It was a dare that I could not win. This kind of abuse is especially easy to blame on a child victim, since children are immature by nature, and are often frustrating. But this is the reality of childrearing, and anyone who is even remotely considering having a child needs to think long and hard about this. Kids will drive you nuts, and it's largely not their fault until they're adults. They simply haven't had time to learn maturity yet.
Emotional abuse affects the soul, and the soul is invisible.
It can be hard for someone with solid self-esteem to ever imagine that a person can be ripped to shreds from the inside out. But it happens.