Jealousy and control

[elvistal7]

Firstly, I hope you don't think I'm being patronising, but really well done. So many people stick around even if they see the early signs mainly because of fear of loneliness or lack of self worth. Self worth is taught to us mainly by our caregivers (parents, adopted parents, foster parents, ...etc.), to a lesser extent by our environment. The reason why women, and men, accept being physically or mentally bullied by their partners is because most of us witness parents who were not in love. In other words, they were ok with living with someone that they knew did not love, respect, or admire them. They may have got on with it and did their jobs as parents as best they could, but that is not love, that is being a work colleague. Demonstrating to children that its ok to live with someone who's company you don't enjoy is how low self worth is taught. If I see my mum or dad smiling and being happy with friends, but then the minute these friends leave and my parents are left alone, the smiles go, the mood changes and it becomes a functional thing, then I will learn that its ok to be at home physically, but mentally I wish I was somewhere else. This is a very dangerous thing to learn, this is what leads to accepting mental or physical bullying and violence.

Therefore never accept, never suffer in silence and more importantly, if you suspect that a friend or loved one may be suffering, get to the bottom of it. Do it not just for your sake or your friend's sake, do it for the children's sake. We need to break this cycle of tolerating lovelessness so our future kids have far more self worth and domestic violence becomes a thing of the past.

[Leigh72]

[quote="get1"]hi, just read this. i'm in two minds about it. i have a couple of characteristics as noted in the first post, impatience at replies and fell very quickly for my girlfriend (i think that was because we were friendly/close before we got together. does this make me violent or controlling, i think not. i would never stop c doing anything or seeing her friends etc etc. i have never raised a hand to anyone nor psychologicaly abused c or anyone else for that matter.
oh and i do shout when i lose my temper. does this make me a control freak? i think not.
just a wee bit of sweeping generalisations going on.[/quote]

Not a sweeping generalisation at all, the OP said that not all traits were necessarily present. However, you admit to a couple of things that you could do to be mindful of in future. Impatience at replies - people are sometimes busy or just plain don't feel like talking, sure it can be disappointing when your partner takes a while to respond, but that's your problem to deal with, not hers. Shouting when losing your temper - that's a loss of self control. Do you shout at your partner when you lose your temper? That is a form of emotional abuse. Nobody deserves to be shouted at, if you feel that you're getting angry, then you should walk away from the situation and revisit when you've calmed down.

As a form of qualifying what I'm saying, I work with domestic abuse - offering support to victims and running a prevention programme for perpetrators and I see a lot of guys saying similar things to you and taking offence at being labelled an abuser. Fact is, we're all capable of it and it's not always intentional - particularly emotional abuse.

[bestgirl]

First of all, can we leave the gender bit out and just talk about people here? These are behaviours that both genders are capable of.

Secondly, I agree with the quoted post. There are a lot of generalisations here: shouting during an argument is not abusive. There is such thing as strength of opinion and I, who am definitely not abusive, and may be suffering emotional and verbal abuse myself, am happy to admit that during heated arguments I have shouted out of frustration. I have never done anything to make my partner fear me (physical, throwing things), and I have not shouted to cause harm to my partner, but because I ffelt frustrated at not feeling heard.

If shouted were to be banned, the whole human population would be guilty, so I'm sorry, but these are generalisations.

Humans are not perfect machines, and they sometimes have a bit of a temper. As long as this is moderate, it's natural and normal.

[stephie2]

In an argument you raise your voice and probably say things you don't mean to hurt the other. At no point should either person feel scared of getting hit. Violence is never ok.