Abuse

Abuse is not always what people imagine. It has shapes and sizes, and many of them are hard to name from the inside. This post is about what abuse is, how to recognize it, and what to do next.

Val & Bruce

The material in this post can be difficult. If you need a reminder that healing is real and peace is possible, start here →

If you are in danger right now

If you are being physically hurt, threatened, or you believe your safety or your children’s safety is at risk, please stop reading and reach out now.

In an emergency, call 911.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (available 24/7, free, confidential)

Text line: Text START to 88788

Online: thehotline.org (includes live chat)

Of all the posts on this site, this one carries the heaviest weight, and we have thought carefully about how to write it. If you are in physical danger, we hope you reached out to the resources above before reading another word. Nothing we say here is more important than your safety.

For the rest of this post, we are going to talk about the kinds of abuse that don’t leave visible marks — the kinds that are quieter, harder to name, and often harder to leave. These are the abuses that many faithful, loving people endure for years, sometimes for decades, without ever quite knowing what to call what they were living with.

What abuse actually is

Abuse is a pattern of behavior used, consciously or unconsciously, to control, diminish, or harm another person. The key word is pattern. A single bad argument is not abuse. A single harsh word is not abuse. Every marriage has moments that both partners regret and repair. What makes something abusive is repetition, intent or effect of control, and the inability or unwillingness to repair.

Abuse can take many forms. Some of them are obvious. Others are so subtle that the person experiencing them may not recognize what is happening for years. The spectrum includes:

Physical abuse: hitting, pushing, grabbing, restraining, blocking exits, throwing objects, any unwanted physical force.

Sexual abuse: any sexual contact without genuine consent, including coercion, pressure, manipulation, and the withholding of affection until compliance. Marriage does not create a blanket consent; consent is ongoing.

Emotional and verbal abuse: persistent criticism, contempt, humiliation, name-calling, silent treatment, threats, or anger used to intimidate or control.

Gaslighting: systematic denial of the other person’s experience — rewriting events, denying what was said, insisting that their memory or perception is wrong, until they begin to doubt their own mind.

Financial abuse: controlling money in a way that restricts the other person’s autonomy — monitoring every expense, withholding access to funds, preventing employment, or running up debts in their name.

Spiritual abuse: using religion, scripture, or ecclesiastical authority to control, shame, or justify other forms of abuse. This can include misusing doctrine about submission, forgiveness, or forbearance to pressure the abused partner to stay silent or accept ongoing harm.

Many marriages that become abusive do not involve physical violence. If you have been telling yourself “he doesn’t hit me, so it isn’t abuse,” we want you to know that physical violence is one form among many — and the absence of it does not mean the absence of abuse.

Am I being abused?

This is one of the most common and most important questions a person in a difficult marriage ever asks. It is also one of the hardest to answer from the inside. Here are some of the signs that what you are experiencing may be abuse — not a diagnostic checklist, but a set of patterns worth taking seriously.

You are afraid. Afraid of what will happen if you say the wrong thing. Afraid of the next mood shift. Afraid of raising a subject that might set something off. A marriage is not supposed to feel like walking on eggshells.

You have stopped trusting your own perception. You find yourself second-guessing what you remember, what you felt, what was said. Your confidence in your own mind has eroded in a way that did not exist before this relationship.

You are isolated. Your relationships with friends and family have quietly shrunk. Your spouse has concerns about the people you used to be close to. You find yourself with fewer and fewer witnesses to your own life.

You are blamed for their behavior. When something goes wrong — including their own outbursts — the problem is somehow attributed to you. You pushed them to it. You provoked them. You should have known better.

Apologies never land. If there are apologies at all, they tend to come with conditions, with counter-accusations, or with a requirement that you forgive quickly and move on. Real change does not follow.

You have learned to manage them. A significant portion of your mental energy goes to predicting moods, avoiding triggers, and shaping your behavior to keep the peace. You have become an expert in a person you are also afraid of.

You feel smaller than you used to. Less confident. Less creative. Less yourself. You may not even remember when the shrinking started.

If you recognize yourself in several of these, please hear this clearly: what you are experiencing is real. It has a name. And you deserve more support than you are likely receiving.

Why abuse is so hard to see from the inside

People often ask, of those who stay in abusive relationships, “Why don’t they just leave?” It is one of the least useful questions in the English language. Here is why abuse is so hard to see and to leave from the inside:

It starts gradually. Almost no one enters a relationship that is abusive from the start. Abuse is typically progressive — it escalates slowly, by degrees, over years. By the time it is recognizable, the person living with it has already adapted to each incremental step.

There are good periods. Abusive relationships are rarely abusive all the time. Many follow a cycle — tension, incident, remorse, calm — and the remorse and calm periods can feel like the real relationship, with the incidents as aberrations. The hope generated during good periods keeps people anchored through the bad ones.

The relationship has rewritten your sense of normal. After years inside a particular dynamic, what would strike an outsider as alarming may feel, to you, like just how things are. Your reference point for “normal marriage” has shifted so gradually you didn’t notice.

There is love — real love — mixed in. This is one of the cruelest features of abusive marriages. You are not imagining the tender moments. You are not imagining the shared history, the children, the hopes you built together. The love is real. The harm is also real. Both are true.

Leaving is often dangerous, practically and emotionally. The point at which a person decides to leave an abusive relationship is statistically the most dangerous point in the relationship. Financial dependence, children, fear of what the abuser will do, fear of what the community will think — these are not failures of resolve. They are real constraints that require real planning.

What to do

There is no single right answer for every situation. But there are some principles that hold across most cases:

Tell someone. Someone safe, outside the relationship. A therapist, a trusted friend, a family member, a trained advocate. Isolation is one of abuse’s most powerful tools; ending it is one of the most protective things you can do. This is not disloyalty. This is survival.

Find a professional who understands abuse. Not every therapist is trained in abuse dynamics, and couples therapy with an abusive partner can actively make things worse. Look for someone who works specifically with abuse survivors. A domestic violence advocate — available through the hotline listed at the top of this post — can help you find one.

Make a safety plan, even if you are not planning to leave. A safety plan is simply knowing what you would do if you had to act quickly. Where you would go. Whom you would call. What documents you would need. You hope never to use it. Having it in place changes how you feel every day.

Take your time deciding what to do. Recognizing abuse does not require you to act immediately. You can let the recognition settle, gather information, build support, and make a plan. The one exception is safety: if you or your children are in physical danger, please treat that with the urgency it deserves.

About the person who is abusing you

We have written elsewhere about mental illness, personality disorders, and addiction — all of which can contribute to patterns that become abusive. Understanding what may be driving a spouse’s behavior is, at times, useful. It can help you see them more compassionately. It can help you make sense of what you have lived with.

But we want to be very clear about something: understanding what may be driving abusive behavior is not your job right now, and it is not the path out.

The question you need to be asking is not “what is wrong with them?” but “what do I need, and what am I willing to do to get it?” A person who is abusive is capable of changing only if they are willing to do the long, difficult, professional work of changing — and that willingness is theirs, not yours. You cannot compassion them into recovery. You cannot love them into repair. You can only tend to your own safety and your own self, and let their choices belong to them.

Compassion for an abuser is not the same as accepting abuse. They are different postures, and you can hold the first without practicing the second.

If you are living with abuse of any kind, we want you to know that what you are carrying is not your fault, and not your burden to carry alone. Help is real. Safety is possible. And the person you were before the shrinking began is not gone — she or he is waiting for you to come back.

If this post has given words to something you have been living without words for, we are deeply glad — and also deeply sorry that you have lived it. You are not imagining. You are not exaggerating. You are not failing. You are surviving something that was never yours to carry, and you deserve every form of help it will take to lay it down. Please reach out to someone today, even if it is just one person, just to say what is true.

— Val & Bruce

About this site

Peace After Pain is written by Val and Bruce — two people who have been through divorce and found healing on the other side. The content here is for informational and educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional advice. If you are in a difficult or dangerous situation, please seek help from a licensed counselor, your ecclesiastical leader, or appropriate authorities.

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