Moriarty & Dee, Attorneys at Law, in Buffalo, New York.

Verbal Abuse:

By Dawn Bonker, Orange County Register (published with permission of the Orange County Register).

The sight of an enraged parent yelling at a child in the supermarket is embarrassing for most people--cause to take a sudden interest in the floor tiles or the chewing gum rack.

For one businesswoman, it's more than a public discomfort. It's a screaming flash back to childhood broken and bruised by her father's curses, insults and verbal attacks.

"Every time I hear it, I just want to cry," said the 35 year old woman, who asked not to be identified.

Once she did cry, wandering the aisles in a silent weep, heavy with the knowledge that child abuse is not always inflicted by a fist.
Emotional child abuse leaves no bruises, is difficult to prove, and in most states is not even considered a crime against children.

But it is the most common form of abuse and probably the most unrecognized, says Steve Farmer, director of Irvine, California, Center for Adult Children of Abusive Parents. Its psychological scars can be as deep as those left by belts, beatings, burns and molestation, Farmer says.

"It wounds the psyche, the soul. It has been said that in sexual abuse there is a spiritual wound. I think that in emotional abuse, it's a spiritual one, too", says Farmer, who says he suffered emotional abuse from his parents.

Emotional damage occurs in all forms of abuse because psychological wounds are always a byproduct of abuse, says Kathy McCarrell, senior social worker with the Orange County (Calif.) Child Abuse Services Team. But emotional abuse alone--whether inflicted as emotional neglect or a storm of emotional torment--carries a unique burden for the child because friends, society and even the courts don't easier recognize it.

"It's difficult to prove, because you don't have bumps and bruises, " Ms McCarrell says. "Emotional abuse can be so subtle."

While society generally agrees that heavy-handed physical punishments are outside the bounds of parental rights, everyone does not agree on what constitutes emotional abuse, Ms. McCarrell says.

What some families consider abusive, others chalk up to be strict child-rearing, a "toughen-them-up" parenting style. Like physical and sexual abuse, emotional abuse tends to be perpetrated by parents who were abused as children.

The National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse just added verbal abuse as an official category of child abuse within the past two years. Only 20 states include it as a category of abuse. California estimates that emotional abuse accounts for only 4 percent of the state's reported abuse cases.

"It probably is underreported," says McCarrell, though in court she won protective custody for children she could prove were emotionally abused.

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Children suffering from emotional abuse are the least likely to speak up.

"I had no idea that I had any emotional abuse. I knew that I had problems, but I had no idea it was abuse, because I thought we were like any other family," says the woman, now 35, who was verbally abused by her father and verbally and physically abused by her younger brother.

"I spent 14 years having my brother torment me and nobody did anything about it...He hit me on the head, in the breasts, stomach, back. He would yell in my ears. He took my things, broke them. I wasn't allowed to have my own things. I was 'selfish' if I didn't let him play with my things.

"My parents didn't understand. They told me to quit tattling. I was yelled at and cursed at daily. That was just part of my father's way. I was never told 'I love you' until I was 30."

The greatest pain didn't come from the punches.

"It was that I was suffering badly and nobody helped me."

Children can't be expected to help themselves. Farmer says. It would be rare and unnatural for children to assume there was something wrong with their parents. And frightening too, because to acknowledge a parent's emotional absence is, to a young child, nearly equivalent to having no parent. Farmer says. So children take their parents at their word, even when it hurts.

"Children really take that on directly, that they're at fault. What it is like is a pile of debris, the debris being the shame that comes with thinking that something's bad or wrong with me." he says.

Such abuse plants seeds in childhood that crop up in adulthood as depression, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, and an inability to trust or form lasting relationships, he says.

Others plunge into a drive to become perfect children. In his new book "Adult Children of Abusive Parents," Farmer describes how he hoped to appease his parents by being the consummate good child.

One Orange County woman, now 31, strove for perfection, turning elsewhere for the praise absent at home.

She was a top student, earned her MBA while still in her 20's and rose quickly to a career in finance.

But in her mother's eyes, she was always a failure. She was yelled at for her hair, clothes, weight, and "everything." Her mother prodded her to eat because she was skinny, then taunted her that she ate too much and would grow fat. In restaurants and public places, her mother called her names, humiliated her and then ridiculed her embarrassment with shouts of, "Look at her, she's upset."

Eventually, she dropped out of business and sought therapy. Now, married and the mother of a daughter, she says she is recovering. She says the abusive cycle is going to stop with her. The fear that it won't stop still lingers.

The woman abused by her father and brother is now a stepmother to two girls and knows how difficult it is to keep from parenting the way she was parented.

"I have to be very, very careful. I really work hard on the relationship with them. I've been married for 10 years now and we're very close. I love them to pieces. it's very hard for me. I have to always think about what I'm saying. I make mistakes and I come out just like my father, and I have to apologize and tell myself to stop," she says.

Even Farmer, a marriage, family and child counselor who has focused his career on helping adults like himself recover from childhood abuse, says he has been guilty of emotional abuse.

On a whim, he asked his daughter, 7 and 10, if he was an abusive parent. The oldest, without hesitation, answered yes. She pointed to a dent in the wall, a memento of a day when Farmer lost his temper and punched his fist into the plaster.

"I scared the dickens out of them. It scared the dickens out of me." he says.

Farmer did what he advises every parent to do when their anger erupts--when their discipline to a child turns to shaming of a child--he apologized for scaring them and he admitted her was wrong. He admitted like all parents, he was not perfect. And he didn't blame his children.

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