Two-step inoculation to most forms of emotional abuse:
Step 1: pay real attention to how you feel about what happens.
Step 2: respect your own feelings.
Congrats, you are now immune to most of these attacks.
(But: both steps can be extremely difficult for most people.)
Conversation
Most aspects of modern life, and most bad parenting memes, prime people for emotional abuse.
Overcoming that isn't as simple as saying a few affirmations or some New Age hippie BS (if anything, those things often help you *ignore* your feelings, thus priming you for more abuse).
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In most cases, people rely on support from people who actually respect & give a shit about their feelings to get out of self-denial, if they're heavy on that.
Not something industrialized life is very forthcoming with.
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The-city-I-live-in-and-am-leaving-soon is full of toddler-level adults who are knocked over by the slightest emotional breeze.
It's not really their fault. The local culture is intensely oppressive and devaluing. It generates profound emotional neediness, that is then denied.
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All of these people would be emotionally healthier if more people they met simply acknowledged their feelings, instead of dogpiling on them or their common foes.
Instead, everyone gets wound tighter into their own cocoon of dissociation & projection/denial.
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A lot of our societies trample people on the fringes, resulting in increased rates of mental health problems in vulnerable groups.
But there are plenty of cultures out there that trample almost everyone. This normalizes poor emotional health, until most people are maladjusted.
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You also get people cheering on the trampling on of others and not realizing that this is how the policies & enforcement mechanisms are developed& tested so that they can subsequently be deployed on the whole population
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No, generally what they don't realize is that they've been trampled for so long, they've internalized it.
People with strongly visible mental health problems are generally just more sensitive and prone to showing their dysfunction.
Most people are maladjusted, by necessity.
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Pretty funny to see every local grandparent struggling with this.
They will yell random abuse at their grandchildren when they get stressed. Do they ever say "I'm scared I won't be able to protect you, please slow down"? No. They don't even know it.
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They survived Communism. Most of them have no connection at all to their basic feelings. They were raised from childhood to avoid exploring them.
Countries with long free-market tails see their own version of this in the dehumanization (and very existence) of the unemployed.
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To people with sufficient infrastructure debt in their emotional regulation systems, it's extremely difficult not to project/dissociate/act-out/act-in.
There is just too much embodied tension. The entire system is full of clogged passages with subfunctional throughput.
As social animals, most of our emotional regulation is normally extrapersonal, whatever all those self-help gurus want to teach us.
When most everyone in your extended circle is suffering through something similar, it's inevitable that these problems won't resolve for everyone.
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The solution isn't just better coping strategies, self-regulation, medication, therapy or vigorous exercise.
All those things help, but you are still stuck reacting to how other people are feeling.
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