Having suffered years humiliating abuse from my wife, I find that not even allowing for abuse being reversed very sexist....

I am a counselor as well as a survivor of 18 years of domestic violence and abuse. I can tell you and your readers first hand just how much shame there is associated with being involved in domestic violence. Even telling one's family is extremely difficult. There is the constant fear that you will not be believed, especially if the abuser is successful and well liked.

It is difficult for anyone who has never personally experienced DV to imagine how horrendous one feels, whether man or woman, being involved with an abuser. The constant barrage of denegrading verbiage destroys one's self esteem.

My counselor was someone who was also a survivor. I personally feel that the best choice of counselor for this particular dysfunction is one who has personal experience. An abused client can feel free to tell me whatever he or she is experiencing because I have been there. This helps substantially with shame issues because he or she knows - we are the same.

If you are reading this and are a victim of DV please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or on the web at http://www.ndvh.org/.

I went to a therapist who had worked for years in the DV field and who also had an abusive husband. I told her that my long term boyfriend was a former abuser who now used only verbal and psychological abuse. She literally told me that the nice side of him was the real side, and that the nasty side of him was a false side, merely a coping mechanism. She wanted me to ignore the nasty side. She said if I didn't do that, then I would be doomed to go from relationship to relationship expecting perfection. I left her feeling that I had no right to expect him to stop verbally abusing me, that I was asking too much from a mere human being. This was definitely shame-inducing.

Pertaining to this article, my verbally abusive ex boyfriend told me that most therapists are easy to fool, and only rarely was that not possible. I neglected to ask why he had been to several of them, but perhaps him having been married five times so far might have been a clue. His statement was a little disconcerting but in light of this article I can see how a convincingly earnest abuser might mislead a trained observer.

Thank you for this discussion.

My partner's therapist happened to be a much better support than my own, with her years of experience and with income differentials in our relationship. Yet the therapist's philosophy (even in the face of a pattern by her client of eventually stigmatizing and jettisoning her partners) was that "Everyone is an expert in her own experience." Initially, my partner was receptive to couples counseling, but only when the going was easy. After that, it was never acceptable in the company of her own therapist, only mine, who was less experience. You can guess how this story ended: Quite abruptly, and without much personal revelation or dialogue, the bond we had built was severed. "As far as I'm concerned, we're done as a couple," I was cuttingly informed.

Of course, when it fell apart, I was confused. There was no means to even restart the serious dialogue we had promised to each other at the outset.

All of this, I think, is independent of the issues that we each have as individuals, as I made several mistakes in the relationship too, of course -- Yet they were misreadings of a complicated woman, not sins.

So, this is a tricky situation. Therapists don't necessarily have the sway to convince their own clients to reassess fully.

They DO have an obligation as professionals to probe more deeply to understand the balance of power in a relationship -- and I see no reliable methodology for figuring that out in individualized therapy. Do you know of one?

If you sensed you were going down for the count in a relationship -- even when all the therapeutic support and opportunities for dialogue were in place -- how could you address this?

I have to wonder if Steven Stosny is simply too lazy to read the literature on female-perpetrated intimate partner violence or if he is just another of Psychology Today's anti-male bigots who justifies his prejudice on the grounds that 'men do more harm'.

I am sorry that you were abused. The system does need to be more responsive to male calls for help. Most police jurisdictions will arrest the party without the mark or evidence of abuse. Our DV classes are about 35% female abusers.

“Trapped by fear” means threatened with physical harm if the victim leaves. The most serious violence occurs under those conditions. Although you have certainly suffered, you have the power to heal yourself. The fear-based victim always has the threat of retaliation for leaving.

Please cite the studies you mentioned.

The very quality that makes therapists effective in helping with mental health and adjustment issues impairs them in dealing with abuse: the ability to accept and validate their clients, which requires believing their accounts of their lives.

Therapists who see emotional problems as an intrapsychic and rely on dogma for treatment are the most dangerous in abusive relationships. Those who see emotional problems as social phenomena with a great many aspects are more likely to urge their clients to see other people’s perspectives as well as clarifying their own.

As for power imbalance, the quickest indicator is ego-protection. The fragile ego is the most aggressive and most likely to substitute power for value.

I'm sure this article is absolutely true, as far as it goes. The great irony is that many partners of abusers worry whether they could be the "real" abuser instead--and what they could be doing wrong to "make" their spouse so mad at them all the time! Meanwhile, abusers imagine they're the victims! That perception is their reason for getting mad and abusing their partner.

What needs watching, as others have said above, is that all this is just as true when the sexes are reversed. If an abusive male makes his wife sound like "Mrs. Bates," an abusive female can just as easily make her own spouse out to be some kind of monster. Abusers are adept at projecting their own faults onto their partners. One of many examples was the husband-murderer Larissa Schuster, who told friends her husband was "controlling" and other complaints. One friend testified that this amazed them. It sounded nothing like the husband they knew... but what Schuster was telling them was an exact description of herself!

So it's wise to be duly cautious about some people's allegations of being abused. The flip side of the article's reference to borderline personality disorder can be found, for instance, in the amazon.com review of Patricia Evans's book "Controlling People" dated July 20, 2003. There a man relates how his wife consulted a self-styled "expert" on abusive relationships, who declared without hesitation--and without ever seeing the man--that her husband must be "abusing" her. As he explained in that review, this "expert" didn't know a thing about his wife's history of crazy behavior, of how she'd been diagnosed by professionals with more than one personality disorder, and dozens of counselors couldn't do a thing with her. She pulled the wool clean over that "expert's" eyes.

I can personally recall more than one woman who claimed her husband was "abusive," yet her own attitude and obvious anger problems demonstrated that she herself must be a difficult, not to mention controlling, person to live with. At the very least many couples are as bad as one another. One woman, after finally being ditched by the boyfriend she kept complaining about, physically assaulted his new girlfriend in the street and tore her hair out in handfuls! With a vile temper like that, no wonder the guy dumped her. She was downright dangerous!

Another woman, while giving very few details of his actual behavior, claimed her ex-husband had been a "narcissist," and constantly discussed the way "men abuse women." Yet her own behavior was almost clinically narcissistic. Among other things, the whole world had to be about her and her "issues," and anyone who thought otherwise was "offending" her! These and other behaviors (including what I saw her wrongly projecting onto others) led me to conclude she'd been the real "narcissist" in her marriage--and her husband could well have been a blameless victim. With some people it pays to be skeptical.

Although I read this blog to help myself in my own emotionally abusive relationship (thank you!), I think it's relevant to point out on this thread a male friend of mine who was married to a female Tai Kwon Do champion. After suffering several broken bones over the course of their marriage, seeing his young son physically and mentally abused, he finally pushed her away from him (knocking her down) and left her. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but he spent time in jail for domestic abuse and was the one to land in anger management classes. This is one man who did live in fear for his physical safety when in his wife's presence.

I know his story is rare, but I feel its important to tell his story.

I have seen similar cases in my work with the military where the wives are trained combatants. It is a terrible condition for those men. But I still haven't seen one where the male victim was trapped in the relationship by fear of harm. Part of the reason is that men have a much higher threshold of fear activation and a much lower threshold of shame activation, in the form of dread of failure as provider, protector, lover, or parent.

The point is not that there are no male victims or that male victimhood is not reprehensible, but that abuse of males, like parents who are abused by their children, does not constitute the same threat to society as abuse of women and children.

A society has to protect all its members, but most especially its most vulnerable.