Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse shows up in a wide spread of behaviors. Belittling and demeaning remarks fall under it. So does passive aggression, which gets harder to pin down because people often dress it up as a joke. The person doing it tends to deny that anything happened at all, and that denial leaves the target with nothing solid to push back against. Language matters here too. You can catch it in plain view: a family member getting cussed out and screamed at in the middle of a supermarket or at a gas station pump.
Think of one version of it as unconditional love turned inside out. Instead of love freely given, love gets held back as a tool for control, or simply neglected. People need love to grow, and the sense that we deserve to be loved first takes shape in the family we're born into. The grim evidence for this comes from unwanted infants raised in nurseries where they got fed, kept warm, bathed, and changed, but almost no affection or one-on-one attention. Those babies failed to thrive. Some of them died.
A child can be loved and still carry emotional wounds. Tell a child, or an adult for that matter, "I'll only love you if..." and you plant a deep insecurity, because the love is hanging on a condition. They have to do something, say something, or become something before they count as worth loving. That is conditional love.
It gets uglier when an abuser keeps stacking the victim up against someone else, usually a person who already soaks up most of the abuser's warmth and praise. Kids and grandkids shouldn't have to watch one child in the family get the clearly favored treatment. This isn't an argument that every child or grandchild must be handled identically at every moment. But affection and attention shouldn't tilt so far, so unfairly, that everyone inside the family (and plenty of people outside it) can see the imbalance.
None of this is limited to children. Adults get emotionally abused as well, women and men alike.