Marsha’s stomach tightened. She had innocently asked her husband Dan what he had planned for the afternoon. She wanted to make sure he wasn’t depending on her to be at home. She was still shaken from the anger Dan had expressed the day before when he found out she had gone shopping without telling him. For several long minutes in the middle of last night’s dinner he had glared and shouted, and threatened to take away the checkbook and the car if she didn’t start checking with him first. So now, the next morning, Marsha was cautiously asking him about his plans for the day. Typically, Dan misread her motives: “Why do I always have to tell you what I’m going to do?” he snapped.

Marsha could feel her body beginning to tense more. “You don’t,” she said timidly. “I was just wondering if you might like to do something this afternoon.”

“Well, I just don’t know why you expect me to tell you everything I’m doing,” Dan said, even more angrily.

“Why are you getting so upset? I never said you had to tell me everything,” Marsha replied.

“I’m not upset. You always make such a big deal out of nothing!” Dan snarled.

“I wasn’t trying to make a big deal out of anything,” Marsha reasoned. “All I did was simply ask—” Before she could finish explaining herself, Dan cut her off and in a loud voice shouted, “Don’t try to deny it. You always do that!” After a few seconds of awkward silence, Dan slammed his fist on the table and continued, “Why don’t you just shut your big mouth and drop it! You don’t have a clue what it means to be a submissive wife, and you’re probably too stupid to ever get it!”

“Okay, Dan, I’ll drop it,” Marsha conceded. “You’re not going to get off that easy,” Dan shouted.

“You always try to get in the last word!”

Exasperated, Marsha exclaimed, “But I thought you wanted me to drop it!

Marsha continued trying to explain herself, but there was no reasoning with Dan. He persisted to twist what she was saying and to call her more derogatory names. A phone call mercifully ended the episode. But Marsha left that conversation, as she had left many others, feeling belittled, confused, and guilty. She wondered what she had said to make Dan so mad and why she couldn’t get him to understand her.

Conversations like Marsha and Dan’s illustrate how spouses can hurt their partners by what they say. No punches were thrown. There was no slapping or shoving (although there could have been). Instead, Dan used his words to beat up his wife.

Using words as weapons is a practice that is as old as human language, but we still don’t give it the attention it deserves. While we have come a long way in understanding the damage that physical and sexual abuse can do, many of us have still not realized that we can injure others with our words perhaps even more than with our fists.

The purpose of this booklet is to call our attention to the power of words to help or to hurt. While we’ll deal primarily with the misuse of words in the marriage relationship, the principles covered can be applied to other relationships. Our chief concern is for the countless husbands and wives who need help in understanding and reacting in a proper manner to varying degrees of verbal control and harm. Together we need to think carefully about words that violate the spirit and promise of the marriage covenant. The author,

Jeff Olson, is a licensed counselor in Michigan and works for the RBC Ministries biblical correspondence department.




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