Any male victims from female abuse?
I was talking to a dear friend of mine who told me years ago how he has been physically abused by his wife and how hard it was for him to share this, because so few people believed his story. Or laughed when he dared to share. Yesterday we talked about how hidden these stories are. He believes it is a lot more prevalent than it seems. People are just to ashamed to share or afraid they won’t be believed.
I recognised his trouble. I was abused by my mother for years, physically and mentally, after she separated from my dad (who she abused as well). In my life I have shared this story to only a handful of people, often being disappointed by their reactions.
What made this especially difficult was how my mom managed to convince me and the people around my family that my dad was actually the aggressor. ‘Woman gets beat up by man’ is just a lot more believable.
In hindsight, it feels like such a twisted dynamic, where my mom as a female abuser used the stories of actual female victims to hide or defend her own abuse.
Of course I do not in any way want to diminish the aggression that women experience. It is a lot more prevalent, and this issue needs all the attention it can get.
I was just wondering if there are any other men here who are victims from female abusers and if you recognise the difficulty in sharing your story as well.
Yes. I can't yet talk about it, even with my therapist, but yes.
I get it. I send you all the strength and kindness I have. You’re not alone.
Far more prevalent than thought, absolutely.
If you take a quick read on the Wikipedia of Domestic violence against men, it both incredibly under reported (roughly a fifth or more compared to women who report), and much more prevalent than thought with about a 1/10th to a full fifth of all men being on the receiving end of domestic violence in their life.
Police are less likely to believe men being abused, doctors as well, and the societal conformity demeans them even more so if they talk openly about it as they continue to receive societal effects of the physical abuse ensuring that less and less people willingly talk about it.
Thank you for sharing. Awful stats and yet somehow in a strange way comforting to know.
Not me, but a friend of mine was heavily physically and emotionally abused by his mother and it eventually drove him to attempt suicide. He was without oxygen for a significant period of time and he is permanently affected by it. His mother was eventually, several years later, involuntarily committed for a couple decades.
My grandmother is a very typical covert narcissist who only ever had enough power over me to teach me how not to fall into her mind games, thankfully. But I did have a few dark nights when I was little.
In grade school, I had multiple teachers who proudly came out of the SCUMier side of radical feminism. The scrutiny on boys was intense, the bias placed front and center along the lines of "women and girls are the responsible ones, and boys and men shouldn't be allowed to make decisions, they're only good at destroying things". Both my parents having raised me feminist, and being a kid who struggled with injustice, the relationships I developed with them were adversarial at best. I can't in good faith attribute all the blame to their treatment, but I have four or five years of lost memories that coincide with the start of their 'tutelage', so I don't know exactly what I went through either.
Finally, just to round it out, I had a romantic relationship in my teen years that heavily featured her threatening my life, and her own, meant I was on-call to talk her through her eating disorder while trying to cope with my own, was choked and challenged to fight back numerous times, and when it was all over, she (falsely, I should say) accused me of physical abuse and rape. A few years later she called and apologized for it all, but especially for the accusation. I believe she meant it, because nobody chooses to act like she did, and wish her the best, but it took years for me to recover from her abuse.
To anyone who has been trapped in cycles of abuse: there are peaceful waters, we just have to tread deliberately. You deserve to find them.
Thank you for sharing. Triggers all kinds of memories. The way my mom spoke about men was horrific. I hated myself and distrusted myself so hard for being male. Even now, it still makes me so vigilant for other people’s boundaries in a way that often makes me forget I have boundaries too.
I remember that during the abuse I had this one line I kept repeating in my head that got me through. ‘It ends with me.’ Even at a young age, I was very aware of the intergenerational dimensions of abuse, probably because my mother kept repeating how she had always been a victim. That sentence, ‘it ends with me’, gave me the strength to keep looking for the peaceful waters as you so aptly call them. I found them, more or less. Even though I still struggle to accept how I will always carry this history with me.
(And the accusations my mother and sister directed at me when I dared to speak of the abuse at a later age, are probably the biggest scar.)
Holy shit, I'm just now recontextualizing the behavior of a couple of teachers I had as a kid...
My ex was verbally and emotionally abused by his ex for years. He ended up getting back together with her after we broke up. I really hope she has changed.
I know this isn't really the point of this discussion, but I'm a female victim of female abuse. Due to my upbringing (with a homophobic/transphobic parent), I have a lot of shame about it and it makes my life a living hell sometimes. My parents are still friendly to my abuser and go out of their way to tell me about their interactions with her/her family because they don't take my aversion to them seriously and find my squirming entertaining. I have only barely touched the topic in previous therapy and shared a couple things with my husband, but it's like the one thing in my life that I don't talk about and could not be pried out of me.
First of all I’m sorry for limiting this topic needlessly to male victims of female abuse. By reading your perspective it dawned on me how insensitive that framing is. Thanks for taking the time to reply anyway. I’m glad it didn’t hold you back.
When reading how your family reacts to your ex, it just hurts me to see how the burden of proof is placed excessively on you as the victim. To me, it would be enough for someone I love to say they feel discomfort with me keeping in touch with someone like an ex, for me to take notice and act accordingly. It just baffles me how hard you are pushed as a victim to share harrowing stories in order to be respected. (And even when you do share, you rarely are respected.)
I wish you all the best. You’re not alone.
For clarity - my relationship with my abuser actually wasn't even a romantic one, but a "friendship" I felt I didn't have the power to leave, and the situation was exacerbated by little physical distance (and I was a minor at the time, so I didn't have the power to remove myself from the situation). This kind of adds to the shame factor for me, because my family just doesn't even make an effort to understand and seems to think we had a one-sided (my side) falling out and seem to find weird joy in bringing her up to me. At this point I hang up on them if they insist on telling me about her. They can find someone else to entertain their gossip.
I'm sure there are a lot more weird stories out there like mine than we hear about. Thank you for bringing up space to talk about it.
It wasn't insensitive. It's okay to look for people like you. It would be insensitive to shut out someone trying to contribute because it's not 100% what you asked for. But you didn't do that. You were just looking for people to relate to. That is okay.
I was in a toxic relationship for three years and a half where she abused me both physically and mentally. I struggle to explain the shame and the pain that comes with it. She was physically smaller than me, younger than me, but she made my life hell for a long while.
The worst part in all of that is that I was staying because I loved her. Because I wanted her to change.
When her social worker warned me that my life was in danger, I should've listened. It took me almost getting stabbed to wake up. It's a terrible wheel.