When you're in a verbally abusive relationship, you need an exit strategy and a safety plan. You need them so you don't have to listen to your abuser's hateful words. Verbal abusers want you to be a man or have the guts to hear the truth. The abuser expects you to stand there and take the abuse because without you, the abuser cannot regain control of him or herself. When an abuser looks at you, he or she sees a target, not a person. The abuser sees something to throw garbage at until he feels less threatened - like a monkey throwing poop.

Verbal abuse, in essence, seeks to destroy your perception of your Self. The abuser sees you as the enemy to his way of life, and therefore will do everything in his power to diminish your mind, body, and soul to nothing and rebuild you in his image. Your abuser wants you to be non-existent, or at least weak and defeated, so he can define you as exactly what he wants you to be: his slave. But you didn't know this was his goal. Over time, you didn't notice that you gave of yourself but he contributed nothing. You cited his rotten childhood or made some excuse that fed your desire to help him to overcome his horrid life situation, drawing yourself into codependency and taking on responsibility for his thoughts and actions. 

Learning about verbal abuse will help you to stop it. I'm not promising that your abuser will change, but stopping abuse begins with you. "Awareness is the greatest agent of change" and your awareness will in one fashion or another change your life. Learning about verbal abuse is key to stopping abuse.

In the last blog, we established that you cannot control what your abuser says or does. If s/he is abusive, no amount of begging and pleading or outright love will make them be kind and sweet to you, their target. So, what can you do to stop verbal abuse? There are a number of steps you can take to regain control of your thoughts, emotions and actions when facing abuse. One of them is reaching out to others. Reaching out to others covers a broad spectrum of behaviors from calling hotlines to receiving counseling from someone familiar with abusive situations.

The answer to "How Do I Stop Verbal Abuse?" is...drum roll, please...You can't! I wish that you could control how another person speaks and how they act. But you can't. Raise your hand if you've ever asked your verbally abusive husband or boyfriend to speak to you in a nicer way. Raise your hand if you've tearfully begged your verbally abusive wife to be kinder to you. Wow. That's a lot of hands. Did it work? No. At least not forever. The next time your abuser felt turmoil, s/he used their anger or sly verbal manipulations to bring you down again because you cannot stop verbal abuse.

Last Friday, my oldest son experienced verbal and physical abuse at the hands of his father (my soon to be ex husband). The father with whom the court sent him to live, the father he thought he could trust above everyone else -  that father cornered him, jerked him, poked his forehead and chest, then put him to the ground and choked him.

It's almost a year to the day the judge awarded primary physical custody to my abusive ex-husband. My attorney was as surprised as I was. My attorney said that the best she could figure (without being allowed to see the interview documents, if there were any), was that my older son elected to be with his father because of his anger toward me, and the judge decided for keeping the kids together.

I asked myself "Why?" more than any other question during my marriage. I thought that finding the answer to "Why?!" would allow me to attack the root causes of the trouble between him and me. But, for so many reasons, why? was the wrong question to ask. Why can be an empowering question in the correct setting. The "5 Whys" is a wonderful technique for getting to the bottom of almost any normal situation. But when using the whys to understand an abusive relationship, it causes trouble. Why? Let's find out...

Certain fantasies bonded me to my verbally abusive husband like super glue.  My heart and mind alternated between "hoping" and "knowing" the dreams were true. I repeated them to myself and other people like mantras, almost as if saying it made it so. The fantasies were created early on and their existence prohibited me from hearing the truth. Here are the top five lies that bound me in "love".

At one job, my boss manipulated and controlled her employees. She tried to win over her employees by becoming overly familiar with us and then using the information to manipulate our actions, even play one employee off another. She obviously manipulated my supervisor, Dean, and after becoming his friend, I found she abused him in hidden ways, too. The signs of workplace abuse made it obvious I needed a new job (Dealing With Verbal Abuse At Work).