Is emotional abuse really abuse?

Yes.

Do you have any experience with it?

Yes. I could list 1,000 sources about emotional abuse and the effects of it, but I'm sure you can use Google the same as I can. If you're experiencing it, which it seems that you are, I suggest that you go to counseling- both alone and with your husband if he'll go. If he refuses, your only hope may be departure. It will persist until you feel like you're nothing and that you deserve it. You don't. 

Oh GOD yes.  It is the most painfully searing, burning abuse imaginable.  Here is why.   It is  maddeningly subtle.   It makes you almost not realize the agony because you are not physicaly bleeding.   But many people wish they could exchange physical pain rather than the mental pain caused by the emotions just tearing at your heart, soul and gut unceasingly.

So, yeah.  It hoits.

Anyway, besides that torment, there is another really wonderful side-effect.  IT makes you SICK.   It will literally manifest in your cellular tissues to cause disease.  People die all the time because of blockages in the nervous system (our body's electrical circuitry) that cause cancer, heart attacks, heart disease, you get the picture.  It will kill you if you let it.

So, give me a broken arm over a broken heart any day of the year.

Right on, JA.

Oh yes. I grew up with an emotionally abusive parent. It's something that stays with you, over the years. The wounds never really heal.

Thank you for your input.

Thank you

Ha! Ive said it out loud " i wish he would just punch me in the face". I would know how to deal with it better.

Yes, it is: along with physiological, verbal and physical abuse.

I worked with abused women and some men.  One can try to hide bruises and the such, but emotional abuse cuts deeper than some people know.

It can be.  What I've seen you describe doesn't rise to it though.  You are the only person who knows what you live with.  Talk to a counselor to see if you are just too week for your aggressive husband or if he is actually causing you to lose function with his mean words.  Why are you with such a jerk?

Of course.

Undoubtedly, yes.

Due to the emotional and psychological element to being abused, and since we all deal with crises differently, the effects of abuse on the abused can vary widely.  The kind you mention, broadly speaking, will leave few if any marks but will instead attack the very basic principles that make up a sound psychology.

One sign of this I'm familiar with (though not on a personal level) can be a person being manipulated into questioning whether what they are suffering actually is abuse at all.  If that's you, I hope you find a way out of that.

Yes it most certainly is!  :-(

i think it is

Well, don't let him punch you in the face.  He has gotten you to the point where nothing else is worth doing except getting out of there.  I hope you do.