It Was Always Something I Did: Covert Emotional Abuse, Gaslighting, and Coercive Control in a Marriage Everyone Else Thinks Is Fine

He gave the best toast at the party. On the drive home he went quiet, did your voice back to you in a high, silly tone, and waited. By the time you pulled into the driveway you had apologized twice, and you still could not say what for.

This book is for the woman in a long marriage to a man who has never hit her and whom everyone else admires. Friends call him a good husband. You have typed covert emotional abuse and gaslighting into your phone late at night and closed the screen before he came in, because calling it abuse felt like exaggerating. In the CDC's most recent national survey, 30.2 percent of American women said a partner had used psychological aggression against them at some point in their lives. Most of them were never asked about it.

The book follows nineteen women, one ordinary evening each. A wife in El Paso reads those numbers in a grocery store parking lot. A woman in Billings counts four days of silence by the dishwasher. One in Columbia stands at a register while her card is declined twice. Others sit in a counselor's office that believed him, hear a teenage son use his father's tone at dinner, and open a bank account of their own. The chapters cover the doubt about your own memory, the money, the friends who fell away, the good weeks that keep you hoping, what it does to your body, and why you stayed.

Expect plain words, real research, and no diagnosis of anyone. Agatha Tonka never tells you what your husband is, and she never tells you whether to stay or leave. She gives you back a clear account of what happened, so you can decide for yourself. One chapter covers what to do if it gets more dangerous and exactly where to call.

This book is general information and stories about emotional abuse and control in marriage. It is not counseling, legal advice or a crisis service. If you are afraid for your safety, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, text START to 88788, or call 911 in an emergency.