5 Books That Changed My Life In 2020
By: Megan Holstein
Tags: Books, Productivity, Self Improvement, Life, Self

The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing by Beverly Engel

“Begin to nurture yourself…Some grew up expecting their romantic partners to give them the nurturing they hungered for, only to be disappointed. But our partners are not our parents, no matter how much we try to make them into parents. No one can make up for the deprivation you experienced, and no one should be expected to.” ― Beverly Engel, The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing

As difficult as it is to find someone to date, it’s even more difficult to keep a healthy and functional relationship. If we consider that half of all US citizens get divorced², that means that half of US marriages are so dysfunctional they must end. Combine that with a trend of falling happiness levels in marriage, and our chances for a happy long-term marriage start to sink.

And that’s for healthy, wealthy people. People with PTSD face a divorce rate of 70%. Disabled people are more likely to suffer divorce. Poor people are less likely to get married but have been divorced more often. For minorities and disadvantaged people, things look bleak.

I have always wanted to have a happy and long marriage. It’s one of the first things I can ever remember wanting. So a big theme of my 2020 reading list was reading about how to have a healthy relationship. There are a lot of good books in this category, like The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work⁰ and Marriage Rules⁰, but The Emotionally Abusive Relationship⁰ was easily my favorite.

What makes The Emotionally Abusive Relationship different is two powerful things:

It teaches us how to identify emotional and verbal abuse from our partners and ourselves. It teaches us how to repair our relationships, whether we’re the abuser or the abused.

So many books about marriage health assume both partners are essentially lovely healthy people who have a few kinks. I’ve found that by the time people pick up a relationship book, they’re already off the deep end, so much of that advice is too meek. But when they do pick these books up, they’re often written only for victims of pretty serious abuse, and they all say the same thing: “Leave your abuser, or you will suffer.”

My big problem with that second kind of book is there’s never any middle ground. It’s just “Break up. Move on.” But you know what? Many people have been emotionally abusive to a partner at one point or another in their life. Hell, most teenage girls are emotionally abusive to their high school boyfriends. (“You didn’t text me back for an hour, and that means you don’t love me!”) Obviously, physical abuse or blatant disregard for your humanity should be a sign to leave. Still, there are many steps between healthy communication and communication so toxic the only thing to do is leave.

The Emotionally Abusive Relationship acknowledges this reality. Engel explains the dynamics of emotionally abusive communication and helps the reader determine whether a relationship is salvageable with a pretty basic set of principles. She also describes the path relationships take on the road to recovery from emotional toxicity, letting the reader know what they’re in for.

Engel also gets into two areas of territory most relationship writers dare not go:

Exploring with the victimized partner how their own attitudes contributed to this pattern. Teaching the perpetrator how to stop.

Most relationship writers dare not venture into this territory for what I imagine to be image issues. The optics of telling a victim their own behavior contributed to a relationship dynamic are terrible. But terrible optics or not, the reality is that many toxic relationships thrive not only because one partner is caustic but also because the other partner tolerates it. If a victim does not acknowledge their own behavior in the cycle, they will end up with one emotional abuser after another.

Another thing with terrible optics is trying to teach abusers how to stop. No one wants to be caught helping an abuser. But for every toxic person out there who is unconcerned and unrepentant, there is one out there who really would like to be better but who can’t get access to the psychological care that would allow them to untangle whatever’s tangled up in their mind. Engel finally writes for the people in this position, giving them a guide to recovering from toxic behavior and what to expect from their partner while they sort out their own issues.

All of these things taken together produce a book that is unlike any other I’ve read about toxic or abusive relationships. If you know your relationship is a mess and can’t figure out why, if you’re single and your last relationship was a hot mess, or if you want to know more about why people get stuck in destructive patterns, The Emotionally Abusive Relationship by Beverly Engel is the book for you.