My understanding of reactive abuse is that it refers to a victim lashing out and retaliating with verbal or physical aggression. Self defense, in my mind, is different in the sense that an active threat has to be present. For example, if someone is pressing you up against a wall and you kick them, you’re acting in self defense. But if you are the victim in an abusive relationship and you initiate violence on a stand alone occasion that’s “reactive abuse.”
However I saw some people online refer to it as “reactive abuse” when they hit their partner who was only ever verbally abusive. In other words, the victim was the only person to ever introduce violence into the relationship. Isn’t that just abuse? If you’re the only person to have ever been physically violent? I guess that’s my main question. Because it seems like that’s just something that an abuser would say- that the abuse is somehow justified because of the other person’s failures as a partner. Something else I saw people saying was that the abuser unlike the reactive victim can be identified by the fact that they have more control in the relationship.