Abuse can affect all aspects of your marriage, regardless of whether the abuse is physical or emotional. Your spouse’s emotional abuse may be one reason—or the primary reason—for your divorce. Emotional abuse may not leave visible scars, but it can also be damaging.
What Constitutes Emotional Abuse?
Many abusers seek control of their victims. If you’ve been the victim of abuse, you may suffer from feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, or fear. Although physical and emotional abuse differ, their result is the same—the victims often feel ashamed, embarrassed, afraid, and helpless.
Emotional abuse can include verbal threats of physical violence, humiliation, controlling a spouse’s whereabouts, isolating a spouse from family and friends, shaming, and following or recording a spouse without their knowledge or consent. Even though the scars of emotional abuse are invisible, it can be traumatizing. Often a spouse who is emotionally abusive to a partner also emotionally abuses the couple’s children. Be sure to watch for signs of depression or low self-esteem in your children and get them the help they need.
Effects of Abuse on Divorce
In many cases, one spouse’s emotional abuse may worsen once the victim leaves or files for divorce. It’s a way for the abuser to try to regain some control and keep you in the marriage. You should carefully document every instance of abuse during your marriage and your divorce. Save text messages, emails, handwritten notes, and voicemails. Write down the details of abusive conversations. You will need to present this evidence to a judge and gathering it will help you prepare for the custody part of your case.
Abuse and Custody
An abusive spouse is going to face a stark disadvantage in a custody case. A judge will try to develop a parenting plan that serves a child’s best interests when evaluating custody. One parent’s abuse, even if it’s only against the other parent, can doom the abusive parent’s chances of obtaining custody.
Some of the factors a judge may consider in a custody case, include:
- each parent’s mental and physical health
- each parent’s ability to meet the child’s needs
- the child’s medical, educational, and emotional needs
- the child’s relationship with each parent
- each parent’s stability
- each parent’s employment demands
- the child’s ties to extended family and/or siblings
- either parent’s history of domestic violence, and
- any other factor the court deems necessary.
A judge may consider all of these factors or any other factor that impacts the child’s needs—including a parent’s physical or emotional abuse within the family. Parents who habitually ridicule, degrade, or otherwise emotionally abuse their children are unlikely to obtain custody. A child’s safety and emotional well-being is central to any custody decision.