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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.