Could you please describe emotional abuse to me in simple symbolic words?

Hello! I’ve been emotionally abused by my parents when I was a kid.

Now I am in college and making my thesis about Parental Emotional Abuse. My project is a web comic and I would like to help parental emotional abuse victims and new parents to seek for professional help. Words do not come to me freely and I have troubles expressing what I want to, so I am asking for help. (Also, my project should be in English but it is not my native language! Hehehe)

I would like to describe emotional abuse in simple symbolic sentences so my readers would get an understanding about it. My comic has one character and she will tell a story about her life being emotionally abused by her father, however, the only sentences I could only think of are:

“It’s entrapping.”
“It’s a wave that slowly drowns you.”

Please help me describe it?
Thank you so much.