Customer Reviews

Verbal Abuse: Healing the Hidden Wound

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you are a woman involved with a true verbal abuser depending on this book for help could be hazardous to your health. Make no mistake, counselors can be just as injurious to the victims as the abuser is if they try to apply the typical therapeutic model of "shared responsibility" in a relationship. This doctor consistently simplifies the abusive scenario into a "disagreement" or "power struggle" and encourages the wife (victim) to understand her huband's need to "feel powerful" She writes "If a wife can recognize her husband's vulnerability,her love can help her to protect him rather than counter-attack"!! So the wife should be denigrtaed and humiliated by her husband and than help "fix" him with her love and devotion. This is not a counselor who has workable knowledge of a true abusive personality. True abusers are personality disordered; they operate from a completely different reality than their victims do, and their goal and eventual effect is to destroy the victim's soul. They don't accept responsibility for what they do and they don't apologize. They blame the victim, who already blames herself and has usually turned herself inside out trying to "fix" herself, him and everything she thinks, says and does. She could well die trying and some do. Verbal abuse is insidious and has far reaching effects, emotional,physical and psychological. Trying to "deal" with it, and ultimately, escape from it, are extremely complicated and difficult feats and this author just seems not to "get it" at all.
For meaningful information and help, read the works of Patricia Evans and Beverly Engel and acquaint yourself with the characteristics of the narcisisstic personality.

The author does exactly what the subsequent reviews claim: abuse is minimized into a relationship "disagreement," with the DISASTROUS advice (born of fundamentalist ideology, not meaningful understanding of abuse dynamics) that the victim's role is to soothe the abuser, thus converting the abuser through the process of granting him MORE power and control. This is the kind of logic that would throw more drugs to a drug addict and wondering why he's not getting any better: "But I gave in and gave him everything he wants!" I hope women who need a book on this subject will contact a local women's center or by visiting a national helpsite like www.ncadv.org

I did not find this book helpful at all. It started in the preface, where she urges the reader to turn to a loving Father God for healing.... In my experience, the words loving & father just don't go together -- I realize that she used the mainstream way of referring to God, but it was still kick in the gut. Later in the book, she has examples of people who were rejected & verbally abused by one parent or the other, and they turned out to be gay. The implication is that people become gay because of the rejection or acceptance of a parent -- a theory so ridiculously out of date and preposterous I can't believe it could be stated with a straight face. Her other examples were also either hard to relate to or just unhelpful.

I can see where this book was well-intentioned, and maybe I was biased because of the God language, but it didn't help me any.