My new mantra for dealing with obnoxious idiots:

[evile]

"That kind of talk doesn't invite me to admire you" is effing brilliant. I want to memorize it and use it every time someone starts acting shirty around me, because it nails everything down in one short sentence: the typical abusive loudmouth is childish and narcissistic, everything s/he does is in an effort to get attention, and (whether s/he realizes it or not, whether s/he will admit it or not) the abuser is desperate to be liked, loved, and admired. (yes, s/he wants to be liked and approved of by the person s/he is screaming at, beating up on, badmouthing, etc. and s/he has NO idea how to go about earning that esteem, so s/he's reduced to just trying to beat it out of you. "If you won't look up to me from where you're standing, maybe you'll look up to me once I've slammed you into the dirt.")

So pointing out that their abusive behavior is achieving the opposite is probably the best way to lay out and enforce a boundary and stop the abusive behavior in its tracks. We'll see how it goes.

OK, so I got one good thing out of The Verbally Abusive Relationship. Mostly that book just made me mad.

Comments

[emmainfiniti.livejournal.com]

I am curious - why did the book make you mad?

[bramblekite.livejournal.com]

the usual when reading anything on abusive relationships; the author's assumption is that the abuser is male and the victim is female. In the preface the author even mentions that she has been approached and asked to use more gender neutral language, or write more about relationships where the abuser is female and she flat refused to do so...

I can't imagine the courage it would take for a male abuse victim to speak up and ask a famous authority for help..and then to have her be so dismissive of his experience....sad and angry making.

There is even less material available if you are not in a traditional m/f hetero mono situation...but i have gay male friends who have been in bad relationships, and a trans lesbian friend who was abused...

So, for men being abused by women, men being abused by men, or women being abused by women,not only are there no law enforcement people sympathetic or helpful in that situation, few or no social services/shelters open to them, but there are no books for them either.

And that makes me angry and disappointed in the whole self help industry, but particularly an author who brings it up only to dismiss it as not being worth the effort for her to address.

[emmainfiniti.livejournal.com]

You know me well enough by now to know how much i loathe gender and het reductive language but I think the author is not intending to be dismissive, but is writing instead to a specific audience, comprised mostly of het women, and saying that the abuse pattern is affected by the het & gendered norms in our society. I have read the intro to her next book and she states that, while women can be verbally abusive in the way that men can, they don't have the cultural reinforcement of abuse that men in het relationships do. It seems sort of like recognizing that there is some sexual dimorphism in humans that means that most men are physically stronger and larger than most women, and recognizing that this contributes to men committing more acts of physical abuse against women (rather than the other way around), while nodding to the reality that individuals may defy this "norm." And the author actually goes so far as to say she has never seen (or heard of) a verbally abusive woman change and give up the abusive patterns, citing gendered social factors as a cause(so she doesn't have any insight for a book on "can your abusive woman change?")
It is a shame that there are not more resources out there for abused people that don't fit the author's model but I don't think that renders her books valueless, even if she is primarily addressing women in verbally abusive relationships. Hopefully, someone with more experience with non-mono, non-het, or male victim experiences can use her work as a springboard to make more inclusive resources available.

[bramblekite.livejournal.com]

hey, I didn't say 'valueless'...I said 'made me mad'. I am glad if someone finds something that works for them and helps them find a healthier way to be. I just...didn't find it spoke to me. I was not trying to offend you, and I'm sorry if I did.

[emmainfiniti.livejournal.com]

No offense taken and none intended in return.
I just had a bit of a different perspective.

[in-quinecorners.livejournal.com]

I'm a little late reading this exchange but...

she has never seen (or heard of) a verbally abusive woman change and give up the abusive patterns

This is an extremely interesting statement to me, for what I presume are obvious reasons. And it fits with what I've observed (the abusive woman I have in mind has a mother and a grandmother who are both alone and bitter and have not either of them had a romantic/life partner who would put up with them in well over a decade -- which is apparently not enough motivation to learn to stop being abusive). I will remember this. Thank you for passing it along.

[emmainfiniti.livejournal.com]

After reading both books almost all the way through, the author seems to informally divide people into categories - people who have a bad habit or two (fixable) and people who are deeply invested in control and will use any means to maintain that control (less fixable). She seems to ascribe both categories to men and women, and I think the latter category is the one where she is saying that she hasn't seen a woman change. There is a lot of social support for the controlling man, but the woman who is deeply invested in overt type controlling has to overcome so much gendered social pressure to be this way, that there is little that will motivate her to relinquish her dysfunctional ways.