Where Is The Line Between Sucky Relationship Behavior... And Abuse?

And What To Do When You're Both Saying "You’re The Abusive One”

Let's get right into it. Today we're doing a Dear Dr. Marina, where I answer longer form reader questions. This one is complex, so settle in.

Dear Dr. Marina...Most of your posts have a caveat stating something like “not applicable to situations with abuse”—but can you clarify on how to better identify and differentiate what counts as “abuse” vs certainly not healthy but more commonplace negative behaviors? There seems to be so many behaviors that qualify as “abuse” when held up to the broad definition and range of abusive behaviors but labeling them as abusive immediately makes one person the victim and the other the abuser which simply isn't accurate or tells the whole story.

And related, what would you advise when one partner and their therapist have labeled your behavior as abusive (and again, by broad strokes it would qualify—yelling, name calling, etc) but who refuse to acknowledge that any of their behavior would also qualify as abuse when held under a microscope? (Emotional neglect/dismissiveness, ridicule/mocking, etc).

It seems like “abuse” has become the new “toxic” and it’s now applied to everything which doesn’t seem helpful or productive when trying to address negative dynamics

I get a variation of this question very often, maybe even daily. It's so pervasive that I actually made a whole (free!) course to address it. If you're in the same boat as this reader, wondering about where exactly the line is and what all this abuse talk even means, please go check out Red Flags and Red Lines: Understanding High Conflict vs. Abuse. You'll get video modules where I walk you through the difference between aggressive, negative, unacceptable behavior that happens in the context of a mutual non-abusive dynamic and coercive, controlling, autonomy-limiting behavior that creates a context of abuse.

I'm not going to reiterate everything in the course here, because...well, I made a whole course about it! Did I mention that it's free?

But I do have some extra stuff to say about this reader's question.

So, let's dive in.