It starts as an argument about something small. The bins, the in-laws, who forgot what. Then somewhere in the middle of it his face changes and out it comes. Selfish. Pathetic. Crazy. Bitch. Maybe worse. And the argument is over, because there is no argument any more, there is just you standing in the kitchen with a word in your chest that you are going to hear again at three in the morning.
Then he goes quiet, or he says sorry, or he says you made him do it. And you are left holding two questions you cannot put down. Is this normal? And is this abuse?
I am going to answer both. But I want to be honest with you about where I am answering from, because I am not answering from a textbook.
I have been the name-caller
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My wife has a name for me when I get like this. Mr. Blamey Pants. I come in the door already stung about something, I do not feel considered, and instead of saying that I criticise her for being inconsiderate. When that lands and hurts her, and she lets me know what a terrible person I am, I do not soften. I react. I call her a name. Mr. Selfish Pants, or something with more edge on it.
I am a couples therapist. I have done this work for twenty years. I still do this. And I still hate it afterwards. There is a heavy feeling that sits in me for hours after I have been cruel with my mouth, and I know exactly where I learned it, because my mother and I did our anger in verbally dramatic arguments that usually ended with one of us racing for the upstairs bathroom.
So when I tell you what is happening in your husband, I am not making excuses for him. I am telling you what it is like from the inside of the man who does it.
There are no angry people
Here is the thing I say most often in my office. There are no angry people in the world. There are just people who look angry when they are really, really hurting inside.
Your husband, in the moment he calls you a name, is not powerful. He is the opposite of powerful. Something in the fight got under his skin, into the place where he feels not good enough, and the pain of that is so big that his nervous system does the fastest thing it knows to get the pain off him and onto you. A word. A cruel one. It works, too. For about a second, he is not the one hurting. You are.
That is what name-calling is. It is not a considered opinion of you. It is a shield. Attack Other, in the language of shame research. If I push you away hard enough, you cannot see how vulnerable I actually am right now.
I want you to hear that carefully, because it is going to change what you do next.
Why something so small produces something so vicious
You will have noticed that the name never matches the size of the argument. It was about the dishwasher. How did we get to pathetic?
Shame is why. When something interrupts a good feeling between two people, that interruption on its own is small. Two units of pain, say. But none of us feel it on its own. It goes back through every old memory of being made to feel bad about ourselves, and if there are two hundred units of remembered pain back there, the two gets multiplied. Two becomes four hundred. That is the weight he is actually feeling when he turns on you. And nobody wants to sit in four hundred units of shame, so he does not. He hands it to you.
And his organism is millions of years old. It does not matter how carefully you phrased the thing about the dishwasher. If underneath it was any flavour of you are letting me down, he could smell it from a mile away, and because you are the most important person in his world, it was not a comment. It was a threat.
The dance you are both in
I call this the Waltz of Pain. One of you is hurting, and out of that hurt says the other one is the bad guy. That hurts the other one, who says, thanks for telling me I am the bad guy, you bad guy. Ten minutes later two people who love each other are saying things to each other they would never say to a stranger.
Couples come into my office swearing they are not blaming and criticising each other. Give them ten minutes on the couch on their own and it is fuck you across the room. Every one of them. Not because they are bad people. Because the cycle has a life of its own and it is stronger than either of them.
So the question is not really, why does my husband call me names. It is, what are the two of us doing to each other that ends with him there.
Now the line. Because there is one.
I have just spent several paragraphs telling you name-calling is a pain reaction, and I mean it. But I am not going to leave you without the line, because some of you reading this are on the wrong side of it and need to know.
Cycle cruelty looks like this. It happens in the fight, on both sides in some form, and afterwards he feels bad about it. He may be terrible at saying so, but he is not proud of it. It is not aimed at your kids. It is not used to control what you do, who you see, or what you spend.
Abuse looks like this, and I say this in the room exactly the same way every time. Violence. Threats of violence. Blocking your exit. Using his voice in a way that frightens you. Controlling money, controlling your body, controlling who you can talk to. Those are not cycle. Those are not acceptable under any circumstances, and I would not do couples work with a couple where they are present, because it is not safe to study a system while one person in it is not safe.
If you read that list and felt your stomach drop, stop reading this article and talk to someone who does this for a living, today. The rest of this is not for you yet.
If you read that list and thought, no, it is not that, it is the words, and then he is horrible to himself for a day, then keep going. You are in a bad cycle with a hurting man, and that can change. If it is volume rather than words, I wrote about that separately.
What to do in the moment
Nothing you say while he is in it will land. His reptilian brain has the wheel. So the job in the moment is small. Do not take the word as the final word. The tough line is the protector. The sad music is underneath. You do not have to agree with the word, and you certainly do not have to accept it. You just have to not swallow it as the truth about you.
If you can, say one thing and leave the room. Something like, I am not going to be called that. I am going to step out and I will come back. Not a threat. A pause. Then actually come back.
What to say tonight
Later. When it is quiet and he is himself again. Not to win, and not to prosecute. You are going to do the one thing that gets under his protector, which is to ask about the hurt instead of the word.
Something like: When you called me that today, something must have really hurt you. What was it?
He may not know. He may say nothing. He may say you started it. Say it again another night. What you are doing is showing his nervous system that there is a way to be in pain with you that does not require a weapon. When that lands, and it does land, the name loses its job.
And then, separately, on a different night, the impact. Not why did you do it, which is his to work out. Just: when you call me that, it goes in like a broken bone and it is still there the next morning. That is all. Impact, not intention. If he is any way healthy underneath, that will hurt him more than any punishment you could give him, and that hurt is what changes behaviour. Scolding never has. Not once, in twenty years, in my office or my own kitchen.
The one story you both fit inside
The way out of this is not one of you winning. It is the two of you going from two separate suffering bubbles, where I feel terrible and you did it to me and you feel terrible and I did it to you, into one shared bubble. Would you look at what we are doing. We are both hurting because we are so important to each other.
That is the whole of couples therapy, really. It is just that it is nearly impossible to do from inside the fight, which is why people pay me to sit in the room.
If you want help with the words for tonight, that is what I built Figlet for. Tell it what he called you and what you said back. It will show you the cycle you are both in and give you the one line that reaches under the name instead of answering it.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
