Emotional Abuse and Trauma: How It Reshapes Our Core Emotions

Written by Roland Bal

To be alive is to be able to feel emotion. Emotion can come in many shades though, from the darkness of hatred or self-loathing to the brightness of being in love or enjoying a sunset.

I believe we hold the assumption that emotion is either good or bad, positive or negative; I would like to explore this a little more with you, as it is one of the pillars that need to be addressed in resolving trauma to help change this perspective, and thereby to heal.

The Four Core Emotions and How Emotional Abuse Distorts Them

In essence, we have four core emotions: anger, fear, sadness, and joy. The other emotions derive from these, at the core. For example, grief, mourning or self-pity are part of a sadness response; hatred, frustration, blame, self-reproach, decisiveness or power of will are part of anger energy; compassion, affection, and pleasure belong to joy; and anguish, anxiety, carefulness, and alertness come from fear.

Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad, positive or negative, but can be expressed either destructively or constructively.

When we are overwhelmed by emotion, it either turns inward through suppression or overflows outwardly. Think of blame and hatred as the overflowing response of anger. Self-reproach is the acting inwardly of anger on the sense of self.

Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad, positive or negative, but can be expressed either destructively or constructively.

To start addressing emotion in trauma work is to create a healthy framework and a new perspective on how we perceive it qualitatively. As emotion is often negatively tainted with the overwhelming experience of trauma, let's be aware that emotion itself can be either utilized destructively or constructively.

This is what emotional abuse does at its core — it teaches you that certain emotions are dangerous. A child who is punished for expressing anger learns to turn that anger inward. A child who is shamed for crying learns to shut down sadness before it can surface. Over time, the nervous system organises itself around these rules: which emotions are permitted, which are forbidden, and what happens when you cross the line. The long-term effect is not just that you carry unresolved emotion — it is that you have lost the capacity to feel certain emotions at all without being flooded by shame, fear, or the expectation of punishment.

How Anger Turns Inward After Emotional Abuse

This surely is a challenge, because it means moving away from blame, guilt, self-reproach, self-pity, hatred, the pursuit of pleasure, anxiety, and many other destructive emotions and starting to establish a new framework for owning emotions that are constructive.

To clarify this, I will give an example: Amy suffered an incident of emotional and sexual abuse when she was a teenager. Back then she found no support from her family and friends, who reacted to her experience with disbelief. From then on, she kept her feelings of anger to herself and beat herself up for having trusted others with her intimate feelings of pain.

This example shows how anger is directed inward after a traumatic experience and turns into self-reproach. In the work that followed, I encouraged Amy to express the anger she feels towards the abuser and ultimately to experience the feeling of anger as a felt sensation in the body. Once the anger is fully owned, the grieving over the experience naturally starts, which marks the healing and completion process and consigns the experience to the past.

This pattern — anger turning inward as self-reproach — is one of the most common long-term effects of emotional abuse. It is not just that you were hurt by someone else's words or behaviour. It is that the hurt was internalised so deeply that you began doing the abuser's work for them. The critical voice that tells you that you are not good enough, that you should have known better, that you deserved what happened — that voice was installed by the abuse, but it now operates as if it were your own. Recognising this is the first step. The second step is beginning to redirect that anger toward where it belongs — outward, toward the boundary that was violated — so that it can complete its natural course through the nervous system.

Owning Your Emotions and Reestablishing Boundaries

It is of vital importance to explain that anger, sadness or fear can be healthy responses, before starting to express and own them. The constructive response of anger, in this example, is to help reset her boundaries, her identity and sense of self by vocalising it. Equally so, with the grieving process; a constructive sadness response, which starts when self-pity, fed by anger, is released.

The expression and owning of anger assists in completing the fight and flight activation of the nervous system.

This is why emotional abuse is so difficult to recover from without somatic work. You can understand intellectually that you were emotionally abused. You can name it, describe it, trace the patterns back to their origin. But the nervous system does not update itself through understanding alone. The emotional residue — the anger that was never expressed, the sadness that was never allowed, the fear that became the background noise of daily life — remains stored in the body until it is met there. Through sensation, through breath, through the gradual experience of expressing what was suppressed within enough safety and containment that the system does not become overwhelmed again.

What often surprises people in this work is that the emotions they have been most afraid of — the rage, the grief, the deep sadness — are not endless. They feel that way because they have been held in for so long. But when they are met with awareness and containment rather than suppression or acting out, they move through. And what remains on the other side is not emptiness but a quiet sense of presence that was never available before, because so much energy was being consumed by the effort of keeping everything locked down.