What's a good script to tell my husband he is abusive? Feminist Advice
A reader seeks a script to convince her husband he's abusive.
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A reader asks…
Is there a script I could use to introduce to my husband the idea that he is abusive?
Our relationship is truly great 90% of the time. He’s a sweet man and we have a deep connection. I know that he loves me. But every time I make him mad, he loses control and lashes out. He breaks things, throws things, screams and yells. He’s never hit me, but it seems like a possibility in these moments.
I want us to move beyond this season of immaturity and hurt. What can I say to him?
My answer
Oh, you poor thing. This breaks my heart to read. I can feel your hope and desperation, your desire to believe that this is somehow different from other abusive relationships, but it’s not. I ran this letter not because it’s so different from other letters I get, but because it so perfectly illustrates the cycle of abuse, and how it damages victim-survivors’ ability to see reality.
The notion that your relationship is different from other abusive relationships, or a different kind of abusive, or not as bad, is baked into the recipe for abuse.
One of the things that distinguishes people who behave abusively from people who don’t is that abusers think certain behavior can justify abuse. That’s why you’ll hear abusive parents talking about “discipline” and how they’re teaching their kids not to be “bad,” and why right wing men love to frame women as irrational, crazy, emotional, and stupid. The justification for the abuse is built in, and reframes the abuse as love and help. Over time, they convince their victims to believe this, too.
This is what has happened to you. We see it in your framing of your relationship: “every time I make him mad…”
Abuse is not random. Abusers are often nice to their victims. O. J. Simpson, for example, was widely documented to have brutally abused Nicole Brown Simpson. Most people now believe he murdered her, too. But in the days leading up to the murder, the couple was apparently talking reconciliation. Friends and family often talked about how much he seemed to love her. He was nice to her right up until he allegedly killed her. This is the normal, typical, predictable behavior of a dangerously abusive man.
Your emphasis on making him angry is revealing. Many victims believe abuse is random, but it is not. Abusers become abusive when something upsets them, because abuse helps them regain control.
Of course your husband is nice when he’s not angry with you. He has no reason to abuse you when you’re doing what he wants. The abuse is a tool to control you. The niceness is a core component of the abuse, because it convinces you that he is not abusive, and that the bad treatment is both deserved and not that bad.
There is no script that can convince your husband he is abusive. It’s magical thinking to pretend that the right combination of words will somehow change the mind of someone who has shown a determined commitment to exploitation. This magical thinking isn’t your fault; it’s built into much self-help literature, and even into feminist discourse. We tell women over and over to communicate better, read the right book, sign up for the right program. Spend more. Do more. Waste more time. The message might as well be, “But have you tried trying?” It’s insulting and demeaning to demand so much labor, when what women get in return is so often less than nothing.
His behavior is deliberate, and he will never see it as abusive. He sees it as the rational reaction to whatever you are doing that upsets him. And it’s effective. The odds are very good that when he behaves abusively, he gets what he wants. He also gets forgiveness, as evidenced by the fact that you’re still with him. So he has no incentive to stop this behavior. It’s constantly reinforced, not just by you, but by an entire culture that values his wants over your humanity.
Abusers can go long stretches of time without behaving abusively. This often happens when their victims internalize the abuse and the abuser’s norms and preferences, causing them to default to behaving how the abuser wishes them to. So the fact that your abusers is nice most of the time is irrelevant; he will behave abusively exactly as often as he needs to to accomplish his goals.
Over time, though, he will become more comfortable being abusive. His abuse will worsen, even if it is infrequent. If you have children, he will eventually abuse them.
Please begin building an exit plan now. Don’t tip him off. Don’t waste more time trying to convince him. Stop wasting your one and only life on someone who will never see you as fully human.
Your use of the word “season” hints at an evangelical Christian upbringing. All cultures and faiths include abuse, but contemporary evangelical communities tend to aggressive endorse abusive behavior, and even lionize it. I urge you to reflect on how this socialization might color your perceptions of your husband and yourself. I write about how authoritarian parents—often evangelicals—set their children up for abusive relationships here and here.
I could have written that letter 20 years ago. My husband was nice “most of the time” but when “I made him angry,” he would have terrifying tantrums. (He was angry, he had tantrums. I may have had nothing to do with whatever made him angry, but somehow he managed to convince me that I was always at fault.) Over the years, the “niceness” became less and less frequent and he had more and more tantrums, longer tantrums, scarier tantrums. After (or before or during) the tantrum, he sometimes played with one of his many swords (he collected them) and muttered about how useless I was. One day he shoved me so hard I fell to the ground, narrowly missing hitting my head on a rock. I was so indoctrinated, it took me a week to see that he had crossed the line into physical abuse.
When I called the Domestic Violence hotline, I realized that he had long ago crossed the line into physical abuse with his “rage driving” with me and his daughter in the car, with throwing things at me, kicking things at me, smashing things.
After I left, I discovered that he had an elaborate plan for me to have a “fatal accident.”
Please don’t take the risk of telling him he’s abusive. Just get out. Zawn’s advice is spot on. Start building an exit plan now. Don’t be like me. I waited to long and almost died in the fatal “accident” my husband had planned. I wasn’t as afraid of him as I should have been; I kept telling myself it “wasn’t that bad.” It WAS that bad. Don’t waste your precious time — just make a plan and get out.
I stayed with my cookie-cutter version of your husband for over 20 years. I tried every possible script. I tried begging. I tried recording him and playing it back for him. I tried literally everything. Sometimes it would get better for a short time, but it always got worse again. There is nothing you can do to get him to stop, or to change. He behaves this way because it gets him what he wants, and because believes he is justifies in doing so. Please, please don't waste decades of your life like I did.