15 Signs You Had An Emotionally Abusive Parent But Didn’t Know It

It’s important to recognize how moody your parent was while you were growing up. “If a parent’s mood swings made you feel like you were always walking on eggshells and you were always nervous or scared of what would happen when they were around (even if nothing ‘bad’ ever happened), that’s emotionally abusive behavior,” Christi Garner, LMFT, tells Bustle. “This higher level of stress while growing up causes changes in the body and brain, and can have long-term effects on health."

Garner feels that an overly critical parent who focused on the negative things about you counts as emotional abuse. “If you still can hear their negative comments in your mind, and you can trace them back to your parent, or they still say these things to you daily, you know they are taking their negative feelings about themselves out on you, which can lead to self-esteem issues and insecurity," she says.

As a result, as an adult, you may find that it’s hard to turn off the negative self-talk, according to Tom Bruett, MS, LMFT. “Notice if you are extremely hard on yourself,” he tells Bustle. “Typically, it can be the voice of a critical or abusive parent that we have internalized.”

Just as you’d like a romantic partner to be emotionally available, think back to whether your parent was, too. “One example might be a child being told they are too sensitive,” Cole says. “Another is a child saying they felt like they wanted to harm themselves and being told they are just trying to get attention.”

When someone’s passive-aggressive, they don’t tell you what’s really bothering them. “If you had a parent who was passive-aggressive, pleasant on the surface, but cold underneath, it’s likely a sign of emotional abuse,” psychotherapist Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., tells Bustle.

“If your parent was overly anxious and always asking for you to help them or take care of them or their needs, the child inherits a piece of that anxiety,” Garner says. “The heightened level of anxiety can also lead to increased levels of cortisol in the child, which has been shown to cause health-related problems later in life.”

You can probably recognize when someone guilts you into doing something, and it’s critical to think back to whether your parent did this, too. “An emotionally abusive parent guilts you,” Cole says. “They may say something like, ‘I gave up so much to have you and you treat me like this.’”

Isn’t it frustrating when you want to discuss a problem with somebody and they choose to ignore you instead? Well, such is the case with an emotionally abusive parent, too. “They gave you the silent treatment,” Cole says. “If you upset them, they shut down and ignored you until you apologized to them.”

Was your parent there, but not really there? “Another indicator of emotional abuse is if you had a parent who was physically present, but otherwise absent — working on the computer, phone, or locked in a home office, talking to everyone but you, or lost in a drug- or alcohol-induced haze,” Tessina says. “Now, as an adult, you may not know how to interact with people in a healthy way, or you may feel disconnected and lost.”

“If your parent was over-involved, to the point of constantly looking through your journals, social media accounts, watching your emails, and always dropping in on your conversations, they might have been emotionally abusive,” Garner says. “Being overly involved in everything you did and not giving you appropriate space (physical, mental, and emotional) could be a sign of enmeshment.”

When someone mistreats you and you blame yourself, not them, it may be another sign your parent was emotionally abusive. “If someone hurts you or treats you badly, that’s on them,” Bruett says. “However, sometimes as children, we learn that we have to put up with people treating us badly in order to survive. As adults, we can recreate these dynamics in other relationships.”

If you’re demonstrating self-destructive behavior, it may be another sign that a parent was emotionally abusive. “Self-destructive behaviors, like addiction, risky sex, or self-harm, can be coping skills for handling big feelings,” Bruett says. “Of course, not all people who exhibit these behaviors have had abusive childhoods, but there is often a higher chance that this is the case.”

To this day, if you still feel anger toward your parent, it may be because of how they acted toward you in the past. “The parent in question may be nice to you now, they may treat you reasonably well, but you have an anger, a rage, or an angst when you think about them,” clinical psychologist Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., tells Bustle. “You may actually not be able to explain why, as you may have blocked out the abusive actions."

If you still fear how they’ll react to most of your life decisions, you may have had an emotionally abusive mother or father. “You make decisions on your own, but with the thought and anxiety that your parent won’t approve,” Klapow says. He says this is because a parent who was hypercritical of their children set up a situation where kids become afraid of making choices. “This doesn’t assure that abuse was present, but it’s a sign that the parenting style was harmful.”

Relationship specialist Jen Elmquist, MA, LMFT, believes that a clear indicator that you had an emotionally abusive parent can be found in how you act toward your partner. “When parents struggle to regulate their own emotions, children learn to take care of their feelings for them,” she tells Bustle. “This is a result of being parentified, a role reversal where a child adopts the responsibility of the parent because the parent isn’t capable of managing on their own.”

Elmquist says this may present itself in various ways in your current romantic relationship, including saying "I'm sorry" when you don't mean it, and feeling guilty for no reason.

If you find you often pick romantic partners that have traits like your parent(s), both good and bad, it’s something to be mindful of, Bruett says. “Oftentimes, we pick partners that make us feel familiar,” he says. “If we came from an abusive or neglectful household, we tend to attract people who will treat us the same way. Of course, you can break the cycle, but the first step is noticing it.”

“Sometimes, people have no idea their parents were emotionally abusive until they get older and learn more about their friends’ or partners’ families,” Cole says. “That’s when they realize that what they experienced wasn’t healthy.”