Hi, my name is Paul Friedman. I founded The Marriage Foundation and today's
topic is "My Husband Is Abusive. What Should I Do?"
There are degrees of abuse and unfortunately in the Western world there
is 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 to... let's see if we can work through this.
Now, 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's could easily be
in the redzone 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. You can say, well there is no excuse never
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
gonna say he's okay, he's not but neither are you, and it's almost like you're
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. All right. Blessings to you
blessings to your spouse, and blessings to your family. Thank you!