Is it Emotional Abuse?

[roinujo1]

Well, this does not happen regularly, maybe once every week, maybe more, but my mom would come home from work and start yelling at us for different stuff. She just yelled about my brother not taking a shower,(Even though she didn't ask him to) and said " and your idiot brother (me) didn't either." Another thing is that my mother would say things out randomly. Like when she say im getting fat and she tells her friends that im gaining all the weight that I lost a year ago( I have been getting depressed, may be tied to my weight gain.) I just wanted to know if this should raise any red flags.

[ShimmeringFaerie]

Personally, I wouldn't go so far as to call it emotional abuse (based on your examples). I don't think it's okay to yell at your children and I don't think that saying negative, personal things about your child to your friends is okay either. But I don't think it's necessarily abuse.

For me, the phrase "emotional abuse" implies that the person saying/doing things means to hurt, humiliate, or upset the other person. It doesn't sound like your mum means to hurt your feelings, even though that is what's happening. If she's mainly yelling when she is coming home from work, my guess would be that she is quite stressed out and frustrated, either from her job or perhaps from coming home and realising that she has lots of cleaning/cooking/etc. to do? That doesn't make it okay, but it does give you some idea of how you can come up with a solution to the problem.

I think you should talk to your mum. Ask her if she is stressed when she comes home and what you can do to help relieve some of that stress. And explain to her that it hurts your feelings when she says "you're getting fat". She may not even have thought about how her words impact on you. Just talking to her might be enough to get her to change what she's currently doing.

I hope this helped. Feel free to PM me if you ever need someone to talk to.