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Part I: Why Take an Adult Timeout

Part I: Why Take an Adult Timeout

05/10/2013 Elizabeth Nyblade, Ph.D.

As a psychologist and an author, I often find myself helping people to deal more effectively with the verbal and emotional abuse they encounter. My book, Stop the Verbal Abuse: How to end the Verbal and Emotional Abuse that Controls You and this article (and many others on this website) deal with different aspects of coping with verbal and emotional abuse. We don’t know what percentage of verbal and emotional abusers are male and what percentage are female, but I still have to use a pronoun for verbal abusers and another pronoun for the recipient of the abuse. I have (mostly) settled for using the term “he” for the verbal or emotional abuser and I (mostly) use the term “she” for the recipient of the abuse. Please believe that I don’t see all men as abusers or all women as targets, but I am using those pronouns because the English language has not been kind enough to give us a good pronoun for someone who may be either male or female.
Many targets of verbal and other abusive behaviors in a relationship tell me that they cannot stop their partner from ‘trashing them’ and they say they have tried everything. However, if you understand what the verbal abuser wants (closeness to you) then you are in a position to train the abuser to minimize his negative behaviors. But consider these issues first:

Before You Begin:

    If your partner is a batterer, do not follow these recommendations. First, make yourself safe from the batterer so that you are no longer in physical danger. Read my notes on “Is Your Partner a Batterer or Just a Verbal Abuser?”
    Before you respond differently to verbal or emotional abuse, read my notes on “The Power of Approval in Your Relationships.” Your partner isn’t going to like it if you take a timeout from him, and if losing his/her approval is very difficult for you to face, you need to realize this in advance. It would be more effective for you to deal with your need for approval in the abstract before you try to deal with the disapproval from the abuser at specific times and in specific circumstances.
    Before you respond to your partner in one of the ways I suggest, read all the way through the three articles on adult timeouts. Then think about what you mean to do and rehearse it in advance. You want to give yourself the best chance to be effective with the abuser and you also want to remind yourself of the positive aspects of what you’re doing. You want to make permanent changes in your responses, not just try something once. Don’t make it easy to be ineffective one time and then decide that you can’t do anything about your situation.

Rewards, Punishments and Negative Reinforcements

Most people think of giving a child a timeout as a way of punishing a child without giving the child a physical consequence like a spanking, but timeout is not really a punishment.

    A parent can reward a child for behaving well, for example by giving the child a cookie. That is positive reinforcement.
    Or a parent can punish a child for behaving badly, for example, by spanking the child. That is a punishment.
    Or the parent can take a reward away from the child, for example, by not letting the child watch TV when the child has behaved badly. That is a negative reinforcement.
Illustration

A timeout for an adult is meant to accomplish the same goals as a timeout for a child. When adults tell a child to take a timeout, the adult is in charge and it is the adult’s company that is being withdrawn from the child. An adult can order a child to take a timeout, and enforce it, at least when the child is physically smaller than the adult, so timeout as a negative reinforcer is only successful with very young children, especially those in preschool. If appropriately used with preschool children, there should be no need for many, if any, timeouts when the child is older. ‘Grounding’ and other disciplinary methods are more appropriate for older children anyway.

What the Target of the Abuse Gains from Taking an Adult Time-out

You can’t successfully tell an adult to take a timeout from you because the other adult can just say ‘No, I’m going to stay right here,’ so the timeout is ineffective. You have to be in control of any strategy you use to use it effectively. And you can’t be in control of the other adult. You can only be in control of yourself. One adult can’t effectively control another adult (except with approval) but an adult can go on a timeout for herself without permission from the other adult. One adult can deny another adult the pleasures of her own company, attention and approval. If you’re not in the same space as the abuser, you can’t be paying attention to the abuser and you can’t be approving of his or her behavior as far as the other adult knows. Therefore, an adult timeout can be an effective response to verbal or emotional abuse. e

During an adult timeout, the target of the abuse gives herself time to regroup, nurture herself, and go on about her business without interference from the perpetrator of the abuse. The target also puts more distance into a negative relationship, hoping that a close-and-negative relationship can become a more-distant-and-more positive relationship. If the target stays to listen and react to the perpetrator’s negative words and deeds, that will make the relationship worse for the target, and also the abuser, although he won’t agree at first that his verbal abuse was damaging the relationship. If the target leaves, she is no longer an audience to the perpetrator’s words and deeds, or a source of rewards to the perpetrator.

What the Perpetrator of the Abuse Gains With a Time-out:

Illustration

TThe perpetrator should gain a learning experience, although he won’t like it! The perpetrator should gain an understanding of a reality that he is not facing, namely that having the target’s company and interacting with the target is not a right but a privilege.

The perpetrator does not have a right to act any way he chooses and still expect that the target will continue to tolerate his bad behavior. If he behaves badly, the target will walk out, either for a short time or, if the abuse continues, perhaps forever. The perpetrator needs to learn that he can no longer get his way by punishing the target with emotional and verbal abuse because the target will no longer maintain a close and approving relationship with him when he abuses her. If he can choose to behave badly, she can choose to take her approval and her company away from him. She is not obligated to ‘take it.’

Your Goals in Taking an Adult Time-out

Illustration

The goal of the abuser is to control you by punishing you for doing something he doesn’t like or to control you by punishing you for not doing something he likes. When responding to verbal abuse, you should have three goals in mind:

    Retain control of yourself, no matter how badly the abuser behaves.
    Stop rewarding the abuser with your company and attention when he verbally abuses you.
    Make the abuser aware that you can leave the relationship if he persists in these behaviors.

Let’s Look at Each of These Goals in Turn and Give Some Examples of What They Mean in Action.

It’s not the case that all verbal abusers know consciously that they are being nasty on purpose because it works. Some of them don’t consciously make the connection between their behavior and your feelings about the relationship. I don’t mean that they aren’t aware of your feelings, because most of them are. They don’t make a connection between their negative behavior toward you and your negative feelings about the relationship.
Many verbal and emotional abusers have been exposed to long-lasting and stable relationships in which one partner abused the other. Those abusers cannot believe that you would leave them when the abusive relationships that they grew up with didn’t dissolve when one partner abused the other.

I once saw a woman for individual therapy who had been married five times and her fifth marriage was in the process of dissolving. She was terribly hurt and frustrated about this, so she came into therapy with me to try to learn what was going on. As she described her interactions with her latest husband, it was clear that when they disagreed, she became very critical and very nasty, even calling him very ugly names. When I asked her why she did this, she said that her husband deserved to be punished because he was not meeting her needs. I told her that it was likely that the man was leaving her because he didn’t like the way she behaved towards him. She didn’t agree. She said that her mother had treated her father this way throughout their sixty-three-year marriage, so she felt confident that behaving this way was appropriate and acceptable when she was angry. She held the man responsible for her anger and she punished him when she was angry and yet she was surprised that he wouldn’t hang around her to get more punishment!

This woman described her father as a womanizer and workaholic who was home very rarely, so she was not describing a man who enjoyed his marriage. He was a man who chose to remain in the marriage while doing exactly as he pleased. She didn’t have a high opinion of men because of her father’s behavior towards women, but it hadn’t occurred to her that her mother’s behavior wasn’t likely to encourage her father to stay home and enjoy her mother’s company.

Notice, however, that you are not aiming to give your partner insight into your feelings about him. You are aiming to give your partner insight into the consequences you will use when your partner behaves badly toward you. Many people, especially women, believe that when they have shared with their partner the fact that they “feel bad” when they are abused, the partner would, or should, stop the abuse, but it doesn’t usually work that way.

An emotional or verbal abuser uses negative and abusive behavior in order to hurt you. His purpose is to make you feel badly because your bad feelings make the abuse ‘work’. If you were indifferent to his behavior, the abuse wouldn’t work because you wouldn’t try harder to please him to avoid the punishment. So giving him insight into how you feel when you are abused does not cause him to want to stop abusing you. Your bad feelings are a feature, not a bug, in this situation. The abuser punishes you to make you feel bad. He wants to hurt you with the punishment.

When you take a timeout, your goal is to help him make the connection between his abuse and future consequences you can give him. You don’t intend to be in his control and you may not remain in this relationship if he does not stop the abuse.

It may be hard for you to believe that your partner thinks that you won’t consider his behavior a reason to leave your relationship with him, but he probably has a history of seeing relationships that were hostile, critical, abusive, and stable. The relationships he is used to may have lasted for long periods of time and he may well be expecting that you will be equally willing to remain in a hostile, critical, abusive relationship. For him to stop abusing you, he must believe that you will leave the relationship unless he changes his behavior.

It sometimes helps to keep a tally of how often the other is doing the behaviors that you consider abusive. Write the tally down on a sheet of paper that you put under a magnet on the refrigerator so you don’t have to depend on your memory when you’re talking about the frequency of the abuse. When you’re speaking to the abuser about this issue, first name the behaviors you don’t like so he has no doubt how you are defining them, then mention the tally.

    I don’t like you calling me names, so I’m starting to keep track of how often you do it. I’ll let you know when you do it so you can keep track too.
    That’s the third time you’ve called me stupid or a bitch today. It’s really adding up!
Illustration

Don’t threaten consequences you won’t go through with. If you aren’t willing to leave him if he calls you ‘bitch’ one more time, don’t threaten it. And don’t start to leave and then change your mind when he apologizes. Your goal is not to have him apologize whenever he calls you a name. Your goal is for him not to call you names. You’re using the tally on the refrigerator to tell yourself, and him, just how frequently he gets abusive.

    Goal number one is to withdraw a particular reward from the abuser, the reward of getting his way. 
    Goal number two is to withdraw a reward from the abuser: the reward of your company and attention. 
    Goal number three is to give the abuser insight into the connection between his own behavior (which is in his control) and a future consequence of his behavior, namely, the loss of the relationship, (which is in your control). 

Goals one and two are immediate consequences and the abuser will feel them immediately. Goal number three is about a very big future consequence that the abuser cannot control, because he can’t single-handedly continue the relationship without your consent.
Now continue reading with the next in this series, “When Not to Take an Adult Timeout” in order to learn when it is inappropriate or ineffective to use this strategy.

Look for my book "Stop the Verbal Abuse"

How to End the Verbal Abuse that Controls You, by Elizabeth Nyblade, Ph.D. SpiritARROW Press, 2016

Learn more

Look for my book "Stop the Verbal Abuse"

How to End the Verbal Abuse that Controls You, by Elizabeth Nyblade, Ph.D. SpiritARROW Press, 2016

Learn more

Elizabeth Nyblade, Ph.D.

Contact me

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Elizabeth Nyblade, Ph.D.

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©Created by

ProFusion Web Solutions

All rights Reserved