Openly calling out the behavior as abuse

[Spygirl]

Hello everyone,

Would any of you share your experience with verbally calling out your PD's behavior as abuse to thier face?

Recently i am finding myself in a place where i feel the need to call out the financial abuse for what it is, instead to eggshelling and trying to unsucessfully negotiate our settlement agreement. My PD said to me in a rage almost a year ago that if i publicly accused him of any abuse, he would accuse me of the same.
He makes threats and jabs at me each meeting, i am either silent or unemotional with simple statements at our meetings with the lawyer.
I understand the concept of narcissistic injury, but i am getting frustrated with his nonsense delays at finishing this. Its been months. I need a strategy.  Some of you have been here. I dont want to make it worse.

[Whiteheron]

I haven't. He told me years ago that if I spoke to anyone about him there would be consequences. At the time I was completely taken off guard - we had just started dating and the red flags had been minimal.

Years later the threat morphed into "if you talk about me to anyone, I will tell them how you really are." Another wtf moment.

Then it changed to "I'm a product of my environment, you're the reason I...x, y, z." Which was solidified in his mind by his mom who would go around saying "he never acted like this when he was living at home." Implication noted.

When I would approach him about individual instances/behaviors, it was all my fault - "I had to threaten to cut you off because you..." or flat out denial "I would never say I was going to cut you off..."

So I haven't. When dealing with L's and the courts, I talk about behaviors, give examples. In the psych evaluation I only gave examples. When talking to his T and our primary doc, I gave examples (primary doc was the first one to say that I was dealing with some 'very bad emotional abuse'), talking to the kids' Ts and doc, examples only.

Now that we are in court, he jumped out in front claiming in an affidavit that I was going to tell the court he was emotionally abusive (words which never came out of my mouth to describe him), then he went on to illustrate all the ways I was the abusive one and how I was inappropriate with the kids. In my responses, I never claimed abuse, just more examples and the truth. That's all I can do. I have a strong feeling the judge will get very angry if I start slinging mud (aka the truth) by calling him abusive and putting labels on him and his behavior. It is frustrating. It is taking forever, because stbx can't get enough of abusing me by proxy. I try to look at is as, the longer this goes on, the crazier he's going to look. It's very hard, but your silence is golden. That he is threatening you and you don't retaliate speaks volumes and the L (and others) will notice.

[coyote]

Here is a phrase; "Those who matter don't care and those who care don't matter." I have called out my uPPDw on abuse and it gave me a sense of empowerment to call it what it is. It is just what works for me but I say stand up for yourself while not JADEing or getting into Circular Conversations. It is what it is and that's all there is to it. If he doesn't like it he can change.