Abuse is such a tough situation. We want to speak to all the brave wives out there who are putting on the mask every Sunday and acting like things are OK when every week you live through a cycle of walking on eggshells, explosions, the honeymoon stage and then starting all over again. But abuse isn’t always as obvious as physical threats or violence; there are lots of subtler— but equally damaging— forms abuse can take.

We have a sad but necessary topic for you this week. For the next few episodes we’re going to be looking at abuse in marriage. Today we’re starting with the question, Is My Husband Abusive?

I think one of my biggest fears coming to a topic like this is that there are a lot of times that the “abuse” word gets thrown out there to describe stuff that really isn’t. And there are a lot of times when something should be called abuse and it is not.

We wanted to take this first episode to really help you go through these issues if you think it might be your situation — before we start talking about how to get help in our next episode. One of the things we put together for this episode is an assessment tool so that you can go through a specific set of questions and then evaluate your relationship to see if your husband is abusive. We’ll look at about how you can get hold of that later on.

As you might expect, abuse gets categorized in a number of different ways. I often like to point out that in the simplest terms that when you’re dealing with an abusive situation it’s to do with issues of power and control. You do need both of those things, not just one. There are a lot of us who struggle with anxiety who try to exert a lot of control on the world around us to try to help reduce the uncertainty — that’s an anxiety problem, not an abuse problem. And there are power struggles in marriage too — probably for most of us — but that doesn’t constitute abuse by itself either.

So let’s lay out some groundwork here about the types of abuse in marriage.

Types of Abuse in Marriage

I think it’s good to look at physical versus non-physical abuse. I’ve actually encountered wives experiencing physical abuse and they didn’t recognize it as such because not all forms of physical abuse look like a balled up fist.

Physical abuse includes any type of violence. Going from least to worst seriousness, this can include:

Throwing something with the intent to hurt or intimidate

Pushing

Grabbing

Shoving

Slapping

Pulling hair

Choking

Hitting with an object

Attempting to drown

Beating

Threats or use of a weapon such as a knife or gun[i].

In addition to that researcher’s definition I would include blocking, acting threatening or intimidating by posturing physically.

Types of Non-Physical Abuse

Non-physical abuse can be more difficult to identify. I want to pause here to make one point. A few years ago I came across my first situation where I had a wife asking for help with abuse. To help me make sure I was brushed up on the topic I consulted with a therapist who has written a book on the subject. During my consultation with this therapist and author, she mentioned the case of a woman who had been stabbed several times by her husband, rolled up in a rug and left in a field to die. The woman survived and her words were: the stabbing was awful, but his words hurt me more than anything else.

I think for a lot of us that have been blessed to grow up in safe families where there was no physical violence we often think of the worst kind of physical abuse as being the batterer. And I don’t want to discount that at all. But I just want to raise the point that non-physical abuse is incredibly brutal too, and should not be belittled. The old playground epithet that “sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words never do” is a bunch of baloney, especially in an abusive context. Just keep that in mind if you’re just beginning to learn about abuse.