I don’t know how to feel about this. My mother abused me, emotionally, but I don’t know if she did so maliciously, or consciously knowing that she was hurting me. I feel like a lot of her actions were done out of a mistaken belief that I was the bad guy and she was merely doing what she felt was “protecting herself”. Or at least, that’s how she presented her actions to everyone, including my father. Her whole schtick was about being the perpetual victim, and she would claim that it was ME that “hurt her” and “I didn’t get to decide that I didn’t” because “her pain was real” EVEN THOUGH the things that “hurt her” were things like, supporting gay marriage, being bisexual, having sexual desires at the age of 22, having a different political opinion to her, not agreeing with her opinion enthusiastically enough, not locking the back door when I left through the front door (when it was my brother who left through the back door but he wasn’t blamed, only I was).

Her abuse centred around framing ME as the abuser and punishing me as such, despite my not doing anything that a rational person would consider abusive. I tried my hardest to be the best daughter possible, I trod on eggshells around her, I constricted my personality and stifled my true self to make her happy. And nothing, nothing I did would make her think I was a good person. It gaslit me until I started wondering if I really was this monster she believed. But I wasn’t. When I left home, a burden lifted. And she turned her abuse immediately to another member of my family, who now understands what I went through.

So I think emotional abuse can be subjective, maybe. And it’s certainly not simple to say “if someone says you hurt them you don’t get to say that you didn’t” because sometimes people use victimhood and guilt AS abuse tactics. For example my mum said I was driving her to suicide because I supported gay rights. Her “hurt” might or might not have been real (it was certainly convincing enough to wrack me with guilt) but it wasn’t reasonable.