanism makes it difficult for them to associate with others when they grow up.
If you also repress your emotions, chances are, you have lived with abusive parents.
“Children learn to repress emotions to survive the pain of the emotional attacks. Shutting down feelings is necessary for psychological survival.” — Mendez
4. You have low self-esteem
Low self-esteem is the product of the constant discouragement you face at the hands of your parents. They always criticize you and discourage you. Not only that, but they also scold you, taunt you and give you verbal hurts all the time.
Because of constant disparage, you develop a sense that you are not worthy of anything. You grow with these feelings that destroy your personality in adulthood if you don’t control these feelings.
“Persistent exposure to belittling, berating, name-calling, and verbal punishment breaks down a child’s sense of competence and forms a foundation of self-doubt, self-hatred, and worthlessness. Emotional abuse shatters hope, pride, and motivation. There is considerable risk of mental health challenges such as depression or poor capacity for functional emotional regulation.” — Mendez
5. You are an attention seeker
This is not strictly related to it, as we all want to focus on the attention a little bit. But if you are after it excessively, you have an underlying problem. This is because you search for the emotional validation you didn’t get as a child from your parents.
That’s why you seek it in other ways to get attention to avoid the sense of being deprived.
“A child who does not receive praise, acknowledgment or acceptance, grows up longing for connections and seeking positive attention. Emotional abuse starves a child of necessary love and affection, often resulting in over-reaching for validation from others and excessive approval-seeking behaviors.”
6. You crave parental approval
Working hard and achieving some things isn’t negative at all. It’s one of the best qualities of those who we deem productive and achievers. But being an overachiever is a problem.
You always try to achieve a goal that is sometimes difficult to achieve. And this struggle gets expedited with every achievement. You develop a sort of megalomania in achieving things that often lead to evil.
Dawn Friedman, a psychologist, says:
“They chase approval and acclaim by striving academically or professionally. While the praise they get for performing well might make them feel better temporarily, it’s fleeting, and so they end up chasing something that’s forever out of reach — the parental approval they crave.”
Friedman is of the view that this is not a realistic approach to life. Instead of becoming an overachiever, which has myriads of negative effects on your well-being, make realistic decisions to live a better life.
7. You feel depressed after interacting with your parents
Well, it’s often normal to feel a little tense or heavy while interacting with your parents if they are big personalities. But feeling depressed all time when you meet or talk to them is not normal.
According to Friedman, if you feel depressed or drained after interacting with your parents, they are emotionally abusive.
“It’s a cultural norm that relationships with families of origin are burdensome but they shouldn’t be. Sure, the people we’re related to maybe annoying or ridiculous but if you find that your functioning dips when you spend time with them (and that includes phone calls), that’s a sign that those relationships are toxic.”
8. You have a hidden rivalry with your siblings
This happens when your parents compare you with your siblings. And parents do that. When parents compare their children, they keep them at odds always.
The comparison makes the siblings enemy, even if they have a sibling love for each other.
If you feel that your brother or sister is ahead of you and makes you tense and depressed, the sign shows that you were excessively compared with your siblings when you were young.
“Instead of your parent highlighting your strengths, your weaknesses were brought to the forefront in relation to the supposed virtues of your siblings. This is not only painful in terms of self-esteem, but it can also hinder the relationship you could have had with your siblings because it turns it into a rivalry.” — Brown
9. Your parents invade your privacy
Setting boundaries and keeping them intact makes relations healthy. But someone tries to invade them openly, especially your parents; they put you in a precarious situation.
Invading a child’s privacy makes him feel guilty and insignificant. It also reduces trust between parents and children.
There are other ways parents can use to monitor their children. It’s also important for a parent to keep children safe, but it shouldn’t make the children feel like they are being watched all the time.
“A parent may ‘snoop’ at computers or cell phones or check journals or calendars to find information of the child being ‘sneaky’ or ‘suspicious’. The parent will accuse a child of being sneaky, projecting on the child their own behavior.” — Bahar
We all suffer at the hands of parents sometimes. But that’s because our parents want us to be better people and live a better life. But sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, our parents become the abusers. They might have their own problems, but parents should practice restraint and patience and not transfer their anger, deprivation, sense of loss, and failure into their children.
If you feel like you have low self-esteem, cannot take stringent decisions, feel insignificant, feel guilty, and are constantly under pressure, or can’t hold your nerve under dire situations, the chances are that you have lived with abusive parents.
But, there is no need to worry. You can mend your ways. You can come out of those fears, failures, and emotional indifference has given to you by your parents.
If you want to come out of your situation and remove the mark left by your parents or other family members of emotional and verbal abuse, you can do it. The best way is to:
- Make friendships with good people. People who can understand you.
- Avoid people who remind you of your past situations or belittle you.
- Do exercise and engage yourself in healthy activities.
- Practice yoga or any other emotional balancing activity that makes you feel calm and relaxed most of the time.
- Recall the good of your parents and avoid how harsh they were to you.
- Enjoy the freedom you have gained as an adult and live in the present.
- Gain more skills and always try to improve your personality.
- Read books. They have a surprising power to make you feel better.
- Make happiness, well-being, and productivity your goals, not a thing that leads to a stop.
- Practice contentment and be happy with what you have.
If you follow the above steps, it will take time, but you will surely get out of your childhood traumas. I have achieved immense results. These are not some researched tips. But I have followed tips to come out of the memories of childhood abuse and live a better life.
