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

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.

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Technorati Tags: abuse, anger, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, emotions, frustration, humiliation, loneliness, Self-Esteem

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

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.

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

What is this powerful indicator that Dr. Gottman was focusing on? The communication styles of both sides, when the fight begins. There are four very definite conflict moves that will tell if you if they know how to fight fair, or if they are going for the yugular, as in other street conflict you can have. There is a fine line between constructive conflict and destructive one…and here it is crossed early on.

Yes, the first sorry mistake is to forget that you are fighting with the person you love, and begin fighting as if your loved one is an enemy to destroy. What kind of satisfaction will you obtain if you win the piddly battle now but lose the war and end up losing your spouse in the long run?

Looks silly to respond that you want to “win”, but that is what most people do. Let’s see how do they fight:

The Nasty Fight has four elements:

a) Begin critizing the other person immediately, about something real or about something you’ve imagined that the person did. It doesn’t matter if it is real, the effect is get the other person feeling critized in a very real way;
b) Defend yourself immediately, and don’t consider if the other person has said something true. To protect yourself is the first duty, and doing that reject any opening to share responsibility or worry by listening.
c) Even better, do the total silence/stonewalling answer. You withdraw from the conversation, deny that you have something to do, and block the communication lines between your spouse and you. 85% of the stonewallers were men, by the way, in Gottman’s study.
d) Contemp is the last move you can do to destroy your partner’s trust on you. You are the superior one, and look at her as from the high levels of your better judgement. She has to appear small, insignificant and silly…help convey this meaning doing some put-downs, correct her ideas or language, make fun of some ideas and laugh at loud at such silliness.

Did you see yourself in some of these behaviors? Are they your first answer when you feel like cornered by circumstances too difficult to accept? And now, are you a bit scared of the price you will pay for this conflict creating behavior?

Well, it’s not so difficult to change and learn to have more positive confrontations. Begin by using phrases like these ones when asking:

“Can you tell me more about what worries you? I’m here to listen;”
” and you were hurt by my behavior? how so?”
” I understand that you did what you did because you had good reasons, and I trust your judgement; perhaps I’m missing information?”
“We need to talk about this issue, and I find myself resisting, but be patient and bring me back when I wander?”
“When you tell me your reactions as now, I feel a bit scared of the consequences, but allow me to walk around a bit…”

More information about how you can learn to have conversations with your partner without aggression? Have a look at Fair Fighting

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.

Technorati Tags: aggression, backstabbing, confrontation, critiques, feelings, fight, Healthy Marriage, humiliation, negative emotions, put down, reconciliation

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 sad place where he tries to humiliate you to keep you under his control.

Being with both feet on the reality ground will give you a good reason to fight back. At this point, the unequal relationship between you and your husband is already twisted. Whatever the explanations he would give about abusing you, he still has no right to humiliate and insult another person…

Want to read more? Here

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.

Technorati Tags: anger, appreciation, Emotional Abuse, humiliation, Self-Esteem, verbal abuse

A new study by Florida State University researchers has found that people who were verbally abused as children grow up to be self-critical adults prone to depression and anxiety. Of the whole sample population, an staggering 30% reported that they were often verbally abused by their parents. What kind of abuse? Insults, negative comments, swearing, and threats of physical abuse, all determining an unhealthy doses of self-criticism in the children.

What happened with the people who were abused as children? We know already that it has negative effects on the personality of grown up people. Professor Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, the study’s lead author, says that the results are on the area of depression and anxiety: “People who were verbally abused had 1.6 times as many symptoms of depression and anxiety as those who had not been verbally abused and were twice as likely to have suffered a mood or anxiety disorder over their lifetime.”

Now we know for sure: parental verbal abuse is toxic, and it not only affects the emotional stability of children, but follows them as a shadow in their adult years. We are forever paying the consequences of abusive parenting. Negative self-criticism generated by parents’ comments continues into adulthood and has been shown to make an individual more prone to depression and anxiety.

Why is this? Aren’t parents the ones supposed to take care, love and protect their children? We have been silent for a long time about noxious parenting happening almost in every household.

Either it is that parents have been themselves traumatized by abuse when children or that they got to believe that stern discipline and fault finding is the best way of raising their children, this has to stop. We need more public advocacy about negative parenting, more role models for positive, self-esteem building child-raising styles and in general a deep transformation in the way we treat children.

It’s no surprise now that adult children of abuse sometimes decide that they need to separate from their parents, when the parents continue the abusive and denigrating commenting about their adult children’s lives they did in the past.

We need more public comments on how abuse from the past re-appears in the present and keeps doing psychological damage. We need to say clearly that we are only going to interact with healthy people who would not use destructive comments to hurt other people’s self-esteem. Perhaps now we can go around even feeing appreciated and loved, for a change?

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.

Technorati Tags: aggression, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, feelings, humiliation, isolation, passive aggressive, reconciliation, resilience, verbal abuse

You either decide that he is doing unwanted behavior because he is bad or morally sick:

a) an intrinsically bad person, revealing at last his mean intentions
b) a sick person, a psychopath who finally can’t control his darker impulses.

Reading this posting brings a third alternative:

c) to externalize on other person and make that other person suffer the same feelings of inadequacy that the passive aggressive male experiences without being able to process.

Here we can see this mindset exposed, where he is either giving her the cold shoulder, or blaming her for everything at the next minute:

“The emotional abuse I saddled on those around me remains the worse product of my depression. I allowed depression to burden not only me, but two girlfriends, my family, and my closest friends. One girl could not deal with it and ended up leaving me. The other stuck around longer, and I abused her emotions without knowing it. I was terrifyingly cold and unfeeling, even as she broke down into tears and begged me to say anything. I made her feel responsible for anything that went wrong in my life. I left her more than once without warning, but would soon come back and manipulate her damaged emotions to get back together.

All of it was a way for me to artificially build myself back up.

I was trying to destroy my depression, but I ended up harming the most vulnerable people in my life. Cowardice and dishonesty dictated my thinking.

What underlies all these abuses is a fundamental disgust and anger with one’s self. I manipulated the emotions of everyone around me to bring them down to my level and feel better about my station in life. Admitting my weakness terrified me so much that I went out and tore away.”

Here it is, black on white, what we had finally to realize:

a) there is nothing she has to be blamed for;
b) He is using a trick (humiliating other) to build his self-esteem;
c) the root is his misguided effort to cover up his “disgust and anger” at himself.
d) there is very little she can do, from the humiliated position, to help the humiliator gain more self-respect; he has first to stop this toxic avoidance of his basic self-esteem problem.

In short: the husband or boyfriend who abuses his partner and humiliates her is doing this under the misguided idea that by putting her down and destroying her peace of mind, he will be above her, therefore will be more powerful, therefore regaining a lost control of himself and thus feeling “manly” again.

All this toxic circuit is displayed only to avoid looking at the basic problem: He doesn’t value or accept himself as a valuable, respectable person from the beginning!

Shouldn’t women leave people like this passive aggressive husband alone, so he can find his way inside, without torturing some external surrogate? At least, we know now that the most loving attitude she can display towards him will not cure his lack of self-esteem….so, staying with him is totally useless.

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.

( Guest post from S.M. Leahy, at The Art of Manliness )

Technorati Tags: Emotional Abuse, healthy relationships, humiliation, respect, Silence

How this issue is broached, makes the whole difference. Can we ask for support without feeling humiliated and put down? Do we have to ask; when it was promised to us from the beginning? If this automatic support falters and our partner sides with others and not with us, can we trust that the relationship is still strong enough?

The basic question is one about the reciprocal commitment to each other´s growth and development, including overcoming childhood traumas by providing here and now the love and recognition that our parents were never able to deliver. We have chosen this partner, and only this partner, with the purpose to heal the past together and experience now the support and appreciation we so much need and cherish.

Then, the real obstacles begin…people are people and most times they cant see the trust deposited in them in the middle of a battle for getting “what I want” over what the other can give…real battles are waged in the wrong conviction that imposing our will we will satisfy the eternal yearning for love and support.

What is sad is how we forget the real needs underneath the positions of the battle format: a need to be accepted and understood, not humiliated or put down by the other.

The real test, the true moment when we can see it this relationship will subsist and deliver its promise is when we can see one side behaving towards the other in the same way his or her parents did: doing humiliation; rejection and put downs with impunity.

Here the circle has closed and we are in the same place we started from and wanted to leave forever…with the help that this partner, selected for our growth, was going to provide.

The helper is now the perpetrator of the verbal and emotional violence we wanted to leave behind in our childhood, and the promise of marriage is broken.

How can we change this dynamics and move on? Perhaps making the explicit contract obvios to both: “we are here together to provide good things for each other; and not to repeat the hurts of the past; if we repeat this treatment so hurtful, then we are not for each other”

Making obvious the deal can help to stop it. Can we from there design another contract including this time the real healing of the hurts of the past? Can we say: “As nobody recognized the good things I did while I was growing up, could you be more generous with your appreciation of me here in the house and when we are with friends? I’d love to hear you saying how much you admire me!”

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: aggression, backstabbing, emotions, healthy relationships, humiliation, loneliness, love

Are you familiar or have you been in the receiving end of someone of the following “nice attitudes”?

1) The boss that takes full credit from the team’s work thus sabotaging employee advancement;
2) The boss keeps complete control over the project;
3) The boss restrict necessary information for the worker to do a good job;
4) Planning for meetings with the employee and showing up later or never;
5) Overriding the worker’s authority with his team;
6) Criticizing an employee in public, making him feel worthless;
7) Exploiting an employee’s particular talent;
8 ) Withholding employee recognition and praise;
9) Playing another worker against old time employee;
10) Micro-managing decisions which are in the employee power to do.

It’s not easy to survive in jobs where leadership is developing this dangerous attitude. You need a minimum of trust in your work environment to be able to concentrate day to day in what needs to be done according to your job description….why is it so difficult to find leaders you can trust?

A risky work environment is stressful, and you pay a high price for keeping a job in a team you have no confidence in. It can force you to get help for issues of anger management, or stress management, or develop by necessity new skills in understanding passive aggression in the work place. Whatever it takes, it needs to be done if you want to keep a measure of rationality doing a job under a boss that is a challenge in himself!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of interpersonal experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with positive strategies. You don’t have to stay in a risky workplace relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today. Get your own copy of the ebook “Passive Aggressive Workplace, here, and begin managing your environment better!

Technorati Tags: anger, backstabbing, critique, humiliation, passive aggressive boss, recognition

It all begins, of course, in infancy, where we all as children have a keen sense of what is just. A lot of things that happen to us are basically gross unfairness. Being told that we are stupid, or lazy, or worthless by the same people who are supposed to love us; being denied acceptance or appreciation and affection are all crimes against young souls that can’t defend themselves…only register the hurt. So we can share the basic definition of anger, as:

“Anger is the emotional response to real or perceived injustice.”

Now, whenever we don’t receive what we think is fair, or just, we get angry in such a way that people see us as having anger problems.

What we don’t perceive today is the hidden pressure of the old, childhood anger…If we did not have the opportunity to reckon how wrong we were treated when growing up, and heal our anger issues, then we pile up a long repressed sense of “world injustice done to us” and are more prone to react with strong feelings to any present provocations…

This old anger has been for a long time in need of healing. If we can come across this process of searching for and identifying the old wounds and accepting them, we can be in the best path for dealing with anger in the right way. We need to face old feelings of resentment because being mistreated and humiliated. It will allow us to reconnect with repressed aspects of our self, and with the true sense of what was just (or not) done to us, but also with forgiveness and appreciation.

Want to let go of resentment? Then stop controlling anger and begin accepting that you have deep reasons to be angry, that you are angry with people from your past, not people from your present, and that the situations and people of the present who make you angry now are poor substitutes for your real targets.

Basically, the best anger management process is locating the first hurts received in our lives, processing them by forgiving our parents for being so horrible raising us (they did the best they could, which wasn’t a lot for most of us) and letting go of the historic injustice.

Then now you can look around at your anger targets of today, and laugh at them because they can’t be worst than your parents, even if they try!

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.

Technorati Tags: angry husband, emotions, forgiveness, hidden anger, humiliation, negative emotions, resentment, Self-Esteem