Then you’re going to come a cropper in the question that social workers struggle with. How do you know emotional abuse when you see it? Neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse are all carefully legally prescribed. Emotional abuse is too, but that differs from being able to spot it, being able to prove it. Abuse is abuse, boundaries are boundaries but the line is blurry. I know where my boundaries are, these days and they stop well before anything that would trigger an emotional abuse label, but those boundaries were hard learned through trial and error.

Emotional abuse is a different beast from the other three.