Honoring Mental Wellness Month by Focusing on Relationship Abuse

I’m interrupting my blog series profiling authors I personally know to commemorate Mental Wellness Month. As the American Brain Coalition lists on its calendar of events, the month of January is Mental Wellness Month. I’ve previously dedicated several blog posts to mental health matters: I wrote in 2020 about strategies for coping with the COVID-19 emergency, and I’ve written a few times about preventing suicide, once in 2022, at which point four people I knew had died of suicide, and once in 2023, when that number had increased to five. But mental wellness isn’t just about emergency situations or preventing suicide. It’s so much more.

Mental wellness and disruptions to it are with us every day, just like physical wellness and its disruptions. However, in US society, as in many others, discussing mental wellness is often stigmatized. Many factors contribute to this stigma, and I could write an entire blog post about them. Maybe I’ll do that another time. For now, though, it’s enough to know that the stigma around discussing mental wellness is frequently a barrier to achieving mental wellness. That’s why the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has developed its StigmaFree program, designed to help workplaces normalize discussions about mental wellness.   

 Noticing differences in how your coworker feels, acts, thinks, or looks? Start a conversation. (StigmaFree Resources/NAMI)

One major cause of disruptions to mental wellness is relationship abuse, and in my experience, this is a topic of discussion that’s heavily stigmatized. I’ve twice been in situations when a woman showed up to a workplace with a black eye, and both times the women said they had walked into a kitchen cabinet door that had been left open accidentally. Once I was too young to fully understand what might have really happened (I was a child, and the workplace involved was an extracurricular class setting), but even then, the excuse didn’t make sense to me. How likely is it that the countertop underneath the cabinet door wouldn’t keep you far enough away from the door to prevent your face from making contact? In the second instance, I suspected the woman’s husband had punched or hit her, and I offered my support directly, not believing the story about the cabinet door in the least. Unfortunately, she demurred rather than accepting my support.

Relationship abuse doesn’t have to be physical to be damaging. I’ve known four women who have confided in me about emotional abuse they’ve endured in relationships. Interestingly, none of them identified what they were experiencing as abuse. They all said their relationship partner had never hit them, so they didn’t think they were in abusive relationships. I explained that abuse doesn’t have to be physical and that emotional maltreatment is abusive, too. Since my conversations with these women, I’ve learned the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) provides resources to help identify relationship abuse. Had I known about these resources then, I would have shared them with these women. Understanding what constitutes abuse is the first step to identifying when someone is being abused.

Thankfully, three of these four women came to recognize they were being abused and are no longer living with the relationship partners who abused them. One has, unfortunately in my opinion, chosen to stay married and living with her spouse. Of the three who are no longer living with their relationship partners, one is still in a marriage with her spouse, but they are separated. The other two were not married but were living with their relationship partners, and they have since broken up and now live separately.

Although the majority of these women have moved away from their abusive relationship partners, the decision to do so was not easy. All four women have children and/or pets, and their responsibility for them was a factor they mentioned for a reason not to leave their partner or spouse. This is just one factor many abused people face in leaving a relationship partner. The National Center for Health Research has published a list that includes several more. When supporting someone who has confided in you about being affected by abuse, it’s important to recognize the complexity of the situation rather than oversimplifying and assuming it should be easy to leave. Hopefully some of the resources I’ve provided in this blog post will be helpful to you or to the person you are aiming to support.

Although my personal experience with relationship abuse involves women abused by men, it’s important to note that men can be abused as well. In fact, the NDVH offers a resource called “Men Can Be Victims of Abuse Too” that indicates 13 percent of contacts to the hotline are by men who are being abused. This resource acknowledges that an even higher percentage of men may actually experience abuse but do not reach out for assistance.

Whether men or women, those affected by relationship abuse certainly face obstacles to mental wellness. And relationship abuse is just one cause of disruptions to mental wellness. Grief, social isolation, everyday stress, and lack of sleep are some other factors that can affect mental wellness. The National Institutes of Health offers an Emotional Wellness Toolkit that provides a plethora of resources for maintaining mental wellness. I encourage everyone to check it out and use what seems helpful.