emotional abuse: the invisible scars

[Music] in light of some new research on understanding how trauma affects any of us who may be neurod Divergent it just made me think so much about how it affects all of us in so many ways and really one of the reasons why I'm here is because not because I figured out my childhood and had a perfect adult life it is because I unconsciously and unintentionally revictimized myself in a new costume in my adult life like so many of us this heart of repeating patterns and that's why I'm here that and the continuous desire to understand and to help others understand their story so the hardest part for me just really quickly has been that did revictimized myself and in the process ended up in a different way having my children experience trauma in similar and different ways not just like mine but as a result of my unhealed and unprocessed wounds and when you build your entire childhood around I'm going to have a different adult life and that is going to fix everything not that I knew that up here by the way I've paint on my hands I'm repainting my bathroom this weekend um is that it's been devastating one of the hardest parts of my work has been forgiving myself and trying to be compassionate around what happened to my children as a result of me not understanding trauma and then some pretty literally unpredictable life events that no one could have necessarily predicted that being said I want to share two articles one briefly and one in more depth around the impact of emotional abuse and the widespread damage that it does it has actually been the least studied in many regards and it turns out that at least a few really interesting articles are saying not only is it the most common form of wounding for us but it often can be the most damaging and I would argue when you include neglect emotional neglect and emotional wounding I'm going to use that word for YouTube um more often than not is that the damage is just invisible an invisible pain that we carry and we are much more likely to do two things to walk around with trauma and to then be revictimized in some form in our adult lives so the first study here just says you know the question is is emotional wounding as harmful as physical or sa and the answer is yes this study found that the participants who reported emotional wounding reported higher scores for depression anxiety neuroticism in general compared to the part participants who reported only physical only SA or combined physical and sa this study along with other research shows that individuals who have suffered from emotional wounding during childhood have long-term consequences that can persist into adulthood now we know this this is nothing new this study you're not going to go oh I had probably didn't know that but I want it to really validate your story and most importantly I want it to validate that you uh may have a form of neurod Divergence ADHD your parents may have autism their own trauma that may have significantly affected the way all of this has played out in your life so the bottom line of This research is that the consequences are severe and that it is as damaging and that exposure can cause lifelong mental physical and emotional difficulties and that can suffer in significant ways now let's really dive into the second study which is about really talking about the invisible scars of emotional wounding I want you to hold in mind the additional layers of things that you might not have thought as trauma just talking about how we can be more susceptible to trauma depending upon how our brains work and how important that is to validate and understanding yourself and at the end of this video we'll talk briefly about emotional regulation techniques as they are a part of the outcome of the damage that is done when we experience emotional neglect and abuse the second study I want to start with saying this that why why are we more likely to be revictimized is the question I I think so much about and why I think this you know evolution of learning about psychology and Trauma and and potentially techniques and nervous system and and all of it is so impactful the first thing is what the study talks about and I had written this down before I even got into it is our attachment patterns our classic attachment insecurity types of patterns anxious avoidant disorganized also called fearful avoidant but really one that I think is much more common on its Spectrum where we have both avoidant and anxious qualities the bottom line is that these attachment patterns are what we're seeking to heal but we often end up revictimized and repeating ourselves in these relationships in terms of our little childhood longings for healing we repeat the trauma in a different costume it looks different as I'll talk more on a project I'm working on in the future for me it looked like this in my childhood I had parents who raged and yelled and screamed a lot and I swore I would not choose a partner like that and for most of my marriage I did not have that but I still lived in a constant state of scanning and hypervigilance for that person's mood and mind I was highly sensitive to that person's changes and that person had a different way of wounding me and I'm sure me them but the point is I ended up extremely wounded and revictimized because I thought it looks so different and so that is why it's so important that these early caregiver relationships really do establish a critical foundation for lifelong learning about what we think we are worthy of and what relationships look like and love does look like or looks like and that there is permanent damage and that in fact it talks about the lack of security and we often call it childhood maltreatment childhood adversity to look at the various ranges of all the different types of wounding but it increases just the actual Act of having adversity that alone increases your risk for more adversity in life and we're going to talk about why that may be especially around PTSD and re victimization and it says in fact many Studies have highlighted just like I said that childhood maltreatment is predictive of revictimization which refers to the exposure of individuals who were victimized during childhood to subsequent traumatic events so what is this about the study starts to talk about that we know we've been studying the impact of these types of adversities since the 70s and 80s and we know that the definition of maltreatment like I said is really about abusive or neglectful acts that are uh perpetrated on us by caregivers that mentally physically or emotionally either have the potential or do harm or threaten a child so what am I talking about I'm talking about yelling and screaming I'm talking about absence neglect being left alone those are all harmful I'm talking about highly critical condescending parents parents who have mental illness their own addictions all kinds of things because when we talk about threat it doesn't although it has in PTSD formal diagnosis it is supposed to be talking about threat of our lives and one of the arguments here is that PTSD doesn't really address the emotional Dynamic which we know that complex PTSD can and by the way I'm talking about complex PTSD and PTSD though this article was done specifically on PTSD I want to make sure we're all holding that we all know the damage of all of these when you have PTSD you often also have complex trauma because you have traumatic events and then often relational trauma so we know that these things cause harm and they can vary in what they look like to cause harm in terms though of just the statistics this study says this was in 20121 that physical abuse emotional abuse saay physical neglect and emotional neglect were the categories of what they looked at in terms of wounding and they found a 12.7% rate for saay 16.3 for physical neglect 18.4 for emotional neglect 22.6 for physical wounding and 36.3 for emotional wounding 36 double the amount of of of emotional neglect and really in many regards almost double of everything in terms or more triple in many of those Dynamics and so the problem is if emotional wounding is so common why has it been the least studied and why does it matter so much well it matters so much because like I'm saying the whole point of this is that when we don't identify parenting techniques and ways of engaging that we don't understand that continually yelling at your child and screaming and losing it and being emotionally volatile or highly sensitive to wounding again and again and again and this happens for lots of reasons but let's just focus on the behavior or neglect leaving leaving kids alone um that all of these things are are really profound and this idea that it's okay to put your hands on a child but not an adult it just blows my mind to think that in in if you were out in public and you punch somebody in adulthood you'd go to jail but you can get away with that in your own home and often no one knows and so we think of abuse I think though like that like physical and that is huge but the point of this whole conversation is to broaden it to really give validation to the the wide range and often one of the biggest pieces because if you have all these other ones you most likely also have emotional abuse occurring with them most parents who are being obviously you can't be frankly all those things are also emotional abuse all those things I just mentioned in terms of categories so it turns out that we all get PTSD or cptsd and it turns out that up to 70% of us experience at least one traumatic event which I just kind of find laughable it's like one traumatic event I know that I'm on the higher end and I'm not at the highest end um but most people I know have had a series of traumatic events losses relational traumas and things like that so I think we are underestimating in large regard for so many people the actual numbers but we know from this study that it turns out that basically yes at least here and I'll link the studies down below that having this childhood maltreatment in the form of emotional wounding does tend to significantly increase vulnerability to PTSD to diagnosable PTSD and to being revictimized it says this we considered revictimization as any subsequent type of traumatic event occurring during adolescence or life or adult life in victims of childhood maltreatment this study aimed to investigate whether the presence of childhood maltreatment especially emotional abuse maltreatment could predict revictimization and PTSD symptoms of severity for a subsequent traumatic event in adolescence and young adulthood and of course it dis found yes like I just said it does and so I just wanted to link those things here but what's interesting is that it found that when they took all the forms of maltreatment that emotional remained one of the most significant predictors alongside sa but that importantly emotional wounding was associated with the largest increases in the number of types of subsequent traumatic events and the highest incident rates of PTSD symptoms highlighting the long-term consequences of emotional maltreatment and a non-clinical EX sample of Brazilian college students it says in addition 74% of them were exposed to at least one form of childhood maltreatment and 50% reported being exposed to two or more types of childhood maltreatment in fact among all continents South America and specifically Brazil has been reported to have the highest rates of estimated childhood Mal treatment now we're not going to go into why that might be but I do think that what it talks about is that it is a ival problem and one of the issues is that there is are these cultural and societal uh differences and expectations around things like what constitutes parenting what constitutes wounding and also says this that additionally in our sample emotional Mal treatment was the most common form of Mal treatment with prevalence rates of 59 and 42% for emotional abuse and emotional neglect respect itively so it says these results are in line with metaanalysis of the worldwide prevalence that showed that emotional abuse is a universal problem and so basically this is supporting it whether it's a little more here or there is IR relevant the bottom line is the literature supports it and remarkably in our sample emotional abuse was the Mal treatment subtype that showed the highest impact causing an increase of 40% in the average number of types of subsequent traumatic events reported by individuals in fact so using the ctq which is a childhood trauma questionnaire they were asked to report responses on as many experiences as they could remember and scores for each maltreatment are considered a continuous independent variable the bottom line is this emotional abuse was the only significant predictor of revictimization after controlling for potenti potential co- confounders so the bottom line is when everything got boiled down the biggest predictor of everything else in this study was being on the receiving end of emotional abuse now pause for a second and think about all of the things that constitute what you have endured and how that might have truly impacted your life in ways you are not even aware of so now let's really get into revictimization and what some of the explanations might be one possible explanation according to this study of why adverse situations related to Childhood maltreatment lead to revictimization is that experiencing these events impairs the cognitive processing of emotional situations and compromises the acquisition of emotional regulation capacities and interpersonal skills what am I saying I'm saying that one reason is that being on the receiving end of emotional abuse it affects your brain it affects the way your brain develops it affects the way your brain takes in and processes information I've talked so much about hypervigilance in my course in my courses around this repeated experience of walking on eggshells and how the fear response the repeated stress response gets activated again and again and again which actually changes the way your brain works and assesses threat and it's also going to affect the way you deal with other people your interpersonal skills the way you try to make sense of What's happen to you is going to be often compromised when you've had this form of maltreatment in fact it was demonstrated that trauma exposure during childhood impairs neural processing of salient emotional stimuli and is associated with a failure to differentiate between non-threat and threat related stimuli so going back to hypervigilance you start to think everything is a threat we often develop this negative attentional bias and the research shows that even in like I've said before neutral faces when you've been raised to look for anger fear depression whatever you're more likely to see that those are the glasses you're wearing even on something that is technically neutral or non-threatening it says interestingly Burns and colleagu showed that emotional abuse was strongly related to emotional regulation difficulties suggesting that emotional regulation skills might be more likely to be negatively impacted by emotional wounding than by any other form of maltreatment due to the former's chronic nature in other words you don't typically have one incidence of emotional abuse at least with a caregiver you might with a teacher coach things like that but most likely it's occurring in our homes and it is most likely repeated and chronic and that is a huge part of the damage in addition to diminished risk detection skills so your skills for detecting risk aren't what they could be childhood maltreatment may lead to long-term disregulation of the functioning of biological stress responses like I just said and hamper the implementation of typical defensive responses at imminent risk of victimization what does that mean that means that you can't fight back against caregivers you don't develop the skills it's not safe it's not an option and one of these examples is that when you become a young adult and adult you don't have the ability to believe you're even worthy of not being victimized you don't have the defensive skills to speak up for yourself I've talked a lot and I do it in my course my new one about avoiding conflict that's one of the big signs being a self- silencer or taking too much and then blowing because you in your childhood conflict was dangerous anger felt dangerous turns out though that self- advocacy sticking up for yourself which might trigger someone's anger might make that hard for you to do so you don't even speak up for yourself let alone engage in conflict and then it talks about arguments around the brain's dysfunction like I just said around the fear defense circuit exactly what I'm talking about and impaired defensive engagement is is significant and it says in their study PTSD patients who had experienced recurrent traumatic exposure were among the least reactive to emotional stimuli and often reported a history of repeated childhood maltreatment exposure so the most damaged people often are the least reactive to things that should trigger more internal stimuli emotionally we've had to dampen that shut that down protect that don't know how to engage with that be dis Associated from that and all of that sets us up to choose partners and people bosses husbands wives lovers um friends colleagues whatever who are more likely to victimize us it sets us up for those things to happen so what it also talks about and I mentioned this earlier is that it's not just that we are victims in our own little family systems it's that going out in the world especially being maybe uh certain populations what we tell what we look at for example for women and domestic issues at home certain people that have differences and uh lack protection through their brains their bodies whatever it is that these cultural patterns and rigid gender roles and all these things prop up a system and specifically one form of a system we're not going to get into one type of person in the system who is more entitled to be harmful to others so the point is that and there it's not to say that victimizers don't have their own set of harm it's just that in this video we're talking about that that piece so in addition things like family functioning and how you have resources lack of security all these things can also create victim blaming it can normalize wounding and create you know factors which also function as increasing our risk for further exposure it says additionally experiencing adverse situations during childhood has consistently identified as a potential risk factor for mental health problems including PTSD so as I've said to get down to the last part talking about the role of PTSD it says in the same vein it was reported that emotional abuse had the largest effect on the prediction of PTSD severity and psychological symptoms in a Portuguese Community sample one of the most important symptoms of pgsd is the reexperiencing of the traumatic event which has been linked to an inability an inability to downregulate negative emotions to calm down to soothe to manage your negative emotions an overreaction to and a failure to recover from unpleasant events so what am I saying what I'm saying is that as an outcome if you're walking around with these types of wounding let's say emotional abuse and PTSD and you may not even know it whether you know it or not it's affecting how you deal with your feelings how you respond to others what you recognize is a problem how you might Advocate or not everything is compromised and it says accordingly increased brain activity to negative stimuli and difficulty with emotional regulation were related to PTSD stress symptom severity and Trauma exposed undergraduate students so another study supporting that the last part of this I'm just going to read to you it says this one of the pathways by which childhood maltreatment might lead lead to increased risk for PTSD is that childhood maltreatment could cause impairments in the ability to understand and regulate the emotions and emotional abuse in particular emerged as the strongest predictor of emotional disregulation as emphasized in this study emotional wounding occurs more frequently than other forms of maltreatment and this might overwhelm an individual's capacity to effectively regulate emotions as he or she or they are chronically exposed to situations involving negative affect taken together this supports the idea that we need to understand this more the impact on Mental Health the bottom line is that our capacity to regulate to manage to respond is impacted significantly by these by these experiences so this study talked about lots of things but I just want to give a quick summary of letting you know wait a minute what is what does it mean to be emotionally disregulated it can look like things like your mood shifts frequently the way you approach eating and feeding yourself crying a lot having emotional meltdowns breakdowns lots of conflict in your relationships being aggressive or taking risks that are unsafe substance use ins significant ways self- wounding poor tolerance of frustration just not being able to handle a lot of things for example so that can look like someone who cries I used to cry when I was angry and I realized not that just like in the last few weeks that I couldn't access my entitlement to anger so the sadness would come first now I can be like mad and it's okay but that I would have thought well why am I crying about this like you know and not realize that I was actually angry it can look like someone shutting you out it can look like someone having a fit in the grocery store because the line is not you know managed well I mean that's frustrating but like a full-on you know losing over that there's probably something else going on certainly driving I think we all are really bad at this so many of us are in our cars like we're normal people there's so many Tik toks about this where it's like oh hi you know therapist come on in and they were're like screaming at people and yelling at them but that we often offload that in those environments and I laugh with my kids like in the 70s you could flip someone off in your car and they might flip you back off and yell back at you now it is literally a dangerous thing to do people are like have lost their minds in terms of that I'm not suggesting the first response was a great one but the point is there's a lot of rage and anger not being dealt with and I would argue a lot of trauma and sadness and disregulation beneath those responses so what can you do we've talked a lot about there's so many videos here I know many of you follow so many great creators who talk about how to calm and soothe your nervous system to recognize that a lot of what's happening is you're living in that fight ORF flight or you're in that collapse shutdown the collapse shutdown might look like dissociation substance use depression all of those things or you're in that sort of anxious fight ORF flight stressed reading scanning making meaning all of that so you want to look at how to soothe and calm your body that whole idea that trauma lives in your body the story that I believe that these old stories are living in our nervous system and the thing is whatever state you're living in most of the time your brain needs a story the problem is that story is often inaccurate or it's an old story and so part of the work I'm going to keep talking about more is what to do with that how do you create new stories how do you challenge old stories and doing things like exercise I really believe in that fight ORF flight that moving your body just walking out the door I heard a doctor talk about I might have said this in my last video but that if if if walking was a pill it would be the most successful drug in history for the most amount of things so just putting on your shoes if if you can and walking out the door I see so many people who are elderly who look good and all they do is walk every day the point is moving your body taking a shower using ice using sour candies listening to music doing yoga stretching I lost my camera again my card stopped working what I was saying was you know moving your body yoga uh exercise of course meditation humming singing listening to music topping techniques um there are so many nervous system regulations things to focus on but you also have to work on creating new stories because once again that negative attentional bias is creating a story often still living in childhood that is not accurate and I've talked a lot about this in my hypervigilance course that I had to scan for my parents anger I mentioned this in the beginning and so I became I became hyperfocused and sensitive to scanning my partner's mood and then making meaning and walking around even though it wasn't loud and yelling but still feeling wounded a lot of the time and sometimes it was because of the how they were and other times it's because I was looking for reinforcement of feeling wounded and I knew how to take the littlest things and make meaning and those were old stories from my childhood so you want to work on accepting how you feel challenging your belief systems obviously reframing grounding techniques mindfulness practices meditations I love the safe place guided meditation I've put that on my new course too as well but you can Google it there's scripts for it that's one where you imagine a place where you feel you know peaceful in nature and all those things or in imaginary worlds looking at things like your sleep and your food intake how you take care of yourself your mental health is so related to your sleep patterns it is so important to prioritize and most of us are not getting enough we don't move our bodies we don't sleep me included God help you if you hit menopause and try to sleep um and then things like you know support animals loved ones therapy podcasts books connections uh taking walks in nature the green and blue effect of being outside it's not just a thing where you can watch a video right but it is important and then of course if you need medication and support in that way those are all important things to look at but I wanted to really once again this is a longer video than I intended but I feel like it's something that is really driven like I keep thinking like why am I here it's because I reenacted and recreated and revictimized myself in devastating ways not many of which I could have controlled I don't think I could have controlled any of them in many regards because I didn't know what I didn't know and most likely you don't either but the goal of this is to give us a lens and a language to begin to validate I hope more and more and going back to the beginning of this in terms of um the recent studies on PTSD in mild stressors can cause trauma especially for those with autism or other forms of neurod Divergence and so I just wanted to you know highlight those things and reinforce that what you know in your body and mind and story is true and you're worthy of healing and support and love and just a quick reminder I have several courses one is free and you can also take three free preview lessons of my new course I'll put the link down below they're pretty beefy lessons too this one is called the hypervigilant trauma personality from egg sh parents and partners and it is just full of activities and knowledge and everything to understand how it can show up in your life it is the course I've just been so happy to put out and I tried to make it more reasonable but at the same time I also have this really crazy chunky course on understanding if you were raised by parents who may have struggled with borderline or narcissism and I would argue now that knowing what I know now that you may have had parents who especially with the borderline piece may have had undiagnosed autism and it's all about healing and dealing with your trauma and it has everything from attachment to you know understanding your parents in depth narcissism borderline where it comes from what it looks like in you what the risks are in you uh all kinds of activities and things like that meditations all of my courses have some form of guided meditation that you can listen to or re-record in your own voice so that's it thank you so much for being here like I said please check out at least at a minimum take the free links and take the free course the the previews just so you can learn more about hypervigilance and eggshell Dynamics if you want to and um I'll see you soon once again take care stay safe okay bye [Music]