Lenore Walker focused only on physical abuse in her book, The Battered Woman (1979). She described an abusive marriage as one in which "... a spouse (the man in more than 95 percent of cases) uses his power be it muscle or subtler manipulation to control his partner. The irony is that he doesn't control himself (p. 15)."
Notice, Walker's definition included a "subtler manipulation" (which can be equated to emotional abuse). N.S. Jacobson and J.N. Gottman include emotional abuse in their definition and emphasize the element of control in their book When Men Batter Women (1998). Although Walker mentions control in her definition, Jacobson and Gottman stress that control is the purpose for the violence.
Since men in our society are more likely to have greater physical or financial power, and are more likely to have aggressive personalities, they are also more likely to be abusers in relationships. When women do abuse their spouses, they and their husbands both perceive him to be weaker in some way than she is.
In the book No Visible Wounds, M.S. Miller discussed further the devastation of emotional, or psychological, abuse, making it clear that emotional abuse is as devastating as physical abuse: Emotional battering, then, runs the gamut from a steady grinding down of a woman to emotional trauma. While her bones are never broken, her flesh never bruised, her blood never spilled, she is wounded nonetheless. With self-confidence and self-respect gone, she lives, empty, with no self left to assert. She cedes control of her life to her abuser. She is helpless. (Miller, 1995, p. 32)
The statistics about physical abuse of women are startling: 50 to 60 percent of women are abused at some time in their lives, and about 2 million women are assaulted by a domestic partner in a year. FBI reports indicate 28 percent of all female victims were killed by husbands or boyfriends.
Walker discovered a "battering cycle" as she interviewed hundreds of battered women for her book. There are three phases:
Tension Building: primarily consisting of verbal abuse and emotional isolation.
Acute Battering Incident: usually including three characteristics: out of control, "teach her a lesson" and overkill.
Kindness and Contrite Loving Behavior: Some authors call this the "honeymoon" phase. This phase is what "hooks" her in the relationship. He brings gifts (perhaps to her hospital room) and apologies and expressions of undying love. Now that he has "taught her a lesson," there will be no more violence. They are fine, in love, and do well until the tension-building phase starts again.
Why does she put it up with it? people ask. [sic] Why doesn't she just leave? Frequently the reason is economic. She may have small children and no way to support herself and the children. I believe an equally important reason is psychological. Often, she has been so beaten down with the abuse that she has no sense of herself or her abilities. Often her abuser criticized her, berated her thinking and her abilities until she did not believe she could do anything to earn a living. In addition, he threatens to take the children away from her. Believing in his omnipo¬tence, she is convinced he can do it.
Learned Helplessness is another theory that explains her difficulty in leaving. It was developed by Martin Seligman. In his book, Learned Helplessness, published in 1975, he described the research that led to the development of the theory. He suspended dogs in slings that immobilized them, leaving them with no sense of controllability. Then he applied random electric shocks to them over a 24-hour period (not enough to do damage, he said, but it was enough to produce pain). Then he took the dogs out of the slings and placed them in a double cage with a low barrier between the two cages and applied electric shocks to the cages they were in. They could escape by simply jumping over the barrier to the other cage. And they didn't. They lay there and took the shocks. They moaned so he knew they were hurting, and they did not try to escape.
Dogs that had not been treated in this way would immediately jump over the barrier to the shock-less cage. Wanting to teach the experimental dogs that they were not helpless, the researchers lowered the barriers, attached leashes to their collars, applied the shock, then quickly dragged the dogs across into the other cage. It took between 200 and 250 trials to teach them that they could escape. (Normal dogs will learn a new trick in 6 to 10 trials.)
Seligman called this condition Learned Helplessness and equated it to depression in humans. The dogs weren't really helpless, but if you THINK you are helpless, you are. In the Reformulated LH model, he acknowledged that humans' ability to reason and their attempts to find meaning in what happens to them differentiate them from animals. Using Attribution Theory, he explained that if a person thinks the random shock-like event is his own fault because of who he is (stupid, inadequate, etc.), the depression sets in. If he can recognize external factors for the event, he will deal with it more effectively.
The women who tend to accept the inadequacy the perpetrator is forcing on them and therefore blame themselves for their husbands' abuse of them, sink into depression and find it difficult to leave. The women who recognize their husband's violence as his character trait and as unacceptable get out, no matter how difficult it is.
Because of the women's movement and publicity surrounding physical battering, most women do realize when they are in such a relationship. When the abuse is "only" verbal/emotional, they are more likely to put up with it, and gradually their sense of self is eroded. They think this is the way relationships are. In her book The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to recognize it and how to respond (1996), Patricia Evans lists the following categories of verbal abuse: withholding, countering, discounting, verbal abuse disguised as jokes, blocking and diverting, accusing and blaming, judging and criticizing, trivializing, undermining, threatening, name-calling, forgetting, ordering, denial and abusive anger (p. 85).
Evans offers some suggestions for verbal abuse. Space here does not permit going into them in enough detail to facilitate their use.
Further, she lists basic rights to expect within a relationship: The right to good will from the other, the right to emotional support, the right to be heard by the other and to be responded to with courtesy, the right to have your own view even if your mate has a different view, the right to have your feelings and experience acknowledged as real, the right to receive a sincere apology for any jokes you find offensive, the right to clear and informative answers to questions that concern what is legitimately your business, the right to live free from criticism and judgment, the right to have your work and your interests spoken of with respect, the right to encouragement, the right to live free from emotional and physical threat, the right to live free from angry outbursts and rage, the right to be called by no name that devalues you, the right to be respectfully asked rather than ordered (p. 122).
If you are in an abusive relationship, what do you do? The Battered Women's Shelter hotline number is (210) 733-8810. Call for assistance.
I recommend your seeing a therapist who is familiar with the abusive syndrome. The first step involves regaining your sense of self and recognizing that the criticism you received was more about giving the other person power than about describing your legitimate faults.
Rosemary J. Stauber, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in San Antonio and founding director of the Bexar County Women’s Center.