To clarify: examples of emotional spousal abuse are:
1) Being verbally degraded repeatedly, i.e. one spouse makes the other feel that their self-worth is devalued by saying they are not worthy. A husband can be repeatedly told that the spiritual weaknesses of the children are all his fault, that he does nothing for their Chinuch. Most damaging is when the spouse is verbally degraded in front of family, especially their own children, since it causes a devaluation of the abused parent in the eyes of the children and totally distorts the sanctity of husband-wife relationship in the children’s eyes. Children very much want to see that their parents are valued and when one parent does the very opposite to the other, it is very destructive to the children’s image of their family home as their sanctum.
2) By constantly refusing to show recognition or acknowledgement for the good things the other does and even worse by blaming the other person for everything that goes wrong, even when the blamer is totally at fault for the very things he/she blames the other for. I know one example where one spouse blamed the other for their astronomical credit card debt despite the fact that the “blamer” was the only one to use the credit cards, but blamed the entire debt on the other because the “blamee” ordered the credit card from the bank! The blamer can be so blind that he/she will accuse the other for not doing a desired Tovah when in reality the “blamee” person did the very Tovah most devotedly every day.
3) This hurts me very much to say, since it may be viewed as an attack on women or being insensitive to their suffering, which is the farthest from my mind: Women who refuse to go to the Mikvah for even short and sometimes long periods of time, assuming that they did not have dispensation from their Rov, are acting emotionally abusively toward their husband since they are engaging Halacha as a weapon. Nothing is more damaging to the happiness and self-worth of a husband than when his wife says “you are not good enough for me to go to the Mikvah for”. I know that the vast majority of Frum women would not dream of doing this, but it happens in some marriages. (There may be cases where a women has a dispensation from her Rov not to go to the Mikvah, in which case she is likely in a very sad and painful situation – and we are excluding these cases from our discussion since this is an entirely different circumstance).
Spousal emotional abuse is very hard to identify since often each spouse sees themselves as the emotional abused, even when he/she does 99% of the abusive behavior. For this reason many people are dismissive towared the plight of the truly emotional abused spouse. Spouses who are truly emotionally abused derserve our greatest support since words can sometimes hurt more than physical blows (both are totally unacceptable), especially since people tend to acuse the abused party for engaging in a “pity party”.