a-rinna:

i feel like a lot of people who have never experienced verbal/mental abuse think it’s having obscenities screamed at you all the time and it can be that but also

someone can be mentally and verbally abusive without ever raising their voice or using a single curse word. someone can insult you, degrade you, berate you, gaslight you, and break down your sense of self and sanity for literally hours at a time without ever slipping from having a genial, even tone. sometimes it’s the victim who finally snaps and screams and tells their abuser to stop or fuck off and the abuser then uses that against them to make it out like they’re the one in the wrong—you raised your voice and your abuser didn’t so you must be the one in the wrong, right? you’re the one who said a curse word so who is really being abusive here?

mental and verbal abuse is not always obvious. it’s not always loud. it’s not always attention-grabbing. sometimes it’s insidious, sometimes it’s delivered with the same tone and inflection that you’d get from someone small-talking with you about the weather at the store, sometimes abusers do it in public—surrounded by other people—and no one even notices it’s happening at all. sometimes when survivors finally tell someone about it what they get in reply is “but i never heard them yell at you” as though breaking someone’s spirit can only be done at a certain volume.

mental and verbal abuse don’t always look the way you think it might look but that doesn’t make it any less abusive or any less harmful to people who go through it.