A Band-Aid, not a cure, for abuse

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Updated: March 7, 2012 8:03AM

‘Torn” wrote in several years ago asking for advice. She’d been married for seven years and had a two-year-old and another on the way. She said her family had a very hard year. Both she and her husband changed jobs, and they also moved.

“The stress,” she wrote, “has been enormous.”

Torn said she’d “come to terms” with the fact that her husband was “verbally abusive” when he was under stress. When he calmed down, he apologized.

The weekdays were fine, but the weekends were horrible. “The verbal harangues start on Saturday morning.”

As a short-term solution, Torn said she decided to leave the house on Saturday mornings. But long term, she didn’t know what to do.

“I can see myself divorcing when the kids are grown. Part of me says, why not now? I can’t tolerate the way things are. And if I stay with him, I’m afraid I’ll lose my inner strength.

“On the other hand, I like him during the week. And there are the children to consider. And I need to know I gave the marriage my best shot. I also know moves are hard, and if I left now, I’d never know if the move caused all this.”

I advised Torn to make a weekend plan with her husband every Friday night, including alone time for each of them. I told her to make a list of triggers that set him off so she could avoid them and he could deal with them without losing control. I suggested having a safe word to use when things started to heat up.

“Working through a difficult situation like this can only increase your inner strength,” I wrote.

Torn wrote in six weeks later to say that the weekends were getting better. She was using the word “halt” as a signal to herself when things looked like they could get out of control.

“Now that I have a word, I don’t need to be emotional to communicate. This is the end for me so I stay calmer. He’s even started using ‘halt’ to mean, ‘We need to stop talking or I’m going to lose it.’

“I really liked your assertion that working through this would make me stronger. It helped change my mindset from ‘This is weakening me; I’m injuring myself by staying’ to ‘I’m a strong person; I’m working through this.’ That helped my self- esteem tremendously.

“While I doubt that this is the end of our troubles, it certainly has at least bought us respite.”

Torn is back to say, “Some of the stuff worked — planning the weekend ahead of time was good; the idea of having a word worked for a short while; each of us having alone time was good, but you fell into the same trap most people do — me trying to fix him by suggesting that I avoid his triggers and find a way to stop his behavior before it escalates. That’s like asking the wife of an alcoholic to find ways to stop him from drinking. It’s giving responsibility to the wrong person.”

In any case, Torn says those things were just Band-Aids, and the abuse got worse.

In Tuesday’s column, we have an update from Torn.

Have you and your partner run out of things to talk about? What do you do? Send your tale to cheryllavinrapp@gmail.com.

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