After years of verbal abuse, she found herself sitting, waiting for a doctor to tell her she was depressed.
She sat there for the third hour in the room waiting for the doctor to come back in. Over the last few months, she had experienced shortness of breath, cold sweats, migraines, excessive weight loss, and nausea. Last night, as she was walking the floor and rocking her youngest daughter to sleep, she started to get short of breath again and this time is was accompanied by dizziness. Suddenly she felt like she was going to pass out. She started praying under her breath and was able to finish rocking the baby to sleep and lay her in her bed. That was the last straw. She decided it was time to see a doctor.
Her husband was watching the kids in the waiting room and had been doing so for the past three hours as she sat there and waited for the results of her tests to come back. The doctor finally came back with the results. “Your tests all came back normal. I don’t think there is anything physically wrong with you, but you are sick. My professional opinion is that you are depressed.”
She quickly thanked him for his time, checked out, and returned to the waiting room, where her husband and children were. Her husband asked her what the doctor had said. She briefly told him that she’d rather discuss it in the car. Right now she wanted to get the kids home. They were cranky and restless (rightfully so after three hours), and she wanted to get out of there.
“Really?” her husband shouted. “We’ve been sitting here for three hours, and you didn’t even have the decency to come out and let us know how it was going or anything! The kids were running all over the place crying and whining; we’ve been here for three hours. What did the doctor say?”
She looked around at the faces of the other people in the waiting room as they watched her being screamed at and scolded by her husband. She was embarrassed and outraged, but as usual, she said nothing and headed towards the car.
Once she strapped the children into their car seats and got in the car, the screaming continued all the way home.
“You’re depressed? Really? Well, join the club; I’m depressed too. I’ve been depressed since we got married. I’m depressed every day. I’ve been sitting in the waiting room with the kids for three hours because you’re depressed? Unbelievable. Take me home. I’m going to play golf!”
I remember when I wrote this story in my first book. When I went back to edit it, I remember thinking to myself, wow, my life was so incredibly dysfunctional. I decided to start this article with that story because I know what it’s like to be the one that has been screamed at for so long that you’ve become immune to it. I was yelled and screamed at for so long, I really didn’t think about it. I didn’t think of myself as a victim of verbal abuse. But I later realized that the way you think about your situation, greatly determines just how much you’ll put up with.
Because I had gotten so immune to it, I really wasn’t giving it the proper weight. As I started to see the situation through the eyes of my writing, which allowed me to see it through the eyes of an outsider, I quickly realized that I was indeed being verbally abused. My daughter was listening to their mother be abused day in and day out, and worse, she was seeing her mother not stand up for herself. That made it a lot easier to say enough is enough.
So many times we beat ourselves up about wanting to get a divorce over simple verbal abuse when there are other women who are being physically abused. But the truth is that we deserve better either way. We deserve to be with someone who has so much respect for us, they wouldn’t dare even think about treating us that way. The even harder truth to swallow is that before anyone else can respect us that way, we must respect ourselves and demand that we be treated and spoken to in a much more respectful tone. That may mean that we make counseling an ultimatum, or it may mean divorce. But either way, Rachel Cruz says it best in her book “Smart Money, Smart Kids,” “More is caught, than taught.” If our children see us model low self-esteem and no self-respect, do we really want them catching that from us?
The point is that yes, screaming, yelling, and cursing is verbal abuse. And yes, it is unacceptable in marriage. No matter what issues your spouse may have going on, it is still unacceptable. Until we learn this lesson ourselves, we’ll never be able to teach it to our children. There are two questions that I asked myself just before I made the final decision to leave. One, do I deserve and want better for myself. Two, would I want my daughter in a relationship like the one that I have? If the answers are yes and no respectively then there is only one more question to ask yourself, “What are you going to do about it?”
Related Articles:
I remember the first time I forced my ex to see a marriage counselor, the counselor actually came to our home because my then husband would not go see them. Anyway, after the counseling session the counselor actually recommended I seek an anti-depressant prescription because that was the only thing that would save my marriage. He and his wife both said they didn’t believe I was clinically depressed however with the bumps in our life and the abuse (they didn’t use that word, good christians aren’t capable of abuse) in our marriage, well an anti-depressant would help me cope.
Sad isn’t it? I was in an extremely abusive marriage, it progressed the longer we were married yet even at that time it was abusive and the church’s recommendation was that I seek medication and stay married.
Wow, I’m really sorry to hear that. When I separated from my husband, about 7 months before I did, I also left my church because of some similar issues. My ex and I attended countless marriage counseling session at my former church and the ridiculousness that I was told was just insane. I remember telling one of my young adult groups one time that I love God, but hate church. Of course that is a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea. These days the spiritual church and the physical church as NOT one in the same. Learning to hear God for myself regardless of what church I attend has done wonders in my life and I pray that it’s done the same for you. I wrote a book about my experience at my former church and why I left, called “Throw Her Down” if you’re interested. Thanks for commmenting on the article. God bless you!
I’ve lived the scene you paint in the doctors office many time with my ex. Sadly, I allowed not only myself to be verbally abused for years but also my children. I could take the lashings; compartmentalize it away, but when he lashed out at my kids, it cut to my core. When I intervened, he would accuse me of always taking their side, never his. At the time, I didn’t connect the dots and label it as verbal abuse, but rather grew so accustumed to it that I looked at it as his expected behavior. It was not until going through our divorce process that a light bulb went off in my head and acknowledged that what we experienced all those years was indeed a form of abuse.
Thanks so much for your comment and for sharing your story. I’m glad you’re out of that situation now. I am actually developing a DVD course for people in exactly in the situation we were in, who don’t yet see what’s happening and who are staying in those dysfunctional situations for far too long. I was the same way as you, learned to “cope” with it rather than put a stop to it. It was my realization of what my daughter was seeing that finally caused me to say enough is enough. Divorce sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but a lot of times it is far better than the alternative. I pray that you are in a much much better place now and thanks again for being an inspiration to others by sharing your story.
Lucky me, I got a combination of 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, & 8 with a heavy does of narcissism mixed in for good measure. What a fun experience it has been!