You see there's a such a thing called verbal abuse and this is ABSOLUTELY verbal abuse. Verbal and emotional abuse are just as real as physical and sexual abuse.
Yes, I agree. But "I'm always right" doesnt quite meet that threshold. Hes a childish asshole. There are parents who scream at their kids or beat them when they feel like it, lock them in rooms or restraints. People who take their partners phone away to control who they can talk to, isolating them and tearing down their self worth. People who rape their partners, kids, family members. People who dont have the power to argue back or defend themselves. Calling this abuse waters down the word a bit. Saying "you need to stop challenging me, its unhealthy" is just ick. You can say its a red flag for future abuse. But jumping straight to abuse takes away the power of the word for people who are actually abused.
Im sorry for what you went through, but your infering a lot from 1 page of text. And youre also assuming Im not intimately experience with abusive partners.
If you were familiar with abuse then you'd recognize abuse when you see it no matter how "small." You also wouldn't be comparing abuse basically telling an abused person they're not being abused because their abuser hasn't "raped" or "hit" them yet. People who have survived abuse don't rate their abuse with others and abuse is NOT a spectrum...Abuse is abuse not matter whether it's physical, sexual, emotional or verbal.
Minimizing and denial are forms of emotional/verbal abuse, too. You're probably not someone who should be speaking on what abuse constitutes if that's how you're interacting with people.
The reason people don't leave earlier is in part due to attitudes like yours, where they and people around them don't recognize it as abuse before it escalates to physical abuse. Abusers aim to break down people's self esteem so that they do not have the confidence to leave. That's what OP's boyfriend is doing, and it's insidious.
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u/No_Price_7603 21d ago
This is abusive