The Wounds Of Words

Until eight weeks ago, Susan*, 37, lived in daily fear of David's return from work. "I would start shaking," she says. "I didn't know what kind of mood he'd be in. From noon on it would be sheer terror, because I'd be watching that clock. I couldn't eat; I couldn't sleep. I lost 25 pounds in two months." While Susan isn't a battered woman in the traditional sense, she took an emotional beating that left deep wounds of its own. David-with whom she has been involved on and off for five years-would fly into rages, complaining about dirt, slamming things around their house near San Francisco and lashing out about her use of money, says Susan, even though she was paying half the household bills. After the birth of their son, now a toddler, David's blasts of fury escalated into daily salvos. Not long ago, he also began to berate Susan's teenage daughter, who has threatened to run away. He even yelled at their son when the child didn't respond to his tickling. "The tiniest details would set him off," says Susan. "My self-esteem and the whole world started going down." Fed up, Susan moved out of the house in August-but returned, at David's request, in September.

When Archie Bunker called Edith a dingbat and admonished her, "Stifle yourself," we laughed. But in real life, verbal abuse is anything but funny. It can warn of physical abuse to come-and even all by itself can destroy a relationship. While almost everyone loses his temper now and then, and even says mean things to a loved one, the verbal abuser has a different style and a different motivation. He uses words and emotions (like anger and coldness) to punish, belittle and control his partner, and he does it compulsively and constantly. He rarely apologizes and shows little empathy. Although men and women have carped at each other since Eden, verbal abuse is suddenly a hot new issue among professionals who study and treat domestic violence.

"There is a brand-new public acknowledgment that people can do as much battery psychologically as physically," says Richard Alan Goodman, a clinical fellow at the Boston Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. One reason may be a groundbreaking new book, "The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond," by Patricia Evans. Published last April, the paperback guide, better written and more serious than most pop-psych books, has sold briskly and made waves on the daytime-TV talk-show circuit. After years of focusing on physical violence, "people now realize that words can be very hurtful," says Goodman, "and couples are coming out of the woodwork talking about this problem."

Just as with physical violence, verbal abuse expresses a need for domination and control-and not surprisingly, most (but not all) practitioners are men. Anyone who wants to run the show can get into the act: employers, teachers and parents as well as couples. As a power play, the war of words can be devastatingly effective; many targets of abuse start to believe the putdowns they hear. Lundy Bancroft, a counselor at Emerge, a Boston program for abusive men, recalls one woman whose husband constantly told her she was fat. When she went shopping, she would try on clothes four sizes too big-and couldn't figure out why they didn't look right.

Mind games:

Men often find it easier to give up physical violence than verbal abuse. "They know they can't get into legal trouble with [verbal attacks]," says social worker Susan Schechter, coauthor with Ann Jones of "When Love Goes Wrong: Strategies for Women With Controlling Partners." But they can still terrify their victims. One woman told Schechter that after her husband stopped his physical violence because he knew it would send him to jail, "in some ways, he got spookier, and I was more frightened. I'd rather he hit me and get it over with than play these mind games for hours. They were worse."