It sounds like assault.
Even in healthy families, people will often forgive a lot of things, or try and "move past" things that they wouldn't ordinarily. For example, you might not forgive a random stranger for crashing their car into yours, but if it's family - you have context, you have a reason to work things out maybe, you have a more complete story maybe, you've both had good & bad times, made mistakes that have needed forgiving. And there's other family members involved, often pressuring us to maintain the status quo, even when it isn't necessarily in our best interests. It's complicated with family. Even without the presence of abuse.
When you add abuse? It gets even more complicated. Your self-esteem is getting trodden on, making it harder to assert your rights of look out for yourself; it can be really hard to accept that abuse has entered into our life (that's something that happens to other people, not me); and the otherwise healthy family habit of looking to rationalise, excuse, forgive, move past, or flat out ignore problem behaviour can become toxic.
Probably none of that is making much sense. But you can call this assault, which is what it is, and maybe that might help a little (hopefully it does) with helping you decide what you want to do with that. Is it something you're willing to forgive? Or is there a big issue here that needs work?
But because it's family? It's nowhere near as straightforward as saying "A stranger asssaulted me - am I okay with that?" It's not a stranger. It's your son. And your wife becomes entangled because of her response. And it all gets very complicated very quickly. And that makes it even more painful, and difficult to heal from.
So, I'm a big big fan of calling a spade a spade. Your son assaulted you. That's not cool.
But I'm also a fan of being gentle with ourselves when it comes to dealing with family, because it is sooo much harder.
So, if you call this what it is, how does that change things? Does it make you feel slightly more empowered to be able to call it that now?
