I hate how physical violence is (correctly) seen as a horrible thing while psychological/verbal violence is frowned upon but not as much as physical violence.
My brother used to bully me every day until I moved out into my grandparent’s house. There were two instances where I snapped and attacked him physically, and ONLY THEN did my family intervene.
Due to my neurodevelopmental disabilities I am unable to verbally defend myself, so I was being harassed and bullied every day and I couldn’t do anything about it.
And because psychological violence is not perceived to be as serious as physical violence, when I responded in the only way I was able to (physically) the situation changed from being perceived as “Al-Anda’s brother being annoying” to “this must be stopped immediately”.
He also threatened to call the police and shit, since physical violence is illegal while bullying and harassing someone every single fucking day isn’t.
I swear, this shit makes me so angry…
Many people lack a basic understanding of what non-verbal violence is and what it does.
I am really sorry that you are in such a situation right now. How long will it take until you can move out?
Fortunately I already moved out in 2020 into my grandparent’s house, thank you for your response!
This is good to hear. In the past I always waited for the day when I turned 18 and could move out. It is sadly the only advice possible to give someone who is under 18 (US and Europa. Dont know about other countries).
The fact that violence is often understood as physical violence drives me crazy. Even governments around the world use methods of violence or torture that are not physical.
In a family context, it can be very bad because the family is still considered a social security. There are enough people who are trapped in such situations simply for economic reasons and can’t get out (violence in marriage, for example).
By the way, I was amazed by the subreddit r/cptsd how certain things are similar as far as psychological violence is concerned. Even the words chosen sometimes are identical.
“Sticks and stones do break my bones but words do not” my ass. I’ve been affected heavily by verbal violence but of course I can’t speak up because they were “joking” and just “learn to take a joke my guy” like, I don’t think making fun of someone for the purpose of letting them down is really joking anymore. It sucks how people can manage to hide bullying and harassment under a blanket of “joking”.
It’s really stupid, everyone knows it’s not a joke. Them saying that is just a way of getting away with it, also this way they don’t have to take a good hard look at themselves and their behaviour. People can really be awful. :-/
It’s like being abusive while trying to make it look like it’s not abusive… 🙄
People that do emotional abuse really do get away with murder… you’re right, no one is treating it as something ‘serious’, but it is, it just murders people from the inside. Part of this is that it’s much harder to prove emotional abuse, often it’s debatable whether it is or not. I’m still unsure if my parents are emotionally abusive, there are people in my life that I think are emotionally abusive but someone else might disagree with me… it’s just not as clear as physical or sexual abuse. So it’s not just that people are being dismissive of it, although they might. People tend to also be very dismissive of anything that feels uncomfortable to them, they’ll sweep it under the rug as long as they can.
Humans are violent! 😅 Not really that nice either… I mean there’s nothing nice about picking on the ones that are weaker, and you having some kind of weakness is obviously not your ‘fault’ and certainly not something you asked for. So yeah, humans are pretty disgusting. Or ‘some’ of them are… there’s nice people also.
But keep in mind that there’s an unusual amount of mental illness at the moment, there’s also a lot of trauma (it makes people feel more threatened, less trusting of each other). So if we didn’t have that to deal with I do think that people would at least be ‘nicer’ and get along ‘better’. I think sometimes you need to open up to people and help them understand you better, because they don’t seem to be able to do that on their own. :-/
Violence is physical force against a living thing (vandalism is physical force against inanimate things). The things you’re talking about are emotional/verbal abuse (which are still also bad, and you could argue are worse than physical violence, but they are not violence).
I’ve seen definitions of “violence” that include verbal abuse; I agree that the latter is more universally understood, but I don’t think the choice of words is the point of the post
Probalby a question of the language you use, maybe this is the reason why OP is writing about psychological violence. German knows “psychological violence” as a term (psychische Gewalt) and it is beeing used.. Also in russian we call it “психологическое насилие”. I also see, that the wikipedia article about “psychological absue” says that, that “psycholotical violance” is an other name for that.
