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CHAPTER 1
The Emotionally Abused Woman
The emotionally abused woman is a particular type of woman, a woman who has established a pattern of continually being emotionally abused by those she is involved with, whether it be her lover or husband, her boss, her friends, her parents, her children, or her siblings. No matter how successful, how intelligent, or how attractive she is, she still feels “less than” other people. Despite perhaps having taken assertion-training classes, she still feels afraid to stand up for herself in her relationships and is still victimized by her low self-esteem, her fear of authority figures, or her need to be taken care of by others. She was emotionally abused as a child, but she may or may not recognize how extensively this kind of childhood abuse continues to affect her life.
Sometimes I just hate myself. I don’t know why, but I let everybody walk all over me—my boss, my husband, my kids, even my friends. I agree to do things I don’t want to do, I go places I don’t want to go, and all the while I resent it. I just can’t bring myself to say no to people, no matter how hard I try.
I can’t believe I did it again! Each time I fall in love I think that he is the one, that I have finally found someone who will treat me with kindness and concern. But they all end up to be jerks who he to me, use me, and end up not even caring about me. What’s wrong with me that I keep doing this? Why can’t I spot the loser, the jerk, instead of always being taken in? I’m thirty-seven years old, and yet when it comes to men I have the judgment of a teenager!
These words were spoken by women who have grown and changed in many significant ways. Nevertheless, they continue to choose partners and friends who cause them pain and embarrassment. They just cannot seem to stand up for themselves in relationships, no matter how hard they try. Because they have worked on themselves so much—through therapy, Twelve-Step programs, and/or self-help books—these women often feel hopeless and increasingly critical of themselves. They recognize that despite their efforts to change, there is still something very wrong with their ability to choose people who will treat them with respect and consideration.
It is often difficult for a woman to admit that she is indeed being emotionally abused, particularly if she is competent and successful in all other respects. But emotional abuse is nothing to be ashamed of. While it is hard to determine the exact number of women in the United States who are emotionally abused, we do know that the number is astronomical. While emotional abuse is probably the most common type of abuse, until now it has received the least attention. Many women who are being emotionally abused do not even realize what is happening to them. Many suffer from the effects of emotional abuse—depression, lack of motivation, confusion, difficulty concentrating or making decisions, low self-esteem, feelings of failure, worthlessness, and hopelessness, self-blame, and self-destructiveness—but do not understand what is causing these symptoms. Many women who seek help for their symptoms do so without any awareness of why they are suffering. This was the case with Maggie.
At our first session, she said to me, “I don’t know why I’m here exactly, except that I’ve been feeling very depressed lately. I can’t seem to get myself going. When I wake up in the morning, I just want to pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep. I have to drag myself out of bed and in to work. At night when I come home I want to curl up in bed right away, but I have to make dinner and clean the house and get ready for work the next day. By the time I get to bed I’m too tired to have sex with my husband. He’s been complaining a lot lately because he thinks I don’t love him.”
“Do you love him? Do you have a happy marriage?” I inquired, wondering whether there might be marital problems.
“I do love him, but I just feel so much pressure in my life that I can’t take any more from him.”
“How does he pressure you?”
“Well, it seems that I can’t do anything right. I know I’m not a very good wife, but I’m under such pressure at work, and I feel so tired. I guess I just can’t be there for him in the ways that he needs me to be.”
Maggie wasn’t being very specific about what her problems were, but as the weeks passed I discovered that her vague description of her husband’s never being pleased with her was an extreme understatement. Her husband was tearing down her self-esteem daily by constantly complaining that she was a lousy cook and a terrible housekeeper, that she never wanted to listen to him talk about his day, that she never wanted to have sex, that she didn’t love him.
As Maggie opened up and shared more about her situation with me, it became more and more evident that she was trapped in a vicious cycle. The more her husband complained about her, the more depressed she became, the less energy she had, and the less desire she had to have sex with her husband. This made him complain all the more. Even though Maggie was not being physically abused by her husband, the emotional abuse she sustained from him was damaging her just as much as if she were being beaten.
“Maggie was also being emotionally abused by her boss. An extremely demanding man, he complained constantly that Maggie was not doing her job. He verbally berated her in front of other employees, stood over her to scrutinize her work, and docked her pay when she was even a few minutes late coming back from lunch (even though he often insisted that she work late, with no overtime pay).
No wonder Maggie was depressed! It was amazing that she was even able to continue functioning at all with the pressure she was under. By the time she finally came in to see me, her self-esteem was incredibly low, and she truly believed that she was a lazy, no-good person who didn’t deserve either her job or her husband.
The saddest part about Maggie’s case was that she didn’t think she was being abused at all, even after I told her I believed she was. “But my husband and my boss can’t both be wrong,” she protested. “It must be me—why else would they both be saying the same things? I am lazy, and I don’t do the best I could at home or at work. I get confused easily, I can’t make decisions, and half the time I seem to be in a daze. It’s a miracle that I even do as well as I do.”
Those who are being emotionally abused often grow to believe their abusers’ accusations. The abused women do, indeed, become less and less productive, less motivated, less affectionate, and less sexual. And as their self-esteem plummets and their depression deepens, they also feel less loving.
Like Maggie and many other women, you may not know that you are being emotionally abused. While you may realize that your husband, boyfriend, or boss seems to be demanding and hard to please, you may not consider his behavior abusive. So what exactly is emotionally abusive behavior?
