Someone said it to you kindly, like it was meant to help you see what was yours to take accountability for. Probably thinking they were speaking hope into the context.
A counselor, maybe. A pastor. A friend who genuinely wanted to help and was trying very hard not to take sides.
You both have work to do. You both have things to own. It takes two, you know.
And you nodded, because it sounded fair — and because you are exactly the kind of person who takes that sort of thing seriously. You do want to own your part.
However, I want to take that sentence apart.
What the Framing Claims
Mutual abuse says both people in a relationship are abusive, both are contributing equally to a toxic dynamic, and both are equally responsible for the dysfunction.
It takes two to tango.
Which is a strange thing to say, when you think about it, because a tango is a beautiful collaborative dance. The sentence should be: it takes only one to turn the tango into a tangle.
Why Mutual Abuse Cannot Be True in a Coercive Dynamic
In a coercive dynamic, there is no such thing as mutual. By definition.
There is an instigator and there is a reactor. There is a person whose pattern is the source of harm, and a person whose pattern is the accumulation of responses to that harm. One creates the environment. The other responds to the environment that was created.
Those two things are not symmetrical. They are not morally equivalent. And treating them as equivalent is a narrative that benefits exactly one person in the room.
Not you.
The Version That Comes Wrapped in Scripture
In a faith context this gets particular traction, because it arrives sounding like humility.
You both have sin. You both need to repent. You both need to forgive. You both need to take responsibility for your part.
And there is real truth in that theology. Like the oft-quoted verse to “take the log out of your own eye first” from Matthew 7:3-5. I’m not dismissing mutual accountability in marriage. In a healthy dynamic — or even a struggling but fundamentally safe and collaborative one — both people’s patterns are worth examining, and both people’s growth matters.
But apply that framework inside a coercive dynamic and it produces exactly one outcome, every time:
The person already carrying all the blame picks up more of it. And the person who has been engineering the breaking points gets to distribute the responsibility evenly and walk away lighter.
That is a mechanism of control wearing theology’s clothes — and it works precisely because faithful people are the least likely to challenge it.
Four Things to Do With the Blame You’ve Been Handed
One: Sort the street
Your reactions were real. The harm they caused was real. The words you said landed on real people, and the context that produced them does not erase that.
You are still accountable for what you did. I know that is hard to sit with, and I’m not going to soften it, because the softening is what keeps women stuck.
But accountability has boundaries.
Notice that nobody who hands you “you need to take responsibility for your part” ever tells you where your part ends. A debt with no amount on it can be collected forever. It’s also why ten years of taking responsibility has never once left you feeling clear — you’ve been making payments on a balance nobody will print, and your spouse is quite happy to leave vague and undefined.
So print it. Real accountability has a street address: this thing, that I did, on that day, in front of those people. If an item can’t be given specifics, it isn’t accountability. It’s shame with a work ethic, and it will take everything you hand it.
Get specific about which side of the street each item belongs on.
Yours:
-
- The specific things you did
- The specific words you said
- The specific impact those had on the people in the room — including, possibly, your children
Not yours:
-
- Being provoked
- The deliberate engineering of your breaking point
- The use of your reaction as evidence against you
- The way the context was stripped away when your reaction was described to other people
- The shame that has been layered on top of a moment of genuine human breaking
Write both columns out. If you’re curious, there’s a word for this! DARVO. Most women discover they have been carrying the entire second column as though it were the first, and that discovery alone awakens something.
Two: Write the clean accountability statement
This is the practice. If you take one thing from this post, take this.
For each moment you are carrying shame about, write three lines.
Line one — what you actually did. Factually. Specifically. I said X to him. I threw Y. I screamed Z at my children. No interpretation. No adjectives about your character.
Line two — the real impact. Not what he told you the impact was. What you honestly believe it was, on the people who experienced it.
Line three — what proportionate accountability sounds like. I said something hurtful. I want to acknowledge that and make it right.
Now look at what that statement does not contain.
It does not contain a global prosecution of your character. It does not import his narrative about who you are. It does not require you to accept that the breaking point was your moral failure rather than the predictable outcome of sustained pressure.
Clean accountability is small, specific, and proportionate. It owns the action, takes the lesson, and stops. It doesn’t justify, rationalize, defend or explain. It “accounts.”
Practice it until you can hold it without it expanding into a verdict about who you are. That expansion — from I said something hurtful to I am a hurtful person — is the exact seam where accountability turns into self-destruction, and you will feel it happen if you’re watching for it.
Three: Know what to say when someone hands you the mutual frame
You will not always be able to argue this, and with him you should not try. But when a counselor or a friend offers you “you both have work to do,” you have options other than agreement.
You can accept your part without accepting the symmetry:
“I’m accountable for how I reacted, and I’m working on it specifically. I’m not able to treat what I did and what produced it as mutual.”
That sentence does something useful. It demonstrates real accountability — which is disarming, because the person expected defensiveness — while declining the equivalence. And it tells you something about who you are talking to, based on what they do next.
If they can hold that, they may be emotionally mature enough to navigate the nonsense with you.
If they need you to accept the symmetry before they’ll consider you accountable, you have learned something important about how much of your story will truly be heard in that room.
Four: Test any framework by asking who it benefits
This is the one to keep permanently, and use indiscriminately.
When you are handed an interpretation of your marriage — by a book, a counselor, a sermon, a well-meaning friend, or him — run this question through it:
If everyone accepted this framing completely, who would be relieved of something, and who would pick something up? And what, specifically, are those things?
A framework that consistently relieves one person of personal responsibility and consistently loads it onto the other is not a neutral description of your marriage.
Run it on the sentence that sent you here.
You both have work to do. Accept it completely, and watch where everything lands.
He is relieved of being the source. His pattern stops being the thing that has to end and becomes his half of a shared problem. He gets a to-do list the same size as yours. Best of all, he never has to stop — he only has to be working on it, which he can do indefinitely, and which he will.
You pick up half of something you did not build. Your reactions get promoted from responses to co-authorship. And you lose the voice for what happened to you, because what happened to you is now what happened between you.
And the person who said it is relieved too. Naming harm costs a coach, a counselor or a pastor something — a hard conversation with a man who is persuasive and well-liked, and a position they would have to keep holding afterward. You both have work to do costs them nothing. It sounds wise, it sounds fair, and it gets everyone out of the room by four o’clock. But keeps them out of the work. Keeps them “safe.” Lets them move on to their happy little lives.
The “mutual abuse” myth is a convenient arrangement for the person who feels entitled to act destructively while expecting “respect” and connection without owning the breakdown that naturally happens. Two people set down. One picks up. I would bet that is not how you would define a healthy marriage.
What God Is Actually After
The mutual abuse narrative uses the language of repentance, and I want to give repentance back its actual meaning.
Genuine repentance is specific. It names a thing, owns it, and changes direction. It costs the person doing it something real.
The distributed, symmetrical, everybody-owns-half version is not repentance. It is a settlement, negotiated by the person who had the most to lose from an honest accounting.
God is not asking you to accept a share of responsibility proportioned by the person who benefits from the proportioning. He is asking you for the truth. All of it. Yours and his, each at its real point of accountability.
You Are Not Half of a Mutually Abusive Marriage
You are not half of a mutually abusive marriage.
You are one person, accountable for your own specific actions, living inside a dynamic that one person built and one person has been absorbing.
Own your half of the street. All of it, honestly, without flinching.
Then put the rest of it down. It was never yours to carry, and carrying it has never once made you feel alive, or beautiful, or strong.
If you want to keep working on this without a face-to-face step yet, the boundaries course is self-directed and goes deep — you can do it at your own pace, at two in the morning if that’s when you’re awake. If you would rather do it alongside other women, the Identity Recovery Groups are exactly that. One-to-one support is available any time through the booking page.
About the author. Sharmen Elaine Kimbrough is an identity strategist and the founder of LiveFound, Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in professional counseling and spent more than ten years developing and leading the women’s programs at the Marriage Recovery Center. She writes for women recovering a self after emotional abuse, coercive control, and spiritual bypassing. More about Sharmen →
