Can someone define emotional abuse for me?

If people define me as too critical of others, am I being emotionally abusive?

I found this in the resource directory. Hope it helps.

Abuse is about control and the fear of losing it. Ill-treatment is an absurd effort to maintain and enhance the abuser's hegemony - social, cultural, legal, and, above all, psychological.

Abusers exploit, lie, insult, demean, ignore (the "silent treatment"), manipulate, and control. There are a million ways to abuse, directly and by proxy. To love too much is to abuse. It is tantamount to treating someone as an extension, an object, or an instrument of gratification. To be over-protective, not to respect privacy, to be brutally honest, with a sadistic sense of humor, or consistently tactless, to be unpredictable, arbitrary, capricious, to react disproportionately, to dehumanize, to objectify - is to abuse.

To expect too much, to denigrate, to ignore - are all modes of abuse. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse. The list is long. Most abusers abuse surreptitiously. They are "stealth abusers". You have to actually live with one in order to witness the mistreatment.

wow. this is exactly how i was treated by my step-mom for the 10 yrs i lived with her and my dad. i engage in si and have been in counseling for it. i never really believed them before when they said i was a*Us*d......i can't stand seeing or hearing the word/

when i married my second husband, he smothered me. he bought my clothes, dressed me like him, found me every time i went to shop or visit a friend...on and on and on.....all in the name of "love".................then when we divorced, i found out just how much manipulation he had pulled on me. all of that was abuse...

To love too much is to abuse. It is tantamount to treating someone as an extension, an object, or an instrument of gratification.

Emotional abuse is anything that belittles you , hurts, insults, condeming you. Someone telling you that your going to be just like someone horrid in your family, calling you stupid, blimp.
angie

it is when your inherent human right to individuation is negated, preempted, dismissed as irrelevent, violated, disqualified, arrested and denied that you have been emotionally abused if this is ongoing and commited. If your right to your dignity, feelings, opinions, successes, judgements, experience, vision, sensibility, questions, curiosity, goodwill are not presumed but are invalidated by someone in relationship with you- you are being abused if you feel abused- trust yourself.

In nutshell, emotional (which is verbal) abuse is: Words which disempower another. The best book on the subject: The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans; it took me 31 years to find the answer as to what was happening to me. Patricia is my heroine along with millions of other women.

I have adapted a definition of soul murder to define emotional abuse:

To abuse or neglect someone, to deprive the person of his or her own identity and ability to experience joy in life, is to commit soul murder. Soul murder is the perpetration of brutal or subtle acts against people that result in their emotional bondage to the abuser and, finally, in their psychic and spiritual annihilation.

If people define me as too critical of others, am I being emotionally abusive?

You ask an important question Growingflower - when you crticize, does it come in the form of 'constructive criticism'?

Criticize:
1 : to consider the merits and demerits of and judge accordingly : evaluate
2 : to find fault with : point out the faults of

I would think that if the critique contains a majority of naming of faults, then it could be emotionally abusive. Some people do this habitually.

However, if you take the true meaning of the word, it means to point out both the good and the not so good points. I like the word "evaluate" because it suggests a sense of fairness.

JMO. Even if no one asked.

If you do find a lot of fault with others, I would say that it *can be* emotionally abusive, although you may not mean it that way. Perhaps you think the other person wants to improve on this perceived fault, and/or wasn't aware of having it. Speaking for me, though, I am intensely aware of my flaws and hardly need them pointed out.

My ex-husband used to be very critical of me, and he didn't understand why it upset me. He'd insist that he was only telling the truth, and to him, "criticism" was when you found fault that didn't exist. For example, telling a perfectly neat housekeeper that the house was messy, calling a thin woman fat, or rejecting a well-cooked meal as badly cooked. As far as he was concerned, if the house actually was messy, the woman actually was fat, or the meal actually was badly cooked, then it wasn't "criticism" to point it out, no matter how brutally. Baloney, I say. I would try to explain that when I constantly hear a negative evaluation of myself, and I know there is truth in it, it eats away at my self-esteem far more than if he was spouting nonsense. Do you make an effort to be tactful with your opinions, and are you just as quick to point out the positive as well as the negative?

Another way a person can come across as critical of others is if they are insecure about themselves, then always compare themselves to others so that the others come out unfavorably. "My hair is prettier than yours," for example, if I wanted to feel good about myself, but didn't stop to think that this is a criticism of your hair.

So, in summary, when people say you are too critical of others, what do they mean?

perfect definition in my book.