Often this includes being humiliated, called derogatory names and being referred to as incompetent while performing tasks like cooking, cleaning, and parenting. Over time, the abused feels guilty and deserving of mistreatment. Psychological Abuse includes excessive jealousy and attempts to control time, activities,dress and personal image. Partners who are psychologically abusive will try to limit who visits or phones, so that the partner becomes isolated from friends and relatives. Psychological abuse can also involve harassment through phone calls and visits at the place of employment, having prized possessions destroyed, being denied sex or affection, and enduring suicide threats by a husband, partner, or lover.
Psychological abuse can include threats to take the children away.
If immigration is involved, deportation can be used as a threat. Financial Abuse means denying access to the family's money and allowing no input into what will be bought. Many abusers prevent their partners from seeking and obtaining work outside the home, or sabotage efforts to work or go to school. These techniques are successful with prisoners of war, survivors of concentration camps and abused women. The effects are long lasting because they attack the individual on both a social and psychological level.