Emotional Abuse and Healthy Relationships

Healthy relationships involve respect, trust, and consideration for the other person. Instead, they involve mistreatment, disrespect, intense jealousy, controlling behavior, or physical violence. Abuse can be physical, emotional, or sexual. Physical abuse means any form of violence, such as hitting, punching, pulling hair, and kicking. Abuse can happen in both dating relationships and friendships.

All relationships have qualities that can make them healthy, abusive, or somewhere in between. Being in a dating relationship can mean different.

Learn more about national efforts to raise awareness about gender based violence throughout the year:. It is one tactic in a range of deliberate behaviors that a person may use to gain and maintain power and control over another in an intimate relationship. Often subtle, tactics of emotional abuse can be harder to identify than more overt physical forms of violence, like hitting, punching, etc.

Nonetheless, emotional abuse can cause similar levels of emotional distress and be just as damaging to mental health as other forms of abuse and is linked to numerous negative health outcomes Heise et al. Often, survivors report that the negative impacts of emotional abuse last long after any physical injuries have healed. While these abuse tactics are certainly not exclusive to teens and can show up in relationships between people of any age, young people experience emotional abuse at alarming rates.

The Facts on Tweens and Teens and Dating Violence from Futures Without Violence states that in a national online survey, 2 out of 5 respondents ages 11 and 12 report that their friends are victims of verbal abuse. According to Break the Cycle, lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are more likely to experience physical and psychological dating abuse, sexual coercion, and cyber dating abuse than their heterosexual peers. For runaway and homeless youth, engaging in subsistence strategies in order to survive can place them at greater risk of experiencing all forms of relationship violence , including emotional abuse.

Despite its prevalence, emotional abuse in dating relationships very often goes unidentified and unreported. As with intimate partner violence in adulthood, intersecting forms of oppression experienced by youth such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. I am not what he says I am! I deserve better.