Domestic abuse is more than sexual and physical violence. It includes mental and emotional abuse, and underneath nearly all of it is verbal abuse. Verbal abuse is more than name calling and more than yelling. It is how control gets built and kept. It is also hard to see from inside, which is what makes it work.
Some of us come home to fear and waiting. If you read your partner’s face for the small signs that tell you what kind of night this will be, and you edit your sentences before you say them, you already know something is wrong in your house. That kind of watching takes everything you have, and nobody outside the house can see you doing it.
It rarely looks like abuse at the start. Most of what people describe from the early months is good. The hard things come out later, after you have moved in, married, had a baby, or done whatever told him you were staying.
Even then it doesn’t announce itself. It starts small enough to explain away. He had a bad day. He didn’t mean it that way. You were tired. Over time you stop hearing the words as unusual, because today is only slightly worse than yesterday, and yesterday was only slightly worse than the day before. The abuse rises and your tolerance for it rises alongside, which is why intelligence and education protect no one from this.
By the time it turns plainly bad, your life is wound around his. Children, money, a house, a church that frowns on divorce. Whatever holds you, it holds.
If something in your relationship feels wrong and you can’t find the cause, or the only cause you can find is yourself, verbal abuse is worth looking at. Naming it doesn’t commit you to anything. It only means you stop explaining it away.
- Am I abused? Take the quiz
- What does living with domestic abuse feel like?
- True stories of abuse, written by people who lived them
- My Abusive Marriage . . . and what i’m doing in it is the journal I kept during the last two years of my marriage.