Ch 8: Abusive Men and Addiction

Why Does He Do That?

If I could just get him to stop drinking and smoking pot, the abuse would stop.

He’s completely different when he’s drinking—he turns mean.

He has stopped drinking, and now he says that I have a problem with alcohol.

I try really hard not to upset him, because when he gets mad he drinks.

He can be a terror when he doesn’t have pot. He’s a lot easier to deal with when he’s stoned.

THE ROLE THAT ALCOHOL, drugs, and other addictions play in abusiveness

has been greatly misunderstood. A majority of abusers are not addicts, and even those who do abuse substances mistreat their partners even when they are not under the influence. Abusive men who succeed in recovering from an addiction continue to abuse their partners, although sometimes there is a short break in their worst behaviors. Physically violent abusers sometimes refrain from violence for a substantial period of time when they get sober, but their psychologically abusive treatment continues or even worsens.

Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

At the same time, a man’s addictions can contribute in important ways to his cruelty or volatility. A drunk or drugged abuser tends to make his

partner’s life even more miserable than a sober one does. The trick is to separate fact from fiction, including the myths perpetrated by abusers themselves, regarding how addiction affects the abusive man and his partner.

NOT ALL SUBSTANCE ABUSERS ARE ABUSIVE PARTNERS

Part of how we know that partner abuse is not caused by substances is that many alcoholics and drug addicts are neither mean to nor controlling of their partners. Some alcoholics drink only late at night, or they drink away from home and return only to pass out. Some become passive and pathetic, not belligerent or domineering. A certain number even provide fairly responsibly for their families and take good care of their children, at least during the early years of their addiction. In such cases the man’s substance abuse certainly causes serious problems for his partner and children, but the atmosphere differs sharply from that of a home where a partner abuser lives. And while substance abusers can be male or female, abusive partners are overwhelmingly male.

NOT ALL ABUSIVE PARTNERS ARE SUBSTANCE ABUSERS

We can further uncouple addiction from partner abuse by observing that a clear majority of partner abusers do not abuse alcohol or drugs or show other signs of addiction. Even if we restrict our discussion to physically violent abusers, I still find addiction present less than half of the time, and most researchers report similar observations.

In short, partner abuse and substance abuse are two separate problems. Both are rampant in the world today, so it is no surprise that they often turn up in the same person, along with dandruff, acne, college degrees, and

various other noncausal factors.

ISN’T PARTNER ABUSE ITSELF A TYPE OF ADDICTION?

No. Partner abuse has its own causes and dynamics that are unrelated to addiction, although it also shares some features. In recent years some

counseling programs have sprung up that claim to address substance addiction and partner abuse at the same time, but they are selling false hopes. A doctor theoretically may be able to develop specialties in both brain surgery and pelvic reconstruction—although it would be very difficult, given the complexities involved—but if he or she claims to perform one procedure that can solve a problem in both areas, you shouldn’t buy it. The differences between abusing women and abusing substances are great enough that they have to be addressed in separate ways.

How Partner Abuse and Addiction Are Similar

The ways in which partner abuse resembles addiction include the following:

Escalation

Alcoholics tend to find that they are drinking increasing amounts, or with increasing frequency, or both. This escalation is caused partly by tolerance, which means that the body adapts to the substance, so that more is required to have the same effect. “I can handle my alcohol” is essentially a short form for saying, “I have been drinking too much for a long time now, so it takes a lot to get me drunk.” (Some addicts experience the opposite effect, so that smaller and smaller amounts can intoxicate them over time.)

Substance abuse also escalates for other reasons, including the addict’s increasing fear of facing reality the more time he or she has spent escaping it, and the mounting life problems that the addiction itself is creating, which gives the addict more things to need to escape from.

Partner abuse also tends to escalate, at least for the first few years of a relationship. One of the causes of mounting abuse is that the abuser gets frustrated by the effects of his own abusiveness, which he then uses as an excuse for more abuse. For example, you as the partner of an abuser may have become increasingly depressed over time (because chronic

mistreatment is depressing), and now he gets angry about the ways in which your decreased energy make you cater to him less enthusiastically.

Similarly, abuse may diminish your drive for sex, and then he is hurt and enraged about your lack of desire for him.

The concept of tolerance can also be applied to partner abuse, but with different implications. As an abusive man adapts to a certain degree of mistreatment of his partner, his feelings of guilt nag at him less and less, so

he is then able to graduate to more serious acts. He becomes accustomed to a level of cruelty or aggression that would have been out of the question for him a few years earlier. In some cases the concept of tolerance also applies to the abused woman, when she becomes inured to his abusiveness and

starts to stand up to him more. He then increases his abusiveness because he sees that it takes more to frighten or control her than it used to. This escalation is similar to the style of crowd control used by a military dictatorship, which shoots rubber bullets as long as they are adequate to

disperse protestors but switches to live ammunition when the crowds stop running away from the rubber bullets.

However, many women (and their children) respond to the trauma of abuse by becoming easier to frighten rather than harder. A recent study of physical batterers found, for example, that about one-third of the men decreased their violence over time, because the women had become so frightened that the men could control them with scary words and glances, making actual assaults unnecessary.
Denial, minimization, and blaming

Addicts and partner abusers share a capacity for convincing themselves that they don’t have any problem and for hotly denying the problem to other people. An alcoholic may say that he drank “a couple of frosties” on a night when he had three forty-ounce beers and two shots, or insist that alcohol is not a problem for him because he never drinks liquor, although he throws back two cases of beer each weekend. The addict also follows the partner abuser’s pattern in externalizing responsibility. In the world of substance

abuse treatment, the expression people, places, and things is used to

describe the addict’s way of always finding someone or something to blame for drinking or drugging.
Choosing approving peers

Substance abusers prefer to spend their time with other people who abuse substances or with those who at least accept the addiction without making

an issue of it, and who will listen sympathetically to the addict’s excuses for his behavior. Partner abusers make similar choices regarding their social circle. Their male friends tend to either abuse their own wives or girlfriends or else make comments about abuse that buy into excuse making and victim blaming. (In research terminology this is called providing informational

support for abuse.) Their female friends may be mostly people who will accept their poor-me stories about being the victims of hysterical or mentally ill women.
Lying and manipulating

Both partner abusers and addicts can have chronic problems with lying to cover up their problem, escape accountability, and get other people to clean up the messes they make. Partner abusers, however, use dishonesty and manipulation for the additional purpose of gaining power and control over their partners, which is a separate dynamic.
Lack of predictability

Both partner abusers and substance abusers tend to keep their partners and children walking on eggshells, never knowing what is going to happen next. This dynamic helps to hook family members into hoping that he will change.
Defining roles for family members

Both abusive men and addicts can set up family members to be cast in roles that serve the abuse scenario. One person may become the confronter, another the protector, and another the family scapegoat, whom the abuser

uses as a place to lay all the blame for the problems that he himself is actually causing in the family.
High rates of returning to abuse after periods of apparent change

Both groups have rampant problems with dropping out of treatment

programs or with continuing to abuse even after “successful” completion of a program. Deep and lasting change comes only through an extended and painstaking series of steps, although the process of change for substance

abusers is quite different from that for partner abusers.

How Partner Abuse and Addiction are Different

The ways in which partner abuse differs from addiction include the following:
Partner abusers don’t “hit bottom.”

Substance abuse is self-destructive. Over time, the addict’s life becomes increasingly unmanageable. He tends to have difficulty keeping jobs; his finances slide into disarray (partly due to the expense of his habit); his

friendships decline. He may alienate himself from his relatives unless they are substance abusers themselves. This downward spiral can lead the addict to reach a nadir where his life is finally such a mess that he can no longer deny his problem. Alcoholics commonly attribute their entrance into recovery to such an experience of “hitting bottom.”

Partner abuse, on the other hand, is not especially self-destructive, although it is profoundly destructive to others. A man can abuse women for twenty or thirty years and still have a stable job or professional career, keep his finances in good order, and remain popular with his friends and relatives. His self-esteem, his ability to sleep at night, his self-confidence,

his physical health, all tend to hold just as steady as they would for a

nonabusive man. One of the great sources of pain in the life of an abused woman is her sense of isolation and frustration because no one else seems to notice that anything is awry in her partner. Her life and her freedom may slide down the tubes because of what he is doing to her mind, but his life usually doesn’t.

It is true that partner abusers lose intimacy because of their abuse, since true closeness and abuse are mutually exclusive. However, they rarely

experience this as much of a loss. Either they find their intimacy through

close emotional connections with friends or relatives, as many of my clients do, or they are people for whom intimacy is neither a goal nor a value (as is also true of many nonabusers). You can’t miss something that you aren’t interested in having.

In recent years, physically assaultive abusers are for the first time hitting bottom in one sense: They are occasionally experiencing unpleasant legal consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, most court systems still treat domestic abusers with special leniency (see Chapter 12), so the bottom seems to be a long way down.
Short-term versus long-term rewards

Substance abuse can be highly rewarding. It brings quick, easy pleasure and relief from emotional distresses. It often provides camaraderie through

entrance to a circle of friends whose social life revolves around seeking and enjoying intoxication. However, these rewards are usually short-lived. Over

time, substance abuse causes the addict emotional distresses that are as great as the ones he or she was attempting to escape in the first place.

Friendships based on substance abuse are shallow and are prone to tensions and ruptures due to financial resentments, paranoia, mutual irresponsibility, and many other factors. An alcoholic tends to drink more and more, not

because of how well it is working but because of how poorly.

Partner abuse, on the other hand, can be rewarding to the abuser for many years, and potentially for a lifetime. In Chapter 6, we examined the multiple benefits that abusers gain through their behavior, none of which necessarily decreases over time. It is impossible to get partner abusers to change by trying to persuade them to look at the damage they are doing to their own lives (as I tried to do in my early years as an abuse counselor)

because they perceive the gains as vastly outweighing the losses. Change in an abuser is primarily brought about when society succeeds in pressuring him into caring about the damage he is doing to others.
Societal approval for partner abuse is greater.

Social supports for both substance abuse and partner abuse are regrettably high, but they are even stronger for the latter, as discussed in Chapter 13. Substance abuse receives the active promotion of alcohol advertising, which domestic abuse does not. But there is an array of writers and

organizations that actively opposes improvements in legal and institutional responses to domestic abuse, whereas there are no parallel organized efforts to defend substance abuse. Television, movies, music videos, and other cultural outlets are replete with messages condoning partner abuse.

Because of these critical distinctions between partner abuse and addiction, programs and books that have attempted to address abusiveness based on an addiction model have failed badly. Batterers Anonymous groups, for example, are notorious for acting as support circles for abusers’ excuses and justifications rather than as launching pads for change.

Recovery programs generally address few or none of the central attitudes and habits that cause partner abuse.

PARTNER ABUSE DOESN’T GO AWAY WHEN AN ADDICT RECOVERS

Question 13:

If he stops drinking, will he stop abusing me?

Over the years, dozens of my clients have gone into recovery from addiction while they were participating in my program, sometimes because of pressure from me. No significant improvement has occurred as a result, except in those men who also worked seriously on their partner abuse issues. During the first several months of recovery, a man’s harsh daily criticism and control sometimes soften, and any physical violence he was using may lessen or cease for a period, raising the hopes of the abused woman. She interprets this respite as confirmation that the addiction did indeed cause his abusiveness, but his behavior toward her gradually, or abruptly, reverts to being as destructive as it was while he was drinking, or nearly so.

Ironically, the man’s backsliding tends to begin precisely as his recovery from addiction starts to take solid hold. The early period of recovery is all-consuming: The compulsion to drink is intense, so the

alcoholic fights a daily internal battle, often holding on by a thread. He may be attending one or more substance abuse meetings per day, which occupy his time and maintain his focus. One result of this Herculean effort is that

the man has little time, energy, or mental space to devote to controlling or manipulating his partner. He is entirely self-focused and absorbed. But when he starts to come out the other end of this white-knuckle process of early recovery, his energy and attention are redirected toward his partner, and his desire to bully her reemerges.

It is not uncommon for abusers to actually get worse when they are in recovery, partly because they may become irritable from not drinking and take it out on family members. Other abusers become more controlling when sober than they were while drunk, standing guard with eyes that are no longer clouded by alcohol.

Perhaps even more important is that an abuser’s recovery program tends itself to become a weapon to use against his partner. Once he stops drinking, for example, he may turn around and insist that she is alcoholic too, even if she actually drinks moderately. He starts to criticize her for being “in denial” about her own drinking, a concept he has learned at his

meetings and about which he now considers himself an expert. Insulting

comments about her drinking habits and pressure on her to give up alcohol and join AA are likely to follow.

The abuser also can use specific concepts from AA against his partner.

For example, AA encourages participants to review their own faults and misdeeds and make an inventory of them and discourages criticizing or

focusing on the shortcomings of others, which is known as “taking someone else’s inventory.” The abuser turns this concept against his partner, so that any time she attempts to complain about his abusive behavior and how it

affects her, he says to her, “You should work on your own issues instead of taking my inventory.” Similarly, he uses the danger that he might drink as an excuse to control her. For example, when he is bothered by something

she does, such as confront him about his bullying, he says, “You’re getting me stressed, and you know I might drink if I get under too much stress.”

The accusation “You’re threatening my sobriety!” becomes a new tool that the abuser uses to hammer and silence his partner. Abusers thus develop

new excuses for abuse to make up for the fact that they no longer can blame it on being drunk.

The philosophy of twelve-step programs includes elements that could be valuable to abusers, but I find that my clients tend to ignore the

principles that could help. For example, according to AA the alcoholic has a responsibility to make amends for all the damage he has done to other

people while he was drinking. Abusers choose instead to take an almost

opposite view, arguing that their partners should not raise grievances about past abuse, “because that was when I was drinking and I’m not like that anymore, so she should let go of the past.” They think of recovery from addiction as a gigantic, self-awarded amnesty program that should cause their partners’ resentments and mistrust to simply vanish.

Abusers in recovery can be just as committed to blaming their behavior on alcohol as they were while drinking. They choose to misinterpret the AA philosophy to mean that they were not responsible for their actions while they were drinking—which is not what AA proposes—and that therefore alcohol is a full and adequate explanation for all the cruelty and selfishness to which they have subjected women. Some of my clients use their recovery to try to escape their responsibilities, saying that they can’t help with the children, get a job, or contribute in other ways, “because the program says I need to keep my focus on myself.” In this way recovery can feed an abusive

man’s self-centeredness and excuse making. A woman who hears the abuser express these attitudes may find herself doubting that he is really changing, and her skepticism is well advised. Her partner may tell her, “You just have no faith in people” or “You don’t believe anyone can change” (as if putting her down were the way to persuade her that he is no longer abusive!), but her instincts are correctly telling her that he is very much the same.

I have had clients who made significant changes from a combination of recovery from alcoholism and working seriously on taking responsibility for their abusiveness. Only then does an abuser’s recovery from addiction become a significant step.

ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCE

Alcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior—

anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine—but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Alcohol and other substances thus contribute to partner abuse in two ways:
1. A man’s beliefs about the effects of the substance will largely be borne out. If he believes that alcohol can make him aggressive, it will, as research has shown. On the other hand, if he doesn’t
  attribute violence-causing powers to substances, he is unlikely to become aggressive even when severely intoxicated.
2. Alcohol provides an abuser with an excuse to freely act on his desires. After a few drinks, he turns himself loose to be as insulting or intimidating as he feels inclined to be, knowing that the next day he can say, “Hey, sorry about last night, I was really trashed,” or even claim to have completely forgotten the incident, and his partner, his family, or even a judge will let him off the hook.

(Courts tend to be especially lenient with abusers who blame their violence on a drinking problem.) And the alcohol is an excuse that

he accepts, so he isn’t kept awake at night with gnawing guilt about having hurt his partner.

I have had several physically violent clients admit that they made the decision to assault their partners before they had any alcohol in their systems. They went out, as a few of the men have put it, “to grease the wheels,” drinking for a couple of hours before coming home to start a

vicious, scary fight. The alcohol arms the abuser with an excuse and helps him to overcome any shame or embarrassment that might hold him back. Beware of the man who believes that drugging or drinking makes him violent. If he thinks it will, he’ll be right.

WHAT ABOUT THE MAN WHO IS ABUSIVE ONLY WHEN HE DRINKS?

I could count on one hand the number of clients I have had whose

abusiveness is entirely restricted to times of intoxication. However, I have worked with dozens of men whose worst incidents are accompanied by alcohol use but whose controlling and disrespectful behaviors are a pattern even when they are sober. These abusers tend to fit into one of the following categories:

The verbally abusive man who escalates to physical violence or threats only when intoxicated: When I ask the partner of such a

man to describe his day-to-day behavior, she usually reports that he gets meaner and scarier when he’s drinking but that his name- calling, disrespect, and selfishness are the same, whether he is drunk or sober. She tends to feel that his physically scary behaviors would stop if she could get him into recovery and that she could

manage the rest of his abusive behaviors. This soothing hope is a false one for two reasons: (a) When this style of abuser gets sober, he gradually accustoms himself to using violence without the

assistance of alcohol, usually over a period of one or two years; and (b) even if he is among the small number of exceptions to this rule, the woman usually discovers that his psychological abuse can be as destructive to her as his violence was, which tosses her back into having to figure out what to do.
The verbal abuser who becomes even more cruel and degrading when drinking but doesn’t escalate to violence: He is doing the
same thing that the physically assaultive abuser does: using alcohol as an excuse. If he gets sober, he gradually comes up with new excuses, including learning to use his recovery as an excuse, and

life goes on more or less as before.
The assaultive abuser who becomes even more violent when intoxicated: I find this style the most common among substance- addicted partner abusers. When this abuser is not intoxicated, he mostly refrains from his scariest forms of violence, like punching, kicking, choking, or threatening to kill her. His partner may say,

“He is only violent when he drinks,” but she then goes on to tell me that he shoves or grabs her, walks toward her in menacing ways, is sexually rough, or uses other forms of physical

intimidation or assault even when sober—behaviors that the abuser has succeeded in convincing her not to define as violence.

If your partner’s behavior becomes much worse when he’s intoxicated, you may tend to focus your attention on trying to manage his drinking, so that you never fully realize how abusive he is when he’s sober. His

substance-abuse problem can thereby create a huge diversion from critical issues.

Alcohol does not a change a person’s fundamental value system.

People’s personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People’s conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol

encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.

ABUSERS MAKE CONSCIOUS CHOICES EVEN WHILE INTOXICATED

One of my first abusive clients, almost fifteen years ago now, was a physically assaultive husband named Max who worked for a utility company. He had gone out drinking after work one evening, and by the time he arrived at his front door he was “trashed.” He told me that as soon as he came in the house, his wife, Lynn, began “nagging” him. He “saw red” and started to scream at her and soon was tearing into her with his fists. Max sheepishly recounted this event to me, going on to admit that he had torn off some of Lynn’s clothes and had “partly” tied her to a chair. (I’m not sure

how you “partly” tie someone to a chair; they are either tied or they’re not.) As Max sat in my office, he seemed to be a likable, mild-mannered line worker. It was not easy to imagine what he must have looked like through Lynn’s eyes that night.

I asked him to describe Lynn’s injuries, and he told me that she had black-and-blue marks and welts up and down both of her legs. I inquired

about any other injuries, and he said there were none. I was surprised, given the brutality of the attack. “Lynn had no bruises on her arms, or on her face? Why not?” Max’s face changed shape, suddenly peering at me as if I must not be very bright, and he sputtered, “Oh, well, of course I wasn’t going to do anything that would show.”

Lynn confirmed to me later that Max had indeed been stumbling drunk that night. But had his inebriation caused him to lose control? Clearly not. He had remained focused on his desire to protect his own reputation and to avoid putting himself at risk of arrest, and so he had restricted Lynn’s

injuries to places where they would be covered by clothing the next day. He could scarcely be termed “out of control.”

I could provide countless similar examples of the consciousness and decision making that my clients exhibit while drunk or on drugs. They may not choose their words quite as carefully, and they may not have perfect coordination of their movements, but they protect their self-interest: They avoid damaging their own prized belongings and usually don’t let their

friends and relatives see their most overt and cruel forms of verbal or physical abuse or anything that they feel wouldn’t be adequately covered by the “I was drunk” excuse.

When I criticize my clients about their drunken abusiveness, they

sometimes respond: “But I was in a blackout.” However, a blackout is a memory disconnection that happens after a drunk person passes out, causing the person to no longer know what occurred upon awakening. The

person was still conscious during the event. If you ask an extremely drunk but still-awake person what happened earlier that evening, he or she can tell you. Thus there is no such thing as being “in” a blackout; the loss of memory happens later.

Finally, even if substances could cause people to “lose control,” the abusive man would still be responsible for his actions while intoxicated because he made the choice to impair himself with alcohol or drugs. A man’s claim that he is not fully responsible for his mistreatment of his

partner because he was drunk is simply another manifestation of the abusive mentality.

SUBSTANCES AS WEAPONS OF ABUSE

Oscar and Ellen

Oscar and Ellen were dining in a restaurant. Tension was mounting during the meal because of several relationship issues, mostly related to Ellen’s

complaints of mistreatment by Oscar. Oscar, on the other hand, insisted that Ellen’s complaints were all caused by her own hypersensitivity and desire to control him. Ellen was pinning her hopes for their relationship on persuading Oscar to deal with his alcohol problem. He had agreed at one point earlier in their relationship that he was indeed drinking too much, and he had maintained sobriety for nine months. His abusiveness toward her actually hadn’t improved during that time, but she didn’t see any other strategy to get him to change.

The argument at dinner that night focused on his economic abuse of her.

Specifically, he had withdrawn $4,000—virtually the entirety of their savings—from their joint bank account and had bought an old BMW “for her.” Ellen was angry that she hadn’t been consulted, all the more so

because she was pregnant with their first child and wanted the security of having some savings. Oscar responded by outdoing her anger, snapping through clenched teeth, “You never appreciate anything I do for you!

Nothing is ever good enough for you! You just bitch, bitch, bitch!” He immediately proceeded to order a cocktail, which he knew would bother her. As soon as the waitress brought his drink, he looked Ellen in the eye, downed it in three gulps, and quickly ordered another. He set out to make himself rapidly drunk, and did. Ellen was then afraid to leave the restaurant

with him, because she had been through numerous occasions on which he had combined alcohol and rage in a volatile mix that led to raised fists, pounded walls, thrown objects, and threats, leaving her cowering and trembling.

Among my clients, I have encountered numerous other ways that they have used substances as weapons, including:

Stomping out to go driving while drunk, because he knows it will cause her to be upset and worried. This type of maneuver is particularly powerful if the couple has children and the family is dependent on the man’s income for survival.

Forcing her to assist him in running or dealing drugs, thereby putting her at risk of serious legal consequences, which he can use to control her further. (A large percentage of women who are in prison for drug- or alcohol-related charges, or for minor economic crimes such as forging checks, are serving time for crimes that either directly or indirectly were instigated by their abusive partners.)

During periods when he is sober or clean, threatening to return to alcohol or drug use if she does not meet his demands or obey his orders, or claiming that her challenges of him are “threatening his sobriety.”

Blaming her for problems in his life that are really caused by his addiction.

Pressuring and manipulating his partner into becoming substance- involved herself. He then uses her addiction to increase his power over her and to get other people to disbelieve her reports that he is abusive. This tactic is particularly common when the abuser has a

substance-abuse problem himself, since he doesn’t want his partner to be able to hold anything over him. But I have also had clients who kept their partners substance-involved while staying sober or using substances only moderately themselves.

Shane and Amanda

In one of my cases, an alcoholic woman named Amanda had entered sobriety several times, but her husband, Shane, would sabotage her progress each time by ridiculing her for being “dependent” on AA, telling her she

was weak for not being able to stay away from alcohol on her own, “without a crutch.” He would also go out and buy beer, telling her, “I just want to have a few on hand in case friends come over,” but he never seemed to drink them. They would just sit in the refrigerator and in cabinets tempting her, and finally she would succumb.

Amanda eventually went into a detox center and didn’t tell Shane where she was going, knowing that if she spoke with him she was likely to give in to the temptation to get back together with him. Shane left no stone unturned in his efforts to find out where she was and get a message to her.

As of my last contact with the case, she had succeeded in staying away from him and as a result had regained custody of her children, which his abuse and her drinking had caused her to lose.

MUTUAL REINFORCEMENT OF ADDICTION AND PARTNER ABUSE

Notice that when a man uses substances as a weapon, he ends up contributing to his own problem with substances. Thus partner abuse can feed the problem of addiction, and not just vice versa. They are two

separate issues, neither of which causes the other but which do help to keep each other stuck. A man’s abusiveness strengthens his denial of his

substance-abuse problem, as he can blame all of his life difficulties on his partner. His negative attitudes toward her allow him to easily dismiss

concerns that she raises about his addiction. At the same time, the addiction fortifies his denial of his abusiveness, as he uses the substance as an excuse and as a weapon.

OTHER ADDICTIONS

I have worked with clients who have been addicted to gambling, cocaine, heroin, and prescription medications. Several have also claimed to be “sex addicts,” but I don’t buy this self-diagnosis from abusive men (for reasons that I covered in Chapter 4, under “The Player”). Any addiction can be a financial drain on a couple, contribute to the man’s secretiveness, and

encourage him to use his partner as a scapegoat. An abuser’s addiction doesn’t cause his abuse, but it does make his partner’s life even more painful and complicated.

ENTITLEMENT AND ADDICTION

An abusive man typically believes that his use or abuse of substances is

none of his partner’s business. No matter how his addiction may lead him to abuse his partner economically (because he pours money into the substance and/or has trouble holding down a job) no matter how burdened she is with household responsibilities because he is out partying, no matter how much worse he may treat her while intoxicated, he nonetheless feels entitled to

use substances as he chooses. If she criticizes him for his selfishness or confronts him with the effects that his partying has on her life, he feels

justified in calling her a “nag” or a “bitch” or labeling her “controlling.” In short, irresponsible use of alcohol or drugs is another one of the privileges that the abusive man may award himself, and he may use psychological or physical assaults to punish his partner for challenging it.

SUBSTANCE ABUSE BLOCKS SELF-EXAMINATION

While substance addiction does not directly cause a man to become abusive, it does ensure that his abusive behavior persists. I have yet to see a client struggling with substance abuse make meaningful and lasting improvements in how he treats his partner unless he simultaneously addresses his addiction. In fact, I allow an alcoholic or drug-addicted client only about two months to begin recovery—if he fails to do so, I remove him from the abuser program. I refuse to give his partner false hope or waste my program’s time. Confronting and changing abusive behavior is an incredibly difficult and uncomfortable journey that demands long-term commitment. It requires immense courage for a man to be honest with himself, reassess his attitudes toward his partner, and acknowledge the deep emotional harm he has caused her.

active substance abuser is willing or able to take on this task.

Thus, although recovery from addiction is not sufficient to bring about change in a man’s abusiveness, it is a necessary prerequisite. Only if he is

willing to address both problems—and I have had a number of clients who have gotten serious about becoming both sober and respectful—can he stop being a source of pain and distress to his partner.