What is the difference between hollering and verbal abuse?
What is verbal abuse?
Well I looked up the definition of Verbal Abuse.
Psychology A form of emotional abuse consisting of the use of abusive and demeaning language with a spouse, child, or elder, often by a caregiver or other person in a position of power.
So hollering becomes abuse when the one doing the hollering is in the position of power or caregiver, hence parents.
I know for a fact that what I used to call ‘hollering’ was verbal abuse, I was the person of power.
I looked up the word ‘demeaning’ to see if what I was hollering about was ‘demeaning’.
Demeaning. Humiliate and degrade: to reduce somebody to a much lower status in a humiliating way.
To reduce someone to a lower status, wow hollering makes him or her lower. I also felt the guilt, but this puts a name on the feeling. I was lowering their sense of status in our home, by hollering for them to do their jobs.
We could split hairs and say, hollering at them to clean up isn’t demeaning, but what we fail to notice is that they are our equals.
We have neither right nor power to subjugate them to feeling less then us.
What I came to learn was that by making them equal I gave them back their responsibility.
Yesterday, I had a prime example of this interaction. My daughter who is in college now, but living at home, wanted to just study all day. What a sassy child you are all thinking, but what we expect from each, is not only to do well in that part of their world, but also to contribute to living here.
So, we had a conversation, each of us stating their side. I truly commended her on doing her life so well, but that she forgot to leave time for contributing for her living. She suggested that I do all the work, since she was so busy and I had a day off.
She has homework time, boyfriend time, but no “taking care of her living” area time. Time management was her issue; she forgot to include cleaning up house time.
We have offered to accept money instead of time, but they all decided time was cheaper to give.
I addressed the issue of her noncontributing, that it was to raise her up to my level, not to keep her beneath. To show her that there is more to living than just schoolwork and a boyfriend, but to also be responsible of her living space.
I stated, “I could do your part, but that isn’t fair to you, you need to feel that you are a contributing part in this house, and it surely isn’t fair to me to carry your weight. It is abuse in the opposite direction to make you useless.”
It is sad to know that so many of the hollering mom’s believe that they are hollering to make the children be more, yet what they are doing is bringing them down.
Whittling away at the Bright Spirit that they arrived as. We ironically whittle them down to our own dysfunctional size.
Lowering their status, keeping the scales unbalanced, keeping them feeling less and less, neither of us feeling good when the hollering is done. We both are losers, we both feel less.
But what we fail to realize or have the tools to implement, is that we must bring our children up to our equals.
How often do you see someone holler at his or her equal?
How do you feel after you have been hollered at?
Does it raise your sense of wholeness, your brightness, and your rightness?
Hollering is sugar coated verbal abuse.
Hollering makes it seem less to the hollering person.
Call it what you will, but in the end, it lowers the status.
It is our job or responsibility as parents to raise our children, not lower them.
What I knew was that this abuse had to stop, and I had to be the one to stop it. It was up to me to save my kids from me!
I had to be the change.
I had to focus on raising them and to do that, I had to raise the bar, raise the consequences, and make them an equal in my eyes.
I M Perfect lady 