Maybe he doesn’t hit you, but with what he says, it probably would hurt a lot less if he just did.

Maybe he doesn’t hit you but he tells you that no one will ever love you as much as he does because you’re “fat, weird, and crazy”.

Maybe he doesn’t hit you...but she does.

Maybe he doesn’t hit you but when he broke you, you apologized.

Maybe he doesn’t hit you, he just comes home angry at the world and broke and starts putting you down for being a useless parasite whose why he’s broke.

Maybe he doesn’t hit you, but he doesn’t have to to make you attempt to take your own life rather than be hurt by him anymore.

#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou, a powerful hashtag started by twitter user z a h i r a (@bad_dominicana), highlights many important misconceptions and stigmas in the world of abuse. In fact, the primary focus of the hashtag is one of the most frustrating stigmas, that somehow because you can see the effects of physical abuse that that means it’s more damaging than other forms of abuse such as emotional or sexual abuse.

Violence isn’t just defined by bruises or scars. Merriam-Webster defines violence as:

:the use of physical force to harm someone, to damage property, etc.
: great destructive force or energy (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence)

The key part of this definition is destructive force. Recent research has found that depending on the type-sexual, emotional, or other nonphysical forms- and the time-childhood versus young adult years -of the abuse, different parts of the brain are negatively affected. You see, the human brain still develops after birth all the way until the mid-20s. Therefore, any abnormal amount of stress during this time frame can significantly inhibit the development of different parts of the brain depending on the type of stress. For example, a thinning in the somatosensory cortex was found in the brains of those who had been sexually abused, whereas thinning was observed in areas of the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe in brains that had experienced emotional abuse.

I know I just threw a lot of science at you, and you don’t have to understand it, but you should understand that just because you can’t see the scars doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Any form of abuse is still abuse, there’s not contest or race between these forms to show which one hurts more. Suffering is still suffering, pain is still pain, and just because there are different forms of suffering and pain doesn’t mean that one form is worse than the other. They’re not comparable, they can’t be placed at different locations on a scale. They all hurt, they all damage, they all kill.

More women experience emotional abuse in relationships than physical abuse. However, emotional abuse cases are so grossly underreported that are hardly ANY reliable statistics out there about nature of emotional abuse today. Literally there is not enough information and data out there for researchers to work with to draw conclusions on how to fight emotional abuse.

It won’t happen overnight, but if everyone who read this article or everyone who subconsciously or consciously harbors stigmatized opinions about emotional abuse made an effort to prevent themselves from acting on those opinions in regular day-to-day life, and instead spread the idea that any form of pain is valid and damaging, then maybe, just maybe, emotional abuse will be treated and thought of with the same urgency and severity as physical abuse.

And instead of the narrative #MaybeHeDoesntHitYou, we could be telling a different story.