VERBAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE IS EQUAL TO PHYSICAL ABUSE.

Psychohistorical study of the history of childhood has provided extensive evidence that childhood in the past was routinely filled with terror, neglect and abuse-both physical and emotional.

While adequate parenting is a recent phenomenon, criticisms for differentiating discipline from abuse still remains an unresolved issue in most countries. In this article “Abusive Childhood” I am sharing my views on how childhood abuse experience can take it’s journey to adulthood resulting in making us develop or stay in unhealthy and abusive relationships.

How Can Abusive Childhood Teach You To Stay In Abusive Relationships

You are taught to be obedient and submissive in your childhood if you don’t want to get beaten; you’re taught this is normal in life, so why should you doubt it when it happens in your relationship?

You’re taught to care about everyone else more than yourself, to provide comfort and be minimally or completely non-demanding of other family members, always put yourself last. And this is exactly what abusive partner will demand as well; how would you fight it if you’re taught this is just your place in life?

Your appearance, skills, interests, achievements, and faults are constantly exposed to criticism, insults, scolding, humiliation and ridicule in abusive childhood, and you’re taught that it’s okay ; how are you supposed to fight it when it happens in a relationship?

You’re humiliated and ridiculed for seeking intimacy or try to express yourself in your childhood, how would you know if it’s okay for you to desire understanding, consideration, reassurance and intimacy in your relationship?

If you’re used to being hit, humiliated, and having your objections to it ignored, or even worse, minimized and punished by even worse violence, how are you supposed to defend yourself when it happens in a sexual situation? how would you be able to know that it’s wrong for another person to harm you if your parents have been doing it, and they supposedly love you?

If you’re always aught to always be grateful that things aren’t worse, always compare yourself to someone who is tortured worse, how are you ever supposed to reach out and get help for being abused? how are you supposed to know when is your situation is really, really bad? There’s always going to be someone somewhere in the world tortured worse, and this becomes a reason for you to suffer in silence and justify what you’re going through.

Abusive parents can’t be direct cause of abusive relationships, if our boundaries aren’t destroyed and our sense of what’s acceptable and to be tolerated in our close relationships skewed to allow abuse and pain, we will have much easier time rejecting abusive relationships later in life.