My counseling practice is located in Bethesda, MD - the community with the highest level of education in the United States.
Yet, individuals and couples have come for counseling for “communication issues” – when actually they were living with and/or perpetrating interpersonal abuse!
In some cases, one of the partners is viciously critical. In other cases parenting includes deeply insulting attacks and physical punishment. There was even a situation in which a teen – encouraged to “express his feelings” by his father – was allowed to physically intimidate his mother.
Needless to say, these intelligent, well-educated folks do not take kindly to hearing that they are perpetrating and/or experiencing what is defined as interpersonal abuse!
So here are some categories:
1.
Coercive Controlling:
A combination of intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing, denying/blaming, use of the children against the spouse, asserting male privilege (or with female abusers, using the system against the spouse (false Protection Orders)), economic abuse, coercion and threats of harm.
Individually or in combination these behaviors are intended to assert power over someone else.
2. Interpersonal Abuse and Violence: Intimate partner abuse, adult survivors of child abuse, sexual assault, child abuse, bullying, and elder abuse.
3. Family violence is broader than intimate partner abuse or domestic violence and child abuse, as it includes any violence or abuse that is occurring within a family – between, for example, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents and in-laws.
4. Neglect: The persistent failure to meet the basic physical and/or psychological needs of a person for whom you are caring, such as failing to protect from physical harm or danger, or failure to ensure access to appropriate medical care or treatment. It may also include neglect of, or unresponsiveness to, the other person’s basic emotional needs.
By the way, as I see it, when someone who’s experienced abuse of one kind or another does something about it, he or she is no longer “a victim of abuse.”