Emotional Abuse Changes Your Brain FAST

Happy New Year! Let’s welcome it with fireworks of a different kind. The kind of fireworks that change your brain in a good way instead of by receiving emotional abuse.

Consider those electric fireworks (impulses) in your brain, firing away on their habitual path. Continuing into the new year with your old habits won’t change a darn thing. To make real change, you’ve got to forge a new brain path for those electric impulses to fire along, and creating them is going to cause some huge explosions in your brain – and in your life.

How many of you want to find a solution to end the abusive relationship you’ve fallen into? How many of you feel that you “should” end your relationship, but can’t seem to walk out that door? How many know your partner abuses you, but you want to stick around to see if your relationship improves?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’re gonna have to do some serious brain re-wiring this year and discover a new way to THINK because your abusive relationship is doing some serious damage to your thought processes. Seriously. Verbal and emotional abuse can rewire your brain and train you to think like a victim instead of the healthy person you were before your partner started messing with your mind.

Proof That Emotional Abuse Changes Your Brain

From Emotional Abuse And Brain Structural Damage at Yahoo Voices:

Emotional abuse results in damage to the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory ability… according to studies from Yale University School of Medicine, Yale Psychiatric Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. Intense stress from emotional abuse floods the brain with hormones …which results in eventual shrinkage of the hippocampus.

~Pierce J. Howard, PhD in his book, The Owner’s Manual for the Brain

For those of you who clicked away to read the article on Yahoo and noticed it referenced children as abuse victims, slow your roll. Verbal and emotional abuse does not only affect a child’s brain-learnin’. Abuse affects adult brains, too. Within two days your completely healthy brain can begin learning dysfunctional thought patterns just as quickly as elderly people can create new gray matter – which, as it turns out, happens in just 48 hours. So, to sum it up, a verbally or emotionally abusive person’s behavior can cause your brain to begin a slow fry in one weekend.

Why Did Your Brain Turn On You?

Think about the first confusing conversation you had with your partner. It probably started out as a simple discussion, but at the end of it, you had the feeling that you must have done something wrong. You ran the conversation through your head, but it didn’t fit into anything you knew before. You began to doubt yourself and your perceptions.

Your brain created a new neural pathway to deal with your confusion which led to a new storeroom in your brain. Within that storeroom, your brain stockpiled the confusing conversations you had with your partner in an effort to figure them out. Over time (and with the required isolation from “normal-thinking” people), your newest storeroom becomes your only storeroom. Bing bang boom, you’re brainwashed.

You’re convinced that you must be crazy and the solution is to not be crazy anymore! Unfortunately, your abusive partner is your main source of feedback on your progress out of crazy, and they don’t want you to “get better” because they’ve done so much work to put you where you are – under their control.

Your brain cannot deprogram your thinking on its own. It needs your emotional and mindful input for that. As amazing as your brain is, it is still only a biologically responding entity and requires you, the Big You outside of your brain, to make it respond differently. You didn’t ask to be brainwashed. You didn’t ask your partner to change your brain. You only trusted that the person you loved, believing they had your best interests at heart, as any healthy person would. You didn’t “allow” your abusive partner to brainwash or abuse you. It happened to you, and now it’s time to reverse abuse’s harmful effects.

Part 2: Brainwashing – Learn How It’s Done So You Can Undo It

Photo by Callum Skelton