Thread by @CCChatMagazine

It can be difficult to recognise emotional cruelty.

Let’s talk
- Ghosting 👻
- Cutting Off ✂️
- The Silent Treatment 🌬
- Stonewalling 🧱
- Withholding ❤️‍🩹
- Destabilisation 🎢

as emotional and psychological abuse.

#coercivecontrol

🧵

An abuser enforces power and control in a number of ways,to dominate and force their victim into submission.

They often do it by deliberately WITHDRAWING their love and affection if their victim doesn’t comply with their *rules* or conform to what is expected of them.

This deliberate rejection causes confusion and panic in the victim as, often, they don’t understand what they did to be ignored in this way.

It is passive violence that can profoundly damage the person on the receiving end.

The person being ignored will often desperately modify their behaviour in order to return the relationship back to how it was. They can’t understand what has gone wrong or why the other person is treating them in this way.

Victims tend to feel extremely distressed.

Although there is no shouting or hitting, this is psychological violence and a form of torture.

It conveys the abuser’s contempt of the victim - that they are not worth the abuser’s acknowledgment. That they are nothing.

That they don’t exist.

Victims of this psychological torture often would rather have the physical violence as it is less painful than being rendered invisible.

At least they would still *exist*.

Studies show that feeling excluded or ignored can cause changes in the brain. 

The “anterior cingulate cortex” in the brain is responsible for detecting different levels of pain. Scientists have shown that this zone is activated when someone receives the silent treatment.

Activation in this zone means that physical symptoms start to appear.

Some very common symptoms are headaches and digestive problems, fatigue and insomnia. If the situation is severe and prolonged, serious problems can arise eg increase in blood pressure.

Because of the high levels of stress caused by the ‘silent treatment’, the autoimmune system is also affected.

It can severely threaten many aspects of mental health, such as self-esteem, belonging, control, and meaningful existence.

Abusers typically enjoy informing the victim that:

“You are nothing to me.”
“You are invisible to me”
“You don’t exist.”

The aim in rendering the other person invisible is to induce feelings of powerlessness and shame.

The silent treatment is a technique of torture because having your existence recognised is a basic human need and withholding of this recognition has huge detrimental consequences.

Stonewalling is similar to ghosting and the silent treatment in that the person guilty of this refuses to answer questions and typically just ignores the person.

When a person stonewalls, they completely shut down a conversation or refuse to interact with the other person.

Withholding affection is a type of avoidant abuse, where someone willingly withdraws affection with the specific goal of hurting a person’s feelings or trying to control them.

Destabilisation is a technique used in mind control and abuse to disorient and disarm with persistent attempts to demoralise the victim. This is often done with intermittent reinforcement of affection and rejection.

Abusers often use a cycle of love bombing and devaluation as a means to destabilise and control victims.
It creates an environment of heightened emotion triggers BIG emotional responses to both destabilise and disorient.

The victim often feels permanently anxious and panicked. This is part of the body’s natural ‘fight or flight’ response.

This response is an automatic physiological reaction to a situation perceived as stressful or frightening.

This perception of threat activates the sympathetic nervous system and triggers an acute stress response that prepares the body to respond in one of several ways:

Although called the ‘fight or flight’ response, there are actually five common responses to threat:

Fight, flight, freeze, flop and friend.

These reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear.

This is also known as the acute stress response.

What happens: In response to acute stress, the body's sympathetic nervous system is activated by a sudden release of hormones.

The sympathetic nervous system then stimulates the adrenal glands, triggering the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline.

This results in an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate.

This acute stress response can happen in the face of imminent physical danger OR as a result of psychological threat.

It is important to understand that the fight-or-flight response can be triggered by both real AND imagined threats.

The fear level is the same of you are being physically threatened or you are in fear of being physically threatened.