My Husband Is Abusive, What Should I Do? | Paul Friedman

What should you do if your husband is abusive? Does it matter if he is physically abusive, controlling, mentally abusive, or verbally abusive? How should you deal with this situation? Paul Friedman shares these issues and more. There are degrees of abuse and unfortunately in the Western world, there's this idea of emotional abuse and psychological abuse and a lot of abuses that I think lower the standard in a way that isn't helpful. There are women who are battered. They're beaten up, they're punched, they're kicked, they're thrown out of moving cars, they're hurt very badly physically. Sometimes their lives are in danger so that's abuse for sure and then there's a scale, and I'm not here to tell you at what point the scale goes from, "Red, you got to get out of there," because in those cases you got to get out of there too. Let's see if we can work through this. If the children are involved, if they're present and I'm talking about when a wife is being hit, struck not necessarily screamed at but struck and the children are not considered, that's also pretty bad. That could easily be in the red zone of "you got to get out of there." However, I have to tell you the truth. I have met with women who pushed their husbands to that point. They know their husbands are volatile. They know their husbands will become unhinged or they even pick times when he's been drinking. What do you do? You can condemn him. There is no excuse and I agree, but there are times when as a wife you've got to use some common sense and not if your husband has an anger problem, a drinking problem or something like that and you know you're gonna push him into violence. I'm not going to say he's okay, he's not but neither are you, and it's almost like your violence which is beginning his violence is almost as bad on a certain level. Here it is. There's the, "You got to get out of there," the children are in danger. You're in physical danger, you got to get out of there. There's just no getting around it and then we go into the shades. I'm not going to address the shades but there's your responsibility part comes up at a certain point and you have to behave well too, and then the emotional abuse and all of that stuff. I'm sorry, you're probably emotionally abusing your spouse as well. You got to learn how to be married so if it's just nice, I shouldn't say just because it's painful. I'm not denying that part but if it's not dangerous then the ticket at this point is to learn about marriage. Learn how to behave, read one of my books. Take one of the courses, do something that's very proactive and calm things down and then see what happens. Write into one of our counselors if you have the need to. It's free and let's see if we can help you in your particular situation, get some perspective. #marriageproblems #abusivehusband #abusivepartner #abusiverelationship #unhappywife