If you answered "yes" to any of the questions, here’s what it could mean:

1. It’s possible that you were not held as a child. Babies, of course, must be held when they’re fed and carried around. But you may have no memory of ever being held, hugged, or touched from early childhood. As a consequence, you may find it unnatural and awkward to touch other people. "Touch deprivation" is a serious problem, and it is a component of childhood emotional abuse.
2. Favoritism and scapegoating are more common than many people realize. Parents have many reasons for treating children differently; while none of them are excusable, they can be explained by the parents’ own unresolved issues. The important thing to understand is that you did nothing to "deserve" this; your siblings are not "better" than you.
3. Childhood emotional abuse can be very subtle. The evidence is not as observable as it is with physical or sexual abuse, and our abusive parent can make us feel that it’s our fault, or that it’s all in our imagination. Children have a natural respect for their parents, and when we’re young, we believe what they tell us. We can end up feeling very alone, because our family may look perfectly normal, even "ideal," to an outsider, and we may fear that if we tell our tales, we will not be believed. Rest assured, it is not all in your head. Still, we do have more control over what goes on in our heads than some people realize!
4. That "stuck" feeling is caused by the way your brain works. Emotional abuse actually changes the "wiring" of our brains. While painful memories are difficult to erase, we can change their meanings. We can stop being controlled by things that bring back bad memories.
5. Mothers are traditionally the nurturers. That’s not just societal; it’s because of the bonding hormone oxytocin and the calming chemical serotonin, which females have more of than males. So if your mother was the abuser, this means the nurturer was absent from your life. If your father was the abuser, your mother probably did one of two things: either try to compensate with an extra dose of nurturing, or turn the other way and pretend it wasn’t happening. The first response may soften the pain of the abuse, while the second is a betrayal and exacerbates it. 
6. As victims of childhood emotional abuse, we learned early in life that our emotional needs would not be met, so we decided that it isn’t safe to have needs. We eventually gave up on expressing them; we learned to mistrust our feelings and eventually disowned them. We then began to overuse our cognitive brain, which eventually loses communication with the emotional brain. Without emotions to guide our choices, we go through life unable to make decisions. We stay "stuck" in uncomfortable situations; we can be miserable for years and not know why, simply accepting that chronic misery is our lot in life.
7. Those are all long-term consequences of childhood emotional abuse. Of course, any of those behaviors could have other causes as well, but if you’re answering "yes" to a lot of these quiz questions, the items listed in Question 7 are additional indicators of childhood emotional abuse. You may not have known until now that this was the cause of your problems! But now you do.
8. Those kinds of messages are forms of emotional abuse. Of course, many (perhaps most!) people in the world today were "unplanned" in the sense that their parents did not plan to have a child at that particular time in their lives. There’s nothing wrong with telling a child that he or she was a surprise, as long as it’s expressed as a happy surprise. If it’s attached to messages such as "you’re not supposed to be here," that is simply wrong. No parent gets to decide whether his or her child has a right to occupy space on Planet Earth! If you were fed messages of worthlessness as a child, you were abused.
9. What may look like ADD, ADHD, or another disorder may actually be a psychological phenomenon called hypervigilance. Here’s how that works: for the traumatized child, life becomes a long, drawn-out crisis. The child spends most of his or her time on the lookout for trouble, and as a result will easily be triggered into chronic tension, fear, anxiety, and depression. The effects can be severe and far-reaching. In the meantime, because any minor stimulus can signal potential trouble for the child, he or she is easily distracted.
10. There are several reasons why abusive behaviors run in families. Certainly there’s a genetic component to problems such as alcoholism. There’s a strong environmental component to all kinds of behaviors, both good and bad. Finally, there’s the phenomenon whereby people tend to expect only what they see and nothing better. Because of these factors, people who grew up in any kind of abusive environment often decide not to have children out of fear that they will do to their children what was done to them. But that kind of fear-based thinking poisons all of a person’s relationships. It would be far better for adult survivors of emotional abuse to learn to change their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It can be done!

How many of these questions did you feel a "yes" answer to? There’s no "score" that determines whether you were a victim of childhood emotional abuse; it depends on a number of factors.

The three keys to our abusive parents’ power over us are:

• authoritative source
• intensity
• repetition.

When we’re young, we believe what our parents tell us; if they tell us something with enough intensity and repetition, it will become firmly entrenched in our minds. Plug any negative message into this formula, and your parent can make you believe anything about yourself.

The more of these ten items you experienced...and of course there are many other influencing factors, as discussed in 

Help! I Need a Hug

A Guide to Surviving Childhood Emotional Abuse—

How You Can Heal Yourself, Overcome Your Obstacles,

and Embrace Your Goals

...the more forcefully they were done to you, and the more frequently, the more strongly you're a candidate for victimhood.

It also depends upon individual personalities and circumstances. A sensitive child may suffer more than one who challenges authority and fights back; a child with one parent who compensates for the other parent’s abuse, or who has a strong support system in grandparents or close family friends, will suffer less.

If you’re a victim, however, you can recover. And you deserve to!