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Whether a person is abusive is a question about a pattern, not an incident — about whether their behavior works, over time, to control another person and narrow that person’s freedom. Shouting is not the test. Losing your temper once, or ten times, is not the test. A single act, however bad, does not settle it, and neither does the fact that somebody is asking.
This page does not absolve anyone and does not accuse anyone. If you have hurt someone, the harm is real and it belongs to you, whatever was done to you first; this page will not soften that. What it offers instead is the question a clinician would ask in place of this one, and why no article can answer it about any particular person.
Does the fact that I’m asking mean anything?
Asking this question is uncommon among people who run a sustained pattern of control — but that is a clinical impression about a group, not a measurement, and not a finding about anybody. Research on convicted offenders shows the opposite response set. Among 2,824 men convicted of domestic assault against a female partner in Shelby County, Tennessee, minimization, denial and victim-blaming were the norm rather than the exception; one in five denied even having argued with his partner during the incident he had just been convicted of (Henning & Holdford, 2006). The movement there is away from responsibility, not toward it.
Two things stop that being proof. A person who has been controlling can ask this too, sometimes in order to be told the answer he wants, and that does happen. And a woman who has never done anything of the kind can arrive here because she was handed the question, repeatedly, by the person she is frightened of. The question travels in both directions, so its presence settles nothing either way.
You may have typed it, deleted it, and typed it again — a person trying to reach a verdict on herself with no assessor in the room. The useful move is not to answer faster. It is to replace the question.
What is the question a clinician would actually ask?
A clinician does not ask was that bad enough to be abuse. A clinician asks what the behavior is doing — whether it sits inside a pattern that produces control over another person, or is something else that happens to be ugly. Severity is not the sorting variable. Function is.
The serious empirical framework here is Michael P. Johnson’s typology, and it is worth getting right because it is usually reported wrong. Intimate terrorism is violence embedded in a general pattern of coercive control — one partner is violent and controlling, the other is not. Violent resistance is the mirror image: the person is violent but not controlling, and the partner is the violent and controlling one. Situational couple violence arises out of specific arguments, where neither person is violent and controlling. Mutual violent control is both (Johnson, 2008).
Johnson’s typology puts a woman who has hit back inside a named category — violent resistance — defined by the absence of control on her side, not by the absence of force. It does not make her a hero: the category names what she did.
Johnson’s typology is contested. Joan Meier of George Washington University Law School argues the data were never designed to measure control, and that family courts use the “situational” label to dismiss substantiated abuse. A useful way to think in a clinical room; not settled science, not a verdict. If the version of this question you carry is about him, that is a different question: whether it is abuse or whether it is his condition.
But I did shout. I did throw the phone. I did say the thing.
The thing you did happened, it was yours, and its effect on the person in front of you was real. No framework on this page deletes that. What the act is not, on its own, is proof of the thing you are afraid of. Mary Ann Dutton and Lisa Goodman describe coercion as a structure: a demand, a credible threat, surveillance to establish whether the demand was met, and occasional delivery of the consequence to keep the threat live (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). That is machinery, and it has to be built and maintained. A person who loses her temper and is ashamed of it has not built anything. A person running that structure knows the schedule.
The other half comes next, because the first half alone would be a script for minimizing and this article is not supplying one. If shouting became the way things get decided in your house, that is different from losing your temper. If the other person has started managing you — choosing moments, softening subjects, going quiet — something is being maintained, whatever it began as, and being provoked first does not unmake it.
There is a way of asking this that makes it answerable and a way that does not. June Price Tangney’s work separates shame, a judgment on the self, from guilt, a judgment on an act — shame-proneness travels with withdrawal and defensiveness, guilt-proneness with repair (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Am I the abusive one is a shame question: about what you are, with no answer that can be checked. What did I do, what did it cost her, what does that require of me is a guilt question, answerable on a Tuesday.
The women who ask this most insistently are the ones who cannot describe the incident without also describing what they did wrong in the ten seconds before it. They hand over the whole ledger unprompted — close to the opposite of minimization, and still not a finding.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours · text START to 88788 · thehotline.org
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
Deaf, DeafBlind and hard-of-hearing callers: National Deaf Domestic Violence Hotline videophone 855-812-1001, 24 hours (a partnership between the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services).
Calling leaves the number in your call log and texting leaves the thread in your messages. Both can be deleted afterwards. If that is not something you can do safely, a friend’s phone or a payphone is the safer route.
What does the research say about women who use force?
The research on women who use force complicates both sides of the argument you have read. In a study of 108 women who had used physical violence against a male partner in the previous six months, Suzanne Swan and David Snow sorted the relationships three ways: 34% where the woman was the victim of the more serious violence, 12% where she was the aggressor, 50% mixed. Almost all had themselves been physically abused by their partners; and while they used more emotional abuse and moderate violence than their partners did, they were more often subjected to sexual violence, injury and coercive control (Swan & Snow, 2002).
Read that carefully, because it does not say what either camp wants. Twelve percent is not nothing. Neither is thirty-four. And the largest group is the one where the honest answer is both, unevenly. A review of 23 studies of women’s motivations found two pervasive themes — anger, and not being able to get a partner’s attention — with self-defense and retaliation also commonly reported and control not a primary motivation (Bair-Merritt et al., 2010). Anger and being unheard, not strategy. Not flattering, and not an accusation either.
“Reactive abuse” is not a clinical term. It appears in no diagnostic manual, has no measurement instrument, and decides the answer inside the phrase: reactive has already ruled that the behavior was a response, which is the thing under examination. The serious term is violent resistance, and a definition can be tested rather than assumed.
Am I codependent, or was I abused?
Codependency is not a diagnosis and never has been. It began in the addiction field as a description of family members of alcoholics, and widened until it covered a great deal of ordinary female behavior, including that of women trying to stay safe. If you found that word first and abuse second — common, because it sits inside a large treatment-marketing apparatus — you were handed an explanation that puts the cause inside you.
The objection to that framing is old, and it came from social work rather than advocacy. Phyllis Frank and Gail Kadison Golden argued the label re-victimizes: “Calling a woman who is living with a batterer a codependent is tantamount to victimizing her again.” The co does the damage, distributing responsibility for one person’s conduct across two (Frank & Golden, 1992). Sandra Anderson’s analysis in Social Work made the structural case: the model ignores the unequal distribution of power, blurs who acted and who responded, and pathologizes traits the culture trains into women (Anderson, 1994).
The clinical point underneath is short. Accommodation under threat describes a situation, not a character. Anticipating a mood, managing another adult’s feelings, going quiet to keep the evening intact — that is what people do inside a contingency they cannot escape, and it appears after the contingency, not before.
The honest other half belongs here too, because this article does not do absolution. Some women do carry relational patterns worth working on, and that work is real. It is not the same claim: you have things to work on and the abuse was a symptom of your character are different sentences, and only one is true regardless of whom you married.
What would a clinician actually look at?
A clinician would set aside the incident you keep replaying and look at four structural things, none about volume. Who is afraid of whom, and about what — fear is the most discriminating variable here, and asymmetric in a way shouting is not. Whose freedom narrowed. Evan Stark calls the core injury a liberty harm: after each round, does one person have fewer opinions she says out loud, fewer people she rings? Whether there is machinery — a demand, a threat, something checking compliance — or only an argument that ended badly. And what came afterwards: repair that costs the person doing it something, or a return to normal temperature that costs nothing.
Fear, freedom, machinery and what came afterwards are how a clinician organizes the material. They are not a scoring instrument, none of them settles anything alone, and — this matters most — they cannot be self-administered by anyone who wants a particular answer. That is not a comment about you; it is true of everybody, and it is why assessment involves a second person who is not inside the situation.
The most useful thing that happens in this conversation is not a conclusion. It is that the question stops being what am I and becomes what happened, in what order, and what did each of us do with it — which can be worked on, week to week. Women arrive wanting a ruling and leave with a sequence.
If this is happening between two people still together and one is afraid of the other, a joint session is the wrong room for it, for mechanical rather than moral reasons.
What this page can tell you, and what it cannot
This page can tell you that abusiveness is assessed on pattern and function rather than severity, what Johnson’s four categories are, and why codependency is a poor explanation for having been abused. This page cannot tell you whether you are abusive. That is an assessment, it requires a person who has met you and heard the whole sequence, and no article can make it — including this one, and including any that told you otherwise. If the aftermath is what troubles you, that is a separate question: whether emotional abuse can cause PTSD.
If you are frightened of your partner, that question is the more urgent one and goes first. If you are worried you have harmed someone, that is worth taking to a clinician rather than carrying alone, and it is workable — anger that has stopped being yours can be given back, so that it comes when something is actually wrong and settles when it is done. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.
Abuse expertise and anger expertise usually sit with different people, and a therapist who holds both takes asking to find — so it is worth having the questions that get you a straight answer about which one you are talking to.
You do not have to have decided anything to start. Not leaving. Not staying. Nothing at all.
SOURCES
- Johnson, M.P. (2008). A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Definitions as stated by the author at Penn State.
- Johnson, M.P., Leone, J.M., & Xu, Y. (2014). Intimate terrorism and situational couple violence in general surveys: Ex-spouses required. Violence Against Women, 20(2), 186–207. doi:10.1177/1077801214521324
- Meier, J.S. Johnson’s Differentiation Theory — Is It Really Empirically Supported? George Washington University Law School. PDF
- Henning, K., & Holdford, R. (2006). Minimization, denial, and victim blaming by batterers: How much does the truth matter? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 33(1), 110–130. Office of Justice Programs, NCJ 212864
- Swan, S.C., & Snow, D.L. (2002). A typology of women’s use of violence in intimate relationships. Violence Against Women, 8(3), 286–319. doi:10.1177/107780120200800302
- Bair-Merritt, M.H., Crowne, S.S., Thompson, D.A., Sibinga, E., Trent, M., & Campbell, J. (2010). Why do women use intimate partner violence? A systematic review of women’s motivations. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 11(4), 178–189. doi:10.1177/1524838010379003
- Dutton, M.A., & Goodman, L.A. (2005). Coercion in intimate partner violence: Toward a new conceptualization. Sex Roles, 52(11–12), 743–756. doi:10.1007/s11199-005-4196-6
- Tangney, J.P., & Dearing, R.L. (2002). Shame and Guilt. New York: Guilford Press. ISBN 9781572309876. Publisher page
- Frank, P.B., & Golden, G.K. (1992). Blaming by naming: Battered women and the epidemic of codependence. Social Work. Full text
- Anderson, S.C. (1994). A critical analysis of the concept of codependency. Social Work, 39(6), 677–685. doi:10.1093/sw/39.6.677
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Educational content. Not therapy, legal, or financial advice. Nothing on this page is an assessment or a diagnosis of any person.