The things abusers say and do put you on the defensive, make you feel crazy, and to wonder if you are the abuser in the relationship. Your best ammunition against the things abusers say and do is knowing the answer to What Is Verbal Abuse? If you can say to yourself, “Hey! That’s abuse!” then you’ll more easily detach from the abuse emotionally and find a psychologically or physically safe place. Safety planning can help protect you against things abusers say and do (Hurtful Words Don’t Define You).
The things abusers say and do are designed to control you. Whether abusers say and do these things knowingly or unconsciously, the result is the same: you feel lower than dirt, afraid, and intimidated. In your weakened state, your abuser finds it much easier to gain power over you.
The following statements and actions are common things abusers say and do. Contribute your comments and take a look at everyone else’s comments too.
Name Calling
- Idiot, Stupid Cunt, Go sit in the corner where you belong (dunce)
- Crazy Bitch, Psycho
- Whore, Slut
- Heartless Ho
- Stupid
- Worthless
- Lazy
- Says “woman” or “man” in a sarcastic tone or demeaning tone.
- On the flip side, they may refuse to say your name at all to deny your existence
Intimacy Breakers
- “It is none of your fucking business.”
- “Why don’t you fucking leave?” or “Get the fuck out of my house.”
- “Shut up”
- Says “I don’t care about your feelings.”
- Often leaves you hanging when they promised to do something with you.
- Consistently puts their desires and schedule above yours.
- Breaks up often then comes running back, begging for forgiveness.
- Interrupts you when you’re talking.
Tells You What You’re Doing
- “Yes, why don’t you stuff your feelings inside.”
- “You’ve got your priorities screwed up.”
- “Stop being a drama queen!”
- “Stop crying – we both know you’re faking it to get your way!”
- Tells you what your intentions are, what you intend to do, and what you really meant when you said/did something.
Plays Word Games
- Interrupts you when you’re talking.
- Repeats “your exact words” but takes them out of context or makes up something that you did not say or mean.
- Challenges you to remember “exact words” but you can’t (or tells you you’re wrong) because the conversation is so confusing you don’t know exactly what they’re talking about anymore.
- Changes the subject to divert your attention.
- Tells you what you really mean to say.
- Drones on for hours, repeating the same points, getting nowhere, until you’re so exhausted you want to agree just to get them to be quiet (brainwashing).
- Re-defines words to mean what they want them to mean.
- Denies saying what they said (even if you’re playing it back to them from a digital recorder, they may deny meaning what they obviously meant).
- Uses tricks like abusive anger to get you to be quiet or listen.
Tries to Appear Better Than You
- “You have no money; without me, you’d be lost.”
- “At least I have a job.”
- “You know nothing about the real world!”
- “At least I know how to make friends that matter.”
Insults People And Pets You Love
- “Why don’t you leave, and take your geriatric dog too? I hope he falls dead.”
- “I hope your dog gets killed in the road right in front of you!”
- Uses threatening gestures toward your pets.
- “Your kid is such a sissy!”
- “Your mother left your dad to chase cock and you’re going to do the same to me!”
- “I’m really concerned that your sister will influence you to be a bitch like she is.”
Sexual Insults And Injuries
- Rapes you (it is possible to rape you even if you are married to the abuser).
- Makes you wear clothing that makes you feel uncomfortable.
- “You were just a good fuck.”
- Turns their back to you while laying in bed to show a withdrawal of affection.
- Lies incessantly about porn or cheating, even when faced with proof.
- Makes you feel “dirty” during or after sex with comments they know you don’t like.
- Uses sexual or racial slurs because they know you don’t like them.
- Tells you to go to a party alone and then insults you, withdraws, or sexually assaults you when you come home.
- Knows the meaning and value that you tie with having sex, but breaks up with you right after sex saying they lied about their feelings to get you into bed.
- Uses crude names for your body parts and knows you do not like them.
Insults Your Ideas and Dreams
- The churches, restaurants, movies, etc. that you choose are not good enough.
- Your career interests are “fluffy” or not real jobs.
- Insults the gifts you give or acts disinterested.
- “That is never going to work.”
- Mocks and makes fun of you.
A private place to write it down
If you already know why you’re here, there’s a private log built for exactly this: the Verbal Abuse Incident and Pattern Log. Write things down before you second-guess them, in a document made to stay yours.
Purchase “Recipes from Mama's Kitchen” $8.99There is also a bundle offer at the end of this article.
They Do Not Care About Your Medical Issues
- You’re hurt after a fight with them and say you should go to the emergency room…the abuser’s response is “Quit your whining and crying and leave”.
- Major medical issue comes up and the abuser unavailable to comfort you or just disappears.
- Acts like a $10 co-pay for your doctor visit is going to break the bank.
- Makes fun of your medications (happy pills, crazy pills, etc.)
- Tells you that depression is in your head and if you appreciated them like you should you wouldn’t be such a sad sack.
Thoughtless of Your Needs
- Makes lunch for themselves without asking if you want any (on purpose).
- Doesn’t help with the kids or household chores.
- Does not ask you about your day.
- Does not start and/or engage in thoughtful communication.
- Keeps you up all night “talking” or raging. Interrupts your sleep for tiny things they could handle alone.
Gifts Are Not From the Heart or Used As Tools
- Gives gifts that did NOT come from the heart, isn’t wrapped, has a price tag on it, tossed at you with no emotion but scorn, etc.
- Gifts given after fights to gain your forgiveness.
- Ignores (“forgets”) your birthday or holidays that are special to you.
Disrespects Your Belongings
- Destroys things that are important to you.
- Destroys or makes you destroy pictures, diaries, letters, or anything else of sentimental value from before the relationship with you.
- Throws away your clothes that either you love or the abuser hates.
- Gaslighting (purposely moves your things or changes your environment and then denies doing it).
- Hides your personal belongings and denies knowing where they are.
- Steals your jewelry, pawns it, then brings another piece home to place in your jewelry box and pretends it is the missing piece.
- Insists you promised to do something that you know you didn’t promise.
- Engages in crazy making behaviors at your expense.
Withholds Financial Information or Money
- Demands that you shop for the household but doesn’t give you enough money to cover necessities.
- Makes you give them your paycheck.
- Doesn’t give you access to the bank accounts.
- Makes you believe that you cannot budget or save, that you waste money, or generally cannot figure out how to handle your financial matters.
- Gives you complete access to the bank accounts and allows you to make financial decisions, but uses your decisions as a tool to verbally and mentally abuse you.
- Closes joint bank accounts with no notice.
- Finds a way to close your bank accounts using your passwords and security information.
Threatens Or Intimidates You
- “Maybe I should just do pot, porn and date other women so you will leave me.”
- “I should run you through the wood chipper out there!”
- “If you don’t shut your ever-runnin’ mouth,…”
- Says “This is YOU!” and hits something or says nothing but you know they’re hitting things to scare you.
- Jerks the steering wheel from you when you’re driving or drives like a crazy person with you in the car.
- Spits on you.
- Threatens to take you to court over issues they know they will lose, but be able to waste your time anyway.
- Seeks attention by threatening suicide. Intimidates you into doing things by threatening suicide.
Abandons and/or Threatens to Abandon You Physically
- Pushes you out of the car and leaves you in a strange place without your personal effects (i.e. cell phone, purse, wallet).
- Takes you to their family’s home far away and then leaves you at their mother’s house for two days while partying with cousins.
- “Maybe I just won’t come home tonight!”
- “I’ll take our kids and leave you on the street!”
Physically Insults or Assaults You
- Spits on you.
- Blocks your exit.
- Drags you.
- Grabs you and makes you stay in one place.
- Hits, punches, or slaps you.
- Kicks you.
- Makes you hold pillows so they can “practice” fighting/self-defense.
- Pinches you
- Squeezes you too tightly.
- Chokes you or puts you in a position where they could easily choke you.
You just read what’s been happening to you.
Here’s somewhere to put it.
Reading a list like this is one thing. Writing down what’s actually happening in your own relationship, in your own words, is another.
That’s what the Verbal Abuse Incident and Pattern Log is for: a private, structured place to record what’s said and done to you, so there’s a record you can trust, even when your memory feels less certain.
What’s inside:
- Quick Capture pages for when you only have thirty seconds and need to get it down before you forget, or before someone’s back in the room.
- Detailed Record pages for later, when you have more time to write.
- Pattern Review pages that help you see what’s repeating, not just what happened once.
- A Summary page, built to hand to an advocate, counselor, doctor, or attorney, without having to explain everything from scratch every time.
It’s not a diagnosis, and it’s not a legal document. It’s a way to keep your own record straight, whether you’re still deciding what this is, still living with it, or getting ready to talk to someone about it.
Privacy. Not everyone needs to hide that they bought this, but every download works the same way regardless. Needing that privacy, or not needing it, has nothing to do with how much what’s happening to you matters.
The download opens with a couple of pages made to look like a recipe file before the real Log begins. PayPal will send you a purchase confirmation email, but even that uses a discreet product name, not the title of what you bought.
Getting it. After you pay through PayPal, you’re brought right back here to a download page where your file is ready and waiting.
Price. $8.99 on its own.
Purchase “Recipes from Mama's Kitchen” $8.99If you also want the Domestic Violence Safety Plan Workbook, the two together are $18.99, or $3 less than buying them separately. The Safety Plan Workbook covers what to do before, during, and after leaving; the Log covers what to write down along the way. Get one or both, whichever is useful to you right now.
Purchase “Recipes from Mama's Kitchen Bundle” $18.99The file name for the Verbal Abuse Incident and Pattern Log is recipes-mamas-kitchen.pdf and the cover of your downloaded document will say “Recipes from Mama’s Kitchen”. It’s the same for the Domestic Violence Safety Plan Workbook, except the file name is more-recipes-from-mamas-kitchen.pdf and the title showing is “More Recipes from Mama’s Kitchen”.
Written by Kellie Jo Holly Close, who has worked in domestic violence advocacy since founding VerbalAbuseJournals.com in 2008.
it feels like living hell in angels city
I would like some thoughts. My wife calls me an abuser. I don’t call her names. I don’t cuss. I go to work and come home. I don’t drink, I don’t go to bars. I don’t watch football or other sports on tv. I have never hit, pushed, slapped, or otherwise physically assaulted my wife. I don’t put her down in any way. I have never cheated on her. I do not have female friends. Nor do I have friends of any type that come to our house. She is a stay at home mother, but controls the bank accounts. In contrast, she constantly complains that I am not loving enough, that I don’t “listen” to her needs.
I will say, I have gotten loud a few times. She calls it yelling, but in my mind I am just trying to get her to listen to me. It happens like this. She is always trying to “fix” me. She will come to me, sometimes after I am already in bed and near asleep. She will begin complaining, or telling me that I need to spend less time at work and more time with the kids, etc.,I will ask her to please leave me alone. She then starts in telling me that I don’t care about her, that she is not important to me, etc. She will do this sometimes in the day time too. She talks in extremes, saying things such as, “You always . . .” “you never . . .” Everything is blown out of proportion. The thing is, I just can’t talk to her. Anything I say, she says I am arguing or fighting with her. When I try to speak, she constantly interrupts so that I rarely get to finish a sentence or thought. When I confront her on interrupting, she says that she has to interrupt because if she doesn’t, her memory is not good enough and her thought will be lost.
During these conversations, I do get to the point where I am frustrated from her interrupting. Thus, I get louder. I am not intending to yell, but she calls it yelling. I just want to be heard.
She does put me down. She constantly makes little digs at me. She constantly calls me an abuser. Tells me that I am cold. She even tries to tell me what I am thinking or feeling from a text message because I asked a simple question. During our conversations, if I ask a question such as, “why would you ask me that?” She tells me that I “always” believe she has bad intentions. Which is untrue. She asks questions that seem to me to be interrogating me, belittling me, and putting me down.
Often when we are “arguing” for lack of a better term, I will be perfectly calm, not raise my voice at all because I don’t want to upset her. I will be very careful so as to not offend her in any way. If I ask an honest question, or state that something she said is not accurate, she gets angry to the point she is shaking, pointing her finger in my face, and telling me that she is going to have a nervous breakdown. I cannot question anything she says. And anything I say is, to her, just an excuse.
Recently, she drained my bank accounts and took off with our children. Telling me that I needed counseling because I am an abuser. She was secretive in all of this. Planning to leave for some time without my knowledge. I also learned that she has been hiding other things from me, purchases and such, on a credit card that I do not have access to the billing statements, even though my name is also on the card.
She asked me to read a book about abusers written my a man named Lundy. I read the book. After reading it and considering the traits of abusers as stated in that book, I concluded that I am not an abuser, but that my wife does display some of the conduct for abusers listed in the book. When I mentioned to her these things, she got irate. Said I “abused her all these years and now I am calling her an abuser?”
Next, I have attempted to fall on the sword and take the blame for everything. I have apologized over and over. However, my wife knows no forgiveness. Even though she says she forgives, every time we have a dispute, she brings up the same stuff that was allegedly already resolved.
I should also say, I am my wife’s second husband. She has told me that her first husband was physically and verbally abusive. I just don’t even know what to believe anymore.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this situation as I am at a loss as to what to do.
My boyfriend has thrown a tv controller at my face because I coughed in his direction when I was sick. He feels he needs to control my son when I’m in the middle of homework with him to turn a light switch off which he could have done himself. When I get upset, he tells me to get the fuck out of his house. The next day he will act like it never happened. He wants to be in complete control at all times or throws a tantrum screaming and throwing things. In public, he acts like he’S the greatest guy on earth paying for families meals and giving the best gifts or doing favors for anybody else. I’ve never seen him apologize or admit when he is wrong. He tries to tell me how what I’m feeling is wrong or stupid. I’m trying to leave to protect my son. I believe he is a narcissist.
Tells you that no other man would ever be able to put up with you because you’re crazy, pathetic and a nag. Or tells you that his family and friends don’t really like you because you’re arrogant and stuck up, this then makes you paranoid and self conscious around them which effects your behaviour towards them; this is then used against you. It’s very manipulative and controlled, you start to withdraw from yoursell and others, maybe go on anti depressants just to help you live through it but then this also validates his behaviour, he’ll say “I told you you’re crazy” “you need fucking happy pills you miserable bitch”. It doesn’t take long for an abuser to wear you down, they suck the life out of you to feed their own insecurities. I’ve been abused for 12 yearse, I can’t remember who I was before this happened. I was 23, happy and confident with the best years of lifeatures still to live. I don’t know who I am now, at 35 I should know myself, I should be comfortable in my skin and know my place in the world, I should have had fun, travelled, laughed, made friends, loved and been loved. I’m just a shell of what I should be, because a man took it all from me. Don’t be like me. Take back your soul. Take back your life and fly away.
Kicks punches slaps spits threatens to leav lied about porn tells me im nothing without him go get the fuck out stupid bitch fat nasty crazy gives me money only for what the house needs never likes to by me anything every holiday for 2 years he has ruined it even my birthdays i by him he doesnt by me he has never bought me a gift all that is happening to me right now and im just so. Lost.