Domestic Violence Checklist
Is your behavior violent, abusive, or controlling? Is it harmful to your partner? Read over this questionnaire from Emerge to get a sense of the behaviors and attitudes that are harmful to your partner, and may indicate that your behavior is more abusive than it is repectful.
What Counts as Harmful Behavior?
In general, harmful behavior is any action which causes pain or harm in someone else. As you can imagine, there are an infinite amount of actions which have the potential to cause pain or harm and many of those are not necessarily intentional. However, at Emerge, we look at those actions which are either intentional or those which may initially be unintentional, but become a harmful pattern of behavior.
The following list contains some examples of harmful, abusive, controlling and violent behavior, as well as the effects that they may have caused. If you have done anything on the list to a partner, chances are that you understand the damage that can be caused to a relationship. At Emerge we ask group members to identify how they have harmed others so that they can work to keep them from happening.
- Have you ever hit, pushed, grabbed, threatened, frightened or intimidated your partner?
- Is your partner afraid of you?
- Are your children afraid of you?
- Are you concerned that your behavior is harming your relationship?
- Have you broken promises about changing behavior?
- Have you ever punched a wall, banged a table, or broken something during a disagreement?
- Have you ever grabbed your partner during a disagreement, attempted to stop them from leaving, locked them out or restrained them in any way?
- Do you pressure your partner to do things your way, even when you know your partner doesn't want to?
- Has your partner ever said 'you're always trying to control me'?
- Do you use names, put-downs or swearing to control your partner?
- Do you put the blame onto your partner for things you are responsible for?
- Have you found yourself 'keeping score' of the wrongs your partner has done to you in order to hold those things against them?
- Have you ever blamed your abusive actions on alcohol, other drugs, stress, or family problems?
- Have you cheated on your partner or been sexually abusive in other ways?
- Have you ever been accused of mistreating your children?
- Are you concerned that your children are being emotionally or psychologically harmed because of the way you treat your partner?
- Has your partner complained about jealous or possessive behavior on your part?
- When you do something that hurts your partner, do you just say "I'm sorry" and then expect acceptance of your apology without making any change in how you were hurtful?
From Emerge http://www.emergedv.com/behavior.html