A healing experience
by - Written: Mar 30 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very helpful if you have been in a verbally-abusive relationship
Cons: Contents can be overgeneralized to include remarks made in an argument
The Bottom Line: It's helpful for those who have actually been victimized. However, be very careful to whom one recommends this book.
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| Kidnykid's Full Review: Patricia Evans - The Verbally Abusive Relationship... |
THE VERBALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP was a book I saw myself in, in every page. I happen to have been in a relationship with a verbal and emotional abuser - who still finds ways to attempt to abuse and denigrate me on any number of websites operated by him - and the descriptions of abusers in this book fit him to a T.
First of all, emotional and verbal abusers wait until they are alone with you, as my former boyfriend did, before they start in on you. Because verbal abusers are universally skilled at putting on a great public front, you will wish to read this book if you need to have the abuser's influence counteracted. The abuser will indeed make certain, otherwise, that you feel as if you are being "gaslighted" or made crazy - the abuser acts one way in public (generally like someone's dream date or whatever) and another in private (generally the exact opposite of the way the abuser acts in public - hostile, discounting, and in other abusive ways).
Secondly, Patricia Evans does indeed go into all the forms of abuse my former boyfriend uses on me and then some. She uses as little psychobabble as possible in order to reach the widest possible audience - if she didn't avoid the psychobabble, she'd lose the very people she needs to reach.
That can be a problem, in a way. There are those out there that will see abuse under every rock, which is actually their problem and not the problem of the person talking to them. This book is not for them.
Also, keep in mind that in my opinion, Evans does not cover every type of verbal abuse, and therefore, those who read this book (liberating as it is) might feel forced to fit an abuser's behavior into one of the categories she lists even though it is not a neat fit into one of the categories.
Also, because Evans' clinical experience is with abused women, she does not talk about female abusers or abused men. This is, as I said, a function of her clinical experience - in her second book, only one percent of the responses to her survey came from abused men rather than abused women, so she does not have the experience in either this or her second book to address abused men's concerns. This has been seen, falsely, as sexism on her part. I know of nobody that would criticize a cardiologist for refusing to speak about how to manage dialysis patients' dialysis treatments or for refusing to prescribe eyeglasses for his patients due to a lack of expertise in these fields, but Evans has taken criticism for being sexist when the truth is that she does not have the clinical expertise to deal with abused men and says so in her second book.
Having said that, however, I know how much I was helped by reading this book. I recommend it to others, as long as those others do not have the problem called "medical students' disease" - diagnosing oneself as, in this instance, being a victim of abuse when the real problem is that one is paranoid or has some other problem which causes one to see oneself falsely as being abused or having some other health problem.
Recommended:
Yes
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