Readings: The Emotionally Abused Woman

I was able to read the first two chapters of The Emotionally Abused Woman (amazon link.) I started this post after I began the first chapter. I wanted to quickly jot down some things and intended on revisiting more topics within this book however lost access to it before I could give a nice book report, so.. I will have to buy it and finish writing about my lessons later.
What I read just in the first two paragraphs was, well... I never thought of it that way. What's astonishing is that the victims of this type of abuse report identical mental effects to those that are physically abused. These include symptoms of confusion, low self-esteem, suicidal attempts and other really, really terrible feelings the victim must endure while tolerating such behaviors. The really terrible thing is that the longer the victim stays with the abuser, the more the victim becomes dependent on the abuser, thus actually contributing to the energy in the cycle. The abuser gets more power, which is what abusing someone fulfills the need of and the cycle repeats itself with a greater magnitude of abuse the next time around. Eventually even if this abuse starts as being sarcastic, it is destined to lead to physical violence where someone will get hurt.

This is a much bigger problem than I think we want to admit. I grew up in a community/society where making demeaning jokes about each other was acceptable. Comedians, teachers and especially our peers. I excelled at making such jokes, seeing others laugh because of something I said made me feel better about myself, made me feel in control of being popular. It's sad looking at it in retrospect. My friends and I wasted so much potential and talent by beating each other up and knocking each other down emotionally. This is a scar that I have, as the same friends that would laugh at my jokes, they made jokes about me and literally beat me up just for fun too. Abusers are almost always victims of abuse themselves.
Something I would do to combat my fathers abuse (which he termed as discipline) was make criticizing and demeaning jokes at the dinner table. My mom really enjoyed them because she was the same way. She would laugh and I would feel like she loved me more which gave me the feeling I was after from my parents. I do love my father, he sacrificed a lot for us and did love us growing up, he just didn't handle conflict very well probably because of things he experienced growing up. His father died when he was young so he had nobody to give him a positive example.
I'm very ashamed of not knowing better and abusing my father the way I did. I'm planning a trip home to see my parents soon and will be apologizing for my behaviors and attempt to explain to them how I've come to know of this and perhaps be able to help them in some way.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words break our hearts."
-someone else

Definitions from the book:
Abuse: Any behavior that is designed to control and subjugate (make submissive) another human through the use of fear, humiliation and verbal or physical assaults.

Emotional Abuse: any kind of abuse that is emotional rather than physical in nature. (ie. intimidation, manipulation, refusing to be pleased)