What emotional abuse does to your brain
The Minds Journal has a video on how emotional abuse affects your brain.
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This information is about the specific health area mentioned above. It comprises a combination of textual and video information, on our site and on external sites. We will be adding new specific health areas and further information continually.
The idea is for you to understand more about the health area you are addressing before you get too far building your action plan.
Emotional Abuse is becoming more and more predominant today due to communications tools such as social media and the press. Many leading story lines are run on soaps making people more aware of what is happening behind closed doors. Physical abuse is well documented and there are legal steps people can take to stop physical abuse.
Emotional Abuse is much more subtle and often victims are often not even really aware that its taking place. Victims can spend a line time living under the shadow of another person living someone else’s life and been controlled.
Emotional Abuse can start as a child and carry on into adult even as a senior. Anyone can be a victim and the perpetrator also can come from all walks of life. Often perpetrators don’t realise they are manipulating, abusing, bullying another person.
If as an adult you are not living your own life or feel another person is controlling or overinfluencing your decisions then this is emotional abuse. Often people will turn a blind eye to this and say” they just care for me and have my best interests in mind” this is often not he case.
If you want to know whether you are suffering from emotional abuse, then simply answer these questions. If you answer Yes to some of these, you might want to take our test.
• Does your partner insist he or she is always right and you are always wrong?
• Do you have the feeling that your partner wants you to admit that he or she is superior to you?
• Do you tiptoe around your partner for fear of triggering an angry outburst?
• Does your partner withhold material items or affection?
• Is your partner often grumpy or irritable?
• Does your partner threaten you?
• Is your partner selfish and uncooperative?
• Do you and your partner often get into verbal arguments?
• Do you feel unloved or misunderstood by your partner?
If so you can take the test, look at the on National Helpline or contact one of our experts who can help you decide if you are suffering from emotional abuse.
There is information available which will help you formulate your action plan – both on our site and on external sites.
MindDrive is all about knowing your own mind. Taking control of your life and making sure your in the driving seat.
PersonalityDrive covers all aspects of personality, including personality disorders and a section on locus of control, which is about taking responsibility for your own life.
Knowing yourself and taking personal responsibility for your life is key to avoiding emotional abuse. Recognising everyone has an opinion and its good to seek others advice but that’s what it is advice. Advice which you can dissect and then come to your own conclusion.
People look at things differently. Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’. People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control
People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older. However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do. This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.
The awareness centre shows you the clear signs of emotional abuse and how to deal with them.
We have experts that can help you identify situations and work with you to enable you to take control of your life.
Healthline.com not only gives you examples of abuse but also how to overcome them.
Sometimes the owner of a video will not allow the video to be played on external sites. If you see the video is unavailable on the left just click the ‘WATCH NOW’ link on the right and the video will play in a new window.
The Minds Journal has a video on how emotional abuse affects your brain.
In order for you to assess what you know about this health area, we suggest using a questionnaire. This might help you understand your situation in this area, or taking it might improve your understanding of the area.
You may be able to take this questionnaire online – either here on our site or on an external site – or download it and complete it on paper – it depends on copyright (and whether we’ve managed to build it on our site!).
The ways you can take a questionnaire:
You can take a questionnaire on our site. This will score the questions automatically and give you a summary showing what your score means.
Our questionnaire is from couples therapist Abe Kass, MA RSW RMFT CCHT, who also authors GoSmartLife. More than a million individuals have taken this scientific-based Emotional Abuse Test!
It is 15 simple questions with multiple choice answers, and it give you a score which can indicate whether you are suffering from emotional abuse. If you are, you can contact the Refuge Helpline
Time's up
You can take this questionnaire on at least one external site.
facealife have a test for psychological abuse which doesn’t require an email address
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You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.
You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.
For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances. Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.
We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.
Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route. You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job). Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?
If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.
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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.
We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.
1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community
Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see
Emotional: Anxiety, Compassion Fatigue, Depression, Gambling, Laughter, Narcissistic, Personality Disorder, Sleep, Stress
Environmental: Environmental Issues, Greenness
Financial: Debt, Family Finance, Financial Planning, Financial Wellness
Intellectual: IQ, Personality, Procrastination
Occupational: Jobs for Different Personality Types, Retirement Income, Work Life Balance
Physical: Alcohol, Disabilities, Dizziness, Drugs, Fitness, Food Preferences, General Health, Healthy Ageing, Illness, Nutrition, Sleep Apnea, Smoking
Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction
Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality
Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.
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One definition of health is:
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’
We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.
It gets more complicated…
The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life. We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.
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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.
We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.
1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community
Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.
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Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.
The 8 are:
You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain. You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.
Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.
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People look at things differently. Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’. People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control
Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.
My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.
People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older. However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do. This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.
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No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.
At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt. We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.
However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.
The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.
This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.
Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.
Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.
Consequently we need to make some changes. The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones. Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.
We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.
It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.
It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.
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At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.
We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.
You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.
So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness). We do this by questionnaire. Which one is determined by the type of person you are:
By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.
You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas. We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.
In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.
We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.
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We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.
The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.
The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.”
Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.
These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).
This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).
These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)
Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.
Expressions of confidence – can change over time
Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change
Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change
Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation
Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.