abuse

from this week’s Hartford Advocate:
“How can a person know if a partner will turn out to be abusive as the relationship becomes more committed? Abusers have a gift for putting their charming, charismatic sides forward in the early stages of a relationship.[…]
The number one thing to watch out for is any kind of verbal abuse: yelling, name-calling, put-downs. They’re also the best indicators of future physical abuse. Does he impose a severe level of control, and what happens when she resists that control? If the control gets worse, that’s an almost certain sign of future serious mistreatment.”

This article was difficult for me to read through, for the obvious reasons, and I can’t say it had much of anything “new” in it, except it was refreshing to see it acknowledged that abusers also have very manipulative (or “charming”, if you want to call it that) personalities, in which they try to pit everyone against the victim.