Emotional Abuse Therapy ~ Clubbing and Battering Vs. Loving and Listening

by Dr. Jeanne King, Ph.D.

Are you clubbing or are you loving? Is he/she clubbing or is he/she loving? From these questions, it’s obvious that this eInsight is for the batterer and the abused.

There is a significant distinction between moments of battering and moments of opening in the dialogue of couples in domestic abuse therapy. Are you aware of this distinction?

Clubbing, Battering and Emotional Verbal Abuse

Clubbing is a metaphor that I use to describe battering in the form of emotional and verbal abuse. It has the feeling of being clubbed or beaten into attention, correction and submission. It is judgmental and diminishing in nature, and it serves to shift the underlying distribution of power as perceived by the batterer in the moment.

While on the surface, it appears interactional; the act of battering is inspired from within. Battering is actually an eruption of vulnerability seeking to dissipate itself. You may have heard of it as impotence longing omnipotence.

I use the metaphor of clubbing to describe it because when on the receiving end, one truly feels clubbed. It’s kind of like being hit or jolted out of nowhere. You can’t really connect it to anything in particular that you are…