What is the harshest way to hurt someone emotionally?

 I saw one comment listed 1.) Gaslighting, 2.) Betrayal, 3.) Physical abuse, 4.) Lying to somebody, and 5.) Silent treatment, and many others that say “forcing someone to love you,” or, “pretending to love someone, when you don't or making them believe you love them when you don't.”

I have known mostly emotional abuse in my lifetime. I have been betrayed by the one I least expected to do so, Physically abused by those I never believed would, lied to, gaslighted, told I was loved without evidence, and given the silent treatment for yearlong periods. I have been confined to small spaces, made to harm myself, starved, and deprived of water, and otherwise degraded by those close to me.

Of all the kinds of abuse I have suffered, though, none is worse than when someone treats you as though you don't exist. The silent treatment is by far the worst. You have only questions and no way to get answers, you have doubts and no way to relieve them; you have loneliness, and someone there who should be keeping it away but instead is not there (either physically or emotionally). You have responsibilities and no one help you sort through them. You have the added burden of caring for another in addition to your own issues, because, unlike them, you care. You develop trust issues with everyone and may even withdraw from people altogether, gradually losing your ability to integrate smoothly. In this state, you become as a baby, not knowing what knowledge you can actually trust in that situation. Confusion and frustration plague you every second and you lose the ability to perform tasks without difficulty.

If you continue to give them that power over you, your recent experiences become the most prominent examples from memory, and you begin to only be able to see that kind of situation for you. Hopelessness sinks in and you will try desperately to get them to break the cycle, only allowing them more control and losing yourself more.

Eventually, you may will even consider things against your character as options. You are literally destroyed and made into something else, and picking up the pieces and making sense of things after that… how do you sort through your trustable “knowledge" and the knowledge you think is true but isn't, when your trustable knowledge didn't fit reality and got you trapped in such a situation?

I'll let you know if I figure that part out. I'm still working on finding my own worth and believing it, because, in addition to all of that, it's really hard to believe anyone could do something so vile on purpose, so you make excuses for them and try to find out what you did to cause it, even if you didn't do anything.

Burn me, flay me, starve me, whatever — the silent treatment is all of these in one. It makes you gaslight yourself, which is harder to combat than when others do it. It makes you starve yourself through anxiety and depression. It is a betrayal of the deepest kind: your sense of certainty. It causes one to lie to themselves and not even know it. And can even cause one to physically abuse themselves.

If you ever give someone the silent treatment whom you have given reason to believe you cared about in any positive way, then you are a murderer; you have murdered that person in truth and turned them into a worthless thing, not even worthy of the respect of an insect, and that concept sinks deep. Only the most callous or ignorant of people would be able to go through with such an act.

• To make them love you when you have no intentions of loving them or being with them. Knowing that you are only playing with their emotions.
• To continue lieing and pretending at every given opportunity that you love them even though you don't and also knowing that they are just too innocent to understand the game.
• To not have a conversation where things can be sorted out but react so badly that they just don't try to sort out the issues anymore.
• Give them false hope that everything is alright when it is not
• Make promises that you don't intend to keep.
• To never make any effort to be there for them while they turn the world upside down to make sure you are fine.
• To always give excuses and not meet or call but have all the time in the world for your friends.
• To ignore them or their messages deliberately making them wait for several hours just for one reply. To cause maximum hurt.
• To switch off your phone when they are in pain especially when the reason is you.
• To never give a closure they deserve because that makes moving on difficult.
• The worst of all is to make them feel worthless and unwanted by comparing them with others.
• To never acknowledge all that they did for you, but instead put all those efforts into a trash.
• To deliberately withhold intimacy.
• To keep them confused and hanging there when you know it's over for you.