Emotional Abuse - A Conversation with Belinda Beaumont

Episode 3 is with Belinda Beaumont, a counsellor at Kids Helpline, a free private and confidential 24/7 phone and online counselling service who has been helping Aussie kids for nearly 30 years now with over 8 million contacts... and one of them was me. 

Children often lack the perspective to be able to identify the abusive elements of their emotional relationship with their parents, it's only in adulthood that they're more able to detect them. You can't go back in time and change the way your parent behaved, but if you have a strained relationship with your parents and think it may be a result of their actions, you may find yourself working backwards to find out why.

Belinda talks about if there are some signs which a child might be able to identify that may give them the right "word tools" to go see their school counsellor to make them understand what is happening at home and not automatically take the parents side, as it is a fear of many children that if the parent finds out they told their truth the abuse then may escalate at home. Even for an adult worried about a child they know, Belinda explains what sort of questions they could ask to open the communication lines to ultimately get the child in contact with professionals like Kids Helpline.