Was I the Abusive One? Why You Reacted the Way You Did
Oct 12, 2026If you were the one who ended up shouting, or the one whose messages look terrible written down, you've probably spent a long time wondering whether you were the abusive one too. That question has an answer, and it comes out of research rather than reassurance.
Most people can name the moment. There was a night in the hallway where you screamed, having asked the same question eleven times and been given eleven different answers. For someone else it was forty messages in an hour, or the thing said about their mother that has never been repeated to anybody since. Whatever yours was, it sits in your memory with a weight nothing else in the relationship has, because it's the one part of the whole thing you cannot put at their door.
What almost nobody explains is that in a significant number of cases your reaction was the point of the sequence rather than a by-product of it.
What Provocation Actually Is
Provocation, in this context, means behaviour designed to produce a reaction in you, which is a different thing from an argument that got out of hand or a bad week in a difficult period. It describes a repeated, targeted sequence that carries on until something in you breaks.
It tends to look mundane from the outside, which is a large part of why it works so well. Questions get answered with silence, something is agreed in the morning and there's no memory of it by the evening, and you get followed from room to room while you're trying to end the conversation. Something precious to you is described as pathetic, in a pleasant voice, in front of other people. Thirty minutes of a tone that denies anything is wrong while everything about it says the opposite.
None of that photographs. Your response does.
What I've seen consistently in my work with domestic abuse perpetrators is that the people who do this are rarely confused about what they're doing, and some of them can describe the exact buttons, the order they press them in, and roughly how long it usually takes. A man once told me he knew he had got there when his partner started crying, because at that point he had the moral high ground for the rest of the week.
Why the Field Does Not Call This Reactive Abuse
You'll see this described online as reactive abuse, and I do not use that term, for a reason that matters more than it might first appear.
Putting the word abuse next to the person who was being abused gives a name to something that was caused, and then hands that name straight to the person who caused it. In practice, the moment somebody accepts the label for themselves, they stop seeing themselves as a person who was harmed and start seeing themselves as half of a shared problem, which is precisely where the pattern wanted them.
The field has a better term for it. In 2008 the sociologist Michael P. Johnson set out a typology of domestic violence which separated violence tied to a general pattern of coercive control, what he called intimate terrorism, from violence that comes out of specific conflicts escalating, which he called situational couple violence. His third category is violent resistance, meaning violence used by somebody trying to cope with intimate terrorism.
Johnson’s argument is that these are different phenomena with different causes, and that treating them as one thing has produced decades of research full of contradictions and overgeneralisations. Violent resistance describes physical violence specifically, so it is narrower than the full range of what people recognise in themselves, although the principle underneath it covers all of it. A response to control is a different event from control.
Why They Stayed Calm and You Did Not
The composure gap is the part that does the most damage to how you remember yourself, and there is an explanation for it that has been in the literature for thirty years.
In 1994 the psychologists Amy Holtzworth-Munroe and Gregory Stuart proposed that those who are violent towards partners fall into roughly three groups, separated by how severe the violence is, whether it appears outside the family as well as inside it, and whether there is significant psychopathology involved. Their largest estimated group in community samples, at around half, was the family-only type, meaning people whose behaviour is confined to home.
That is the one who is composed everywhere else - the reasonable colleague, the helpful neighbour, the one your friends liked and still ask after. Their regulation in public is clear, which is exactly why yours looks so poor sitting next to it.
The typology has been tested and criticised a good deal since, and later work, including by Holtzworth-Munroe and colleagues in 2003, found the categories overlap considerably more than the original model suggested. What has held up is the observation that behaviour can be reliably severe at home and entirely unremarkable everywhere else, and that there is no contradiction between those two things.
Provocation also runs differently depending on who is doing it. One version is instrumental and cold, used to win something specific in that moment. Another runs through emotional escalation, accusation and pursuit, where your inability to end the conversation is itself the mechanism. Different routes, same outcome, and the same person left holding the reaction afterwards.
What Happens When Somebody Else Walks In
This is the point where provocation stops being a private problem and becomes a matter of record.
Charlotte Barlow and Sandra Walklate published research in 2025 on how victims of coercive control come to be identified as perpetrators, and their account describes five overlapping problems rather than one simple mistake: manipulation, misidentification, miscommunication, misunderstanding and minimisation.
Several things in their findings will be recognisable to anyone this has happened to. Perpetrators frequently called the police first and made counter-allegations about what their partner had done. Those who did not present as frightened, meek or passive were treated as less credible, and five of the ten women interviewed had fought back at some point.
One participant described her partner standing there calm as anything, apologising for her behaviour. Where alcohol was involved, both parties were often judged to be as bad as each other.
In a sample of 58 coercive control cases, police took positive action in 55, and in five cases where a man called claiming the woman had harmed him, she was still recorded as the victim. Misidentification is a recognised and serious problem in policing, but it is also not the usual outcome.
What their work establishes is that the composure gap has consequences well outside your own head. A person who is distressed is interpreted as the aggressive one and a person who is calm reads as the reliable witness, to officers working under time pressure who are responding to a single incident rather than a pattern built over several years.
Was I the Abusive One?
There is a limit to all of this, which is important to discuss.
None of it means your behaviour did not matter, or that anything you did becomes acceptable because of what came before it. Where you frightened somebody, that is a thing to look at with clear eyes, and the people who come out of this best are the ones who can hold both halves of it at once.
What it does mean is that your reaction has a cause which sits outside your character. You were doing what a person often does when the conditions have been built so that the only way to be heard is to raise your voice, and the only way to end a conversation is to lose control of it.
That's why the question keeps coming back round. The behaviour was yours, but the conditions were not. Those two facts have been sitting on top of each other for a long time, and they can be separated.
Where to go next...
If you want to map what actually happened in your relationship, including the incidents you are least proud of, the Relationship Mirror Toolkit is free and built for exactly that. It takes you through the behavioural patterns of psychologically harmful relationships, so the parts you have been carrying as evidence against yourself can be seen in the sequence they actually happened in.
๐ [Download the Relationship Mirror Toolkit here] ๐
Or use this link:
This week’s YouTube video covers the same mechanism from the perpetrator’s side, including what those perpetrators I work in say about provoking a reaction on purpose.
๐ [Watch the YouTube video here] ๐
Two posts connect directly to this one. “DARVO: Why You Ended Up Apologising for Things They Did” explains what gets done with your reaction once it exists, and “Coercive Control: The Rules You Were Never Told” covers the conditions that make a reaction almost inevitable in the first place.
- https://www.thehealthyrelationshipcompany.com/blog/darvo-in-relationships
- https://www.thehealthyrelationshipcompany.com/blog/coercive-control-the-rules-you-were-never-told
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