What It Feels Like To Be Emotionally Abused

I don’t normally watch the TV ‘soapies’, but a storyline on one of them caught my eye recently. It’s about an older woman who’s been emotionally and verbally abused by her husband to the point where she breaks and lashes out at him with a wine bottle. At the point of writing this, she’s in jail, awaiting trial for attempted murder – and viewing herself as a ‘bad’ person who deserves punishment. The other characters on the soapie have mostly turned against her, as even before the wine bottle incident, he had quite expertly cast himself as the ‘victim’, and her as various bad things. Even the police don’t pick up on the clues.

As a survivor of emotional abuse myself, I find it too painful to watch, though of course I’m hoping the truth will eventually emerge. But I don’t have much hope of it, as it can be really hard for anyone who hasn’t been through this to understand what it’s like. While my situation never got as far as wine bottles, it nonetheless nearly destroyed me. So I want to explain something of what it feels like to be the recipient of emotional and verbal abuse.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that it’s essentially a betrayal. I’m not talking about sexual betrayal here, but a betrayal of the very trust that should exist between partners. When you enter into a relationship, there’s a basic assumption that they will deal with you fairly and honestly, that they truly care for you and that anything they tell you is the truth. So when they start telling you that you’re this or that Bad Thing, that you’re no good at this or that, you believe them. They must be telling you this For Your Own Good, right? Or at least that’s what they tell you, and they love you, so it must be true, right? Overwhelmed by this flood of new ‘information’ about yourself, you lose all sense of who you were before in the struggle to correct your ‘faults’, to become what they’re telling you that you ‘should’ be.

It's especially easy for them if you already have low self-esteem and are inclined to believe the worst about yourself. (Abusers hone in on such vulnerable people, of course.) Add in being autistic (as in my case), even if you don’t know it at the time, but do know that you have trouble ‘reading between the lines’ and making good judgements about yourself and others, and you’re primed to believe that they are seeing something you can’t, even if it doesn’t ‘feel right’. Under a relentless barrage of criticism, you cave. They must be right, you must be bad, bad, bad. Having been reduced to a state of helpless abasement, you don’t find much to admire in yourself anyway.

Their attitude that they’re positively saintly for putting up with you, that nobody else would, means that over time, you come to believe that others must have seen these faults too, but been too polite to tell you. You become ashamed, not wanting to inflict your flawed self on anyone else, and will probably seem withdrawn and anti-social to others. Thus it’s easy for your partner to cast your actions or words in the worst light to others in turn, subtly running you down, and further isolating you. With no other opinions to compare your partner’s to, your judgement becomes skewed, and you continue to believe the worst. I eventually came to see myself as worthless, as a partner, as a mother, as a friend, and quite possibly even as a human being.

Many people seem to think that verbal and emotional abuse is ‘not as bad’ as physical abuse. “It’s just words.” Even the victim/survivor may think this, or be reluctant to reveal it, or even to see it as abuse. Those harsh words can actually often go hand-in-hand with physical violence, but even without a blow struck, they can be devastating. Without wanting to minimise the hurt from physical abuse at all, damage from a broken limb can heal faster than damage from a broken heart. Because that’s what abusers do to you. They break you. They shatter your heart, your psyche, your very sense of self, your will. I would say they reshape you to their liking – but you’re never to their liking. They’re never satisfied, there’s always more criticism. Nothing about you is sacred.

Even after you scrape up enough shreds of self-esteem to get out of the relationship, it can take a long, long, long time to realise what’s happened to you, and what you’ve lost. To give just one small example, my partner had me convinced that I was hopeless as a ‘home handywoman’. If I even started to do a job around the house, she’d sigh impatiently, and snatch the tool off me with a contemptuous “oh, give it here!” Afterwards, it took me more than two years to remember that before her, I’d actually been moderately competent at doing stuff. Not as expert as her maybe, but I’d known what to do with a screwdriver or hammer, I’d rewired electric plugs, swapped a faulty cord on an iron, and even done up old furniture. But under the onslaught of her contempt, I’d forgotten all that. I’d forgotten the very idea of being competent – at anything.

And it can be an even longer time healing. Even now, more than twenty years later, I still find myself squirreling out damaged parts of my psyche. For instance, I still have to remind myself that if I do something that’s not ‘how others (deep down, I mean ‘her’) would do it’, it’s okay. No-one’s watching me, about to pounce and tear me apart for it, I don’t have to constantly defend my actions or words anymore. But despite my best attempts to dismantle it, the kneejerk fear-reaction is still entrenched in me, not to mention the belief that the way I do things is ‘wrong’, even if it feels right to me. That’s how deep the damage can go. This is a battle I’m still fighting. Even writing this has stirred up old, painful memories.

My wish is that people will come to understand that emotional and verbal abuse is just as devastating, just as emotionally destructive, as physical abuse. That it can wreck people, wreck their lives, wreck their relationships with others, even wreck their physical health, and leave them feeling, afterwards, like a piece of wreckage washed up on a beach, no good to themselves or anyone else.

Never underestimate the power of ‘mere words’.

The Emotional Difficulties of Autistics

Over the years, I’ve heard lots about the problems associated with being autistic – our sensory, social, executive dysfunction issues, etc. We have discussed them often, and often at great length. But I’ve never heard anyone, on the spectrum or not, talk much specifically about our emotional issues. They seem to be largely ignored by NTs, while autistics simply suffer through them.

And yet they loom large in our existences, often dominating our thoughts and our days, dragging us down into depressions or other mental illness, hampering our efforts to live full and good lives, and often leaving us feeling ‘stupid’, ‘inadequate’, ‘over the top’ or somehow ‘just wrong’ for having them.

Some of our emotional issues are internally caused, eg by alexithymia. We may not feel anything, when we think we ‘should’. Or we know we’re feeling something, but we’re not sure what. Or the feelings rush in, uncontrollable, overwhelming us, almost drowning us. Or they come at a time or in a way that’s not ‘appropriate’, causing us embarrassment, shame and distress. Simply identifying and managing our emotions can be an enormous battle in itself – and leave us feeling stupid and ashamed, simply for having to wrestle with something that ‘everyone else’ seems to manage okay.

And then there’s the emotions caused by our struggles with executive dysfunction. When your living spaces are knee-deep in chaos, you can’t seem to organise your way out of a paper bag or get to anything on time, can’t get proper meals together, and you feel like you look like you slept in your clothes (and maybe you did), and somehow it’s ‘all your own fault’ and you ‘just need to shake up your ideas’ (as others will no doubt tell you), it’s difficult to feel good about yourself, or about anything in your life. This can fill us with shame, embarrassment and anxiety, and cause low self-esteem and depression.

There’s also our social problems – by which I mean how people react to our efforts to connect with them, or simply co-exist with them. When our social efforts aren’t recognised as such (eg because we’re non-verbal, or we don’t do it in the ‘appropriate’ way), or we’re criticised, yelled at, laughed at, ridiculed, bullied, physically attacked, rejected, snubbed, etc, then we naturally feel a range of emotional reactions. Few of these are acknowledged or validated by non-autistics – in fact our reactions (eg meltdowns, social withdrawal) tend to be blamed on our autism, rather than being understood as reactions to how we’re being treated.

Sensory issues often compound our social problems of course – and add to the possibility of meltdowns, shutdowns, fleeing, or getting a negative reaction from others when you ask for help. If you’re constantly being told that you’re ‘making a fuss about nothing’, or to ‘stop your whingeing’ and that you should ‘just harden up’, it’s hard not to feel ‘weak’, ‘stupid’, scared and inadequate for this on top of all your other problems.

And then our responses to all these can be in turn be misunderstood by others, causing us to be dumped on even more, stressing us out even more... A vicious circle, causing a potent stew of pain, shame, self-loathing, anger and anxiety, which can see us so overwhelmed we end up curled into a sobbing heap under a pile of blankets, pacing back and forth stimming wildly, posting frantic requests for support on social media, or even self-harming. And then we feel shame for having those feelings, and shame for feeling shame… on and on it goes, till many of us are simply, well, broken.

A lot of our emotional issues are caused, therefore, not just by our ‘issues’, but by other people’s reactions to those issues, and/or by not having the right supports. In fact we’ve often had to create such supports for ourselves, or sometimes clued-up parents or aides will, by creating ‘emotion charts’ to help us name a feeling, visual or electronic schedules to help with time management or household tasks, specific guidance with social issues, and so on. But this help varies extremely widely – it’s often a matter of good luck rather than good policy, and the result is we suffer far more than we need to. It’s all a bit of a mess, really.

So I want to say this to autistics – that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU FOR FEELING THE WAY YOU DO. Your feelings are valid, a perfectly logical reaction to the pressures and stresses of our lives – including those stresses not being understood. You have the right to your feelings, and the right to seek support. And, flawed as our autistic community can often be, your fellow autistics are almost certainly the only ones who will understand and accept your emotions, and be able to help you through them, because we’ve been there too. Find your own tribe.

And to neurotypicals, I want to say this. If you want to know why we autistics have such a high rate of mental illness and suicide, LOOK NO FURTHER THAN HOW WE’RE TREATED. If you want to ‘fix’ our emotional states, first acknowledge our issues, then help us find the tools to do something about them. And change social attitudes to the autistic while you’re at it. Simply assuming that they’re ‘just part of being autistic’, and assuming that if you can ‘get rid’ of the autism somehow (newsflash: you can’t), they’ll just magically disappear, is not helping us at all.