If This Is Happening To You Or Someone You Know


The National Domestic Abuse Hotline 
(1-800-799-7233) is a great resource. They also have a very good website to get verbal abuse defined for you and gives examples of behavior to look for: http://www.thehotline.org/

Now all of the effects are very intense, doom and gloom stuff: permanent brain damage, emotional turmoil, mental illness, early death. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are several areas where interventions are possible. Clearly, the earlier that there is intervention, the better. If the negative behaviors, or toxic stress were to be reduced, eliminated or corrected, that could limit the lasting effect. Once there are more lasting behaviors that are leading to mental or physical disorders more formalized interventions are needed. One's social contacts can help as well.
One major light at the end of the tunnel is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT. Dialectical Behavior Therapy is a specific type of psychotherapy developed in the late 1980's by psychologist Marsha M. Linehan.
DBT has four main steps or components. The first one is the most important, namely “distress tolerance.” The therapist validates the patient's experiences and helps them become stable, because often they have not been validated in verbal abuse situations. If someone tells a child that they’re pathetic and their feelings don’t make sense, the response is to hide those feelings.
An additional step is “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is all about being present in the here and now. Instead of ignoring experiences and, as mentioned above, pushing down their emotions, patients are taught to allow the experiences to happen, and to embrace the change and learning that will come with them.
Another step of DBT is centered around undoing the coping skills learned under verbal abuse situations and learning “emotional regulation”. In the setting of verbal abuse many victims will push down their emotions, not talk about what they are feeling, and most likely shut off from caring loved ones. It is hard to connect with people when they have been taught to not talk about how they feel. Everyone will have bad times, and the goal of DBT is to help you find better ways of dealing with them.
Giving patients the tools and skills to reach out to in others in times of need is another step, called “intrapersonal effectiveness”. The emotional support structures are also very important, because with mental illness comes vulnerability, and with vulnerability comes fear, and with fear comes helplessness. Despite what they may feel, the clients are never helpless. In many verbal abuse scenarios the victims may feel weak and vulnerable because they essentially perceive that they have no power. DBT helps them recognize that they do have power and that they are not as paralyzed as they may feel.
DBT seeks to ensure that the patients develop more effective social skills to help them for the rest of their lives, and to teach these skills to future generations that they impact. DBT teaches skills that are very important to have because without them someone who has trouble communicating because of verbal abuse, could in turn be abusive in a caregiver role. Without DBT, the cycle of abuse will continue, indefinitely.

Support group resources:


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