Psychological Abuse Can Be Just As Damaging As Physical Abuse
My dad almost killed me, but he loved to brag that he never hit me.
I rather reluctantly sit down on the sunken, worn, sandpaper colored couch across the room from my new therapist.
I’m here because — at age 29, with an impressive career, a healthy and loving eight-year relationship, a stable and safe home, a robust group of wonderful friends, time and space to pursue my passions and dreams, and a psychiatrist and treatment plan that have tamed the devil that is my ADHD — I still can’t put my finger on the root of the anxiety that grips me daily. It’s an anxiety that I can’t shake as it wraps me up in its familiar symptoms, all while my life on the outside seems increasingly more evolved, creating a dissonance I can’t take any longer.
“So,” he begins, then pauses as we size each other up. “Tell me what it felt like to be your parents’ daughter.”
It felt terrifying.
But it was terrifying in a way that felt too nebulous to be fully addressed, too innocuous to dare complain about to an outsider at the time.
I always knew there was a distinct possibility that one day my father could snap and lose all restraint, but the fact that he never physically hurt me made me constantly second-guess if my terror was justified.
See, my father grew up with parents who spanked him or slapped him or hit him with a belt when he misbehaved, so he felt highly evolved in that he never once hit me or my brother. He also made sure that my brother and I knew that he had been punished with leather lashings that left welts and that we were lucky by comparison.
But I lived the vast majority of my childhood in near-constant fear because I had no idea if all that pent up rage would escape from my father as a slap in the face or murder if he finally reached a snapping point. My imagination always ended up working as his accomplice.
What so many people do not understand, just like my father didn’t and still doesn’t, is that the absence of physical abuse does not equate to the absence of abuse.
“The most challenging and prevalent form of child abuse”
In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics deemed psychological maltreatment “the most challenging and prevalent form of child abuse and neglect.”
I imagine that the reason it is so prevalent is because it is so gravely misunderstood.
My father, for example, was utterly and thoroughly convinced that abuse only meant physical or sexual abuse. It was out of his realm of consciousness to even interpret psychological maltreatment as damaging and traumatic, and I believe that this was influenced significantly by the era in which he grew up. When his older brother died in a car accident at 16, my father’s parents told him to bury his emotions because anything less would be weak and shameful. This was the psychological abuse lobbied at him that, unacknowledged and unaddressed for 40 years, led him to eventually inflict the same abuse on his own children.
I acquiesced to seeing a therapist that wants to focus almost entirely on my childhood because I don’t want my future children to inherit a lineage defined by psychological warfare disguised as love.
I would love to put my stories about my father to rest and never recount them again, not in therapy nor in writing. But telling them in therapy helps me learn how to break my own destructive family cycles, and I hope that by telling them here, others can do the same.
I wrote this story now because I fear for the children who are stuck at home during COVID lockdowns with their abusers. Add on the burdens and stresses of a global pandemic and recession, and these circumstances create the perfect storm for an uptick in psychological abuse. The more we talk about and validate its existence, the less children have to suffer.
“Psychological abuse isn’t considered a serious social taboo like physical and sexual child abuse,” said Joseph Spinazzola, PhD, a clinical psychologist formerly at The Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Spinazzola was also the lead author of a 2014 study from the American Psychological Association that found that childhood psychological abuse can be just as harmful as sexual or physical abuse.
“We need public awareness initiatives to help people understand just how harmful psychological maltreatment is for children and adolescents,” Spinazzola said in light of his findings.
What psychological abuse looked like in my home
My dad is a large guy, about 6’3” tall, so he hovered over my mom, my brother, and I. As an adult, I’m a mere 5’3” and 105 pounds, so I was never anywhere near matching up physically to my father as a kid. He used his size to his advantage. He would often corner us as he yelled, and every time, I waited as his hands would start to rise and flinch with the exaggerated parts of his speech. I saw the difficulty he had with physical restraint, watched as he almost slapped or punched me or my brother or my mom countless times.
But he never hit us.
When my brother or I was anything less than our father’s idea of perfect, we were called stupid, insolent, pathetic, unworthy, ungrateful… the list could go on forever. When my brother’s grades tanked in high school, my father would use dinner as an opportunity to deride and belittle him. More nights than I could count, my father screamed that my brother was worthless, a waste of space, a f*cking loser destined to be a loser for the rest of his life.
If any of us ever tried to stand up for the others, my dad would laser-focus on the mutinous one, getting right up on top of us with a crazed look twitching across his face.
“You DARE defy me?” he would spit into our clenched faces, hand raised and shaking as if on an invisible tether keeping it from flying forward and making contact.
But my dad never hit us.
“An unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child. Some parents assume they can fully control their children, simply because they gave them life.”
Several years after my parents divorced, my dad remarried, and against every screaming instinct in my body, I reluctantly started seeing him again. At one of the few dinners I attended at his new wife’s home, her adult daughters were reminiscing about a time when one of them hid the belt their mom used to dole out punishment.
My dad stared at me from across the table the entire time, and I could feel his disgustingly proud look burning into the side of my skull while I kept my gaze fixed firmly on the daughter speaking. He waited giddily for the opportunity to jump into the conversation, and when it arrived, he beamed ear-to-ear while proclaiming that he had never hit his kids.
The day my dad almost killed me
My father forced my brother and me to go to church every Sunday for the entirety of our childhoods. He was raised strictly Catholic, and his approval of my brother and I was predicated most significantly on our ability to be picture-perfect devotees. The day he almost killed me, it was because, at the age of 16, I finally told him that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and that I never had.
I remember standing as far across the room from him as I could, shaking and sweating profusely from my palms. We were on the upper floor of my childhood home, which was my parents’ bedroom and my father’s office.
“Come here,” he insisted.
I refused.
He asked why I was so far away, and I said I didn’t want to come any closer. What I couldn’t say was that I was terrified this confrontation would cause him to snap, and I wanted as much distance between us as possible.
I knew that by telling him that I didn’t agree with the Catholic Church and most organized religion, I was effectively challenging the world view upon which much of his identity was based and therefore rejecting him as well.
“Come here when I’m talking to you,” he yelled.
He couldn’t as effectively terrorize me into submission if he couldn’t stand above me and almost hit me.
“No,” my voice shook, but I stood my ground.
Suddenly, he moved past the desk and started walking toward me quickly. I panicked, and my flight instinct took over. I turned and ran downstairs, then across the house. As soon as I started running, he started running, too. His footsteps rattled the house as he yelled louder and louder, barreling after me.
I still have a deep-rooted fear of being chased because of encounters like this.
With nowhere else left to go, I ran into the back corner of my bathroom and sank to the floor in a tiny ball. Bracing for what came next, I held my hands over my face and head.
He screamed that I was his property as long as I lived under his roof. That he owned me and it was my duty to be subordinate and submissive or else he would make me. Didn’t I know that everything I had was actually his and that he could take it all away or kick me out any time he wanted?
“You think this is bad?” he said mid-rant, eyes bugging out of his skull, face so red it might burst. “You have no idea how f*cked up I can make your life.”
“As long as you live under my roof, you’re going to church whether you like it or not. I expect you to be ready in 15 minutes.”
I didn’t have the energy or will to fight it anymore.
Fifteen minutes later, feeling trapped and panicky, I climbed into the back seat of my dad’s Ford Explorer instead of the front passenger seat. I should have known the symbolism of this move would infuriate him even further.
He hollered at me about being disrespectful, and I remember mostly dissociating at this point. My vision became grey in the periphery and tunneled out, and I felt like I was hovering somewhere near but outside of my body. Time slowed to a crawl, and I looked down at my own life like it was a surrealist movie.
We were going to a church in the next town over, and once my dad hit the freeway, he started pushing 85/90 mph in a 65 zone. I still don’t know if it was intended to scare me or if he was so blindly furious that he didn’t even notice.
The off ramp for the exit we were taking was a loop, so the speed limit dropped significantly, but my dad barely slowed down. I felt the inside tires of the car lift up as he took the turn, and I remember snapping back into awareness of my own body and thinking, “this can’t be how I die, please don’t let me die like this.”
I knew that it was a matter of a few mere miles-per-hour that kept us on the ground and not rolling across the hill below.
When we finally arrived, I peeled open my clenched palms to find that I had dug my practically nonexistent fingernails so deeply into my palms that I had broken the skin.
Without saying a word, my father and I departed the car and began the great performance of normality. I watched him twist the grimace on his face into a polished smile. My father was a masterful shapeshifter in public.
During the hour we were in mass, I looked around at every familiar face, every family I recognized and had grown up around. I imagined asking someone for help or a ride home because I was so scared of getting back into the car with my dad, but I also knew this would make things worse for me when I got home.
I considered calling my mother to come get me, but I also knew that she would undergo hell for helping me out of that situation. I didn’t know what else to do that wouldn’t end up with either me or my mother suffering more, so I just got back in the car against all my greater instincts.
With psychological abuse, the burden of proof is almost entirely the victim’s. There are no obvious visual cues, no DNA left behind, no scientifically undeniable proof. It’s just one word against the other. I never believed that my word, as a female child, could ever trump my father’s, so I never tried.
I made it home safely that day, but I never forgot the feeling of finally being certain that there could be an irreversible price on flaring up my father’s temper.
Swapping near-death stories on Mother’s Day
It was hard for me to talk about at the time, even with my mother, with whom I have a wonderful relationship. She was incredibly depressed back then, and I remember feeling like my father had stolen her from me on top of everything else.
Over the past 10 years, as we’ve healed in our own respective ways, my brother, my mother and I have had many discussions about what we endured and how it all felt. We can crack jokes now, and I know it’s largely a coping mechanism, but it’s nice to own our narratives instead of being owned by them.
On Mother’s Day this year, I spoke on the phone with my mom for nearly four hours. I mentioned the pain of feeling responsible for still checking in on the parent that made my childhood a fear-filled hellscape. I recounted the story above, mentioning how f*cked up it feels that I still feel obligated to be present in the life of a person who I genuinely feared might kill me. Parent-child relationships are so complicated in that way; shared DNA somehow makes many of us feel like we must endure treatment that we would accept under no other circumstances.
My mom, bless her, always reminds me that I’m allowed to set boundaries and limit exposure to whatever degree I feel is necessary, and she assures me that I wasn’t alone in my fears.
She told me a story about trying to get my father to go to marriage counseling with her before their inevitable divorce. It was something that happened frequently — she tried to get him to face his demons, and he raged at her for suggesting that he was anything less than perfect.
He always insisted that, “Therapy is for people who have something wrong with them, and there’s nothing wrong with me, so I’m not going to therapy.”
During this particular argument, my mom said that she dared to tell my father, “You know, you look like if you had a shotgun right now, you wouldn’t even hesitate to kill me.”
She recounted that he was shocked, and he said the same thing he always said, “But I’ve never even hit you.”
After sharing in the catharsis of swapping these stories, my mom and I then admitted to each other that we had both wondered many times over the years if we were one transgression away from becoming one of those families murdered by the patriarch in a fit of blind rage.
What a thing to reflect on with your momma on Mother’s Day, no?
What the research says
Some recent research suggests that psychological abuse may have more negative and long-lasting effects on children than physical abuse.
The 2014 study led by Joseph Spinazzola, PhD, for the American Psychological Association found that childhood psychological abuse can be just as harmful as sexual or physical abuse.
Researchers analyzed data from about 5,600 youth who reported experiencing one or more forms of abuse during childhood (psychological maltreatment, physical abuse, or sexual abuse). For this study, psychological maltreatment was defined as “caregiver-inflicted bullying, terrorizing, coercive control, severe insults, debasement, threats, overwhelming demands, shunning and/or isolation.”
A whopping 62% of children reported experiencing psychological maltreatment, and out of this group, nearly a quarter said that this was the only type of abuse they had endured.
Researchers found that the children who had been psychologically abused developed anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms, and suicidal ideation at the same — and sometimes higher — rates than their peers who were physically or sexually abused.
Psychological maltreatment had the strongest association with depression, general anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, attachment problems and substance abuse. When psychological maltreatment was coupled with either sexual or physical abuse, the negative consequences were far more severe than in children who had experienced only sexual or physical abuse.
When researchers looked at the outcomes of behavioral issues at school, self-harming behavior, and attachment problems, they found that children who experienced psychological maltreatment were at risk of more severe outcomes than those who had experienced one of the other types of abuse. Only children who experienced sexual and physical abuse simultaneously exhibited the same risk factors for these outcomes as the children who were psychologically abused.
Those outcomes aren’t just devastating for individuals, they also broadly affect society as a whole.
“Psychological maltreatment carries a significant burden for society, as can be seen in its effects on the health and social care systems, such as the costs of educational failure, crime, and health services as a result of poor mental health,” the 2012 APA study found.
And yet, psychological abuse hasn’t received anywhere near the level of study as it should, in large part due to perception problems.
As a result, many medical professionals and social workers lack the proper knowledge base and/or set of tools to effectively identify and treat psychological abuse in children. The 2012 APA study highlighted the need for pediatricians, in particular, to develop new methodologies to ask children about their emotional wellbeing, as well as to include assessment of parents and/or caregivers for potential risk factors, such as mental health issues and substance abuse issues.
But the burden of responsibility to fix this problem can’t just fall on the shoulders of pediatricians, there needs to be a shift in the collective consciousness to broaden the definitions of how we interpret abuse.
Psychological abuse is a much bigger problem than most people realize, and it’s time we start talking about it more.
