One of the more common forms of child verbal abuse is when the child is fighting with their caregivers. We all know that sometimes you say things you don’t mean in a fight, but it still does damage. And this damage leads to two things: what psychologists call “self-talk”, and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Self talk is when kids internalize what their caregivers have previously said. If a child is constantly referred to as bratty, annoying, useless, these early messages are often internalized and that child may grow up thinking all these things are true, especially if they are thrown at them constantly. They also adopt coping mechanisms to deal with the constant emotional strains. These methods include disengaging, which essentially is when they pretend it's not happening, and feeling everything and getting angry which often leads to chaotic tendencies.
During puberty is one of the times kids are most susceptible. As a kid your limbic system take huge strides in developing, which if all goes well makes sure your emotional handling, decision making, and impulse control functions all develop normally. But during that time you are also more susceptible to verbal abuse.
The corpus callosum, a broad band of nerve fibers joining the two hemispheres of the brain, helping them communicate, is also developing, and verbal abuse can cause it to be underdeveloped. This consequently has the probability of under developing the whole brain. Although the brain is fairly plastic and can recover from many potentially damaging events, underdevelopment is something from which it can never recover (Epping-Jordan, Mark).
Many studies have found that the more exposure to peer verbal abuse a person reported, the more likely they were to be experiencing things like anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, dissociation, or drug use.
The under development has also been linked to a whole host of mental and behavioral issues, such as alcoholism, depression, illicit drug use, bipolar disorder (BHD), poor work performance, anxiety, smoking, and suicide attempts. This underdevelopment is the effect. The early behaviors, such as anxiety, or agitation or aggression come first. If left unchecked, these behaviors become more toxic behaviors such as depression, poor academic achievement or early initiation of smoking (etc). Again, if these behaviors continue to be unchecked, alcoholism, suicide attempts and other more serious behaviors can result. Finally, adults with these behaviors have their own children. They have never learned adequate coping and parenting techniques, and sadly perpetuate the cycle.
This triangle is something the CDC put out to talk about the sorts of effects what they call ‘adverse childhood experiences’ have on people.
But let's use verbal abuse (as it is our subject) for the adverse experience. On the gray (bottom) level you have being verbally abused, and next in the dark turquoise is the disrupted neurodevelopment that comes with it. In the turquoise, we have the short term effects: the acting out, and lost friends, and self esteem issues that lead into the light turquoise, which represents doing drugs, early smoking, bad relationships, the beginnings of a chronic mental condition that is left unresolved. And in the white turquoise you have the long term effects: the self talk, the prolonged drug use, the mental illnesses. And in the yellow you have early death that might result.
If you think you may be Part of The Problem
If this is happening to You Or Someone You Know
