You’re Not Imagining It, How Emotional Abuse Shows Up and How to Trust Yourself Again

You're apologising for something that wasn't your fault.

You're second-guessing a memory of an event that happened last week.

You're walking on eggshells in your own home, monitoring your words, your tone, your very presence to keep the peace.

And somewhere inside, a small voice is asking: “Is this normal?"

Emotional abuse doesn't always leave visible bruises, but the internal wounds it creates can be deep and long-lasting. It can erode your confidence, distort your reality, and quietly unravel your sense of self. Worse, it often happens so gradually that you adjust to it—rationalising the behaviour, blaming yourself, or trying harder to keep the peace—before you realise what's really happening.

If you've ever wondered whether your relationship is okay, or if you're “too sensitive", this blog is here to help you name your experience. Recognising emotional abuse is the first step toward healing.

What Is Emotional Abuse?

Emotional abuse is a pattern of behaviours designed to control, intimidate, or manipulate another person. It's the systematic undermining of someone's reality, worth, and autonomy.

The thing about emotional abuse is that it rarely announces itself. Sometimes it hides in silence and withdrawal. Sometimes it masquerades as jokes that sting, sarcasm that cuts, or "honesty" that feels like criticism. Other times it's overt: constant blame, relentless scrutiny, or gaslighting so effective that you stop trusting your own mind.

But beneath all these different forms, the intention is the same: to make you doubt your reality, question your worth, and become dependent on the abuser's approval. It's designed to keep you off-balance, confused, and controlled.

What makes emotional abuse particularly insidious is that it targets your nervous system directly. Over time, your body learns to stay in a constant state of alert, scanning for signs of the next criticism, the next conflict, the next shift in mood. Your nervous system gets rewired to expect threat—and when you're always braced for impact, it becomes nearly impossible to relax, to trust, or to believe you're safe.

What Emotional Abuse Is Not

1. It’s not normal conflict or occasional irritation. All relationships have misunderstandings, bad days, and moments of frustration. Emotional abuse is a pattern, not a one-off disagreement.

2. It’s not someone expressing a boundary. A partner saying “I need some space” or “I’m not okay with that” isn’t abuse. Abuse is when boundaries are ignored, mocked, or punished.

3. It’s not feedback delivered respectfully. Constructive criticism focuses on behaviour (“This hurt me”), not on who you are (“You’re pathetic,” “You always ruin everything”).

4. It’s not a trauma response taken in isolation. People can shut down or become overwhelmed under stress, but that doesn’t make them abusive. Abuse requires intention or repeated harmful impact, not one dysregulated moment.

5. It’s not a personality quirk or communication style. Being “blunt,” “direct,” or introverted doesn’t equal abuse. Abuse involves power, control, manipulation, and fear.

6. It’s not something you cause. Someone else’s cruelty is never your fault. Emotional abuse is a choice the other person makes, not something you “trigger.”

Recognising the Signs of Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse creeps in so gradually that you begin to adjust to it. You might not even realise you're being abused, you just know something feels wrong. You rationalise the behaviour (“that's just how they are"), blame yourself (“I must be overreacting"), or try harder to keep the peace.

If any of the following patterns feel familiar, your instincts are likely trying to tell you something important.

Constant Criticism

Do they regularly put you down: your appearance, your ideas, your choices, often wrapped in the guise of "helping" or "being honest"? Over time, this wears away at your self-esteem. The voice in your head that used to speak gently to you gets replaced by theirs. You find yourself anticipating criticism before it comes, trying to pre-empt it by being harder on yourself than they ever could be.

The impact is cumulative. One critical comment might sting, but a hundred of them reshape how you see yourself entirely.

Gaslighting

Do you second-guess your own memories? Does your partner twist events, deny things they said, or suggest you're being "too emotional"? This is gaslighting, and it's one of the most destabilising forms of emotional abuse.

Gaslighting works by making you distrust your own mind. When someone repeatedly tells you that your memory is wrong, that you're misinterpreting situations, or that your feelings are disproportionate, you begin to lose faith in your own perception. Your nervous system gets confused. If you can't trust your own mind, who can you trust? This fracturing of internal safety is where much of the psychological damage takes root.

For a deeper exploration of gaslighting tactics and how to recognise them, check out my blog on gaslighting.

Withholding Affection

Is love or attention given and taken away depending on whether you've pleased them? Is physical affection used as a reward for compliance or withdrawn as punishment? This kind of emotional punishment teaches you to walk on eggshells, to monitor your behaviour constantly, to try to "earn" love that should be unconditional.

Over time, this creates a trauma bond. You become hypervigilant, always trying to guess what might make them withdraw again. Your nervous system learns that love is conditional and must be maintained through constant performance.

If you're noticing this pattern, you may find my blog on trauma bonding helpful, it explores how cycles of harm and intermittent affection create powerful psychological bonds that can make leaving feel impossible.

Blame Shifting

Do they refuse to take responsibility for their actions? Do they flip situations so that you end up apologising for being hurt by them? When you're always labelled "too sensitive," "overreacting," or "causing drama," you internalise the blame. You begin to believe that the problem is with you—that if you were just different, they wouldn't behave this way.

This is one of the cruelest aspects of emotional abuse: it teaches you to blame yourself for being mistreated.

Isolation

Are you discouraged from seeing friends or family? Do you feel guilty when you spend time with others? Are your relationships with people outside the abuser monitored or criticised?

Isolation is a control tactic. It weakens your external support system, making you more dependent on the abuser for validation and connection. When you have no one else to check your reality against, the abuser's version becomes the only version you know. Your nervous system has nowhere else to find safety, so it turns to the source of the threat—creating a dangerous paradox where the person hurting you is also your only perceived source of safety.

To understand how isolation functions as a tool of control, you may find my blog on coercive control illuminating.

Constant Monitoring and Mistrust

Do they check your phone, control who you talk to, or demand constant updates about your whereabouts? Are you accused of things you didn't do? This hypervigilance on their part often creates hypervigilance in you—a mirroring of their fear and control.

Over time, you may start believing you should be monitored, that your privacy isn't important, or that you deserve scrutiny.

The Nervous System Impact

Here's something important to understand: emotional abuse isn't just a series of bad interactions. It's a systematic recalibration of your nervous system. Your body learns patterns of threat and safety that become deeply embedded.

When you're in an emotionally abusive relationship, your nervous system never gets to fully relax. Part of you is always scanning for danger, always preparing for the next criticism or conflict. This state of chronic activation has real physiological consequences.

You might find yourself exhausted but unable to sleep. Your digestion might be affected. You might experience tension headaches, muscle tightness, or a constant sense of dread. These aren't "all in your head"—they're your body responding logically to an environment it perceives as unsafe.

Over time, this constant activation can leave you feeling numb or disconnected. Paradoxically, after months or years of hypervigilance, your nervous system might shut down entirely. You dissociate. You feel nothing. This too is a survival response—when the threat never ends, your system protects itself by disconnecting.

Sometimes the hardest part is noticing that something isn’t right.

The Emotional Impact of Abuse

Emotional abuse reshapes not just how you feel in the moment, but how you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how you move through the world.

Low Self-Worth

You begin to internalise the criticisms. Over time, they become your internal voice. You believe you're not enough, or too much, or fundamentally flawed. You lose trust in your own judgment. Decisions that should be simple—what to wear, what to say, whether your feelings are valid—become agonising because you no longer trust your own mind.

This isn't vanity or insecurity. This is your sense of self being systematically dismantled.

Anxiety and Depression

Living with ongoing emotional tension, unpredictability, and threat creates chronic activation in your nervous system. This can manifest as generalised anxiety, panic attacks, or a deep sense of hopelessness. You might feel like you're constantly failing or never quite safe. Even in moments of calm, there's a sense of dread—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Many survivors describe depression as a flatness, a disconnection, a sense of moving through life behind glass. This is often your nervous system's way of protecting you from the full weight of the pain.

Hypervigilance and Hyperreactivity

You become oversensitive to tone, facial expressions, or subtle shifts in mood. You might react strongly to minor things—a partner sighing, a change in schedule, a text that takes too long to respond. This isn't nervousness; it's your nervous system still in survival mode, interpreting every small signal as a potential threat.

This hypervigilance can persist long after the relationship ends. If you notice this pattern carrying into safe relationships, you may find it helpful to explore why healthy love can feel uncomfortable after abuse—it explains how your nervous system continues to search for danger even when you're finally safe.

Shame and Self-Blame

You might feel ashamed that you didn't leave sooner. Ashamed that you still love them. Ashamed that you "allowed" this to happen. Shame thrives in silence, and it often keeps people trapped—unable to reach out, unable to ask for help, believing they somehow deserve what's happening to them.

It's important to name this clearly: the shame is not yours to carry. The abuse was never your fault.

Difficulty with Trust and Connection

After being emotionally abused, the idea of being vulnerable with someone else can feel terrifying. You've learned that intimacy can be used as a weapon, that vulnerability can be exploited. Even in new, safe relationships, part of you remains braced for harm. You might struggle to believe that someone can love you without conditions, or that your needs matter.

Did You Know?

Nearly 48% of women and 49% of men have experienced some form of psychological aggression by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. You're not alone—not by a long shot. This experience is far more common than we often realise, and the shame you might feel about it is compounded by the silence surrounding it.

Breaking Free: A Compassionate Pathway

Leaving or confronting emotional abuse is rarely easy. The dynamic itself is designed to keep you doubting yourself and believing you're the problem. The abuser may have convinced you that you're too sensitive, too demanding, too needy—that the abuse is actually just them being honest or caring in their own way.

But here's a truth worth sitting with: you are allowed to protect your peace. And you deserve safe, respectful love.

Step One: Reach Out for Support

Abuse thrives in isolation. The very first step is breaking that silence—talking to someone safe. A friend, family member, therapist, or counsellor. Someone who can hear your story without judgment and help you see what you might not be able to see clearly right now.

Reaching out is an act of courage, and it's the essential foundation for everything that follows. You don't have to go through this alone. If you're at the stage of considering whether to leave, my blog on leaving toxic relationships offers compassionate guidance on this deeply personal decision.

Step Two: Learn to Set Boundaries

Once you begin to recognise the patterns, start setting small but firm boundaries. This might look like limiting contact, not engaging in their arguments, or simply saying "no" without over-explaining or justifying yourself.

Boundary-setting won't stop an abuser from trying to manipulate or control you—but it creates a protected space where you can begin to reclaim your agency. Your nervous system needs to experience that you can say no and survive. That rejection doesn't mean annihilation. That your needs matter.

Step Three: Seek Professional Help

A trauma-informed therapist can do several important things: help you understand the patterns, identify how the abuse has affected your nervous system, rebuild your self-esteem, and process the complexity of what you've experienced.

Not all therapists are trained to work with emotional abuse and trauma. Look for someone who understands coercive control, gaslighting, and the nervous system impacts of relational trauma. This matters.

Step Four: Plan Your Safety

If the abuse continues or escalates, it may be time to consider ending the relationship. This is a big and deeply personal step—one that deserves careful planning. Consider your practical safety, your financial independence, your support system, and your emotional readiness.

For some people, this happens quickly. For others, it's a slow process of building resources and courage. There's no "right" timeline. What matters is that you move at a pace that feels safe for you.

You are allowed to leave. You are allowed to start again.

Healing From Emotional Abuse

Healing from emotional abuse isn't linear, and it doesn't come with a timeline. You might feel angry, relieved, exhausted, confused, or all of these things simultaneously. You might have days where you feel strong and days where the grief hits you all over again. All of that is valid.

Healing also doesn't mean you have to understand or forgive the person who hurt you. It means learning to integrate what happened, reclaiming your sense of self, and building a life where you feel safe and valued.

Rebuild Your Sense of Self

Emotional abuse fractures your identity. Part of the healing process is reclaiming who you are, separate from the abuse and separate from what the abuser told you about yourself.

Reconnect with your strengths. Notice small things you're good at. Spend time with people who reflect the best parts of you—not the most wounded parts. Listen to music you love. Do activities that make you feel alive. These aren't distractions; they're acts of reclamation.

Practice Nervous System Regulation

Because emotional abuse lives in your body, healing requires somatic work. This might include breathwork, grounding techniques, gentle movement, or simply noticing moments of safety and calm. These practices help your nervous system learn that threat has passed, that you can relax now.

Over time, as your nervous system experiences repeated moments of safety, it begins to rewire. You might notice that you startle less easily. That conflict doesn't feel as catastrophic. That calm feels more possible.

Allow Time and Space

There's no timeline for healing. Comparison with others only adds suffering. Some people heal quickly; others need years of gentle, patient work. Both are okay. Healing isn't about "getting over it." It's about integrating what happened with compassion for yourself. It's about learning to hold what was painful without letting it define everything.

Relearn Trust in Relationships

After being emotionally abused, intimacy can feel dangerous. The thought of vulnerability might trigger your nervous system all over again. This is a normal protective response.

Healing from this means going slowly. Listening to your body's cues. Testing trust in small ways with people who have shown themselves to be safe. It means believing that not everyone will harm you, even though someone did.

Grieve What Was Lost

Sometimes, healing involves mourning. Mourning the relationship you hoped you'd have. Mourning the person you might have been if you hadn't been hurt. Mourning the time lost. This grief is valid and deserves to be witnessed.

A Final Word

If you've been in an emotionally abusive relationship, please know this:

You are not broken. You are not to blame. And you are not alone.

Your nervous system responded intelligently to an unsafe situation. Your adaptations—whether that was people-pleasing, perfectionism, hypervigilance, or disconnection—kept you safe. Those strategies made sense in the context of abuse.

Now, with support and gentleness, you get to learn something different. You get to experience what it feels like to be trusted, respected, and loved without conditions. You get to rebuild your sense of self, brick by brick. You get to learn that your needs matter, that your reality is valid, and that you deserve peace.

Recognising the signs, reaching out, and taking steps toward safety and healing are courageous acts. You deserve relationships where you feel seen, respected, and loved—not ones that make you question your worth.

If you're ready to talk, I'm here.

📧 kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
📞 0452 070 738