In other cases, the fear is unnameable. You might find yourself saying to a friend: “I don’t know what he’ll do; there’s no way to tell with him, but he’ll do something, and it’s going to be bad.” Waiting for the punishment can be even harder when you don’t know what it will be. Even the abuser who has never used violence knows that there can always be a first time—and he may well be aware that you know that too. So he looks for ways, perhaps explicit or perhaps enigmatic, to remind you not to “push him too far,” because you won’t want to see what happens.
