10 Signs of Emotional Bullying: How to Spot Them

Emotional bullying is when a person tries to get what he or she wants by making another feel afraid, small and helpless.

It can happen in a children’s playground. Or it can happen in adult relationships. These days, emotional bullying can also take place online. 

Emotional bullying brings about negative effects. If it is made repeatedly, the victim’s mental health can decline. Victims end up with depression, anxiety, shame, guilt and fear, and have difficulties showing up fully at work or in their business. Emotional wounds can create leaks in attracting money and abundance too.

Fortunately, it is possible for anyone to work on healing emotional wounds. In some situations, victims are not able to recognise that they have been bullied. Well, it is important for anyone to learn how to identify the signs so that you can tell if there has been bullying. 

10 Signs of Emotional Bullying 

An emotional bully may

1. Name-call, tease or mock you
2. Shame, humiliate or torment you
3. Put-down or belittle your feelings
4. Says things to put you in fear
5. Orders you around like you are subservient 
6. Invades and disrespects your boundary 
7. Ignore or exclude you from a group
8. Dramatises small issues and blames them on you 
9. Gangs up on you 
10. Guilt trips you in a manipulative way.

Such behaviour is prevalent especially in abusive relationships. The emotional bully is sarcastic, manipulative and may even play pranks in order to shame the victim. Unknowingly, the victim may dismiss the behaviour as childish or immature, or make excuses for the bully. The thing is that emotional bullying, whether subtle or not, can create lasting scars. 

Negative Effects of Emotional Bullying 

I’ve seen how the effects of emotional bullying impact my clients in their well-being such as …

• Low self-esteem
• Depression
• Bad academic grades
• Poor job performance
• Isolation
• Physical health challenges.

Standing up to the bully is one thing but if the experiences stem from childhood or if they’ve caused damaging effects, I recommend doing some emotional healing work.

Heal Your Emotional Wounds 

Covering up with a band aid does not solve the problem since there is already “bleeding” beneath the psychological scars. 

It is best is to heal emotionally at root cause for recovery to take place. Hence, we work on releasing any fear or shame at the somatic level, inner child, clearing disruptive patterns, changing your core beliefs, raising self-worthiness and tapping into self-love. 

If you are finding it hard to do these on your own, getting help for emotional healing may just be the most courageous thing that you can do.

I usually draw on a combination of healing modalities to help my clients such as EFT, Matrix Reimprinting, energy healing, inner child psychology, Neuro-linguistic Programming, timeline therapy etc. Apply for a discovery call to find out more about working together here. 

Learn to build resilience, courage and self-love instead! 

To your well-being, 
Evelyn Lim 
Energy Healing Therapist
Accredited EFT Practitioner

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