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April 16 - April 26, 2022
He raises a fist, towers over you, shouts you down, or behaves in any other way that makes you flinch or feel afraid.
He drives recklessly or speeds up when he’s angry.
Beware of the man who has a different set of rules for his behavior than for yours.
The term abuse is about power; it means that a person is taking advantage of a power imbalance to exploit or control someone else.
He retaliates against you for complaining about his behavior.
Suppose that you complain about being silenced by his constant interruptions during arguments. He then gets a huffy, hostile tone in his voice as if your objection were unfair to him and says sarcastically, “All right, I’ll just listen and you talk,” and acts as if you are oppressing him by calling him on his behavior. This is an effort to make you feel guilty for resisting his control and is the beginning of abuse.
And some men ridicule the woman when she complains of mistreatment, openly laughing at her or mimicking her. These behaviors remove all doubt about whether he is abusive.
He tells you that your objections to his mistreatment are your own problem.
All of these tactics are forms of discrediting your complaints of mistreatment, which is abusive. His discrediting maneuvers reveal a core attitude, which he never explicitly states and may not even be aware of consciously himself: “You have no right to object to how I treat you.” And you can’t be in a fair and healthy relationship if you can’t raise grievances.
If your partner criticizes or puts you down for being badly affected by his mistreatment, that’s abuse.
He is kicking you when you’re already down, and he knows it. Seek help for yourself quickly as this kind of psychological assault can cause your emotional state to rapidly decline.
You will need to form your own conclusions about whether your partner’s mistreatment of you has become repetitive.
Is your level of energy and motivation declining, or do you feel depressed?
Is your self-opinion declining, so that you are always fighting to be good enough and to prove yourself?
Do you find yourself constantly preoccupied with the relationshi...
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Do you feel like you can’t do any...
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Do you repeatedly leave arguments feeling like you’ve been messed with but can’t figure out exactly why?
The good news is that remorse is often genuine; the bad news is that it rarely helps. To make sense out of this contradiction, we need to look first at a crucial aspect of what is going on inside an abuser: Abusers have numerous contradictory attitudes and beliefs operating simultaneously in their minds.
“My partner and I should have equal say over things but my decisions should rule when it comes to issues that are important to me.”
The following steps could help prevent his next incident of abuse, in a way that apologies cannot: Giving you some extended room to be angry about what he did, rather than telling you that you’ve been angry too long or trying to stuff your angry feelings back down your throat Listening well to your perspective without interrupting, making excuses, or blaming his actions on you Making amends for anything he did, for example, by picking up anything that he threw, admitting to friends that he lied about you, or telling the children that his behavior was unacceptable and wasn’t your fault Making
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The more time he has to tear down your self-opinion, the more difficult it will be for you to believe that you deserve better treatment.
The more time he has to hurt you emotionally, the more likely your energy and initiative are to diminish, so that it gets harder to muster the strength to get out.
You do not cause your partner’s slide into abusiveness, and you cannot stop it by figuring out what is bothering him or by increasing your ability to meet his needs. Emotional upset and unmet needs have little to do with abusiveness.
Certain behaviors and attitudes are definitional of abuse, such as ridiculing your complaints of mistreatment, physically intimidating you, or sexually assaulting you. If any of these is present, abuse has already begun.
I feel like I’m going crazy.
He’s a teddy bear underneath.
I really love him.
What can she say? That he’s sarcastic? That he holds on to things? That he’s overly critical? A friend would respond: “Well, that sounds hard, but I wouldn’t call it abuse.” Yet, as Jesse walks away, Bea feels as if she has been slapped in the face.
THE ABUSER’S PROBLEM IS NOT THAT HE RESPONDS INAPPROPRIATELY TO CONFLICT. HIS ABUSIVENESS IS OPERATING PRIOR TO THE CONFLICT: IT USUALLY CREATES THE CONFLICT, AND IT DETERMINES THE SHAPE THE CONFLICT TAKES.
He insults, belittles, and patronizes Bea in multiple ways,
He considers it her job to play a supporting role to him. This is the same as the attitude that “behind every great man stands a woman.” So if either of them is going to be the center of attention, it should be him, and if he is feeling like being quiet she should be, too, remaining in his shadow.
He is constantly focused on her faults, so he assumes everyone else is, too.
He doesn’t like having her appear in public as smart, capable, and interesting, because that collides with his deeply held belief that she is irrational, incompetent, and worthy of being ignored—a ...
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He is afraid on some level that if she gets enough support for her strengths, she will leave him—...
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He assumes that she comes off badly, which embarrasses him, but he is also concerned that she may have come off very well, because then other people might see her as a capable person.
Abusive men are uncomfortable when they see signs of budding independence in their partners and often look for ways to undermine the woman’s progress in the days ahead.
Jesse perceives Bea to be yelling because one of his core values is that she’s not supposed to get angry at him, no matter what he does.
He thinks she doesn’t care about him because in his mind she can’t care about him unless she cares only about him, and not at all about herself or other people.
He thinks she dwells on her grievances because she sometimes attempts to hold him accountable rather than letting him stick her with cleaning up his messes—literally and figuratively.
Part of why Jesse accuses Bea of doing all the selfish or abusive things that he does is to make it hard for her to get anywhere with her grievances.
He is drawn to making Bea feel sorry for him so that his feelings can remain the center of attention, crowding hers out. She will feel as though she shouldn’t pursue her complaints about the ways in which he has just assaulted her verbally, because he is suffering so much.
He may want her to worry about what other people will think. She won’t want to come out looking like the mean one, so she’ll take steps to smooth over the fight.
On some level he enjoys walking alone for half an hour, wallowing in self-pity, because it helps him feel more justified about his recurring pattern of cruelty and undermining toward Bea. It’s a way of reassuring himself that she’s the bad one, not him. An abuser is a human being, and somewhere inside him, buried under thick layers of entitlement and disrespect, there is a heart that knows that what he is doing is wrong. This heart periodically tries to send a few beats up through the layers, so the abuser has to stomp them back down.
The abuser sees an argument as war.
His goal in a verbal conflict is not to negotiate different desires, understand each other’s experiences, or think of mutually beneficial solutions. He wants only to win. Winning is measured by who talks the most, who makes the most devastating or “humorous” insults (none of which is funny to his partner), and who controls the final decision that comes out of the debate. He won’t settle for anything other than victory. If he feels he has lost the argument, he may respond by making a tactical retreat and gathering his forces to strike again later.
She is always wrong in his eyes.
It is frustrating, and ultimately pointless, to argue with someone who is certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that his perspective is accurate and complete and that yours is wrong and stupid. Where can the conversation possibly go?
Many non-abusive people express their opinions with tremendous conviction and emotion yet still allow themselves to be influenced by the other person’s point of view. On the other hand, it isn’t hard to tell when someone is refusing to grapple in good faith with your ideas and instead is just r...
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He has an array of control tactics in conflicts.
My clients have so many ways to bully their way through arguments that I couldn’t possibly name them all, but the abuser’s most common tactics are listed in the box below: Sarcasm Ridicule Distorting what you say Distorting what happened in an earlier interaction Sulking Accusing you of doing what he does, or thinking the way he thinks Using a tone of absolute certainty and final authority—“defining reality” Interrupting Not listening, refusing to respond Laughing out loud at your opinion or perspective Turning your grievances around to use against you Changing the subject to his grievances
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