There are two very obvious symptoms that it will tell you if someone suffered long term abuse. The first one is the inability to express anger in particularly rage, and the second one is the persistent felling of anxiety.
As we are wired to respond to threats by fighting of fleeing, if there is no resolution in the fight you retreat by running away.
And for as long you can't find any resolution by fighting, by expressing your anger in a productive way you are going to retreat and the emotion associated with that is anxiety.
In order to stop your anxiety you have to restore your capacity of self-defense. Which is very likely that it was destroyed when you were a child.
And the process through which you destroy someones capacity to protect himself is called obedience. Which in modern society is the norm when it comes to treating children.
Whenever they are trying to negotiate with you or ask you for what they need you use some form of coercion like violence or manipulation techniques like grades etc. to induce them pain. Like this they associate pain with asking for what they need and in order to avoid the pain of asking for what they need they stop doing it.
This let's the victim of abuse in a weird state of chronic anxiety, withdrawal and isolation. Often that suppressed rage comes out in all kinds of outlets like aggressive sports, aggressive music, addictions etc. but almost never is being channeled by the victim towards the abuser, so for as long as that last there is no chance of stopping the abuse.
It is not the abuse from years ago that it is causing your anxiety, the abuse that you experience years ago only damaged your deffence system, but your anxiety it is caused by the abuse you received today. All vices happen under the shadow of denial, including letting others abuse you, victims of abuse are in denial about the fact that they are being abused, they would rather blame they're anxiety on the events of the past that are now irrelevant rather than inconvenient others today.
Self-deffence is about inconvenience, in particular inconvenient others by stopping them to use you in an unfair way. Most of the anxiety experience today by humans comes from other humans, as we eliminated most of others predators, the only effective predator that is taking advantages of humans is the human itself.
However separation will stop the abuse from one person, but it doesn't revers the negative effects of obedience, which means that you remain with a lower deffence mechanism and you are vulnerable to be attacked by others.
Predators attack the weak members of a species, and the more abuse you experience the more dysfunctional you have become, so the harder it will be to form relationships with sane people, because they are going to run away from the dysfunction. Can't really blame them for that.
The solution is to learn to inconvenience other people whenever it is justify, you don't want to be either nice or bad, I found the best way to be is difficult, if others are treating you well there is no point in creating any unnecessary drams, if they don't it is best to inconvenience them with your words and actions.
