If I had to choose between physical and verbal abuse, I'd take a beating anytime. You can see the marks, so at least people feel sorry for you. With the verbal stuff, it just makes you crazy. The wounds are invisible. Nobody cares. Real bruises heal a hell of a lot faster than insults.

Remember the old saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me"? It's not true. Insulting names, degrading comments, and belittling criticism can give children extremely negative messages about themselves, messages that can have dramatic effects on their future well-being. As one caller to my radio show put it:

As a society, we have traditionally considered the discipline of children a private matter, to be handled within the family, usually at the father's discretion. Today, many civic authorities have come to recognize the need for new procedures to deal with widespread physical and sexual child abuse. But even the most concerned authorities can do nothing for the verbally abused child. He is all alone.

The Power of Cruel Words

Most parents will occasionally say something derogatory to their children. This is not necessarily verbal abuse. But it is abusive to launch frequent verbal attacks on a child's appearance, intelligence, competence, or value as a human being.

Other verbal abusers are more indirect, assailing the child with a constant barrage of teasing, sarcasm, insulting nicknames, and subtle put-downs. These parents often hide their abuse behind the facade of humor. They make little jokes like, "The last time I saw a nose that big was on Mount Rushmore," or, "That's a good-looking jacket -- for a clown," or, "You must have been home sick the day they passed out brains."

Like controlling parents, verbal abusers have two distinct styles. There are those who attack directly, openly, viciously degrading their children. They may call their children stupid, worthless, or ugly. They may say that they wish their child had never been born. They are oblivious to their child's feelings and to the long-term effects of their constant assaults on their child's developing self-image.

I just can't go on this way. I'm practically fifty and I'm super-sensitive to almost everything that anybody says to me. I can't take anything at face value. I always think someone's making fun of me. I think my wife's making fun of me… I think my patients make fun of me. I lie awake at night thinking about what people said to me during the day… and I keep reading bad things into everything. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy.

Phil, 48, had the outward appearance of a confident man. He was a tall, rugged-looking dentist with a taste for stylish clothes. But when he spoke, his voice was so quiet that I had trouble hearing him. I had to ask him several times to repeat himself. He explained that he was seeking help for his painful shyness.

Phil talked openly about his current life, but he closed up when I asked him about his early years. With some gentle probing, he told me that what he remembered most vividly about his childhood was his father's constant teasing. The jokes were always at Phil's expense and he often felt humiliated. When the rest of the family laughed, he felt all the more isolated.

If the child, or any other family member, complains, the abuser invariably accuses him or her of lacking a sense of humor. "She knows I'm only kidding," he'll say, as if the victim of his abuse were a co-conspirator.

It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he'd say things like: "This boy can't be a son of ours, look at that face. I'll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don't we take him back and swap him for the right one." I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. One day, I finally said to him, "Dad, why are you always picking on me?" He said, "I'm not picking on you. I'm just joking around. Can't you see that?"

Phil, like any young child, couldn't distinguish the truth from a joke, a threat from a tease. Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, "We're going to have to send you to preschool in China." Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land.

Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on. When he made an attempt to confront his father's behavior, he was accused of being inadequate because he "couldn't take a joke." Phil had nowhere to go with all these feelings.

We have all been guilty of making jokes at someone else's expense. Most of the time, such jokes can be relatively harmless. But, as in other forms of toxic parenting, it is the frequency, the cruelty, and the source of these jokes that make them abusive. Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child.

As Phil described his feelings, I could see that he was still embarrassed -- as if he believed that his complaints were silly. I reassured him by saying, "I understand how humiliating your father's jokes were. They hurt you terribly, yet no one took your pain seriously. But we're here to get to the bottom of your pain, not to discount it. You're safe here, Phil. No one's going to put you down."

He took a few moments to let this sink in. He was on the verge of tears, but he made an enormous effort to hide them as he said:

When Phil first came in for treatment, he made absolutely no connection between his hypersensitivity and his father's taunting. As a little boy, Phil was unprotected because his father's behavior was never recognized as abuse. Phil was in a typical "lose-lose" situation: "My dad's jokes hurt me and I'm weak because I can't take it."

Little Phil was the butt of his father's jokes and struggled to hide his feelings of inadequacy. Adult Phil was no different, but he moved in a much larger world, so he transferred his fears and negative expectations to other people. Phil went through life with his nerve ends exposed, expecting to be hurt, to be humiliated. His hypersensitivity, his shyness, and his distrust of others was an inevitable but ineffective way of attempting to protect himself against further hurt.

I hate him. He was such a coward. I mean I was just a little kid. He didn't have to pick on me that way. He still makes jokes at my expense. He never misses a chance. If I let my guard down for one second, I get zapped! And then he comes off looking like the good guy. God, I hate that!

Many parents dish out their verbal abuse under the guise of guidance. To justify cruel and denigrating remarks, they use rationalizations such as, "I'm trying to help you become a better person," or, "It's a tough world and we're teaching you to take it." Because this abuse wears the protective mask of education, it is especially difficult for the adult child to acknowledge its destructiveness.

"I'M ONLY SAYING THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD"

Vicki was 34 when she came in for therapy. She was an attractive woman who worked as an account manager in a large marketing corporation, but her self-confidence was so low that it threatened her professional advancement:

I've been working for this big company for six years, and I've done pretty well. I've been slowly moving up, you know, from secretary to office manager to account manager… moving through the ranks. But last week the most incredible thing just happened. My boss told me he thought I could really go places with an M. B. A., and he offered to pay for me to get one! I couldn't believe it! You'd think I'd be thrilled, but all I can feel is panic. I haven't been in school in ten years. I don't know if I can do it. And I don't know if I'm up to an M. B. A. anyway. Even people close to me say that I'm getting in over my head.

"But one reason you're happy is that you're proud that you worked your way up," I said. "Don't you want to keep going?" She agreed that she did. I suggested that the advances she'd made at work and the opportunity her boss had offered her were testaments to her worth. The evidence didn't seem to jibe with her mother's doubts. I asked if her mother had always been so negative about Vicki's abilities.

When I called my mother to ask her if she thought I ought to do it, she brought up some very good points. You know… what happens to my job if I don't make it. And had I thought about the fact that with an M. B. A., I'm going to scare away a lot of eligible men. And besides, I am happy with what I'm doing.

I remarked that whoever was giving her that assessment wasn't much of a friend because real friends are supportive. This embarrassed her. I asked her why she seemed uneasy. She replied that by "people close to me," she was referring to her mother.

My mom always wanted me to be the perfect little lady. She wanted me to be graceful and elegant, and to speak well… when I'd blow it, she'd try to shame me into doing it right. She meant well, she really did. She'd imitate me if I mispronounced a word. She'd make fun of how I looked… ballet recitals were the worst. Mom had dreams of being a dancer herself, but she got married instead. So I guess I was supposed to live out her dream for her, but I never danced as well as she could, at least that's what she always told me. I'll never forget one recital when I was about twelve. I thought I'd done pretty well, but my mom came backstage and said -- in front of the whole class --"You danced like a hippo." I just wanted to sink through the floor. When I sulked all the way home, she told me I should learn to take a little criticism because that's the only way I was going to learn. Then she patted my arm, and I thought she was going to say something nice, but you know what she said? "Let's face it, dear, you don't do anything very well, do you?"

Vicki's mother seems to have been strongly invested in making her young daughter feel inadequate. She did so through a series of confusing double messages. On one hand, she urged her daughter to excel, while on the other hand she told her how terrible she was. Vicki always felt off balance, never sure whether she was doing anything right. When she thought she'd done well, her mother deflated her; when she thought she'd done poorly, her mother told her she couldn't do any better. At a time when Vicki should have been building self-confidence, her mother was knocking it down. All in the name of making Vicki a better person.

"BE A SUCCESS -- BUT I KNOW YOU'LL FAIL"

But what was this abusive parent really doing? Vicki's mother was fighting her own feelings of inadequacy. Her own dance career was thwarted, perhaps by marriage. But perhaps she used marriage as an excuse because she didn't have the confidence to pursue a career. By establishing her superiority over her daughter, Vicki's mother could deny her feelings of inadequacy. Any occasion became fair game, even if it involved humiliating her daughter in front of her peers. It is particularly scarring for a budding adolescent to be embarrassed in this way, but the toxic parent's needs always come first.

During adolescence, little girls start to become women and little boys start to become men. The child's adolescence is an especially threatening time for the insecure parent. Women feel frightened that they're growing old and losing their beauty. They may see their daughters as competitors and feel the need to belittle them, especially in front of their husbands. Men may feel a threat to their virility and power. There's room for only one man in the house, so they use ridicule and humiliation to keep their sons feeling little and helpless. Many adolescents exacerbate the situation by being openly competitive as a means of testing the waters of adulthood.

The Competitive Parent

The need to make someone feel inadequate in order to feel adequate oneself rapidly evolves into out-and-out competition. Clearly, Vicki's mother came to see her young daughter as a threat because as Vicki grew older and became more beautiful, more mature, and more competent, her mother had more trouble feeling superior. She had to keep up the pressure, keep on demeaning her daughter, to defend against this threat.

Healthy parents experience their children's growing competence with excitement and joy. Competitive parents, on the other hand, often feel deprived, anxious, even scared. Most competitive parents are not aware of the reasons for these feelings, but they know that the child stirs them up.

Vicki simply gave up trying to accomplish anything:

Competitive parents have often been victims of deprivation in their own childhoods, whether from shortages of food, clothing, or love. No matter how much they have, they still live in fear of not having enough. Many of these parents reenact with their children the competition they experienced with their own parents or siblings. This unfair competition puts enormous pressure on a child.

"You cannot be more attractive than I am," or, "You cannot be happier than I am." In other words, "We all have our limits, and I am yours."

For so many years, I didn't do a lot of things, even things I really liked, because I was afraid of being humiliated. After I grew up, I kept hearing her voice, just putting me down. She didn't swear at me, she never called me dirty names. But the way she was always comparing herself to me, she made me feel like such a loser. It hurt so bad.

Despite what competitive parents may claim to want for their children, their hidden agenda is to ensure that their children can't outdo them. The unconscious messages are powerful: "You cannot be more successful than I am,"

Because these messages are so deeply entrenched, if the adult children of competitive parents do manage to excel in something, they often experience tremendous guilt. The more they succeed, the more miserable they become. This often leads them to sabotage their success. For these adult children of toxic parents, under-achievement is the price of peace of mind. They control their guilt by unconsciously limiting themselves so they don't outperform their parents. In a sense, they fulfill their parents' negative prophecies.

Branded by Insults

Some verbally abusive parents don't bother to hide behind rationalizations. Instead, they bombard their children with cruel insults, harangues, denunciations, and derogatory names. These parents are extraordinarily insensitive to both the pain they are inflicting and the lasting damage they are doing. Such blatant verbal abuse can sear into a child's self-worth like a cattle brand, leaving deep psychological scars.

Carol, 52, is an extremely beautiful model-turned-interior-designer. In our first session, she told me about her latest divorce -- her third. The divorce had become final about a year before Carol came to see me. It had been a painful experience, and Carol was left feeling frightened about her future. At the same time, she was going through menopause and seemed on the verge of panic over losing her looks. She felt undesirable. She told me that these fears had been intensified by a recent Thanksgiving visit with her parents.

I remember feeling sad and lonely a lot of the time when I was little. My father always teased me, but when I was around eleven he started saying really horrible things.

It always ends up the same way. Every time I see my parents, I get hurt and disappointed all over again. The hardest thing is that I keep thinking maybe if I come home this time and tell them that I'm unhappy, that something's gone wrong in my life, maybe just this one time they'll say, "Gee, honey, we're really sorry," instead of, "It's your own fault." As long as I can remember, it's always been, "It's your own fault."

I told Carol that it sounded as if her parents were still exercising tremendous power over her. I asked her if she was willing to explore the roots of that power with me so that we could begin to change the patterns of dominance and control. Carol nodded and began to tell me about her childhood in a wealthy midwestern family. Her father was a prominent physician and her mother was an Olympic-level swimmer who retired from competitive athletics to raise her five children. Carol was the eldest.

He used to say, "Your breasts smell bad… your back stinks. If people only knew how filthy and smelly your body is, they'd be disgusted." Honest to God, I'd shower three times a day. I'd change clothes all the time. I'd use tons of deodorant and perfume, but it wouldn't make any difference. One of his favorites was, "If someone turned you inside out, they'd see stink come out every pore in your body." Remember, this is coming from a respected physician. And my mother never said a word. She never even told me it wasn't true. I kept wondering how I could be better… how I could keep him from telling me how awful and smelly I was. When I went to the bathroom, I always thought if I could flush the toilet faster, maybe he wouldn't think I was so awful.

Carol stopped again and looked away. "Come on, Carol," I said, "I'm on your side."

For some reason, my father decided… God, this is hard… he decided I… I smelled bad. He just never let up. I mean, other people used to tell me how pretty I was, but all he could ever say was…

"Like what?" I asked. She told me it didn't matter. She started biting her cuticles nervously. I knew she was trying to protect an emotional nerve. "Carol," I said, "I can see how painful this is for you. But we have to get this stuff out in the air where we can deal with it." She started slowly:

I told Carol that it sounded as if her father had reacted irrationally to her burgeoning womanhood because he couldn't deal with his preoccupation with it. It is very common for fathers to react to their daughters' blossoming sexuality with discomfort and often hostility. Even a father who is kind and loving when his daughter is small may create conflict during her adolescence in order to distance himself from sexual attractions he finds unacceptable.

Now that I think about it, it was a sexual thing. I always felt his eyes on me. And he was always bugging me for details about what I was doing with my boyfriends, which was practically nothing. But he was convinced I was going to bed with everyone I went out with. He'd say things like, "Just tell me the truth and I won't punish you." He really wanted to hear me talk about sex.

I asked Carol whether any of this rang true for her.

To a toxic father like Carol's, a daughter's sexual development can trigger extreme feelings of anxiety, which, in his mind, justify his persecution of her. By projecting his guilt and discomfort on to her, he could deny any responsibility for his feelings. It is as if he were saying, "You are a bad and wicked person because you make me feel bad and wicked things for you."

During the emotional maelstrom of adolescence, Carol desperately needed a loving and supportive father to give her confidence. Instead, he subjected her to relentless denigration. Her father's verbal abuse, combined with her mother's passivity, severely damaged Carol's ability to believe in herself as a valuable and lovable person. When people told her how pretty she was, all she could think about was whether they could smell her. No amount of external validation could compete with her father's devastating messages.

I started modeling when I was seventeen. Of course, the more successful I was, the worse my father got. I really had to get out of that house. So, I got married at nineteen to the first guy who asked me. A real doll: he hit me when I was pregnant and he left me when the baby was born. Naturally, I blamed myself. I figured I must have done something wrong. Maybe I smelled bad, I didn't know. About a year later, I married a guy who didn't beat me, but he hardly ever talked to me. I stuck that one out for ten years because I couldn't face my parents with another failed marriage. But I finally left him. Thank God I had my modeling, so I was able to support my son and myself. I even swore off men for a few years. Then I met Glen. I thought this was it; I'd somehow found the perfect guy. The first five years of our marriage was the happiest time of my life. Then I found out he'd been cheating on me almost from the day we got married. I did a lot of forgiving over the next ten years because I just didn't want to lose another marriage. Last year he left me for a woman half my age. Why can't I do anything right?

I explained to Carol that by asking her father, or the men she chose to replace him, to make her feel okay about herself, she was putting her self-esteem in their hands. It didn't take a genius to see how destructive those hands had been. She had to take back control of her self-esteem by confronting the self-defeating beliefs that her father had planted in her childhood. Over the next few months she gradually came to realize that her self-esteem was not lost -- she was just looking for it in the wrong place.

I reminded Carol that she had done a lot right: she'd been a loving and available mother; she'd raised a son who was doing well in his own life; she had two successful careers. But none of my assurances carried much weight. Carol had internalized her father's image of herself as a worthless, repulsive human being. As a result, most of her adult life was propelled by a self-defeating quest for the love she had craved from her father as a young girl. She chose cruel, abusive, or distant men -- like her father -- and tried to get them to love her the way her father never had.

Perfectionist Parents

The impossible expectation that children be perfect is another common trigger for severe verbal attacks. Many verbally abusive parents are themselves high achievers, but all too often their homes become dumping grounds for career stress. (Alcoholic parents may also make impossible demands on their children, then use their children's failure to justify drinking.)

Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame.

Children need to make mistakes and discover that it's not the end of the world. That's how they gain the confidence to try new things in life. Toxic parents impose unobtainable goals, impossible expectations, and ever-changing rules on their children. They expect their children to respond with a degree of maturity that can come only from life experiences that are inaccessible to a child. Children are not miniature adults, but toxic parents expect them to act as if they are.

Paul, 33, a dark-haired blue-eyed lab technician, came to me because of troubles at work. He was noticeably shy, self-conscious, and unsure of himself, but still he managed repeatedly to get into heated arguments with his immediate superiors. This, along with increasing concentration problems, was jeopardizing his job.

As Paul and I talked about his work, I could see that he had difficulties in dealing with authority figures. I asked him about his parents and discovered that Paul, like Carol, had been branded by insults. As he described:

I was nine when my mother remarried. The guy must've studied with Hitler. The first thing he did when he moved in was lay down the law: democracy stopped at the front door. If he told us to jump off a cliff, we had to jump. No questions. I got it a lot worse than my sister did. He was on my case all the time, mostly about my room. He would do this goddamned inspection every day like it was some kind of army barracks. When you're nine or ten, things are always a little messy, but he didn't care. Everything had to be perfect, nothing could be out-of-place. If I left a book on the desk, he'd start screaming about how I was a disgusting pig. He'd call me a fucking little asshole or a little son of a bitch or a snot-nosed bastard. It was like his favorite sport to keep pounding me with those lousy names. He never hit me, but the goddamned names hurt just as bad.

When my stepfather was young, he was the smallest kid in the school. Everybody picked on him. By the time my mother met him, he was husky because he'd gotten into working out. You could tell he'd put it all on, though. Somehow, all that muscle always looked like it ought to be on somebody else.

I had a hunch that there was something about Paul that had stirred up strong feelings in his stepfather. It didn't take long to figure it out. Paul had been a shy, sensitive, withdrawn child, small for his age.

Somewhere inside Paul's stepfather, a small, frightened, inadequate boy was still alive. And since Paul had so many similar characteristics, he became a symbol of his stepfather's own painful childhood. Because his stepfather had never accepted himself as a child, he felt immediate rage at the young boy who reminded him of himself. He used Paul as a scapegoat for the inadequacies he couldn't face in himself. By tyrannizing Paul with impossible demands for perfection, and then verbally abusing him when the boy fell short, his stepfather could convince himself that he was powerful and strong. The damage he was doing to Paul probably never even crossed his mind. He thought he was helping the boy to be perfect.

When I was fourteen, I got into drugs real bad. It was about the only time I ever felt accepted. I wasn't going to make it as a jock, and I sure wasn't the life of the party, so what else was there? Just before I graduated high school, I bought some really bad shit and nearly OD'd. Well, that did it for me… no way was I ever gonna go through that again.

Paul's mother divorced her second husband when Paul was eighteen, but by that time Paul's spirit was already seriously battered. Paul knew he could never be "perfect" enough for his stepfather, so he just gave up:

Paul attended a junior college for a year, but quit despite both a yearning and an aptitude for a career as a scientist. He just couldn't concentrate. His IQ was extremely high, but he would buckle in the face of a challenge. He'd gotten into the habit of giving up.

"I CAN'T BE PERFECT SO I MIGHT AS WELL GIVE UP"

When he entered the job market he found himself falling into antagonistic patterns with his bosses, again replaying his childhood. He went from job to job until he finally found one he liked. Then he came to me to try to keep it. I told him I thought I could help.

I really like this new lab where I'm working, but I'm always terrified that I'm not going to do a perfect job. So, I put off a lot of what I have to do until way after my deadlines, or I'll rush them through at the last minute and screw up. The more I screw up, the more I keep expecting to get fired. Anytime my supervisor makes a comment, I take it personally and overreact. I'm always expecting that the world is going to come to an end because I've screwed up. Lately, I've gotten so far behind that I've been calling in sick. I just can't face it.

Even though Paul's stepfather was out of his life, he still maintained a strong hold over Paul because the demeaning messages continued to play in Paul's head. As a result, Paul stayed entangled in what I call "The Three P's": Perfectionism, Procrastination, and Paralysis.

Paul's stepfather had implanted in Paul the need to be perfect -- Perfectionism. Paul's fear of failing to do things perfectly led him to postpone doing them -- Procrastination. But the more Paul put things off, the more they overwhelmed him, and his snowballing fears eventually prevented him from doing anything at all -- Paralysis.

THE THREE P'S OF PERFECTIONISM

Adult children of perfectionist parents have usually taken one of two paths. They've either driven themselves relentlessly to win parental love and approval, or they've rebelled to the point where they develop a fear of success.

I helped Paul think through a strategy to approach his employers openly, tell them he was having personal problems that were interfering with his work, and ask for a leave of absence. They were impressed by his honesty and his concern for the quality of his work, and they granted him two months. That wasn't enough time for Paul to explore all of his problems, but it was long enough for us to get him out of the hole he'd dug for himself. By the time he returned to his job, he had been able to take the first steps toward facing what his stepfather had done to him, which made him better able to differentiate between real conflicts with his superiors and conflicts arising from his internal wounds. Even though he was to remain in therapy for another eight months, everyone at work told him that he seemed like a new man.

THE 'S" WORD

There are those who behave as if someone is always keeping score. The house can never be clean enough. They can never experience pleasure in an accomplishment because they're convinced that they could have done it better. They feel genuine panic if they make the slightest mistake.

Then there are those who, like Paul, live a life of failure because they cannot deal with "the 'S' word"-- Success. To Paul, being successful would have meant capitulating to his stepfather's demands. Paul probably would have continued to fail at job after job if we had not silenced his stepfather's voice within him.

One of the most extreme examples of the havoc created by verbal abuse was Jason, 42, a handsome police officer in one of my hospital groups several years ago. The Los Angeles Police Department had insisted that he be hospitalized because the police psychologist had concluded that Jason was a suicide risk. At the hospital staff conference, I learned that Jason was consistently putting himself into unnecessarily life-threatening situations. For example, he had recently tried to make a drug bust by himself, without calling for the appropriate backup. He came very close to being killed. On the surface this appeared to be a heroic act, but it was actually reckless, irresponsible behavior. The word was out in the department: Jason was trying to kill himself in the line of duty.

The Cruelest Words: "I Wish You'd Never Been Born"

I told Jason that his mother sounded crazy.

It took several group sessions for me to gain Jason's confidence. But once I did, we established a good working relationship. I still recall vividly the session in which he told about his bizarre relationship with his mother:

My dad skipped out when I was two years old because my mother was impossible to live with. She got even worse after he left. She had this really violent temper, and she never let up on me, especially since I happened to be the spitting image of my old man. I don't remember a day when she didn't tell me she wished I'd never been born. On a good day, she'd say, "You look just like your goddamned father and you're just as rotten." On her bad days, she'd say stuff like, "I wish you were dead just like I wish your father was dead, rotting in some shallow grave."

I thought so too, but who's going to listen to a kid. One of our neighbors knew about it. She tried to get me into a foster home because she was convinced my mother was going to kill me. But nobody listened to her, either.

In addition to inflicting enormous hurt and bewilderment, this form of verbal abuse can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jason's suicidal tendencies are relatively common among the children of such parents. For these adult children, facing and dealing with their toxic connections to the past can literally be a matter of life or death.

He paused for a moment and shook his head.

Through his actions on the police force, Jason was unconsciously trying to be a dutiful, obedient son. In essence, Jason was trying to wipe out his existence, to commit suicide indirectly in order to please his mother. He knew exactly what it would take to please her because she'd told him very explicitly: "I wish you were dead."

Jason's mother had sent him a clear message: she did not want him. When his father left and made no attempt to be a part of his son's life, he reinforced the point: Jason's existence was worthless.

Jesus, I didn't think this crap bothered me anymore, but my insides turn to ice every time I remember how much she hated me.

When you take these negative opinions out of other people's mouths and put them into your unconscious, you are "internalizing" them. Internalization of negative opinions -- changing "you are" to "I am"-- forms the foundation of low self-esteem. Besides significantly impairing your sense of yourself as a lovable, valuable, competent person, verbal abuse can create self-fulfilling negative expectations about how you will get along in the world. In the second part of this book, I'll show you how to defeat those crippling expectations by making the internal external again.

While there is no question that children can be damaged by put-downs from friends, teachers, siblings, and other family members, children are the most vulnerable to their parents. After all, parents are the center of a young child's universe. And if your all-knowing parents think bad things about you, they must be true. If Mother is always saying, "You're stupid," then you're stupid. If Father is always saying, "You're worthless," then you are. A child has no perspective from which to cast doubt on these assessments.

When "You Are" Becomes "I Am"