"Emotional abuse involves a broad range of tactics, including shaming and gaslighting, which are meant to leave you feeling powerless, hopeless, and less.
In some cases, the signs of emotional abuse are so subtle that you might not be sure you're on the receiving end.
Depending on the types of emotional abuse and how long you've been dealing with these behaviors, you might experience different effects on your emotional, physical, and mental health.
Long-term emotional abuse can potentially impact your brain, especially if the abuse happened during childhood when the brain is still developing.
These are some of the ways research suggests emotional abuse can impact your brain:
Emotional understanding and empathy.
Early emotional abuse could cause changes to the hippocampus that make it harder to empathize with the emotions of others.
Self-awareness.
Emotional abuse is linkedTrusted Source to thinning of certain areas of the brain that help you manage emotions and be self-aware — especially the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe.
Epigenetic changes and depression.
Research from 2018 has connected childhood abuse to epigeneticTrusted Source brain changes that may cause depression. Epigenetic refers to how your environment and behaviors affect your genes. In particular, the study found changes to certain genes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is an area of the brain that's involved in the stress response."
Source:
https://psychcentral.com/health/effects-of-emotional-abuse#brain-impacts
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