My first girlfriend in highschool had severe anxiety and was so incredibly quiet and shy. It was so tough cuz she was a genuinely sweet and caring person once she opened up to you. I was extremely surprised to learn her family was nothing like that when I met them. Until I met her dad, and he kept calling her an idiot, and stupid, and useless. Then I understood why she never wanted to say anything. Every time she opened her mouth she was criticized by her dad. This attitude towards your own kids is insanely damaging.
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It’s very difficult to notice that it’s happening to you sometimes.
It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I noticed every single thing I say my mother seems to instantly try to take the opposite side and tell me I’m wrong, purely because it’s in her nature.
That level of negativity combined with a hair trigger for screaming, and she wonders why I don’t talk to her about absolutely anything 🤷♂️
Honestly, I think that type of abuse is the worst because it cuts way deeper and leaves a permanent mark. I was yelled at (a lot), physically abused, and sexually abused, but I was always encouraged and supported. (Weird, I know. No, I'm not getting into it.). Because of the verbal support I received from my mother I was confident enough to stand up to my sexual and physical abusers even though she had not been able to as a child. I was also strong enough to break away from them and take on life solo after completely cutting them all off from my life (my mother had already passed away).
If you believe in yourself, you can fight. If you don't, you might just sit there and take it. Psychological abuse is the cruelest and most damaging.
My anxiety also came from living with an abusive father. It sucks always second guessing yourself and never feeling safe and secure because your baseline is abuse.
EMDR helped me. I hope your ex found or finds some healing.
Like I've definitely raised my voice with my kids but couldn't imagine a world where I ever would call them stupid. That is just trash parenting and amazing that anyone would do that to their offspring.
Ya, I think the study is mostly aimed at the negativity and denigration of the child. While I almost never raise my voice and would absolutely never call my children "stupid", there are times where a raised voice helps break though to the child. It's also good when you leave such a raised voice for imminent situations. For example, kid starts reaching for something dangerous, a shout will stop them cold, especially when they aren't used to dad shouting.
Oooh yeah. My parents gently raised me and a shout from one of them was immediately understood not as them being angry but them being scared. By contrast we had some friends who were just incessantly yelled at in anger all the time. The difference was stark in how willing to accept advice, correction and trust in the experience of adults was. When you are essentially just told to obey and then yelled at you don't really grasp the underlying principles that advantage you later because at any point that anger could just be you hitting a parent's pet peeve. It's also really hard to respect someone who doesn't respect you back.
We grew up pretty damn straightlaced. By contrast our yelled at peers ended up by and large going completely off the rails once nobody was in a position to force them to obey and about half of them went really far astray.
I think it also depends highly on the circumstances, if your child did something very very bad (hit bother with a hammer say) then youd actually be derelict in your duties as a parent not to yell at them (and ground them, etc) in that situation. Going too soft on them when they really go off the rails can be just as bad or worse than being too hard on them.
One benefit of shouting at your kids and generally dismissing their emotions is that you can enjoy your retirement without them anywhere near you and die alone.
and you won't understand how your action created the circumstance you're in and you'll complain to everyone about it.
I see you've spoken to my in-laws.
Hi mom!
Not just yelling at kids, just being in a house where people are verbally abusive can fuck a person up, if my parents were not yelling at each other they were yelling at one of us kids. to the day 30 some odd years later just being around someone who is pissed off triggers my anxiety.
Just last night i went out to help my dad change a flat and it brought up so much shit from him yelling at me over everything when I was a kid. That was 30 years ago and he wasn't even yelling at me this time just pissed off at the situation.
This crap definitely sticks with you.
Any yelling beyond "don't do that thing that is imminently dangerous" can often just be parents taking out their stress on their kid. That's kind of how it felt whenever my dad yelled at me. It was never something that seemed sensible to yell about.
I am 70 the words uttered by my father when I was 5 still ring in my ears. He said "I wish you had never been born".
I am 32. I love my dad, he did his best. He was a good dad.
But I will probably never be able to forgive him for the times he shouted and yelled at me when I wasn't a good kid. He went into fits of rage over mundane things like homework and failing school. I remember everything he said in those fits of rage. Every instance of it. And I definitely remember feeling terrified.
And will remember it until the day I die.
Even at 70 years old.
I loved my dad, but he would yell really angrily when he got mad at me and it would terrify me to the point where I would beg him not to hit me (he never hit me). I turned out mostly okay, but I can see how that could really screw someone up.
This is horrible to do, but I feel like this really downplays physical/sexual abuse.
How so? If the result is similar they are just different roots to the same outcome.
The main difference is that the resilience, or the ability of a child to cope with the abuse, may vary greatly between physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse (like what the article is talking about). So a single sexual abuse is much more likley to cause Trauma, then beeing yelled at once. But beeing yelled at for years? Beeing told that you are wortheles repeatedly? That is likley to cause a lot of harm, especially because it plants a sense of "not beeing good enoth" in you that can take a lot of work to overcome once grown up.
There is no need to rank diffent kinds of abuse against each other. We need to see them as equaly harmful for children and not trivialice them.
This is correlation study, and we all know what that means, right? Correlations are significant results certainly, but not at all conclusive.
My dad loves to yell. Not at me, anymore, but he got it from his mother - they used to work out their problems in the form of screaming matches. I remember early in my teenage years he would bring up, almost out of nowhere sometimes, that he never hit us. He was proud of that. But man oh man, he sure loved to yell at us.
I only remember my grandfather yelling at me, once. It's not even fair to say "yelling AT me", because he was yelling FOR me - I was a dumb kid and I'd left the front door open to go outside and play. Once I got in front of him, he explained to me - calmly, quietly, but firmly - why I couldn't do that. I never did it again. I don't remember him yelling before or since that moment.
I miss my grandfather - he's the source of some of my fondest childhood memories and I can only hope I do him proud. Meanwhile, when my dad dies, I'll be glad to be rid of him. So, you do the math.
Maybe shouting at children all the time until they leave home is about the same as them getting sexually abused once.
But they aren't equivalent in the slightest when compared in the same quantities.
I got shouted at and called stupid all the time, but i feel being belted with sticks for minor things was probably what left more of a mark (mentally) to be honest
Although I don't think verbal abuse is acceptable, I think that equivalency is a bit much
You miss-read (or didn't read) the article if that's your take-away. It's saying the long-term effects can be roughly the same. It's not equivocating the actions themselves.
They're not equivocating the malice of verbal abuse vs. sexual abuse. They are equivocating the damage this kind of abuse can do to children, which their research supports. There's no reason to take offense as if they were taking a stand on the non-severity child sexual abuse, which they are not.
Verbal abuse when I was growing up was backed up with the threat of physical abuse. And having been bit and hit by my dad, and seeing my mom and older brother hit by my dad, those verbal threats carried a lot of weight.
I've walked on eggshells around my dad and every man that reminded me of him my whole life. It's affected my relationships and made it impossible to hold down a job as most bosses have the same authoritarian streak my dad did.
So yeah, verbal abuse is damaging. Rather it's equivalent to other forms of abuse I can't say. But it took me 44 years and a skilled emdr therapist to finally heal enough that I don't feel overwhelmed whenever I get emotional.
And for much of the last fifteen years I've been trying to find a therapist that took my trauma seriously and knew how to help me with it. So many misdiagnosis (anxiety, substance use, and depression were symptoms, but not the diagnosis that helped). Many suicide attempts. Many psych meds that didn't help. Many many years feeling unheard by the medical establishment.
So yeah, it's damaging.
Why?
I will say, verbal abuse is harder to pinpoint.
In some ways, it's easier to have a source of trauma to point to and say "that's the cause," so you can address and treat it.
I was verbally abused. My inner dialogue was one of critisism, guilt and shame, that I didn't realize until well into adulthood. I thought that was how everyone talked to themselves.
If I had been physically abused, I would have known about it. Much less insidious to the mind.
E: Was also just thinking about triggers. If you were a victim of physical trauma, your triggers might be very obvious. With verbal trauma, for me anyway, they were much less obvious. To think back, I went years and years having fight or flight reactions for no obvious reason, often manifested as anxiety or poor impulse control, wasted so many days just feeling anxious instead of working on myself. One trigger for me is loud voices. Had no idea until well into adulthood things started making sense. Damn near had a panic attack one day when a chef started yelling at the line cooks while I was waiting for my order.
I only learned that I was raised by a major league narcissist with anger management problems after I met my wife. She has training in clinical counseling and helped me realize that soooo much of my personality and habits can be traced back to my upbringing. Turns out my grandfather treated him the same way.
Generational trauma is a cruel monster that many of us never learn about. That's a damn shame too.
I really hate the idea of parents. Like two people raise you and are responsible for you? Reading Brave New World as a kid, it took me until the very end to understand it as dystopian. I thought the idea of your parents being barely a part of the equation, just absent minded and high all the time? Great. Trusting school to raise you entirely using weird subliminal studying methods was actually an improvement. It is dystopian, but yeah I basically think this idea of an atomic family unit to be the most bizarre and selfish, anti-social bullshit. My parents didn't let me know my relatives, were able to choose who I was friends with, where I was able to go. And all the while I'm reliant on them to not be kidnapped or hate crimed and to support my goals rather than force me to sit at home. The abuse just continues on and on. I will never be okay, I can only hope to make some cool art before I die. But that start of life decides for you whether you will be important or not.