Anyone can suffer abuse and it doesn’t have to be violent, there are many forms of abuse. Most abuse doesn’t leave physical scars, it leaves mental ones. Abuse can be physical, psychological, coercive or emotional. Suffering any kind of abuse over a prolonged period of time will wear down a person’s self esteem and confidence, they may develop a state of learned helplessness and believe they can’t leave the abusive situation.
The Cruel Experiment That Explains Your Anxiety
This video explains Martin Seligmans research into learned helplessness.
What makes emotional abuse particularly insidious is that it doesn’t show up on an X-ray. There’s no bruise to photograph, no evidence to point to. And yet the damage is just as real, sometimes more lasting than physical harm. Research published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy confirms a robust link between emotional abuse and social anxiety in adulthood, finding that the pathway runs through shame: abuse creates a deep sense of shame, which drives relentless self-criticism, which in turn fuels anxiety and social withdrawal (Shahar et al., 2015). If you’ve ever walked away from a conversation feeling like you said the wrong thing, looked the wrong way, or simply were too much, that’s the shadow of emotional abuse, still doing its work.
Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is extremely hard to recognise, it’s usually covert and very manipulative. If you regularly feel negative emotions after interacting with someone there’s a good chance they are emotionally abusing you. An emotional abuser will use a person’s emotions to control them, they will criticize them, embarrass them, blame them, they may try to turn them against family and friends or turn family and friends against them.
Red Flags of Emotional Abuse
Boundary Breaking
An emotional abuser will break down your boundaries with unrealistic demands, they will expect you to put them first, they will often bring up the past and use things that they have done to justify you dropping everything for them, they will use emotional statements to try and win arguments, they will become angry if you don’t agree with their opinions or adopt different opinions to them.
Someone who is emotionally abusive will blame you for making them abuse you, they will constantly change criteria of tasks and then criticise you for not completing the tasks to the required standard. They will use your sense of morals or compassion to make you feel guilty or shamed. An emotional abuser will probably be sarcastic.
Someone who is emotionally abusive will probably be emotionally dysregulated and prone to mood swings, they will criticize what you wear, they will criticize what you do for a job, they will probably find silly things to argue about and start arguments for no reason, their behaviour will probably be unpredictable and you will never know when they are going to blow up in your face.
This unpredictability is not accidental, it’s one of the most damaging features of emotional abuse. When you can never predict someone’s mood, your nervous system goes into a state of permanent threat detection. You become hypervigilant. You scan faces, choose your words carefully, brace for impact that may or may not come. Over time this becomes your default setting, even when you’re nowhere near the abuser.
If a parent is emotionally abusive they will probably enmesh the child, enmeshment often occurs in dysfunctional relationships where one parent is physically or emotionally absent and the opposite sex parent inappropriately bonds with the child and uses them as an emotional crutch or substitute spouse. When this kind of abuse occurs the daughter may become daddy’s little princess, the son mummy’s little soldier. The same sex can also transfer their sexual rage onto the child leading the daughter to grow up hating men or the son women. An emotionally abusive parent will probably try to turn the child against the other parent, for me it was my grandmother who turned me against my father.
Invalidation
An emotionally abusive person may invalidate your feelings by accusing you of being too emotional, sensitive or calling you mad. They may deny things happened and say you’re imagining stuff, an emotional abuser will probably accuse you of being selfish if you won’t do what they want. If the emotional abuser is a parent they will say things like, “I didn’t raise you to be like this”, “I never thought you’d turn out like this” or “you’re getting just like your father, mother, etc.”
This is sometimes called “gaslighting,” and it’s worth naming it clearly, because many survivors spend years doubting their own experience. If you grew up being told your feelings were wrong, dramatic, or made up, it makes complete sense that as an adult you struggle to trust yourself. That self-doubt doesn’t come from weakness. It was installed by someone else.
Inner Child Healing For Emotional Abuse
I, like many children, grew up around mentally, physically and emotionally abusive people. It caused me to suffer low self esteem, a fear of blushing and very bad anxiety. As mentioned in a previous post, 61% suffer some form of adverse experiences in childhood and I do believe the emotional abuse probably had the worst impact on my life.
The connection between emotional abuse and blushing is something I rarely see talked about, but the research backs it up. Studies show that blushing is closely tied to shame and the fear of being negatively evaluated by others (Crozier, 2010, via PMC). When you’ve grown up being criticised, embarrassed and made to feel small, your body learns to treat social situations as dangerous. Blushing becomes a kind of involuntary confession, “I’m exposed, I’m not enough” which is exactly what the abuser taught you to feel. This is why simply telling yourself to relax doesn’t work. The response is rooted far deeper than conscious thought. You can read more about how I work with this on my stop blushing page.
Emotional Abuse In Childhood Is Hard To Detect
Any kind of trauma or adverse experiences in childhood are hard to detect because as children we are looking to the people around us to understand ourselves and the world, if those people are abusive to us we internalise it and think it means there’s something wrong with us but because it is so covert and subtle emotional abuse doesn’t stand out in our memories like being hit or thrown across a room would.
If we are constantly being emotionally abused, called names and told we are useless we will internalise that abuse and develop an inner critic. When we develop an inner critic it’s because we have internalised the abusive parents or parents and we will keep abusing ourselves the way they abused us even long after they are dead in some cases.
Neuroscience helps explain why this inner critic feels so automatic and so loud. Childhood experiences literally shape neural pathways — the brain’s default routes for processing the world. When criticism, shame and fear are the dominant experiences of early life, the brain builds its architecture around those experiences. The good news is that the brain retains plasticity well into adulthood. Research shows that inner child healing work can stimulate neurogenesis, the creation of new neural connections particularly in the hippocampus, which governs memory and emotional regulation. In plain English: you can rewire the responses that were built in an environment that no longer exists (Reframe, 2025).
As I have said in previous posts, repetition compulsion means that what we don’t heal will reenact so it’s very important to do inner child work and heal your inner child if you were emotionally abused or if you keep finding yourself in abusive situations.
How Hypnotherapy Helps
So where does hypnotherapy come in? Talk therapy is valuable, but it has a limitation: it works primarily at the conscious, verbal level. The wounds left by emotional abuse are often stored at a subconscious, somatic level, in the body, in gut reactions, in the automatic shame response that fires before you’ve had a chance to think. Hypnotherapy works by bypassing the critical conscious mind and communicating directly with the subconscious, where those old patterns live.
A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts examined hypnotherapy as an intervention for adults with histories of childhood trauma and abuse. Across multiple case studies, participants experienced significant reductions in anxiety, improved resilience, and greater social confidence following hypnotherapy sessions (IJCRT, 2024). Additionally, a meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology found that hypnosis has received endorsement from multiple medical associations and was identified as a treatment approach with “high programmatic priority” by the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (Rosendahl et al., 2024).
When combined with inner child healing work, hypnotherapy gives you a way to go back, not to relive the pain, but to meet the younger version of yourself who took on all that shame and criticism, and to begin the process of letting them put it down. The messages you absorbed about being too much, not enough, or fundamentally flawed were never true. They were someone else’s dysfunction, handed to you when you were too young to refuse it. You can give it back.
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