The Abusive Wife

Opening the Conversation on Abusive Wives and Reviling

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are going to talk today about a topic we talked about before, but maybe approaching it from a slightly different vantage point.

We're going to talk about the Me Too movement. This idea today that seems to be gaining strength is that biblical counseling is fueling the abuse of women in churches. Complementarianism is doing that.

Elder-led congregations are doing that. All these biblical things are the problems. I'm not a biblical counselor. I've taken courses in biblical counseling for my seminary training, and I'm familiar with biblical counseling.

But I really appreciate those who are biblical counselors because they're in the trenches. They're dealing with these concrete situations on a daily basis. They're seeing what's going on out there in the world in their own congregations and beyond.

That's why today I want to introduce everyone to Pastor David Edgington, who runs a ministry called Compassionate Counselors. You can find out more at CompassionateCounselors .com. You don't sound too mean.

Compassionate Counselors sounds pretty nice. Off the top here, I think that'll deflate all the leftists who want to rage about your book, which is The Abuse of Wife. That's what we're going to talk about.

Pastor Edgington, thank you so much for being willing to come on the podcast and talk about this. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. You wrote a book called The Abuse of Wife. One-word question.

Why? Why would you do this.

To yourself? At the moment when I wrote the book, I didn't realize how much attention it would get. It was actually published back in 2015, which is a whole different world in some ways. The reason I wrote the book is very simple.

There's nothing from a biblical perspective on women being abusive to men. It's almost without fail the other way around. I just did a search because I kept finding situations. I find plenty of situations with men that are abusive to wives.

It's not a one-sided issue, but I found nothing that addressed women that were abusive to their husbands. I had counseled a number of men that were in that situation, a number of women as well. I just needed some help, so I did some research.

My book has a lot of stories in it that are all true stories. I've changed the names to protect people, but every story that I mentioned in the book literally happened. I either saw it firsthand or counseled people and they verified it.

I think it's hard for people to conceive of the idea that a woman can be abusive. Maybe a little bit into the podcast, we'll talk about the difference between abuse and reviling. Reviling is actually the better and more biblical term for it.

We live in a culture now, John, that largely men are ridiculed, men are mocked, men are generally portrayed as buffoons, and they deserve to be mistreated by women. This is the talking point that goes on.

If a man claims to be mistreated by a woman, it's generally thought, well, he just deserves it. For instance, here's a situation. If a wife is angry at her husband, what people will often say is, well, what did the husband do to make the wife so angry at him?

But you switch it around, and now let's say the husband is angry at the wife, then they say, well, why doesn't this husband deal with his anger? We bring about a double standard. It's a blatant, hypocritical double standard, but many people don't see it.

They don't want to even acknowledge it. A second issue that I see is that women are often viewed as the fairer sex, that they sin less than men, they're better than men, and that Scripture says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

So there's nothing biblical that can support that contention, that women are the fairer sex, and there's also nothing that in practice that we see that necessarily either. So a third issue that I see with the whole idea of abusive wives is that somehow we as a society think that it's somehow unmanly or unmasculine for men to claim that women can be wicked towards them, and many men won't say anything about this, mainly because they're afraid of being stigmatized, and they're afraid of being judged as weak or wimpy or not strong enough, and then you add to that many churches believe, or they actually refuse to believe, that women can abuse men, and this is across the board.

This is not just in complementarian or patriarchal churches. This is in egalitarian and feminist churches that women just can't possibly be that way towards men, but interestingly, I've counseled a number of pastors who have married women that were that way towards them, and then these men begin to see it clearly.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I could keep going, John. There's a lot of things I could say about this. I don't want to dominate the conversation, but jump in with some questions if you want.

Why Reviling Is a More Precise Biblical Term Than Abuse

I have a number of questions based on what you just said, the first being you mentioned that reviling is a better term than abuse, so I've always been uncomfortable since the Me Too movement got going with even using the term abuse because I know there is such thing as abuse, and there's a legal definition for what constitutes abuse, but it's so general now that it gets applied to everything, and adulterous affairs are now abusive if there's a power disparity, and it happens to be a man who's participating, who's in a position of authority, or even maybe just because they're a man, and I'm like, that's not abuse.

You said reviling is the more biblical term. Why would you use the word revile instead of abuse as a substitute? Good question.

Now, the first reason, I'm saying that I prefer the term revile, and yet I named my book The Abusive Wife. Seems like a contradiction at first, but the reason I did that is that most people don't know what the word revile means, even Christians.

They're unfamiliar with the term, so I thought I have to use a term that people are more familiar with, and then in the first chapter of the book, first two chapters of the book, I explain why reviling is a more precise and accurate term, because abuse is broad.

Abuse can be physical abuse. Abuse can be sexual abuse. Abuse can be verbal abuse. It can be emotional abuse. There's a variety of things, and it gets misused as well, misapplied, but the term revile, I believe it's loiterero in the Greek, is the verbal mistreatment of someone else, and it is very clear and explicit in Scripture that this is a very serious offense.

It's not something light. It's not just, you know, you lose your cool once. In John chapter 9, the man that was born blind, it was said that the Pharisees reviled him, so they're using words as a, I like to say it as a non-contact weapon.

It's beating someone verbally. 1 Corinthians 4 .12, Paul says, when we are reviled, we bless, so it's kind of the antithetical approach to life. Jesus Christ in 1 Timothy 2 .23, when he was reviled, he did not revile in return, and maybe one of the most glaring ones is Matthew 15 .4, where it says, whoever reviles his mother or father is to be put to death.

So obviously, it's a very serious, serious issue, but if we just call it abuse, anybody can say this is abuse. Anybody can use that, and some examples of reviling behavior in Scripture, they're all over the place, and not just for men.

There's reviling all over the Proverbs with women who reviled their husbands. Proverbs 19 .13, a wife's quarreling is a continual dripping of rain. Proverbs 21 .9 and 25 .24, it's actually repeated in the Proverbs.

It's better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife. Proverbs 21 .19, it's better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman. So it's all over the Word of God, Proverbs 27 .15 and 16, and Proverbs 14 .1 probably describes it the best, where it says that the wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.

So now to clarify, and so that you or I don't get accused of what we're not saying, John, is that I'm not saying that all women are revilers. It is certainly not the case. The vast majority are not reviling wives, but they are out there, and there's a lot more than we tend to believe.

I see them in counseling. I see them all the time. It's a sad and tragic thing, and mostly pastors won't recognize it. They just kind of give a pass to the wife. But as you noticed, you noted earlier that the name of this ministry is Compassionate Counselors.

We're not out looking to stigmatize women. We're out there to help people with compassionate biblical help and say the Word of God addresses these things. The other thing that we should say about reviling before we get off of that topic is that reviling is grounds for church discipline, and yet I cannot think of a single church I know of that has ever done discipline for someone for reviling.

1 Corinthians 5 verse 11, 1 Corinthians 6 verse 11 shows that among other sins, the sin of reviling is listed there as one of those. Jonathan Edwards even preached a sermon on this topic called The Nature and End of Excommunication, end being in a sense of the goal of excommunication, that he said that this kind of discipline should be done when there is no reason to hope for repentance by gentler means.

So the reviling wife does not respond to a gentle approach. I always give people compassionate help. I am always gentle with them, but the reviling wife does not respond to that. So that doesn't mean I get angry at them.

I really get saddened by them, and I get saddened for the husband as well. But the reviling wife is bitter. She's unforgiving. She's controlling. She's harsh. She's abrasive. She's unsubmissive. She's cruel and malicious, and there are women like that out there, and there are women in our churches like.

That, and it's a tragic thing. Now you wrote your book in I think 2015, at least that's when it was published, right, which is I think before the MeToo movement, like right before the MeToo movement started.

Correct. And now that we're on the other side of that, I'd say we're still, we're in the institutionalization phase of the MeToo movement. They've had their activist stage, and now we're in the institutionalist stage where this is now being ingrained everywhere in policies and procedures.

The Me Too Movement, Institutional Power, and the Double Standard Against Men

And what you say runs so counter to that because the narrative is that women by definition are the oppressed in any kinds of situations that involve abuse, reviling, etc. And what you're saying is that actually, you made a telling statement earlier that the problem seems to run in the other direction as far as the institutional church, and I'm assuming the United States is concerned, because you said that the church tends to not categorize women who are revilers in that way.

They don't police it, they don't detect it perhaps even, the stigma runs. They give it a pass. They give it a pass, and they let the man, or they are free to condemn men for their sins, but there's, the wind is blowing in the direction against men in general, which I think those with common sense who have concrete examples that they just examine their lives, they know this to be the case.

Not that there aren't situations of abuse of husbands, because there are husbands who revile. But women aren't exempt from that. They also have a sin nature, and I can even think of my own personal life of some of the stories I know, and in my life in divorce situations, especially child custody battles.

I'm not saying that I have any stats on this. Maybe you do, but it seems like more often than not, the wives are the most aggressive, or ex-wives, the most nasty, and that's in my experience. My experience is limited though.

If I listen to the mainstream media, or Hollywood, or even those on the woke left in Christian circles, I would think that I shouldn't believe my eyes. I shouldn't believe my ears. I should just realize that this is an anomaly, and in fact, what's actually happening across the board is it's men that are exclusively abusing, reviling women.

Why don't you just talk to that for a moment about where do you see this evidence, and I know you see it in the Word of God, but where else do you see that this is going on? Is this showing up in your counseling sessions?

It definitely is,.

John. Last year, I did a study, just an informal study of the counseling situations that I did where there was abuse, or let's use the word reviling behavior in the marriage, that that was what was going on in the marriage.

That was the main problem in the marriage, and this is going to sound strange to a lot of people, but what I found was 87 of those marriages were reviling wives, not reviling husbands. Now, of course, 13%, they were reviling husbands, and that's where I'm not saying that men don't do the same thing, but what I am saying is that often the wives get away with it because they pour on the tears.

They pour on the charm. They're nice in front of the counselor, and it is a growing problem. It was a problem back in 2015 when I wrote my book. Now, it is off the charts. I actually have an online support group, and I want to give a shout out to all my brothers in my support group.

I know they're going to listen to this podcast, guys all over the country that have contacted me because of the book that I wrote, and every one of them says the same thing. They say, you wrote this book as if you had a video recorder in my house.

You know exactly what was going on. You wrote this book, and you describe what it feels like exactly the way that I feel, and these are all good men. They're sweet men. They're godly men. They're gentle men.

These are the traits of a man that is likely to find a reviling wife, gentle, kind, compassionate, soft, maybe tends more on the passive side than the aggressive side. He's not an angry man. He's sweet.

He's loving. He loves his family. He loves his kids. Those are the ones that the reviling wife actually targets and finds, and she goes after them, so these men, we're in constant contact with each other, email or Zoom meetings and things like that just to talk about things, and all of these men have the same story.

It's uncanny how similar the story is, so let's talk a little. I want to talk a little about the Me Too movement because I want to address that, too. That was not an issue when I wrote the book,.

But as you said, it's—. Let me just make one point, though, because what you just said—we don't have, I guess, the data that we would need to figure out.

Exact numbers. I haven't done any in-depth studies. I'm just talking about me, myself,.

What I've seen in counseling. I know that, but here's what I wanted to say. We are often given the stat that I think it's like one in four girls or one in three girls is going to be raped at some point in their life, and it's this rape culture that men are involved in.

Of course, that's not an accurate statistic, and I've made that case on the podcast here before, but we're told to accept that, and then we're told not just accept it but change all your institutional policies wherever you are.

We need to even change the laws to account for this. We need to police these men, and I think we should police men for their sin, but it's on the basis of this idea that we have an epidemic, that it's systemic.

If what you said is true, then there's another problem that's completely being ignored, and you won't ever see a policy on it. It's not even detected, and you're not allowed to detect it. As soon as you do, you'll probably be called some names or something.

You're a misogynist. It's fascinating to me to see the political angle of all this and how much politics influences the way that we even approach counseling situations. Why don't you talk about the Me Too movement?

You just mentioned that it's off the charts, the reviling women. Has the Me Too movement fueled.

That? I'm going to assume that the Me Too movement started out with good intentions. I don't think necessarily it had anything evil in its goals. In fact, in some ways, I think it was important because I think a lot of men got away with wicked behavior towards women, and there was no accountability for this, and nothing happened.

This is a tragedy, and it's sin, and it's wicked that men have done this for so long. But I think what's happened over the years that I've seen, I think what has taken place with the Me Too movement is it's been hijacked by the Marxist critical theorists.

If we're talking about race, for instance, that there's the belief with the critical theorists that, okay, everything is structured to oppress people of a certain race, typically Black people, and it's systemic, and it's widespread, and we have to destroy and burn down the structures.

I see the same exact thing with what we're talking about here with reviling women, is that here we're talking about all men are toxic. It's systemic, and we have to burn down the system, and it pushes back against men being the heads of their homes.

It pushes back against complementarianism, patriarchal families. It's become convenient for feminists in particular, and certainly not all women, to buy into this because this kind of thinking permeates society, and it's creeping in all of these different areas.

It does seem like a political movement, but really it's more than that. I think Marxism is way more than just a political movement. I think it's a move of the enemy himself. I think that's the one thing that I would say about the Me Too movement.

It has some important components to it. It's holding men accountable, but now it's become basically a witch hunt that any man that hurts a woman in any way emotionally is an abuser, is toxic. It's like our feelings are not sovereign.

We can't just say, well, I feel, therefore what you did is wrong. That's a dangerous and deadly way for us to operate. See, we should not blindly believe all men, nor should we blindly believe all women.

We have to investigate. We have to look into these things. We have to examine them biblically. One of the things that I see that furthers this idea is the concept of counseling people individually rather than counseling them together because it sets up the gossip.

It sets up that the narrative has already been determined and there's no way to go around it. In other words, if a wife comes to me and says, my husband's abusing me, what's he doing? Well, he's verbally saying, he's doing this, not talking about physical abuse, not talking about sexual, talking about just verbal, then the counselor needs to talk to both parties.

This is the way our country is founded. You're innocent until proven guilty, but the Me Too movement is basically you're guilty until you can prove you're innocent. Everyone knows you can't prove your innocence.

Counseling the Reviled Husband and the Wife Who Reviles

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This reviling category isn't often detected. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, things that would more likely involve law enforcement or should involve law enforcement, obviously, those should get the headlines in a way.

Those should be dealt with in very direct and very quick ways. It's more subtle, I think, the reviling, but it is damaging. This is what I do want people to see. I've seen it in friends that I have in their lives.

It is disheartening in ways that I think those who don't experience it find it very hard to grasp. Walk me through the reviled husband who comes into your office. What does he say to you? What does he describe as going on at home?

What do you say to him in how to navigate and.

Deal with that situation? Okay, let me go through some things as I've taken some thoughts down on that because I figured you would ask that kind of a question. First of all, what I would say, and I alluded to it earlier, is that unless there is physical danger, sexual abuse going on, I request that the husband and wife come together for counseling, even if it seems like it's one-sided, even if it seems like, no, he's evil, she's evil, it doesn't matter.

It's like, I need to hear you both. I need to hear from both of you what's going on. Tell me what's happening. When we get into the reviling wife category, here's some of the things that I hear from the wife.

She says, I want my independence from him. I don't want anyone telling me what to do. I don't need a man to be happy. I want to live my own life, and I don't like the traditional family. Being a mother is not a fulfilling role.

So those are kind of warning signs for me. When I hear things like that, I go, okay, we've got the makings of something that has potential big problems here. There's already a disorder in this marriage.

There's already a misunderstanding of what these roles look like. Some of the traits of a reviling wife, that these are actually in my book, is that she insists on control. She wants control of everything, and she insists on her husband thinking a certain way.

She wants him to agree with her about everything, and if he doesn't agree with her, then he hates her, then he dislikes her, then he's a bad husband, he's a bad man. And nearly every, I probably would say every situation I've counseled, that's been one of the predominant things, that the wife insists on controlling everything in the home.

Now again, just as a caveat, I counsel people where the men are that way. They want to control everything too, and that's not godly either, but we're talking about the reviling wife now. Intimidation.

Now, usually the reviling wife is not bigger, is not stronger than her husband, but she resorts to verbal intimidation. I've counseled families where the husband is six foot five, and the wife is four foot ten, and she scares him to death.

She just terrorizes him in a multitude of ways. And seeing most people look at that, and they say, well, what's she going to do to you? She's this little bitty thing. She's 90 pounds soaking wet, and you're this big hulking professional athlete.

What can she do? You have no idea what that is like. And again, if you remember what I said earlier about the men, they're kind, they're gentle, they're sweet, they're loving, they're compassionate. They're not angry, harsh and aggressive men.

So they're not going to just squash their wives. But the wife sees that, and she says, I can control him. I can intimidate him. I can manipulate him. Often the wife has a seared conscience. First Timothy 4 .2 and Second Timothy 3 .7 talks about this.

She lacks empathy, doesn't have a conscience about what she's doing. There's no humility in her heart. There's no sorrow. There's no sadness over how she's treating her husband. No guilt over the cruelty that she's doing.

Sex is used as a weapon in the marriage. And now this can work two different ways. It can be the wife denying her husband of sex, saying, you know, all you do is, all you want is sex every day, every day.

That's all you want. And the husband says, I love my wife. I'm not demanding. I'm not, you know, insisting on this, but just simply desiring intimacy with my wife is a horrible thing. So the reviling wife will use it that way.

She'll refuse to have any type of physical connection with him at all, even holding hands. But it can also be used the other way, where I've counseled families where the wife is just absolutely wicked to the husband all day long.

And then she entices him and allures him into bed. Now, again, I've seen men do the same thing with their wives. They've verbally thrashed their wives, and then they want to be intimate with them. And the wife's like, what are you kidding me?

The same thing happens with wives towards their husbands. The same. Why would we think it's different? Why would we say that the sexes are so different on things? Sin is sin in a man's heart and in a woman's heart.

It's the same, the same tactics, the same things that you see men doing to women. Women now feel the fancy word now is empowered to do it. Now we've got freedom. Now we can treat men the way they've been treating us.

And I go, wow, it's like a revenge and a bitterness in the heart of some women. Now, the other thing I want to say too, is that I've often found that women that were sexually molested as children, or they've been through some deep, deep trauma as little girls, as young, as young women, often that is what animates this reviling behavior, whether it's the sexual issues or the violence issues or the bitterness issues or things like that.

But again, there's freedom in Christ with that. There's wonderful, amazing freedom in the Lord in that. So sometimes that's what animates it. So again, we're not just... I mean, believe me, I'm not trying to throw women under the bus.

I'm just trying to help men that are suffering, and nobody hears them. Nobody.

Listens to them. And I think that's why people like Jordan Peterson, who obviously not a Christian or a biblical counselor in any stretch of the imagination, is so popular. Just the acknowledgement that, yes, women are capable of hurting men too.

It's not just something that men can do. It's women. I'm thinking of examples as you were giving those illustrations of people that I've known in my own life who describe, they fit perfectly into that template that you just described for us.

You know what else is funny, John? I'm just going to interrupt you.

What I have found is that other women who are not reviling women, to them, they believe it. They say, oh yeah, I know there's reviling wives out there. I know women like that. Women say, I know other women like that.

They readily see it more than men do. Really? When you think about people... Yeah, that makes sense actually. When you think about people that fight, physically fight, okay, you and I fight, we go at it.

Then we say, okay, let's be buddies now. Let's go on. Let's move on. Typical man, yeah. We got it handled and addressed. I mean, I've never done that, but I know that's part of the male thing. What happens when women fight?

Oh boy. It's ugly. It's screaming. It's hair pulling. I'm going to hate you the rest of your life. Women have that tendency to be more bitter than men in that way, that they don't let go. They never forget.

It's believable from that perspective that it's very common. I've had women that read my book, The Abusive Wife, and those women are not abusive. They're not reviling. They read it. They say, I know a bunch of women like this.

Then I've had men that have read my book that don't have an abusive wife. They say, I can't picture this at all. Every man who's been in that kind of marriage, like I said, they say, this is me. This is exactly what I've experienced by my wife or my ex-wife.

Yeah. I'm grateful. I have a good wife, which I'm grateful for. She's not a reviling wife and makes me more grateful talking to you about that. Sometimes she'll observe things in social situations. She'll later say something about another girl or she'll notice something.

It totally went over. I'm like, what are you talking about? She can see things in their relationship because she's got the detection equipment for that, whereas I just don't. I only see what's right in front of me.

You as a male counselor, you've had so many situations. I'm assuming you can detect more easily those kinds of dynamics. Let me back up and say this. What kind of hope can you offer to people out there, first the husband, then the wife, the husband who's been reviled or is being reviled, and then the wife who is reviling her husband?

Have you seen these situations turn around and healthy marriages form? It's very slow. It's very.

Difficult. Let me back up a second. Often, the reviling wife or the reviling husband, they're not born again. That's the first problem. They might act like they are. They might be religious people. They might go to church, but they're not born again.

That's been my experience almost across the board. There's been some exceptions, but almost across the board. That's the first difficulty with this is that they live this hypocritical life and they act like they're born again, but they're not.

Until they are convicted about that and see that, boy, I'm just living a double life. They're not going to get help. They're just going to get more and more angry. I've had husbands and wives where I counseled.

I just gently, very gently approached some things with the wife to hold her accountable. Again, compassionate counselors. There have been a number of times I can think of right now where the wife is so furious.

She gets up, storms out of my office, slams the door and goes sit in the car and waits for her husband. It's like, what happened? The husband says, that happens to me all the time. I go, it's so sad. She's running away from someone that's going to help her because I have seen people helped, but a lot of the wives that just bought into the idea that no, now you're a toxic male too.

You're just like my husband. I've had wives that get mad at their husbands for not defending them in my office. I said, why would your husband defend.

You? What you did is wrong. I wonder, it's always a curiosity.

Ask your husband for forgiveness. I do the same thing with the husband towards the wife. That was harsh, what you said to her. Address that biblically.

Right. It's always a curiosity to me when I see a relationship that fits the description you gave. I wonder, the first question is, why did you two get married? What happened along the way to cause, and it must be that this takes time, as you said, to get out of.

It also takes time to develop, to get to this point. I don't see it. You think the best.

It's just like a naive woman that marries a bad boy, and she says, well, I'll change him.

Right. Yes, that's good. That's good.

The same thing that guys say, well, she's a little rough on the edges, but I'm a sweet and gentle guy, and she's a little bit more direct. Okay, maybe she'll round things out, and we'll make this better than just me.

It's like, no. It takes years before you see it, and sometimes 10, 20, 30 years, and then you go, oh my, what's wrong with me? That's what happens with these men. They say, what is wrong with me? Why does my wife treat me this way?

I go, brother, it's not what you are doing. You're not causing this problem. This is in her heart, and she has to be held accountable for her heart so that she can be free, but she's trapped in the bitterness.

Hebrews 12 talks about that, that the roots of bitterness that defiles many. That's where she's trapped. She's so bitter over something in life. It could be a variety of things. It could be, like I said, being sexually molested as a child.

It could be that her father was harsh verbally with her. It could be that she wanted to have a great career, and now she's just a homemaker. I go, that's an incredible, incredible gift, a mother staying home with her children and raising them, but some women are resentful of that.

Again, they listen to the culture rather than the Word of God, and their hearts get hardened, and their hearts get soft.

Yeah. What you said earlier, though, struck such a chord with me because that's so true, that men do see more easily when a girl wants to marry a bad boy. You look at the guy, and this happened actually funny enough just the other day with my wife and I.

She was showing me pictures online. How much can you judge from a picture? Not a lot, but enough that I detected things in the picture, how a man presented himself. It was a few pictures down to his hairstyle and everything else.

I looked at it, and I said, okay, that guy, I don't know what it is about him specifically. I can't even quantify it quite for you, but I know that this is a good girl, and I know that she's seeing that this is a rebel.

This is a rugged kind of guy. I can just tell looking at this, this isn't the kind of guy she should be with. I'm like, I don't need to see it. My wife's like, what are you talking about? How could I be judgmental?