Is it Emotional Abuse? Assessment Tool

Today's episode provides an assessment tool for understanding emotional abuse. Often, abusers distort our reality, making us question ourselves. This tool offers clarity and validation to identify what's truly happening in your relationship. Understanding context, intent, and effect is crucial as they reveal whether actions are part of systemic abuse or isolated incidents.

Remember that it’s not about individual behaviors but recognizing ongoing manipulation or exploitation patterns. These insights can empower you to make informed decisions about your relationship moving forward. The assessment tool is available on my website: emotionalabusecoach.com

Transcript

Welcome to the relationship recovery podcast. Posted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes in narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself, and others and heal the relationship with yourself, so you can learn to love in a healthy way. Hello, and thank you so much for being here as always. Today's episode is meant to be a bit of an assessment tool for you.

Hello to begin to understand emotionally abusive behaviors. And what I find helpful about this are about things like this is that it takes it's a tool so that you can try and understand what's going on in your own relationship and make the best step moving forward. And so A lot of times, when we are feeling the way that we're feeling we're actually told by the abusive of person that we're not seeing it clearly that we've gotten it wrong. That we are not. The way that we view the world is inaccurate.

And so the purpose of this is to begin to shed some light on what's actually happening to give you something that you can use to come back to that my hope is to validate and to give you something that when you are feeling this way, you can come back to it and say, is this what's happening or not, and be able to move through from there. This assessment tool is not or. I'm calling at assessment tool, but it's really just a series of questions that I have. And these questions, I'm also going to put on my website emotional abuse coach dot com so that you can go and look at it if that's easier for you. So again, these series of questions are meant to talk about identifying, emotional abuse because often, we are so gas that we don't see what's happening.

And abusive behavior is so covert a time its own city, It's the times Zurich even extremely over, but really, it always comes back to A pattern of power or control, and exploitation. And to make sure or to identify that a person is establishing this kind of pattern, it's really important to go back. And look at abusive behaviors, but to also go beyond that and to see what is actually happening in this moment, because we can find that really any behavior can be used as a person to survive abuse or be used as a person to establish power. So this is why so many people think that they are the abuse of 1 is because in a way, you can almost like gas yourself to say, I must be doing this. The And so when we take a step back and look at why this was established, thinking about a lot of the context, the intent, the effect, and looking at the pattern of behaviors, it helps us take a step back from what's actually happening and begin to validate and un gas ourselves so that you can make the best decision of what this is and what you want.

To do moving forward. Again, a lot of people have a really hard time with this, it's a really hard I think for anybody to just sit with some of these behaviors and sit with what's happening and not cause ourselves to think, but why did this or but I did that? Use this to really focus on the behavior, so you can begin to ask yourself. Is this abuse or not. So let's start with context.

Context is what's been happening in the relationship over time. Even what was happening, what was happening immediately before and after a specific behavior occurred, what meaning or history does a certain behavior have given that context? What impact does that context have on your ability to take care of yourself in the relationship. It's important to ask yourself this and to put it into context because often and abusive of person will not and that if they do, the light deny your reality that it actually happened the way that you believe it happened or the context that's there, which is gas lighting, or they'll tell you that you're escalating and that you're making into something that it's not. We can also look at an intent What are the real imagined perceived expressed or intuitive reasons for the behavior?

What's the goal of the behavior? Was the behavior used to establish control or was it used to regain control over themselves? Was it about having their need met even if you couldn't need it? Like, you can think about, like, getting incessant calls, well while, you're in a work meeting a busy work meeting, and you don't answer, but effect is anger towards you because you didn't answer, not the fact that you were in the meeting, and you were busy, and you couldn't. Can also look at the effect.

Whose life is smaller as a result of the behavior. Who's is being controlled or manipulated, horse exploited hurt. Here's an example. When I lost my coal like that, she finally realized how much she'd been hurting me and allowed me. To move back in versus when I reacted like that, I felt so ashamed of how I acted, that I gave up on the changes I've been asking for.

Right? 1 way of thinking about it? Is, like, is there a reason an intent behind it? Or is there humility in the way somebody is acting even if they don't realize it in the moment, but there is humility there. It doesn't change that the behavior was abusive.

And the behavior itself is not the point. That's not what we're looking at. It's determining if the behavior is part of a pattern of power and control over a partner. And this assessment do group of assessment questions really pointed it at that. It's about trying to understand and wrap your mind around what is actually happening if you need space to begin to think these things through.

I hope that this is helpful. Again, the relationship recovery, course, which is now called the emotional abuse for cover... Course of my website, is available if you want to continue to work through some of these behaviors, but I know that I needed a way to think through some of these things, and I hope that this is helpful for you too. As always, you can follow me at emotional abuse coach on Instagram, emotional abuse coach dot com. It can always email me at jessica jessica coaching dot com.