In His Own Words Abused Men: Violent Alcoholic Wife Attacks

In His Own Words Abused Men: Violent Alcoholic Wife Attacks is an effort to help raise awareness about the invisible victims of domestic violence: Abused men. Abusive personalities are bad enough when sober. Add alcohol and other drugs to the mix, and it exacerbates their propensity for cruelty and craziness. Sometimes to the point of physical violence.

The gentleman featured in In His Own Words Abused Men: Violent Alcoholic Wife Attacks experienced this firsthand. He didn’t walk on eggshells with his ex; he literally dodged flying beer bottles.

Gabu (not his real name) joined the Shrink4Men Forum a few years ago. because he was at the end of his rope. He was trying to protect himself and his son from his wife’s abuse. He used the forum to both document his wife’s abusive behaviors, and as a means to reality-test in the face of extreme gaslighting, projection, drunken rages, name-calling and physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

I strongly recommend that anyone in an abusive relationship DDD (Document! Document! Document!) and ABR (Always Be Recording) for the same reasons. This is especially important if you’re a man who’s being abused by a woman. You may not be believed — especially by law enforcement and the courts — if you don’t have solid evidence.

In His Own Words Abused Men: Violent Alcoholic Wife Attacks

March 22^nd

Alcohol Abuse

Wife, 12-year old son and I meet my mother and her fiancé for dinner. Once we’re at the restaurant, wife orders a Cosmo “strong.”  I think to myself, “Oh, great,” because of her alcohol problems.

Wife and my mother split a carafe of wine after her Cosmo. Then we go to my mom’s house to share photos of our holiday last month. All is going well until Wife opens another bottle of wine. Soon after, I hear her pushing my mother about selling some property. I mean she just keeps riding her about it. I don’t see why as it’s none of our business.

Finally my mother says, “Well, it’s not my decision, so that’s where we are on this.” Son, mom’s fiancé and I are in the other room. I hear Wife and my mother whispering. It sounds heated. Then the two of them go upstairs. We all follow to make sure they’re okay. It’s also getting late and we have an hour’s drive home.

Drunk Drama Mamas

Wife is staggering around and is in my mother’s face yelling at her. My mother is also visibly intoxicated. They’re both rehashing past incidents when they’ve felt slighted by each other. They’re accusing each other of causing so much pain, how they both have tried to be accepting of one another for my sake, etc.

Wife gets more boisterous. She calls my mom a bitch and other names as my mom’s fiancé, our son and I stand there in disbelief. I let wife go for a bit, as I decided to stop “saving” her when she does this stuff. She’s an adult and can pay the consequences for her actions.

Verbal Abuse

Finally, I get wife to stop and we leave. For most of the ride home she’s belittling me, saying that I chose “Mommy’s side” (not true as I was completely neutral during this).

Once we’re home, Wife goes upstairs and I go to our son’s room. I explain that what happened is a good example of how not to behave. He understands and gets ready for bed, as it’s really late now. Wife enters the kitchen and I go upstairs. I hear our son go down to the kitchen and beg wife to stop drinking.

Child Abuse

It just kills me as she cannot, or will not see what she’s doing to him. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable that must’ve been for him. “Please just do it for me, Mom,” he says. “Please stop drinking.” My heart hurts hearing him say that to her.

No One Sleeps Tonight or the Midnight Feeding Frenzy

Wife comes to bed and asks if I’ll hold her. “No thanks,” I say. Then she starts more of her crap, so I get my pillow and head downstairs to the couch. Five minutes later, she comes out of the bedroom, flips on the lights and tries to get me to go upstairs. I had the blanket over my head, as I knew she would come out and do her classic flip on the lights move.

She sees that she’s not getting anywhere and heads back upstairs leaving the lights on. A few minutes later, she comes back and tries the “nice guy” routine. I don’t respond and she changes tactics — the “bad guy” routine. That’s the one where I ruined her life and she tells me about all the men she’s going to fuck after I’m gone, no one will want me, etc.

Physical Abuse

She transitions back and forth between the two routines a few more times. I continue to ignore her, so she escalates and punches me on the top of my head.

At this point, I’ve had enough, get up, sit her down on the couch and ask her to stop the nonsense. She jumps up and punches me in the head again. I go upstairs, get dressed, pack my overnight bag, grab my work bag and laptop and head for the door.

Blocking Egress

Wife blocks the door and says all kinds of things in a desperate attempt to get me to stay. She loves me. She’s just sick of my mother’s shit. She’ll do anything if I don’t leave. She’ll fuck me if I want, etc. At this point, I’m thinking to myself that she’s already fucked — in the head.

I leave and she grabs onto my coat. I pull away and get in my car. She screams, “I hate you!!!” (the neighbors will love that at 1am) and slams the door. I head to the hotel to get some sleep.

May 9th

I came home asked Wife if she wanted to talk after the most recent fight when she complained I wasn’t “reaching out to [her] enough.” She said nothing, so I went to read the paper in the kitchen. After awhile, she joins me and says she feels inadequate compared to me. I’m good at my job, successful, etc. I say it’s not a competition; our marriage is supposed to be a partnership. She gets miffed and says it is a competition.

Then she says nobody likes me because I’m so obnoxious and sarcastic to everyone. She tells me our son doesn’t like me for the same reasons. Then she says she isn’t sure if she wants to be in this relationship. That she’s been having an emotional affair because I wasn’t close to her. Again, I tell her I can’t feel close to someone who belittles me each time they get upset.

Emasculation

I go to the grocery store. When I return, she says she’s  surprised and hurt that I haven’t reached out to her. I remind her she just told me she’s not sure she wants to be in this relationship, so the onus is on her to make that move. Out of nowhere, she claims that after I go out with my friends I’m horny the next day, and that proves I’m gay.

I tell her that it’s because I had a break from her and forgot what she was like for a little while. She replies that I should go fuck (my best friend). Additionally, I should go fuck my ex-girlfriend (a woman I dated 20+ years ago) because she “knows I want to.” This comment is made immediately after she told me I’m gay.

Throwing Objects

She kicks the footstool at me; I put it back onto its legs. She grabs the glass of micro-brew that I just poured and throws it against the wall. Beer and glass now cover the area where our son plays his Xbox. Very nice.

She makes joking comments about my manhood and penis size, then grabs the glass coffee table and goes to throw it at me. I grab her in self-defense, and push her onto the couch to stop her. She’s drunk again based on her breath and slurring.

I go upstairs, find her stash and dump the bottle of wine and the small bottle of Jack Daniels. When I go to check on her back downstairs, she’s dumping my other 5 microbrews into the sink. Perhaps in retaliation for getting rid of her stash — I don’t know. I watch to make sure she didn’t chug them as she’s done in the past.

Infidelity

Afterward, I go to the basement den to try to relax. She stands at the top of the stairs and, in between other nasty, mean and disgusting comments, confesses that she did cheat on me. It’s said much in the same manner when she initially confessed she had an emotional affair by spending up to 2 hours a day instant messaging a co-worker. Then she went out to the garage to smoke.

Victim Playing

I follow to make sure she doesn’t do anything to my car or overnight bag still in my car from the hotel last night. Nope, all secure. So I head back to the den. She returns to the house and says I broke her toe when I stopped her from throwing our glass coffee table at me earlier and is hobbling around complaining about it. Between her attempt to throw the table and now, there’s no indication her foot was hurt.

Despite her “broken toe” and already being drunk, she goes out to buy more beer for herself. I stay in the basement den to avoid her for the rest of the night. She tries a few more times to try and impress her views on me, which I ignore.

Child Abuse

At one point, she’s going off on how she wanted to be fucked. “Bent over the couch with a thumb up her ass,” she says. Our son’s bedroom door is right next to the basement door, so I’m sure he heard whole thing. At 9pm, I come up from the basement and watch some TV. By 10pm, I try to fall asleep on the couch.

Sleep Deprivation

At 10:15pm, she comes out of our bedroom to use the bathroom and goes back to bed. 10:30pm, she comes back out of the bedroom, flips the lights on, uses the bathroom, comes out, stops, turns the bathroom fan on, leaves the lights on and goes back to bed. She knows the bathroom fan drives me crazy and leaving the light on is also in her top ten list of favorite ways to torture me. I go upstairs and shut them both off.

10:45pm, she’s moaning and complaining loudly. I offer her aspirin. She’s looking for compassion, but I have little because she was fine enough to go out and get beer for herself. I go back downstairs and she starts knocking loudly on the bedroom wall.

I’m afraid her selfish tantrum will wake our son, so I rush upstairs and offer to put a pillow under her foot. She starts ripping me a new one. I look her straight in the eye and tell her that she is indeed filled with pure evil.

Rage On You Crazy BPD

Then, she starts yet another rant accusing me of being gay. Time for the hotel again. She follows me, making these disgusting sounds with her mouth (simulating a blow job). When I turn around to face her, she has a large ceramic sconce in her hand raised over her head ready to throw at me.

I duck into to dining room and put on my coat and shoes. She comes down, sees what I’m doing and yells that I’m wasting more money on a hotel again. She says she’ll stop (the abuse) if I don’t go. I leave and get to the hotel around midnight. Glad that I planned ahead and had an emergency overnight bag with clothes for a couple days in my car while she went out for beer.

*The submissions to In His Own Words Abused Men arrive in all manner of writing style and grammar and punctuation usage. In order to facilitate ease of reading, some require minimal editing and others quite a bit of editing. I also add the headings and subheadings to point out the different forms of abuse. My edits do not change the content of the men’s stories, however.

Post-Script

Gabu’s divorce is almost finished. Toward the end of the marriage, he was able to obtain a protective order against his wife. She was arrested after she tried to push him down a staircase. The criminal trial is still pending. She’s been able to have continued three times now. Unfortunately, she’s been able to completely alienate their son from his father thus far. Which, I suppose isn’t difficult when you have a family judge who doesn’t enforce his own orders.

Thank you Gabu for sharing your story. I truly hope you can undo the damage your abusive ex has done to your son. I also hope the criminal court throws the book at your ex.

Post-Post-Script

Gabu’s son voluntarily removed himself from his mother’s care during his senior year in high school. This occurred after Gabu was finally able to get him into court ordered reunification therapy. His ex was able to delay it for approximately two years. Last time, Gabu checked in with me, his relationship with his son is thriving and he’s doing well in college. He also has very little contact with his mother who’s many issues haven’t improved, but worsened over the years.

Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals with relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. Since 2009, she’s specialized in helping men and women break free of abusive relationships, cope with the stress of ongoing abuse and heal from the trauma. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. If you’d like to work with Dr. Palmatier, please visit the Schedule a Session page or you can email her directly at [email protected].

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