On The Nature of Abuse

It is very common that people misread the emotions and stability of others. For example, if I had a nickel for every time I had a panic attack in public and nobody around me even seemed to notice, I'd be very wealthy. This is because people often don't see what they would expect to see.

Television has a lot to do with this. People see examples of people having nervous breakdowns and panic attacks on t.v. and in the movies, but when they see one in real life it's as much a surprise to them that what they're looking at is a panic attack as it would be for them to realize that an Arab person could be a Christian (no offense to Arabs, Christians or any combination thereof. I'm sure you know what I mean).

I've always felt that if you were to perform an experiment in which an actor imitated a real panic attack with one group of people and a "televisionized" panic attack with a control, you'd find that almost everyone in the test group and actually several people in the control group would do nothing. I'd even be surprised to see anyone in the test group even staring, because a real panic attack can be incredibly, even dangerously quiet.

It is much the same way with abuse. I guarantee that if one was to show a group of people actual abuse without telling them what it was, they wouldn't recognize it as abuse. It's especially the case if the form of abuse being shown is not physical abuse. Physical abuse is the most widely accepted form of abuse in our society, and few people are even aware that there are other kinds of abuse. Verbal abuse is somewhat known, but other than those two, abuse is almost ignored by society at large.

Probably the most underrated form of abuse is emotional abuse. Emotional abuse occurs when a person is actively controlled and manipulated by another through their emotions. If a person spends one day caring and loving for another person, then the next day telling them they're awful, and then the following day is back to loving and caring, that throws the other person through an emotional roller coaster that can be almost as psychologically scarring as physical abuse. Worse, even, in some cases, because it is not recognized as abuse and can lead a person to feel like they may have genuinely done something wrong, with no one outside the relationship recognizing anything out of the ordinary, and so it goes on for years without even being acknowledged.

This is the nature of abuse. Much like torture, it is not the actual physical harm that is often characteristic of it but the psychological damage that often goes unnoticed. Abuse victims start to live in fear of the abuser. They start to do anything they can to appease them in order to prevent that assault, whether it is physical, verbal, emotional or sexual.

As an abuse victim myself, I feel that it is time that we expanded the public understanding of abuse. Too many times have I shared about my own abuse and been attacked and shamed for it. Telling an abuse victim that they aren't really the victim of abuse only adds to the pain that they feel, and emotional abuse is often treated as though it is not actually abuse. It also doesn't help that abuse victims often don't even realize they are being abused.