SaraKay SMullens Identifies the 5 cycles of emotional
abuse:
1.
Rage
The anger that permeated your home frightened you so
badly that it kept you from thinking for yourself, learning to trust
your own judgment or creating your own paths, as well as left you
ill-equipped to deal with the legitimate emotional reactions of
others. The rage of others you experienced filled you with terror
and helplessness. The outbursts you endured were not a “cry for
help” within a relationship. Rather they were displaced outbursts
that the abuser used in order to achieve a sense of power, control
and domination over others.
2. Enmeshment
In your family, there was the expectation that
everyone needed to be together all of the time. There was no place
for a closed door for privacy, for individual thoughts. The family
was expected to be one enormous entity with no boundaries separating
one from the other. Your joint interests were mandated and
implemented with homemade psychological glue. You acquiesced
because you felt you had no other choice. If those you cared about
deeply tried to enter the family circle, they were treated as
outsiders until or unless they were willing to become part of your
family enmeshment.
3. Extreme Overprotection
Just when you were at the age to express your own
individuality and seek a measure of independence, you were smothered
by extreme parental overprotection. With extreme overprotection,
there are the crippling messages of needing to satisfy parents,
being the center of a parent’s happiness, and the inability to be
safe without a parent’s care. The result of suffocating
individuality and independence in a child is not only the
endangerment of a lack of confidence and inappropriate expectations,
but frequently feelings of guilt.
4. Rejection/Abandonment
If you voiced an opinion with which your parents or
caregivers did not agree, they withdrew their love for you, leaving
you feeling isolated and terrified to think for yourself. Only if
you agreed with them completely and saw everything through their
eyes, never your own, would love be shown to you. Understandably,
you learned to view love and control as one and the same, trusting
neither.
5. Complete Neglect
No one was there for you, ever. Your basic needs
such as food and clothing may have been met, but there was never a
feeling of emotional closeness or any substantive conversations.
This cycle is in many ways an extension and extreme case of the
rejection/abandonment cycle. Yet, within it, there is no semblance
of calm or acceptance, however false and fleeting these may be.
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In
evaluating which cycle of emotional abuse defines your personal
experience, keep in mind that in some families only one parent is
the emotional abuser, or the abuser may be the primary caretaker of
the child. In some families, each parent is the abuser but each
parent abuses differently (using different cycles). Or the abuser
can be operating from a shifting combination of cycles. Other
caregivers who are prominent in a child’s life may also expose them
to these cycles. Without awareness of the impact of the five
cycles, these cycles repeat themselves in all facets of an
individual’s life – friendship, love and work – with dangerous
ramifications in the community and on society in general.
To learn
more about the five cycles, how to use these definitions to improve
your understanding of yourself, someone you care about, or someone
you work with, please read Setting
YourSelf Free. |
