Physical & Emotional Abuse Support Group
Abuse is a general term for the treatment of someone that causes some kind of harm (to the abused person, to the abusers themselves, or to someone else) that is unlawful or wrongful. No one deserves abuse, period. Abuse can be emotional, physical, or sexual.
Hi, I am having a lot of trouble determining what is acceptable behaviour. After 20 years of putting up with intimidation and verbal abuse from my H, I feel like the frog that has been slowly boiled, I can't tell whether his present behaviour( which has improved markedly of late) is what normal, untraumatised people would be willing to accept. Because I am easily intimidated by him, I tend to shut up and put up with a lot. Could anyone tell me what their reaction would be to what happened today....
We were clearing an area in our yard to build a henhouse. My husband and 13 year old daughter were raking up leaves, so I joined them. I started to rake the leaves one way which apparently was not according to my husband's plan. He wanted to rake them all onto a pile to burn them later, I didn't know this as he hadn't said. So he says that it was SO obvious which way he was raking and why wasn't it obvious to me, seeing that it was obvious to my daughter( she was raking the 'right' way). I shut my mouth and start raking them into a pile which was still the 'wrong' way as he wanted the pile somewhere else. So he drops his rake, comes over and stands over me, starts telling me in a raised voice how I should be raking and again that it should have been OBVIOUS.
I felt intimidated and humiliated and later, very angry at being spoken to this way, but this has become the 'norm' , although he would never speak to other people outside the family like this. I find it too hard to stand up for myself when I feel intimidated, but in my heart it just feels wrong. What would anyone else have done or felt? Am I over sensitive?
We were clearing an area in our yard to build a henhouse. My husband and 13 year old daughter were raking up leaves, so I joined them. I started to rake the leaves one way which apparently was not according to my husband's plan. He wanted to rake them all onto a pile to burn them later, I didn't know this as he hadn't said. So he says that it was SO obvious which way he was raking and why wasn't it obvious to me, seeing that it was obvious to my daughter( she was raking the 'right' way). I shut my mouth and start raking them into a pile which was still the 'wrong' way as he wanted the pile somewhere else. So he drops his rake, comes over and stands over me, starts telling me in a raised voice how I should be raking and again that it should have been OBVIOUS.
I felt intimidated and humiliated and later, very angry at being spoken to this way, but this has become the 'norm' , although he would never speak to other people outside the family like this. I find it too hard to stand up for myself when I feel intimidated, but in my heart it just feels wrong. What would anyone else have done or felt? Am I over sensitive?
Secondly, he was well out of line.
Thirdly, if you want a handle on what it feels like to not be abused - you don't start to feel "intimidated and humiliated".
I was only thinking today, that I have had the amazing good fortune, after all I have been through, to spend time with someone who never makes me feel that way. I said to him only recently how much I appreciate the fact that, even when he's critical, I genuinely feel he's criticising the action, not me personally. He has been critical - we all have our faults. But only a very few times in nearly 2 years, and he will say he doesn't like something I do and then it's very genuinely up to me to decide what I do about that, if anything. I respond, and then that's it - it's never mentioned again. And same goes the other way.
You should NEVER feel intimidated OR humiliated in a relationship. Ever. Angry sometimes maybe, hurt sometimes maybe, nobody and no relationship is perfect. But intimidation and humiliation have NO place in a relationship.
I wouldn't. It's rude, and it makes the person feel like they are dumb.
Would that kind of talk be Ok in a work situation--would anyone like a person who communicated with them like that? No.
I think that his actions are also feeding off the past. He has probably said more things to you like this--trying to show that you have no "sense" or are dumb, or something like this.
Then, this experience, what he says about raking leaves, gets all the more powerful because it is strung into a series of events like this. If it was the first time he ever talked to you like this--you would react differently. Maybe this is a little like hypervigilance.
I think the way that he was acting was obnoxious and rude. Your an adult, so he shouldn't talk to you like you are some kind of subordinate to him.
I agree with Livindadrem--his words do sound "intimidating and humiliating"
(especially since he probably said it in front of your daughter, thus putting a strain on your relationship with her since she was being compared to you--though you are the mother.)
That kind of thing would make me mad too. Life is too short to spend it with rude people.
Trust how YOU feel inside.
If I were raking & you started to help & I wanted you to rake them into a certain pile. I would simply ask you if you would mind raking them over here (and point to the pile). I would also THANK YOU FOR HELPING!
Hugs!
Trust how YOU feel inside. If it doesn't feel like love, if it doesn't feel nice, if it doesn't feel respectful, it isn't.
My husband would tell both of us that we are oversensitive.
Nobody else talks to me like that, and I don't ever talk to people like that, especially people I love and care about.
It's a horrible feeling.
But what your husband did was wrong, The disrespect, the intimidation is just wrong.
Go with your gut. If you feel it is wrong, if you FEEL it is wrong, then it most likely is. Trust your gut, even when your mind tries to talk you out of it. (which is what is happening in your first paragraph). You know the truth, or, your gut does.
In other words, I would have dropped the rake and walked off. After I started stopping the behavior and failing to do it again because I was so incompetent. Of course it was always something, so leaving was the best thing I ever did.
Sorry, but the bar always moves. The only way I could stop it was to handle it the way I did.
I know how you feel, ive been there. No one will ever treat me like that again. I feel lucky now.
I don't believe (sorry) in that stuff about how we "teach people how to treat us". It's true up to a point, when you are talking about normal people. But when you are talking about abusers and disordered people, no amount of "standing up for yourself" is going to change who they are. They will just change their tactics. And if their abuse really isn't working? Well they'll just look around for a new victim.
I used to cower before him. He'd bark questions at me, thinking I'm being insolent but really I didn't have the strength to speak. Didn't matter though since any answer I gave just digs my grave deeper.
Now I stick up for myself. I still cry but I get angry too. He's learned that I'm not afraid of him anymore so he stepped up his game to threats of violence, punching a door and throwing things. What my H fails to understand is I am still very much afraid of him but I am no longer afraid of losing him simply because I stood up for myself.
If he so much as pushes me I'm leaving his ass. That's my line, god help him if he crosses it.