Women who have experienced both often say the same thing. The beating healed in two weeks. What he said took years.
Emotional abuse is a sustained pattern of behaviour designed to make you smaller, more doubtful and easier to manage. It is recognised in Nigerian law under the psychological and emotional abuse provisions of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act. It is also the form of abuse that women are least likely to be believed about, including by themselves.
What it includes
Almost every item below can be defended individually as a bad mood, a joke, or a marriage going through a difficult period. That is the point. It is the repetition and the direction of travel that make it abuse.
- Constant criticism, usually aimed at the things you cannot change quickly. Your appearance, your intelligence, your cooking, your family, your background.
- Public humiliation, or jokes at your expense that stop being jokes the moment you object, at which point you are told you cannot take a joke.
- Threats aimed sideways. Not at you but at what you cannot afford to lose. The children, your job, your immigration status, your reputation at church, your mother’s health if she hears about this.
- Silence used as punishment, sometimes for days, sometimes with the household instructed not to speak to you either.
- Blame transferred completely. If you had not said that, I would not have had to. You know what happens when you talk to me like that.
- Withdrawal of warmth as a lever. Affection that arrives when you comply and disappears when you do not, so that ordinary kindness becomes a wage.
- Isolation dressed as concern. Your friends do not have your interests at heart. Your sister is jealous. Nobody understands you like I do.
Gaslighting is a specific thing
Gaslighting is not a general word for lying. It is the deliberate rewriting of what happened until you no longer trust your own memory.
It sounds like this. That never happened. You are remembering it wrong. You are too sensitive. Everyone thinks you are unstable. I never said that. You always do this. Ask anyone.
The damage is not that you believe him. Most women do not, at first. The damage is that you stop being certain, and a person who is not certain cannot act.
She cannot describe her situation to a doctor, because she keeps adding qualifications. She cannot give a clear account to a police officer, because she is anticipating the objection before she has finished the sentence. She cannot decide to leave, because deciding requires trusting your own account of your own life, and that is precisely what has been dismantled.
If you have found yourself saying I do not know if I am explaining this properly, three times in one conversation, that is the fingerprint.
Why it is so hard to report
Each individual incident sounds trivial when described aloud. He said my food was bad. He did not speak to me for two days. He told his mother I am careless with money.
Told separately, to someone with fifteen minutes, those sound like an ordinary marriage on a bad week. The harm lives in the pattern and in the repetition, and the pattern is exactly what gets lost when a form asks you to describe the incident.
This is the same problem coercive control creates, and it has the same solution. Describe the system rather than the events. Not what he did on Tuesday, but what the rules are and what happens when they are broken.
What it does to your body
Sustained fear is a physical state, not only an emotional one. Women describe sleeplessness, weight change in either direction, headaches, stomach problems, jaw pain from clenching, and a heart that races when a key turns in a door.
Very often the body registers what is happening before the mind is willing to agree with it. If a doctor has investigated your stomach three times and found nothing, that is worth thinking about rather than dismissing. What sustained threat does to a body, and what tends to happen afterwards, is set out separately.
Getting your certainty back
Write it down as it happens
Dated, in your own words, on the day. Keep it somewhere he cannot reach, which for most women means an email to an account he does not know exists rather than a notebook in the house.
A contemporaneous record is difficult to argue away, including inside your own head at three in the morning. It is also the single most useful document you can bring to a lawyer.
Tell one person consistently
Not five people once each. One person repeatedly, so that somebody other than you is holding the timeline. Being able to ask did I tell you about this in March is worth more than sympathy.
Notice the language you use about yourself
Women in this situation begin to describe themselves in his words. Careless with money. Too emotional. Difficult. If you can hear his phrasing coming out of your own mouth, that is not a character assessment you arrived at independently.
Speak to somebody who knows the pattern
For many women the moment the fog lifts is not being told to leave. It is being told that what they are describing is a recognised thing, that it has a name, and that other people have described it in almost identical words.
If you are the friend
The single most useful sentence you can offer somebody in this position is that you believe her. The second most useful is a specific memory. You told me in March that he had done the same thing. That is not taking sides. It is returning a piece of her own history that has been taken from her.
How to help a friend or sister who is being abused and What not to say to someone experiencing abuse cover the rest.
It counts
You do not need a bruise to deserve help, and you do not need to be certain in order to ask a question. If you have recognised yourself anywhere in this article, that recognition is enough to justify a phone call.
Questions people ask
Can emotional abuse be part of a court case?
Yes. The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act names psychological and emotional abuse. Evidence of a pattern, such as a dated diary, messages and witnesses, matters more here than in any other kind of case.
How do I know it is not just a difficult marriage?
Difficult marriages have arguments that either person can lose. Look at whether it runs one way, whether it is enforced by a consequence, and whether you are afraid.
He has never called me a name. Can it still be emotional abuse?
Yes. Silence, withdrawal of affection, and threats aimed at things you cannot afford to lose do the same work without a single insult.
I think I am the one being difficult. How would I tell?
Ask whether you are afraid of the reaction. People in ordinary marriages annoy each other. They do not rehearse sentences before saying them.
If you need help now
If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, call or send a message to +2348025170267, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.
Before you rely on anything on this page
We publish these articles so that you can understand a subject and work out what to ask for. They are written carefully and in good faith. They are still general information about how things usually work, and not advice about your situation, which we do not know.
- This is not legal advice.
- We are not a law firm. Criminal law in Nigeria is largely a state matter, the VAPP Act applies in a state only if that state adopted it, and statutory, customary and Islamic marriages are governed by different law and different courts. Two people with the same facts can have genuinely different options. Get advice from a lawyer who practises where you live — and if cost is the obstacle, ask us, because arranging that is part of what we do.
- This is not medical advice.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces being examined. Do not delay seeing a doctor, nurse or pharmacist because of something you read here, and do not start, stop or change any treatment on the strength of it. If something is time critical, go and be seen.
- This is not counselling, and it is not financial advice.
- Articles about trauma, sleep, money, debt, renting or starting a business describe what commonly helps. They are not therapy and they are not a recommendation about your own money. Speak to a counsellor, a qualified adviser or your own bank about your circumstances.
- It may be out of date, or wrong for where you are.
- Law changes, services close, numbers stop answering and practice varies by state. We correct what we find, and we cannot promise that every page is current on the day you read it. Where we do not have something confirmed, we say so rather than fill the gap.
- Reading this does not make us your lawyer or your doctor.
- No professional relationship is created by reading an article, and we cannot accept liability for decisions taken on the strength of one. What we can do is help you reach somebody who is qualified to advise you, which is what the legal and health parts of our work exist for.
- We cannot promise an outcome, and we cannot make anybody safe.
- A protection order is a piece of paper backed by an enforcement system that is inconsistent. A plan works until the day it does not. Anybody in this field promising safety is selling something, and the promise itself is dangerous because it stops people planning.
Do not let this notice stop you acting. If you are in immediate danger, call 112. If something is medically urgent, go to a hospital — you do not need a police report to be treated. And if you do not know where to start, that is a normal way to begin: use the contact page and we will take it from there.
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