When Archie Bunker called Edith a dingbat and admonished her, “Stifle yourself,” we laughed. But in real life, verbal abuse is anything but funny. It can warn of physical abuse to come-and even all by itself can destroy a relationship. While almost everyone loses his temper now and then, and even says mean things to a loved one, the verbal abuser has a different style and a different motivation. He uses words and emotions (like anger and coldness) to punish, belittle and control his partner, and he does it compulsively and constantly. He rarely apologizes and shows little empathy. Although men and women have carped at each other since Eden, verbal abuse is suddenly a hot new issue among professionals who study and treat domestic violence.
“There is a brand-new public acknowledgment that people can do as much battery psychologically as physically,” says Richard Alan Goodman, a clinical fellow at the Boston Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. One reason may be a groundbreaking new book, “The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond,” by Patricia Evans. Published last April, the paperback guide, better written and more serious than most pop-psych books, has sold briskly and made waves on the daytime-TV talk-show circuit. After years of focusing on physical violence, “people now realize that words can be very hurtful,” says Goodman, “and couples are coming out of the woodwork talking about this problem.”
Just as with physical violence, verbal abuse expresses a need for domination and control-and not surprisingly, most (but not all) practitioners are men. Anyone who wants to run the show can get into the act: employers, teachers and parents as well as couples. As a power play, the war of words can be devastatingly effective; many targets of abuse start to believe the putdowns they hear. Lundy Bancroft, a counselor at Emerge, a Boston program for abusive men, recalls one woman whose husband constantly told her she was fat. When she went shopping, she would try on clothes four sizes too big-and couldn’t figure out why they didn’t look right.
Men often find it easier to give up physical violence than verbal abuse. “They know they can’t get into legal trouble with [verbal attacks],” says social worker Susan Schechter, coauthor with Ann Jones of “When Love Goes Wrong: Strategies for Women With Controlling Partners.” But they can still terrify their victims. One woman told Schechter that after her husband stopped his physical violence because he knew it would send him to jail, “in some ways, he got spookier, and I was more frightened. I’d rather he hit me and get it over with than play these mind games for hours. They were worse.”
The vocabulary of verbal abuse is wide-ranging. As anyone who has ever seen a bully in action knows, it can take the form of anger, ridicule, undermining, constant judging or challenging. Then there’s the painful but familiar ploy of the zinger disguised as a joke; when the victim expresses hurt feelings, the abuser is ready with his cold retort: “What’s wrong–don’t you have a sense of humor?” The abuser is a pro at denying what the victim knows to be the truth (“I never said I’d take you to see that play”) or diverting the conversation to a subject of his choice. Persistent denigration through name-calling, says Evans, is “outrageously abusive,” and a sign that the abuser’s emotional development is severely-possibly permanently–stunted.
For most of their seven-year marriage, Roger has been wearing and tearing Jane down. “He would always notice little things and then fly off the handle,” says Jane, 27, a Dallas homemaker. “If he saw that I put the roll of toilet paper on the holder with the paper going under instead of over, he’d lose it. It was always silly things.” Last winter, when Roger took a new job as an executive for a large corporation, he began complaining frequently to Jane that his boss lost his temper and yelled at him when anything, however slight, went wrong. Jane had a quick response. “I told him, ‘That’s just what you do.’ I was familiar with that.” Then Jane heard about Evans’s book and gave Roger a copy. Unlike many verbal abusers, he was able to recognize his problem. “It was like looking into a mirror for him,” Jane says. “He never believed it before.”
Jack, 50, a commercial-airline pilot, says he endured 17 years of verbal assault from his second wife. He sought psychotherapy, studied the Bible for four years, joined Al-Anon and spent hours on a PMS hot line. Finally, he gave up and filed for divorce. “When you look at verbal abusers,” he says, “they’re not interested in anything but winning at any cost.”
Most verbal abusers resist changing. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to modify this kind of behavior,” says Goodman. “It’s like concrete—unless [the abuser is] motivated to save the marriage.” But with knowledgeable therapy, sometimes new ways of communication can be found. If the abuser won’t change, says author Evans, abused partners can try, at their own pace, to set limits, making it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any further verbal attacks. More often than not, however, a truce will fail to hold, and the only way for the verbal victim to become the victor is to have the last word: goodbye.
