Why the Abuse?)

Yesterday I examined the situation of an addict and his spouse when she is abusing him for his wrongs. To be clear, I am not saying that all forms of anger are inherently abusive, at times anger is the right and proper reaction to a situation. But it absolutely possible for the wife to go off the deep end as well. This is never okay, and an addict in this situation should look to remove himself from such a situation. He shouldn’t fight back in kind, he should just get away to a place where he can be safe.

But it is worth considering, why is the wife behaving like this? From name calling to throwing plates, why does she feel like she has to explode in rage? She might have been a gentle, peaceful person up until this moment, so clearly she isn’t fundamentally hateful. What has possessed her, then, to be like this now?

We’ll spend the rest of today exploring those questions, but the short answer is this: the wife is showing outbursts of rage because she is terrified of showing her husband her inner suffering. Behind all that rage is a terrible, terrible sadness.

Secondary Emotions)

Psychology is the study of mental behavior and processes. It takes all of the outer attitudes that we exhibit and seeks to understand what happened inside of us to prompt those reactions. Many of us live our entire lives not even considering our emotional reactions, assuming that they are self-explanatory, but the reality is far more complex.

One concept that is discussed in psychology is that of “secondary emotions.” The idea here is that sometimes an inner, core emotion gets wrapped with a secondary, outer one. A common example of this is anger as a secondary emotion to fear. It is quite common for us to react with hostility to something that has scared us, and this behavior makes sense when it comes to dangers in nature. If we were to cross paths with a wild animal we would feel terrified, but rather than show that fear we might scream and throw rocks at it to chase it off.

But this same instinct applies to non-life-threatening social interactions as well. I’m sure we have all seen a person that has an angry outburst at a seemingly innocuous statement or question. Asking a friend what test score he got might get in a sharp response if he is insecure about his intelligence. Expressing a personal opinion on “rape culture” might elicit a tirade from your partner if your words have triggered a painful memory. Asking your boss to clarify his instructions might call down a strong reprimand if he is afraid of being seen as a poor leader. On the outside we’re seeing the anger, but inside is all manner of pain and fear.

These angry outbursts are therefore a self-defense mechanism, a warning that people should back off from a tender area. It’s very similar to the rattling of a snake’s tail or the baring of a lion’s teeth. Unfortunately, most of us employ this angry warning technique to our own detriment, using them as a way to avoid our problems rather than dealing with them. At some point in our lives we do need to have these defenses challenged, but probably not by someone who is ignorant and insensitive about what is happening inside.

The Hurt Behind the Anger)

And this is the important thing to understand when your wife comes at you with an angry tirade. Most likely, all her cutting, insulting remarks are a mask over the real issue. Her primary emotion is one of intense hurt and grief, but she doesn’t feel safe showing that to you. She doesn’t feel safe because that is a very intimate, very vulnerable part of her, and your actions have communicated to her that you are not a safe person to expose that side to. So when she feels the sadness overflowing and starting to spill over she instead surges out in anger, trying to shield you from seeing the brokenness that almost got out.

I’m not going to say that it’s okay for her to abuse you just to hide her hurt, but we must appreciate the fact that she probably doesn’t even know what else to do. She is trapped in a no-win situation. You, as the addict, have proven that you cannot be trusted with the most intimate parts of her soul, but those parts are bleeding out of open wounds. What exactly is she supposed to do with that?

Well, we’ll talk about what she is supposed to do with that in the following posts, but just for today I wanted to give proper appreciation for the reality of what the spouse is going through. It is in our nature to view those who are overly angry in a disdainful way, but in many cases they are the people most deserving of our pity.

NOTE: Throughout this series I refer to the addict as “he” and the injured partner as his “wife.” This is merely a convenience for maintaining consistency. It is entirely possible for the addict to be a woman and the injured partner to be her husband. It is also entirely possible for the strained relationship to be between non-romantic partners, such as with a parent and a child.

Constructive Criticism)

All of us need constructive criticism in our lives. We all have blind spots around our personal flaws. An outside perspective helps to bring our subconscious attitudes in check and helps to mold ourselves into the best version of ourselves that we can be.

But not all criticism is “constructive” criticism. Indeed, much of the critique that we receive tends to be of the “destructive” variety, specifically intended to tear us down. It’s end goal is to make us fit another person’s flawed desires, or simply to make us hurt. This sort of criticism has no value to us, and we would do well to distance ourselves from it.

Further complicating matters, though, is the fact that there is also “mixed” criticism. This is criticism that really does have a good point, a revelation about ourselves that we would benefit from learning, but the speaker of this criticism has impure intentions. What they’re saying is right, but they’re saying it with the intention of hurting us.

Allowing another person to mistreat you isn’t appropriate, but neither is dismissing the fair points they are making about your character. Today I want to focus on a way that you can manage both of these sides at the same time. I’ll start off by illustrating it with an allegory.

The Shot)

Imagine for a moment that a piece of criticism is like getting a shot. Having a needle stuck in your arm, even when administered by a professional, is always going to sting. It’s exactly the same as when we’re being told that we’re doing something wrong, no matter the abundance of tact used, it will always sting a bit. How we respond to this prospect of pain depends on how mature we are.

Children might respond to a shot by resisting the person trying to administer it, or going limp and falling over so that the needle can’t pierce their skin, or even striking back. We do the same thing with criticism when we start dismissing it as incorrect, entering a depressive state where we tune out everything that has been said, or start hurling insults back at the person. We don’t care about the medicine that is being offered, we are exclusively focused on the pain that is associated with it.

A more mature person will sit upright and calmly receive the inoculation. They’ll accept the momentary discomfort as a necessary inconvenience, and the whole thing will be over much sooner because of their cooperation.

But so far we’ve been assuming a careful administrator of the shot/criticism. Now let us imagine that the person coming at us is enraged, and they’re swinging that needle wildly! That needle may still have some worthy medicine inside of it, but we’re going to suffer more damage than good by letting this person carve into our flesh with reckless abandon.

The ideal solution (and this is far easier said than done) would be to stop the would-be attacker, take the syringe into your own hands, and calmly administer its composition to yourself. In terms of dealing with abusive criticism, this means that you will not permit yourself to be insulted or screamed at, and if someone breaks this boundary you will leave the situation, but at the same time you will be sensitive and empathetic to the emotions that are behind the attack.

An Example)

Let us give a clear example of this. Imagine a lust addict in recovery who goes out one evening with his wife. An attractive woman passes them by and the wife starts to wonder if the husband is lusting for her. The wife feels hurt and insulted, and after getting home she lays into her husband, accusing him of having been emotionally unfaithful the entire evening. She brings up all the past wrongs that he has committed. She shouts, she insults and disparages, she swears, and she tries to push him back into the role of irredeemable cheater. Maybe she even starts to get physical!

And all the while, let’s assume that the husband in this case was having a perfectly innocent, sober-minded evening. Now he’s under attack, though, and his fight-or-flight instincts are kicking in. He wants to shout back, or to disappear into his shame, but that will only make the situation worse. Instead, he realizes that he needs to disarm the situation and acknowledge his wife’s justified hurt.

That doesn’t mean that the husband has to engage with any false narrative, though. He doesn’t have to take her insults to heart. He doesn’t have to say he was lusting that night if he really wasn’t. But he does need to speak up and admit that that he has betrayed his wife in the past and he can see that she is still hurting for it and he is sorry. He validates her underlying pain, but he does not condone her out-of-line behavior.

If his wife is able to come back to a calm place, then he can remain in her presence and work to understand more of that underlying pain. He takes ownership for past faults and meditates upon them. As a result, the wife sees how he has applied the syringe to himself and allowed himself to feel sad and emotional for the harm that he caused. If, on the other hand, the wife remains abusively hostile, and needs some space, then the husband moves somewhere else and has that moment of empathy and introspection in private. In either case, he has done his part to learn and grow from the constructive criticism that was hiding inside the abusive criticism. He has responded to the situation in a way that is respectful and honest.

NOTE: Throughout this series I refer to the addict as “he” and the injured partner as his “wife.” This is merely a convenience for maintaining consistency. It is entirely possible for the addict to be a woman and the injured partner to be her husband. It is also entirely possible for the strained relationship to be between non-romantic partners, such as with a parent and a child.

Toxic Criticism)

In my last post I explained that the addict needs to find empathy for the pain that his behavior caused his wife, though this is easier said than done. Speaking for myself, even after years of practice I still have many emotional safeguards that tried to dissuade me from really leaning into the pain. There is always that tendency to become defensive and search for any other path. I have even tried to fake empathy at times while keeping my heart securely locked off, but nothing but sincerity works. As my mentor in my first addiction recovery program often repeated “you can’t go under it, you can’t go around it, you can’t go over it. You have to go through it.”

Part of the challenge facing the addict is that he will likely face all manner of challenges that trigger his defense mechanisms. Typically the addict’s wife is not only hurt, she is angry, and that anger can come through in a multitude of ways. Insults or shouting or misrepresenting events will tempt the addict to dismiss everything his wife is saying. She’s being irrational, unfair, or intentionally derogatory, so he feels excused from taking anything that she says to heart. After all, this is already delicate, shameful ground for the addict, and anything abrasive is likely to drive him into his shell.

Certainly, the wife of the addict has a right to be angry. She has been profoundly hurt, and no one would reasonably expect her language to be unaffected by that. But at the same time, there must be a point where the expressing of one’s hurt can go too far, starting to become a form of abuse itself. Where is that point? Where is the line where one’s invective just isn’t okay any more? Even if someone has justified anger, they can express it in an unjustified way. And when they do, how are you supposed to respond to that?

Well, we will get into all of that, but before anything else I wanted to spend the rest of the day discussing a fact that every addict needs to appreciate.

Ricochet Damage)

If your spouse is expressing her anger in a way that is unfair, isn’t that basically the same as exactly what you did to her? Wasn’t the revelation of your betrayal something that caught your wife totally off guard? Didn’t it hurt her without justification? Didn’t it come on her totally out of the blue? You might be totally right that this pain your spouse is putting on you is unfair, but paradoxically, undeserved pain is exactly what you do deserve!

Now I’m not here to say that two wrongs make a right, but I am going to maintain that you can use this as an opportunity to better appreciate the reality of what you inflicted upon your spouse. You can feel all the stinging, out-of-line, crushing pain and say “I get it, that’s what I did to you.” In most cases, what you are feeling is nothing more than a part of the damage that you put out into the world ricocheting back in your face.

Which, once again, is not to say that we should live an eye-for-an-eye, but we do need to appreciate what it was for like for the other person when we took their eye away. We need to be able to have a taste for that experience, even if we don’t have to experience all of it.

When the addict’s spouse sees that he is deflecting her pain, that is only going to aggravate her further! The fastest way for the addict to de-escalate his wife’s anger is for him to develop a genuine and profound understanding of her pain. Cheap, phony efforts are only going to prolong things and make it worse for everyone. The addict must learn to lean face-first into the pelting hail. He needs to allow some of the shrapnel bouncing back from his own actions to land in the flesh.

I’ve said it twice now, and I’ll say it one more time. None of this is to say that verbal or physical abuse from a wounded spouse just has to be put up with. There is a line between holding empathy for another’s pain and just being their punching bag. And maybe that makes sense conceptually, but how do you actually walk that line in practice? Come back tomorrow as we explore the answer.

NOTE: Throughout this series I refer to the addict as “he” and the injured partner as his “wife.” This is merely a convenience for maintaining consistency. It is entirely possible for the addict to be a woman and the injured partner to be her husband. It is also entirely possible for the strained relationship to be between non-romantic partners, such as with a parent and a child.