CREATIVE CONFLICT RESOLUTIONS » abuse

Emotional Abuse in your Marriage?

norafem — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:35:49 +0000

In old days, perhaps it was the natural marriage relationship style, the one we saw in our parents’ relationship: the dominating husband, and the sweet subservient wife. It was the norm, and people took that as the logic, expected way to be in a marriage.

It had a dirty secret….if the wife would have different takes on a situation she would have to sneak her views into a conversation, because her husband was the one supposed to do decision-making.

She could suggest, but the final decision (and credit) was not hers. Even if she had, God permit, some really good ideas…she needed to take care of her husband’s face by attributing such ideas to his creation.

And when she felt entitled to some decisions of her own? Several heavy weight traditions would discourage her. Church would preach submission to husbands; society would control her by ridicule. There was little a husband needed to do to “keep her in her place.’’

Even if we accept the benefits of sustaining this state of affairs, times have changed, and this hyerarchical marriage order has disappeared. Has it?

Sometimes I doubt it, because we can see that this male superiority marriage model persists. How? It has taken a different form now given that it’s the husband’s job to enforce her obedience, because society and church have abandoned preaching about wife’s submission to husbands.

It’s left in the hands of a husband to make his wife comply and obey, and to support his authority in the home. How does he do it? Lacking divine authority, there is the tool of emotional abuse to help him make his wife to feel inferior.

How? How come I’m linking persistent male authority with emotional abuse in marriage? Very simple: now, the way to have her humbled and in her place is to make her feel diminished and wrong, being always corrected because being criticized by a higher authority. I know a couple, now in their seventies…she has been all her life a stay-at-home wife and mother. He stills walks into the kitchen and announces to everyone: “she is always burning the food, what is she burning today?”

Is it true? Even if it is, what is the need to shame her in front of her relatives or friends? To prove male superiority, of course! After all those years of marriage, his instincts as the last word, judge and executioner are prevalent. Could he had learned to see her skills with more love and compassion? Could he appreciate more her positive aspects? Of course he could!

What he is doing is using snide comments to inflict public humiliation on her…leting her know who is still the boss. The harsh critiques, negative comments and complaints about her only role are the ways in which she is told to keep her place; if she protests, more abuse will be coming.

Why men do this? They don’t have any obvious need to continuously prove superiority…right? Or is it perhaps their insecurity that forces them to nag, criticize and demean the people who love them the most? So they can show who is the boss?

This attitude is really pathetic and has no place in a healthy marriage… How many divorces do you know, caused by her fatigue at being treated as a lesser, never equal partner?

If you married expecting that your partner would be the person accepting you warts and all; love you and admire you even beyond what you yourself know about your skills…then this is fraud. It means that you can’t trust the person you promised to love above others, because this person is reducing you to a lesser place below him.

Emotional abuse in marriage intent is to support male superiority, but ends up destroying the relationship. Are you in a marriage damaged by emotional abuse applied to support his dominant role? If so, how do you manage to keep your self-esteem alive?

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

Technorati Tags: abuse, appreciation, Emotional Abuse, emotions, feelings, frustration, Healthy Marriage, humiliation, negative emotions, recognition, verbal abuse

Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships?

norafem — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:06:18 +0000

Sometimes, help is coming from different sources, when you never expect it. There is a very detailed and extremely supportive article about the reasons women tell themselves they need to stay put in abusive relationships…and you need to read it all.

Want to know what John Shore has to teach you? Just click here now, and you will know

Once you are left without valid reasons to stay in a sad, empty and lonely relationship, you need to know how you can heal from the hurt!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Is Healing from Abuse Easy?

alfaprima — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:36:33 +0000

Unlike physical abuse, emotional abuse may not heal by itself over time. Given that its impact targets more the psychic areas than the body, you could be unconsciously scarred for a long period of time.

Because the damage is on the self-esteem and identity areas, healing emotional abuse means healing primarily both your mind and soul, not your body. Healing an emotionally abusive relationship can only take place once you realize that you are indeed in a power grab, abusive control style of relationship, not an egalitarian one. Prior to this, you need to do the following:

Accepting the sad reality that you are in an abusive relationship is hard and painful, but necessary. You can’t continue thinking that he is “too tired” or “making jokes but not seriously making fun about you.” This is for real a very sad place where he tries to humiliate you to keep you under his control.

WANT to Know More about How to Heal from Abuse?

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, abusive relationship, anger, confrontation, Emotional Abuse, feelings, forgiveness, frustration, Healthy Marriage, hidden anger, loneliness, love

Cold shoulder = emotional abuse?

alfaprima — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:55:11 +0000

The silent treatment, also known as the “cold shoulder treatment,” consists of feigned apathy, total silence, and being distant on purpose. One person displays an attitude of complete disinterest for the spouse, as if the other person would be a complete stranger.

This form of emotional abuse can be very disorienting. Being ignored on purpose by your husband, your most intimate ally, crumbles your whole being. The experience can leave you thinking that you have been reduced to the level of a ghost, if your presence is systematically ignored and turned irrelevant…!

Want to be able to identify and heal cold shoulder?

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, anger, Cold Shoulder, Emotional Abuse, feelings, frustration, hidden anger, resilience

Can emotional abuse be healed?

alfaprima — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:41:50 +0000

When you are a child, all the deal with the grown ups around you revolves on a single question: are they going to help you grow, develop and survive as to be happy as an adult? Or they either don’t care about you, getting you in serious danger of life, or are they going to provide less than good care, enough to survive but missing love and appreciation?

Given the terrible fact that people can’t give beyond of what they themselves experienced, the odds of any baby receiving consistent good care delivered with love and respect are few. We all have been raised by parents who could not express love, or did not how, or were abused children themselves. Some of them, for reasons still not clear enough, even became abuser parents themselves.

In all the conversations about how to deal with the trauma of abuse, persisting after we grow up in hidden and obvious forms, the issue is how to heal and repair the damage. We all tended to assume that we could repair the damage through a mix of care, support and time.

Is that true? are emotional abuse wounds able to heal after some time? Are the scars left by factors like negligence, pressure by parents and peers, sexual abuse, aggressive environment at home with screams and scolding, physical beatings or public humiliations by parents or siblings able to heal and disappear?

What we know now is that childhood stress due to emotional negligence or abuse, especially when combined with genetic factors can result in structural changes in the brain and may make people more vulnerable to get depression afterwards.

The child receives, through early abuse, an indelible imprint of himself, of his parents’ image of himself, and of human relationships in general which will follow him the rest of his life and make the development of trust almost impossible.

Scientific research done on 24 severely depressed people from 18-65 years showed that abuse had caused some structural alterations of the brain, associated with a higher vulnerability to depression. They were investigated with high-resolution structural MRI and childhood stress assessments, and compared with healthy people from the same age group.

What does it tells us? That this is the most tragic event in the life of a young person. Being abused in any way is a serious violation of personal boundaries that not only attacks a baby now, but determines the future of her relationship with others and the world in her future.

We are talking here about damaging the capacity to experience love and trust in a relationship with others unhindered by fear. It is what makes us humans, the capacity to trust others and be with them. How someone is willing to trust others if the brain configuration has been altered precisely in the aspect of connection with others who could again abuse?

If you recognize the scars of abuse in your perception of the world and of others around you, (mistrust, suspicion, fear) perhaps you can explore the possibility of looking for abuse in your childhood. Going ahead, we could talk about some process that, beyond repairing your self-image so you feel that you have the right to be loved and cherished in the right way, would allow you to cross the bridge of blame and guilt and forgive.

Why forgiveness? I can’t find any other resource who could help mend the damaged relationship between the parents or relatives who abused us and ourselves. There has to be a way to clean the past, bury the abusive child-raising practices, begin a new one relating to the children now in our lives showing love and respect.

Does forgiveness help reshape the brain? We don’t know yet. Probably not, but what it can do is to manage the abuse experience as one more of the memories of our childhood and archive it. We have learned through tears our lesson: there is no growth or balance or love in interpersonal violence and abuse. We have learned resilience.

What is, then, left? You tell me, what’s your experience? from this side, forgiveness is a process that takes time, and begins not with forgetting, but with remembering our emotional abuse with the question: what do I have to learn from this experience? and how do I move on afterwards?

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, aggression, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, feelings, forgiveness, hidden anger, humiliation, resilience

ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH YOUR OWN LIFE?

norafem — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:40:51 +0000

St. Valentine’s Day is coming again!

Can you ignore it? Of course you can…if it is too painful to remember what it means, right?
Basically, it reminds us of the excitement from love feelings. Love feelings? Ha, what were those, you might ask?

When you first fall in love, there are certain chemicals in your brain that make all your perspective shift into high gear…you really know that you are in love, because you feel it all the time. Your pulse quickens; your heart beats and this delicious feeling of anticipation gives a rosy tint to your (previously boring) life.

You also know what follows: once the first wave of excitement is gone, or destroyed by some unkind comment or nasty put down, dissapointment sets in. You are in a relationship, right, but the pulse-quickening excitement is gone! Now, you tell yourself that at least, you get security being in this relationship, and that has to be enough…

The chemistry of love is based on the brain: every time we produce a feeling or a thought, we can be sure that it is based on a chemical track in our brain. The love excitement felt by the chemicals in the brain is highly addictive!

And we all need that burst of dopamine in the brain that makes us feel alive, excited, deeply connected and successful…either produced by a relationship, or produced from being in love with our own lives.

Well, then, here is a different tack on this Valentine issue: can you get equally excited about loving your own life? Self-love is usually discounted up front, but without a deep connection with yourself, you will always be waiting for others to give you recognition, support and love!

And we all know that putting your self esteem at the mercy of others is not a good starting point for any relationship. Sometimes we accept the pain of a bad relationship as a screen that covers the first hurt: we are abandoning ourselves! We learned that while growing up and being not appreciated in our families; now is normal to feel not worthy of love and connection with others.

If you know that an important part of your happiness is being cared for and appreciated by your partner, be sure that you respect and care for yourself and your own projects first. Whatever makes you happy and gets you excited about your life has to be cared for and included in your life plan, either single or married.

And what is important for you has to be important for any partner you can select: don’t accept that your spouse rejects or ignores an important part of you. It is the equivalent to rejecting a piece of you, so don’t agree of dumping those values or that interest only because he tells you it’s worthless.

Take stock of what you are looking for to make yourself happy. Whatever the kind of emotional abuse you had in your past, we need to remember that the basic task of life: to accept and love oneself is still to be done. We are responsible for a life project that is uniquely ours; nobody else can do it for us. If you didn’t learn to love yourself growing up, why can’t you accept this Valentine day to begin doing it?

Only when we recover the path to self-development, we get in touch again with this wonderful person inside us waiting to grow up, be mature and independent and able to enter only into relationships full of support and respect.

Now, isn’t it a wonderful Valentine message to be able to look us in the mirror and say: “Here is to you and your happiness, lovely girl! Happy Valentine!”

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, appreciation, love and connection, respect, Self-Esteem, Valentine's Day

Stop His Emotional Control

norafem — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:09:41 +0000

Do you remember the times when it felt as if everything you did was being watched and scrutinized by your man, all done with a suspicious and angry attitude? As if trying to catch you on something despicable? Making you feel like a berated child?
It makes you feel always unsure of being accepted or loved…walking on eggshells because of feeling tense, confused and utterly lonely… has it happened to you?

And you can’t win, because whatever you do, something will not be perfect and you will fail the grade, and be found inferior. Did we choose a husband or a preceptor with demanding standards for everything? It looks like our loved one has transmogrified in the persecutory entity, always supervising and grading us.

This is not the marriage between equals we wanted!

You know, sometimes we women need to disengage from the notion that his behavior is our responsibility, because something we did or didn’t do is causing his anger. But probably 90% of the times, it will have to do with something inside himself, which makes him feel insecure or threatened…and is covered fast by attacking everything on you.

I know, I know, don’t roll your eyes….you already know how childish he can be, so what’s new? Well, the new thing is to ascribe the origin of his critique not to something you did, but to something inside him!

Like in:

“Oh, you are not happy with the way I just prepared your salad? Well, it being the same salad I do for you every day, what else inside you are you not happy with today?”

Of course, you don’t need to tell him exactly this, but you get the idea…what is needed here is a strong effort to detach yourself from automatically accepting guilt or responsibility for his moods, and inviting him to deal with them by himself, without resorting automatically to guilt you.

This is the first step in a healthy relationship: each one is the owner of his/her emotions, responsible for changing them if they are not of their liking, and should not use the loving partner as a reservoir for them.

Make this principle part of your shared life and you will see that things begin to improve! You will be building your self-confidence and your skills at knowing what part of the relationship dynamics is your responsibility and what is his…and you will nip emotionally abusive behaviors in the bud.

Technorati Tags: abuse, angry husband, appreciation, attitude change, healthy relationships, recognition

Emotional Abuse: Hoping to Have a Healthier Marriage?

alfaprima — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:46:39 +0000

Along the days and the years of your marriage, perhaps you were all the time completely aware of the nagging feeling haunting you…perhaps a tiny question: is this all? IS THIS RELATIONSHIP BE LIKE IT IS NOW FOR EVER?
You knew that there was not a lot of growth; more or less, both were growing old with the same attitudes, negativity and pettiness of the first times.

So what? most of people endure mediocre marriages, you would mutter to yourself. And perhaps it’s true that you were destined to this monotony, where no excitement endures. What made it worst was the constant negative nagging, commenting and observing always the dark, unresolved side of things. Why to be optimist in this world, where there is so much pain and trouble? he would say.

Even then, you kept waiting; perhaps some behavior you could not define and ask for. Now, perhaps, you know better: you would like to have some joy, some positive view of life to tide both over everyday challenges and put a smile in your face.

There is this basic solution: make an effort to stop negativity. Nobody has the right to poison every day’s mood with a negative comment, and now you want it to stop.

Perhaps you can say to him: “It doesn’t matter if this is your truth or not, if you are going to say something negative, I ask you to think twice before doing it. You have the right to think as you do; but in this shared household I have the right to avoid this kind of poison. If you say something negative about me, the house, our relatives, or life in general, I will consider it as poisonous as second hand smoke, and will leave the room without previous notice. I want to hear positive expressions that reinforce my belief in life as worth living; nothing else will do. So, now that you are warned, I hope that you will understand if I refuse to hear your negative comments, as if I was deaf, and not answer them. I will ignore any negativity. Thanks for paying attention to my decision.”

Now is the time to take yourself seriously. Walk out and don’t allow any negative comment get to you. Perhaps you can think of other external activities to do when you walk out of the house, and have this list ready, so you can be busy and doing things that give you joy while leaving the negativity behind.

Isn’t it easy? taking yourself seriously means that your daily well being is in your hands…walk out on abuse; don’ reject or challenge it, but walk out into pleasure activities. Even having a walk by yourself will be more beneficial than listening to abusive and mean comments.

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, negativity, Self-Esteem

Sharing Power Makes a Healthy Marriage

norafem — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:41:01 +0000

Sometimes, the key to a happy marriage is but a political one. Which one? the power sharing issue, of course!

The male desperation to keep the female under control by either physical, sexual, economic and psychological ways shows up in so many ways. If we see a husband controlling whatever resources the wife can have, either the food money or her income or her time, we can assume there is a man insecure of his role as a man.

Is this surprising? of course not, there has been in process a transformation in gender roles, from authoritarian to egalitarian partnerships, still under way. This is also a personal transformation required from today’s husbands, if they want to be part of a relationship which makes both sides happy.

We are all familiar with the thousand ways in which we can recognize coercion and power games from the husband to the wife, and sometimes the other way around…This exercise of the “male privilege” is a relic of the past, but much cherished when men don’t know how to be otherwise…most social models portray a man who knows best and has all the answers…

Adults know how much insecurity is hidden behind this charade, but anyhow some men tend to believe it’s their duty to prevail over their spouses. This is a good example of what we call “winning the battle but losing the war strategy.” It is not a surprise that it generates a lot of resentment and anger.

If we could educate young boys and men in the art of sharing decision-making with their female partners, we could eliminate one of the ugliest scars of relationships, the push to use control which becomes the path to interpersonal abuse and domestic violence.

Marriage is a game in which both sides agree to learn from each other to be able to develop into grown up people. It is impossible to do so if there is not an opening up to receive and to give.

Receiving, for the blockaded male soul, means being open and respectful of her ideas and influence.

How difficult is this for any man? A little bit of emotional intelligence can go a long way…perhaps the husband only needs to remember that his best role is to:

-listen to the other side;
-make joint decisions;
-accept that her side is important;
-value her perspectives;
-even when making the decision, integrate her views in it.

Just forgetting the need to win over the other side is a great step ahead. Another big step is to learn how to fight fair in your marriage.

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: abuse, control, domestic violence, emotional intelligence, Healthy Marriage, marriage, power over, resentment

CREATIVE CONFLICT RESOLUTIONS » abuse

Emotional Abuse in your Marriage?

Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships?

Related Blogs

Is Healing from Abuse Easy?

Cold shoulder = emotional abuse?

Can emotional abuse be healed?

ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH YOUR OWN LIFE?

Stop His Emotional Control

Emotional Abuse: Hoping to Have a Healthier Marriage?

Sharing Power Makes a Healthy Marriage