Yours raises a point seldom addressed:
Guys don’t necessarily differentiate between physical vs emotional abuse. Some words are received with the same feelings as being punched. “It’s just words” may be true for some, but not others.
I went to a course, just before the end of my marriage (19 years ago) called “Learning to Live, Learning to love”. It is part of what destroyed my marriage.
The men went to a class and the women went to a separate class. Now, in my class, we used a book that was VERY hard on men and went over all the ways we can be abusive (right down to the “silent knite - abuse through silence”. The exercises would help you to see how you might abuse in certain ways you were not aware of.
But an interesting thing happened. In one case, it asked if the family treated you a certain way. I thought, “nope. But now that I think of it, the family treats HER that way”. But I went on and finished up all the stuff in the lessons. What I learned helped me to this day.
However, one day I went to the women’s class to see what their book was teaching them about women in relationships. THEY WERE USING THE EXACT SAME BOOK. i.e. the men’s class was helping us identify how we were abusing our wives and the women’s class was helping them identify how we were abusing them!
And so much of it was contrived. That is, the “cycle of abuse” created an environment in my marriage where, even if on a lark, I thought it would be nice to get my wife flowers, that was considered part of the cycle of abuse. It was the “kiss and make up phase.” Yep. psychologically, it made giving her flowers abusive.
On a side note, throughout our marriage she would complain about the quality of the flowers I gave her. A missing petal here, a brown spot on a rose there. Sheesh.