Thank you for your response, Mia! I appreciate your support and elaboration of the nuances inherent to these distinctions between different types of abuse.

It’s interesting to consider that physical abuse is performed by those who have nothing to lose after being exposed as an abuser while emotional abuse in its subversiveness is more common among narcissistic abusers. I can definitely relate to this, for one of the prevailing reasons behind my writing this regards my father’s view that he and my sister have nothing to complain about because he didn’t beat us physically like he was as a child. I’ve noticed this same reasoning being used by others, which I find to be a really interesting reflection of the harms caused by literal/scientific thinking in psychological contexts, as well as the influence of sexist devaluation of emotionality on the invisible prevalence of emotional abuse.

I also agree that these two types of abuse aren’t worse or better than another; they’re different, and seem to overlap in certain contexts, for physical abuse has harmful emotional implications and emotional abuse can lead to physical self-abuse (e.g., cutting, addiction, etc.). The coworker whose parenting I challenged by claiming emotional abuse was worse than physical abuse has stopped talking to me; I’m not upset about it.

I hadn’t considered the aforementioned individuals as cases of Stockholm syndrome, but can see this now and am glad to have this connection to another concept, so thank you for that! Us humans are such complex and often tragic creatures.

Thank you for your support of and interest in my work!