emotional trauma recovery
&
personal transformation
“Your wounds are here to help you evolve.”
What is more dangerous:
a bottle of toxin labelled ‘toxin’ or a bottle of toxin labelled ‘love’?
Emotional abuse is extremely dangerous, because it is far too easy to confuse it with love. Nobody teaches us the difference between nurturing love and toxic abuse. Whatever we received in early childhood, we call it ‘love’ when we grow up.
When we are adults, we wonder why we are struggling in narcissistic relationships or other emotionally abusive dynamics. We wonder why we are unable to leave the narcissist. We wonder why we keep attracting another one. We wonder why we are unhappy, depressed, anxious, financially broke and physically sick.
We were programmed to confuse ‘toxin’ with ‘love’ and we are drinking from the wrong bottle…
without realising it.
Emotional abuse is frequently difficult to recognise, but its effects are everywhere: broken families, declining mental health and deteriorating physical well-being. It is, without a doubt, the new public health emergency of our time.
Welcome, I’m Dr Orsolya Toth.
It is my passion to help people like you heal from the devastating and often underestimated impact of emotional abuse.
What is Emotional Abuse?
Emotional abuse is when someone uses you to meet their survival needs on a long-term basis without physical abuse. This may sound strange, but your abuser may or may not know that they are abusing you. Chances are that they were similarly abused in their own past, so they often think that what they are doing is normal. They believe that using another person like an object, for their own selfish purposes, is acceptable.
At the heart of emotional abuse is the abuser’s fear of abandonment. They are terrified that you will leave them and that they will die. The practical consequence of this fear is that the abuser will be extremely controlling. You must do as they say, otherwise you will be severely punished. You are not allowed to express your emotions, thoughts or opinions and you are blocked from pursuing your true interests. You are also verbally abused, manipulated, humiliated and criticised to no end. The objective is clear: when you are brainwashed by your abuser, you will not leave them.
This type of controlling treatment forces you to repress who you really are. Instead of living as your authentic Self, you are playing out your abuser’s agenda in your life. The saddest part is that you have been programmed to act this way and you don’t even know that you are living someone else’s life. But one day you wake up and your life is in chaos: your romantic partner is abusing you, your work life is a mess, you are isolated or physically sick.
Often, we need a shock in our adult lives to realise that we have been programmed to endure emotional abuse. At first, emotional abuse is invisible and it’s much harder to detect than physical abuse. But because of the mind-body connection, emotional abuse is not any less harmful than physical abuse. If anything, it is more insidious, because it’s harder to recognise and we will endure it for longer.
Emotional abuse destroys you over time. It’s not about the individual abusive act. It’s about repeated emotional violence that has a cumulative effect on your mind and body. We may even downplay the significance of a single incident and mistakenly believe that we need to ‘toughen up’ and deal with it, when the healthy solution is to walk away. Instead, we stay and keep drinking the toxin, because the bottle was labelled ‘love’.
What is Emotional Trauma?
Emotional trauma is the cumulative effect of emotional abuse that results in the loss of your authentic Self. To cope with your abuser’s controlling nature, you adopted survival patterns that are now deeply ingrained in your mind and body. When we have been subjected to emotional abuse, we end up living life as a collection of coping mechanisms, rather than as the person we were meant to be. Repressing who we are becomes a sad and destructive way of life.
Because we developed these survival patterns from early childhood, we don’t even know that we are acting them out. We falsely believe that these mental, emotional and behavioural patterns are the fixed essence of our personality. Most often we don’t notice them, so the patterns run our lives from the depth of our subconscious mind. We please people, we placate them, we prove our worth to them to keep them around even when this destroys us. We falsely believe that we don’t have a choice.
Being disconnected from our authentic Self is very painful. It leads to many struggles in life and it causes intense suffering in adulthood. For as long as our mind and body can repress the pain, they will do so. But at some point, the pain comes up to the surface and we can no longer hide from it: we must face what has so far been repressed. As we do so, we begin to heal.
How to Heal Emotional Trauma?
The key to healing emotional trauma is to reconnect with your authentic Self. To do this, you must recognise and release the survival patterns that have been with you for decades. We can only do this if we turn within and ask the right question: ‘What are the patterns in me that attract emotional abuse, narcissistic relationships and other chaos into my life?’
The patterns that we must release served our survival decades ago. We needed them to keep our attachment to our caregivers. Today, however, these patterns are destroying us. When we were children, we had to prioritise our attachment to our parents and home environment at the expense of our authentic Self. Today, we must make the opposite choice: we must prioritise our authentic Self and let go of our outdated attachments to people and circumstances that no longer serve us.
This opposite choice is the essence of a new evolution: we can no longer live by the outdated rules of childish survival mechanisms that instruct us to cling to people and circumstances that are toxic for us. There was a time and place for these attachments, but we have moved on. We must let go of our old programming and consciously choose a new one: a path of authenticity and freedom to be who we really are.
Since it took years of emotional abuse to disconnect you from your true Self, it will take time to heal the wounds of trauma. There is no quick fix to healing trauma. Releasing ingrained mental, emotional and behavioural patterns takes commitment and patience.
The good news is that there are effective tools that can help you with your recovery, including those that I use in my coaching practice. There are also fantastic resources out there on this topic that can help you begin your healing journey. Take a look at my book on narcissistic abuse for new insights on this phenomenon and a comprehensive healing guide from narcissistic abuse.
