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.

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:

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

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.

There are four categories of non-physical abuse described in one of the journal articles we pulled:

Where this gets tricky is that your spouse’s behaviors can just look like bad behavior. There often isn’t a clear cut line between aggressive or controlling actions and abuse. So what is the difference between bad behavior and abuse?

Leslie Vernick is a Christian counselor who works with many couples in abusive marriages. I am going to refer to her work because she has good work. But I want to mention this. I’ve been to her website. And in my opinion, which she may or may not want, I think the marketing people have designed her website so that it invites wives to conclude their husbands are abusive. And I think that is a very risky approach and I would urge a great deal of caution.

I have nothing to say in the defense of abusive husbands. Even as a therapist who employs a Rogerian, non-judgment, unconditional acceptance approach, I still have the urge to take abusive men out behind the barn. Even though that probably wouldn’t help them.

Abuse is a horrible thing. But her site makes an assumption that you’ve shown up married to a manipulator. And I just want to caution because we all try to manipulate our spouses. So that’s just a heads up. Her book, The Emotionally Destructive Marriage, has some very valuable content for us to look at together.

In there she makes the distinction between marriages that are disappointing and marriages that are destructive[vi].

You may be listening today and you find yourself in a disappointing marriage but one that is not destructive or abusive. There are marriages in which things don’t turn out as expected. You may feel upset that there is not enough romance, that your husband disagrees with you on important issues, or that you don’t feel the emotional connection that you want. If you find yourselves in conflict over these matters, where does it move from disappointing to destructive?

She offers three indicators to help you know if your marriage is disappointing or destructive. You have to take all of these items together.

Now you may have promises or indicators of these but we’re looking for evidence. On the other hand, if your husband misbehaves but then demonstrates change, awareness and taking responsibility then his behaviors may not fall into the abusive category.

So take those three indicators together. Does your husband show repeated abusive behavior or more than one type, while showing a lack of awareness, responsibility or willingness to change? If you’re getting solid “Yes’s” on all of them, we may have a situation.

So far we know that abusive behavior is repetitive, involves a variety of behaviors and often comes with a lack of awareness, responsibility, and change[viii].

Let’s look at some specific examples of non-physical behavior.

Porrua-Garcia tal (2016)[ix] developed a psychological scale called The Scale of Psychological Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence. In this scale, they divide psychological abuse into the following categories. There are six of them, and I’m going to list them off. There’s quite a bit here but remember that we have a simplified 2-page assessment available to our much-appreciated supporters. It’s a good tool to help you identify if you’re in an abusive marriage and should seek help. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.

So let’s go through these six points on the scale of psychological abuse. Read through these statements and see if you recognize any of them in your own relationship

So psychological abuse can take many forms, including everything from direct insults to controlling different aspects of your life and undermining your value and independence as a person. The indicators mentioned above all still apply to psychological abuse— it has to be persistent, take more than one form, and lacking any awareness, responsibility or desire to change in order to be considered true abuse.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post: a lot of definitions, a lot of specific criteria. So let’s recap. We started with the question: is my husband abusive?

We looked at the types of abuse in marriage: physical and non-physical, and noted that we should never discount non-physical abuse, which can be just as damaging as the physical kind, if not more so.

Then we looked at Vernick’s take on: is my marriage disappointing or abusive. And her three helpful evaluation points:

And finally, the list from the more recently developed psychological scale.

If many of the examples and different kinds of abusive behavior mentioned in today’s post sound all too familiar, or if you think there are patterns of abuse in your marriage, you may be wondering what you can do about it. Should you be hanging in there in the hopes that your husband will change, or are some patterns of behavior too deeply ingrained to ever be altered?

This post is the first of a three-part series on abuse in marriage. Get the other posts here:

Is My Husband Abusive? [1/3]

When to Leave (or Stay In) an Abusive Marriage [3 of 3]

References

[i] Maureen Outlaw, ‘No One Type of Intimate Partner Abuse: Exploring Physical and Non-Physical Abuse Among Intimate Partners’, Journal of Family Violence, 24.4 (2009), 263–72 .

[ii] Outlaw.

[iii] Outlaw.

[iv] Outlaw.

[v] Outlaw.

[vi] Leslie Vernick, The Emotionally Destructive Marriage: How to Find Your Voice and Reclaim Your Hope (Colorado Springs, Colorado: WaterBrook Press, 2013).

[vii] Outlaw.

[viii] Leslie Vernick; Outlaw.

[ix] Clara Porrúa-García and others, ‘Development and Validation of the Scale of Psychological Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence (EAPA-P)’, Psicothema, 28.2 (2016), 214–21 .

[x] Porrúa-García and others.

[xi] Porrúa-García and others.

[xii] Porrúa-García and others.

[xiii] Porrúa-García and others.

[xiv] Porrúa-García and others.

[xv] Porrúa-García and others.