hen Chaim got married 15 years ago, he never anticipated that his wedded bliss would degenerate into a nightmare. “For the first few years everything was more or less okay, although my wife Naomi never wanted to participate in any family gatherings on my side of the family,” he says. “My siblings tried to welcome her, but she never seemed interested. My sister thinks Naomi was intimidated by us. The result was, I was prevented from participating much in family events.”

Chaim wanted to make his marriage work even when his wife was difficult, especially because they had children right away. The first few arrived in rapid succession, and the third had some developmental issues. Chaim was learning in kollel, and money became very tight. “Maybe it was the stress of lots of kids so fast, plus Naomi working so hard, and us never having enough money that made everything start to unravel,” he speculates. “She was also a perfectionist who always wanted our Shabbos meals to be fancy and the house just so.”

After several years of this stress, Naomi started becoming extremely demanding. By then Chaim had dropped afternoon seder and begun working in a local grocery store to make ends meet. Since Chaim had a break between morning seder and going to work, Naomi used to leave him a long list of things she wanted done: shopping, housework, paperwork for their daughter’s special programs, forms for government assistance programs (because of their low income).

“If I didn’t manage to do everything she wanted me to, oy vey!” Chaim relates. “She’d start screaming so loud our neighbors used to hear, which was a terrible chillul Hashem. Or she’d punish me by saying I wasn’t allowed to touch the supper she’d made, and if I tried to take a pot to make myself something, she’d scream that I wasn’t allowed to touch her pots. Very often I’d go to bed hungry to avoid making more of a scene in front of the kids.”

Chaim was increasingly miserable as the years went on, but he felt responsible for his six children. How could I leave my kids with a crazy woman? he thought. How would the children find shidduchim if their parents divorced? But Naomi’s mental health only seemed to deteriorate.

Naomi’s sleeping habits became very erratic; she’d be up all night obsessing about her terrible life, lack of money, and stress. She expected Chaim to keep her company all night long. “When my eyes began closing of their own accord, she’d pour water on me to wake me up, then laugh at my reaction,” Chaim says. “One night she threw my tallis bag clear across the living room.

“She stopped caring who saw her behavior. Once she came into the store where I worked and began throwing cans of food at me. Someone called Hatzolah, but she ran away, and when one of the men approached her and tried to convince her to come with him, she refused.”

At this point, Chaim says, “I felt like a shell of a person, a dog on a leash. I’d lost my self-esteem, all my joy in life; all I could do was shlep from one day to the next, walking on eggshells. I was constantly assaulted with false accusations, and Naomi was clever and manipulative enough so that nobody except my rav believed how much I was suffering. The kids were confused; she’d say to them, ‘Look what Daddy did to me! He made me this big bruise!’ — but the kids didn’t see any bruise where she pointed.”

Naomi became increasingly violent — hitting and slapping, throwing things at Chaim. Later she took to locking herself in her room and banging her head against the floor until she created bruises. One day she took pictures of her bruised face and showed them to the police. They arrested Chaim, refusing to listen to his protestations, and he spent the night in central booking. “It was the most horrible, degrading night of my life,” he says.

His therapist and his rav advised Chaim to get out of the marriage. He finally moved to his parents’ home. “I’m still traumatized,” he admits. “I even still feel scared of my wife, that she’ll try to kill me or something. I lock the front door and my bedroom door at night. But despite my fears, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in years. When I come home from work, nobody is screaming at me, throwing things, or setting the police on me.”

A Hidden Scourge

Domestic abuse usually conjures forth images of a brutal, raging husband terrorizing his wife and children. Community organizations have worked hard to ensure that women who are physically and emotionally abused by their husbands have recourse to legal protections, social support, and shelter for themselves and their children.

But since women are generally physically smaller and weaker, it’s difficult to imagine a wife inflicting damage on her husband or controlling or dominating him. Aggression is so widely believed to be a male problem that there’s not even much scientific research about women and aggression or women and criminal behavior.

“We’ve historically defined power as male power,” says psychotherapist Hillel Sternstein, LCSW. “But women have power too, they can also be abusive.”

Philip Cook, author of Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence, writes, “Male victims find themselves in the same position women were in 30 years ago. Their problem is viewed as of little consequence, or they are to blame, and there are few available resources for male victims.”
Domestic abuse by women occurs far more often than we might think, according to statistics. Professor Murray Strauss of the University of New Hampshire has compiled evidence showing that the rates of initiating violence are equal between men and women, leading him to conclude that researchers have been blinded by a “selective inattention” to violence against men.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four women will be the victim of domestic violence, but one in seven men will be a victim. When it comes to serious injuries due to domestic violence, the rate of men and women inflicting the wounds is about the same, around 2 million cases yearly per gender.

Philip Cook writes, “Hundreds of scientific studies support what every experienced law-enforcement officer knows: Half the time, [domestic violence] is a case of mutual combat; a quarter of the time only the woman is violent; a quarter of the time only the man is. Women strike first in some manner half the time, which of course greatly increases her chances of being hurt in return.”

Defining abuse, which can be emotional as well as physical, can be murky. Does constant henpecking qualify as abuse, or merely signal a dysfunctional relationship? Hillel Sternstein points out there’s a difference between occasional, episodic violence — moments where a woman “loses it” and attacks her spouse in frustration — and ongoing, more methodical kinds of control and domination.

While men are stronger, women often compensate by using weapons; the old comic-strip image of a wife menacing her husband with an iron skillet is not far off the mark in some cases. Sharron Russ, the director of the hotline for Shalom Task Force (an agency that assists families with troubled home situations), remembers a man whose wife would assault him with a heavy pan when he went to sleep. “He was terrified to sleep in his own house,” she says.

Abuse can also take the form of manipulative behavior and false accusations. Rabbi Benzion Twerski, a psychologist, is deeply concerned by the growth of false accusations in the frum community. Now on his fourth cycle of training community rabbanim and askanim in dealing with shalom bayis problems, he has begun advising a healthy skepticism vis-à-vis abuse reports, because some abusive women seek to frame their husbands. “One woman, who clearly had psychiatric problems, had surgery on her head for seizures,” he relates. “She waited a couple days for the bruises from the surgery to look ugly, then called the police Erev Shabbos, showed them the bruises under her sheitel, and told them her husband had beaten her.

“The husband was summarily handcuffed and brought to central booking, but since by then it was Shabbos, he couldn’t even call anyone!”

The Progression of Abuse

Victims of abuse may not initially perceive it as such, says Dan, a therapist in private practice (who prefers that his clients not identify him in this article). “A slap or poke may not be identified as abuse at first, especially if it’s from a person who’s weaker,” he says. “A man might react with confusion, even shock, he won’t initially see himself as a victim.” One of his clients, a large, strong man, used to get screamed at by his wife and poked hard in the chest. “He was terrified of her!” he says.

There’s no standard profile for an abused husband, says Meir Rizel, LMHC, the director of men’s education at Shalom Task Force. “Some people think abused men must be wimps. But it’s not true, in the same way that strong, capable women sometimes end up in abusive marriages. I’ve treated men in the military who shared stories about military friends who were beaten by their wives. Women may be weaker, but they’ll use implements to even out the strength differential. And today, when many women earn more money than men, women can control men financially.”
Abuse usually starts out small, Rizel says, like a woman who orders her husband never to call his parents when she’s around. “You can imagine how much worse that would sound if a husband told his wife not to call her parents,” he says. “But what should the husband do? He doesn’t want to be the bad guy, he doesn’t want to come off as a brute, so he complies.”

Some men fight back, but many have deeply ingrained inhibitions about striking a woman, displaying other forms of aggression, or brawling in front of children. A man with low self-esteem may buy into the idea that he is somehow to blame and deserves punishment. “There are people who believe their spouse is their bashert, and they just have to accept her,” says Sternstein. “Some think they’ll eventually be able to change the spouse. Or they reason that divorce is worse than a bad marriage, either for themselves or for the kids.

“In our society, being a victim gives a woman a certain status, but that’s not true of men. Research on victimization shows that while people show sympathy for an abused woman, they’ll blame a man or think he should stop complaining. With abused women, the challenge is to empower them; with abused men, the hard part is getting them in touch with their own powerlessness and vulnerability.”

Because men find it so shameful to admit abuse, they’re slow to seek help. Sharron Russ says that only one or two of every hundred abuse calls to Shalom Task Force come from men. “It takes a man a lot longer to call,” she says. “Men don’t like to see themselves as victims. When they finally call, it’s out of real desperation.”

What Makes a Wife a Bully?

Why a man’s life partner turns on him can stem from a variety of factors.

“Sometimes a woman has an ideal of what her husband should be,” Sternstein says. “If he doesn’t fulfill it, she can become furious.” Because she feels betrayed, her angry, vengeful behavior is justified in her eyes. Others become vindictive because they came into marriage with expectations of being taken care of that aren’t being fulfilled. “Sometimes a couple married very young, at the urging of parents, but it’s not a good shidduch,”

Sternstein says. “They may have stress from money or kids, but few coping skills, yet they feel divorce is not an option.

“I’ve had clients who became frum partly to rebel against their parents,” he recounts. “They’d marry a learning guy, then find he wasn’t able to sit and learn all day. They’d married for that image, not because they loved who he really was, and then were stuck because they couldn’t go back to their parents. Such women become abusive because they feel trapped and frustrated and can’t give up their ideals to meet him in the middle.”

Dan notes that some abusers simply reenact abusive behaviors they saw from their parents growing up. “They learned at home that violence is a way of settling things or getting what you want,” he says. But Rizel stresses that an abusive family background need not be a determining factor. “In fact, sometimes those people have a stronger resolve not to repeat the dysfunction,” he says. “They work hard on themselves and can end up having the best marriages.”

Mental illness also may play a role in abuse, though it’s important not to confuse an abusive woman with one who yells, screams, belittles, or is violent as a result of alcohol abuse or mental illness, points out Rinat Lustig, LCSW, a psychotherapist in private practice. “Episodic instances of violence don’t necessarily reflect an abusive personality,” she says. “It takes a skilled therapist to differentiate between an abusive woman and a woman with a mental illness who needs help — it can be a fine line.”

Most violent women have personality disorders or some other form of psychological instability, agrees Sharron Russ. Some need medication but were never treated.

Getting Help

“When a relationship becomes abusive,” Rinat Lustig says, “the first move is for a man to identify what is going on — that is, call the abuse by its name — set limits and say, ‘We need to see a therapist.’ If his wife refuses, he should seek therapy himself for a deeper understanding of why he’s tolerating the abuse. What he should not do is assume that his wife is the whole problem and throw up his hands thinking that if she doesn’t go for help nothing can ever improve.”

On the contrary, the man can sometimes keep the situation from spiraling. Strong marital communication skills coupled with self-awareness are key in preventing conflicts from deteriorating into more significant conflict. “Take the wife who’s always nagging her husband,” Meir Rizel says. “The couple needs to stop and think, ‘What’s behind the nagging?’ If she’s constantly calling her husband to ask where he is, maybe the message really is: ‘I miss you, I feel alone without you, you’re important to me.’ You have to identify the longing behind the negative behavior.”

Unfortunately, men tend to withdraw when women become critical and demanding, notes Rizel, which aggravates the situation. Let’s say a woman screams at her husband because he forgot to buy grape juice before Shabbos and got home too late to bathe the kids. What she’s really expressing is: “I need your help, I feel all alone having to manage this.” If the husband responds with anger, or by withdrawing, he reinforces her belief that she truly is all alone and abandoned, which makes her even angrier. “When you see anger instead of the longing, the ‘noise’ instead of the subtext, you only perpetuate the cycle,” Rizel says. While you can train people in anger management, a longer-term solution includes identifying the sources of the anger and addressing them.

An abused spouse may also enlist the support of a rav or community organization; if he feels himself in physical danger, he can apply for an order of protection. It’s important that he not suffer in silence, remaining alone without supports. When a man’s wife is violent, he may feel obligated to stay with her out of fear the children will become the next victims. “The husband can’t just take the kids and leave,” Sharron Russ warns, “because he’ll be accused of kidnapping. But if she’s really mentally ill, he can go to court and petition for custody.”

Of course, if his wife is open to working on her own issues, the marriage stands a stronger chance. When the source of abuse is some overblown expectation of marriage, the abuser needs a reality check. “None of us gets everything we want in life!” declares Hillel Sternstein. “People with low self-esteem depend on outside things like material wealth to feel good about themselves — they can’t soothe themselves without them. But they have to learn to compromise on their expectations and view their spouses as people, not objects put there to satisfy their needs.”

Rabbi Twerski agrees: “Many have the attitude, ‘If I can’t get all I want, I’ll do whatever I have to do to get it,’ ” he says. But ruthless behavior only harms marriages and children in the long run: “Marriage is grand,” he quips, “but divorce is a hundred grand.”

Even if the wife refuses to seek therapy, Sharron Russ emphasizes the importance of getting help for the victimized husband. “He needs therapy to salvage his battered self-esteem and help empower him,” she says. “Often victims of abuse become so beaten down they become immobilized. A therapist can brainstorm with him to find tools to deal with the situation, to identify supports like a rav, family, friends. They can also discuss a safety plan.” There are currently no shelters for abused men in the frum community as there are for women, although a few exist in the non-Jewish world.
The earlier the husband seeks help, the better, says Rinat Lustig, before the husband becomes too habituated to enduring abuse. “I was recently reading Night, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, where he speaks about how people who are beaten repeatedly get to the point where they just stop responding,” she says. “You don’t want a Jewish husband to ever get to that point.

(Originally featured in Family First Issue 407)