Verbal Abuse versus Physical Abuse

My blog posts mainly describe my experience in a relationship with a verbally and emotionally abusive man. That is the perspective I know personally, but abuse is not limited to one gender. Controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive behavior can occur in many different kinds of relationships.

For a long time, I struggled to recognize what I had experienced as abuse because my ex-husband never hit me. Like many people, I had absorbed the idea that domestic abuse meant physical violence. If there were no bruises, I thought maybe it did not really count.

At one point I even wrote a post titled Verbal Abuse Is Worse Than Physical Abuse. Today, I would phrase that differently. I do not think different forms of abuse need to be ranked against one another. What I was trying to express was how difficult verbal and emotional abuse can be to recognize, how long someone can live with it without realizing what is happening, and how lasting the effects can be.

It was domestic abuse… but he never hit me.
No. It was domestic abuse. Period.

Most of us have some idea of what physical abuse looks like because we have seen it portrayed in movies, television, and the news. What I was never taught to recognize were the quieter signs: constant criticism, blame, intimidation, manipulation, control, humiliation, and the slow erosion of confidence in your own judgment.

Emotional abuse can wear a person down over time. It can make you question yourself so often that eventually you stop trusting your own reactions.

My relationship also affected me physically. I spent years going from doctor to doctor trying to understand why I felt so unwell. I had never considered that chronic stress from a relationship could be contributing to how I felt until one doctor finally asked me a simple question:

“How is your marriage?”

That question stayed with me.

I had spent so much time wondering whether something was wrong with me that I had not seriously considered whether the environment I was living in was affecting me.

Looking back, I also think some of my earlier experiences shaped what felt familiar to me. I grew up around unhealthy relationship dynamics, and verbal abuse was not something I had been taught to identify clearly. When certain behaviors are familiar, they can be easier to normalize, especially when you are young.

I was only twenty-one when my relationship began. In my early journals, I wrote that he seemed almost too good to be true. I thought he was handsome, intelligent, and interesting, and I loved our conversations.

But before long, I became increasingly confused about why the relationship felt so difficult.

My instincts kept telling me that it should not be this hard.

When I questioned the relationship, I often heard variations of, “All relationships have problems. You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” Over time, I began wondering whether I was the problem, whether my expectations were unrealistic, or whether my perspective itself could not be trusted.

That is one of the things emotional abuse can do. Instead of examining what is happening in the relationship, you begin examining yourself.

Recovery involved learning something very different: I could not control another person’s behavior, but I could learn to control how much access that behavior had to my life.

I had to learn how to set and maintain boundaries. I also had to recognize that well-meaning advice from people who had never dealt with a highly controlling relationship was not always useful. “Just keep trying to work it out” may sound reasonable from the outside, but sometimes repeated attempts at cooperation simply lead back into the same unhealthy pattern.

Eventually, I realized that trying a dozen different approaches with someone who continued responding in the same way was not creating a healthier relationship. The pattern remained, even when the words suggested things would be different.

That realization helped me stop asking, What else can I do to make this work?

And start asking, What do I need to do to protect my own well-being?

That shift mattered.

One of the sayings I learned in Al-Anon still fits well here:

Take what you like and leave the rest.

That is true of advice, recovery, and even stories like mine. Your experience may not look exactly like mine. It does not have to.

Sometimes the value is simply recognizing one piece of your own experience in someone else’s story.

Photo Credits:
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay