He’s crazy.

He feels so bad about himself. I just need to build up his self- image a little.

He just loses it. He’s so insecure.

His mother abused him, and now he has a grudge against women and he takes it out on me.

I’m so confused. I don’t understand what’s going on with him.

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice

the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.

To further divert your gaze, he may work to shape your view of his past partners to keep you from talking to them directly and to prepare you to

disbelieve them should you happen to hear what they say. If you could

follow the thread of his conduct over a series of relationships, you would find out that his behavior isn’t as erratic as it looks; in fact, it follows a fairly consistent pattern from woman to woman, except for brief

relationships or ones he isn’t that serious about.

Above all, the abusive man wants to avoid having you zero in on his abusiveness itself. So he tries to fill your head up with excuses and

distortions and keep you weighed down with self-doubt and self-blame. And, unfortunately, much of the society tends to follow unsuspectingly along behind him, helping him to close your eyes, and his own, to his problem.

The mythology about abusive men that runs through modern culture has been created largely by the abusers themselves. Abusive men concoct

explanations for their actions which they give to their partners, therapists, clergypeople, relatives, and social researchers. But it is a serious error to

allow abusers to analyze and account for their own problems. Would we ask an active alcoholic to tell us why he or she drinks, and then accept the explanation unquestioningly? This is what we would hear:

“I drink because I have bad luck in life.”

“I actually don’t drink much at all—it’s just a rumor that some people have been spreading about me because they don’t like me.”

“I started to drink a lot because my self-esteem was ruined by all these unfair accusations that I’m alcoholic, which I’m not.”

When we hear these kinds of excuses from a drunk, we assume they are exactly that—excuses. We don’t consider an active alcoholic a reliable

source of insight. So why should we let an angry and controlling man be the authority on partner abuse? Our first task, therefore, is to remove the

abusive man’s smoke and mirrors, and then set about watching carefully to see what he is really doing.

A BRIEF EXERCISE

In my public presentations on abuse, I often begin with a simple exercise. I ask the audience members to write down everything they have ever heard, or ever believed, about where an abuser’s problem comes from. I invite you to close this book for two or three minutes now and make a similar list for yourself, so that you can refer to it as we go along.

I then ask people to call out items from their lists, and I write them on the blackboard, organizing them into three categories: one for myths, one for partial truths, and one for accurate statements. We usually end up with twenty or thirty myths, four or five half-truths, and perhaps one or two realities. The audience members squint at me and fidgit in their seats, surprised to discover that the common beliefs about the causes of abuse contain several dollops of fantasy and misconception for each ounce of

truth. If you find as you go through this chapter that your own list turns out to contain mostly myths, you are not alone.

For the partner of an abusive or controlling man, having all of these mistaken theories pulled out from under you at once can be overwhelming. But for each stick that we pull out of the structure of misconception about abusive men, a brick is waiting to take its place. When we’re finished, your partner will find it much harder than before to throw you off balance and

confuse you, and your relationship will make sense to you in a way that it hasn’t before.

 

The Myths About Abusers

1. He was abused as a child.
2. His previous partner hurt him.
3. He abuses those he loves the most.
4. He holds in his feelings too much.
5. He has an aggressive personality.
6. He loses control.
7. He is too angry.
8. He is mentally ill.
9. He hates women.
10. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.
11. He has low self-esteem.
12. His boss mistreats him.
13. He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution.
14. There are as many abusive women as abusive men.
15. His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner.
16. He is a victim of racism.
17. He abuses alcohol or drugs.

 

 

Myth #1:

He was abused as a child, and he needs therapy for it.

 

The partners of my clients commonly believe that the roots of the man’s abusiveness can be found in mistreatment that he suffered himself, and many professionals share the same misconception. I hear explanations along the lines of:

“He calls me all those horrible things because that is what his mother used to do to him.”

“His father used to get angry at him and beat him with a belt, so now if I get angry at all, he just freaks out and starts throwing things around

the house. He says it’s because deep down, he’s really scared of my anger.”

“His stepmother was a witch. I’ve met her; she’s vicious. So now he really has this thing against women.”

 

Question 1:

Is it because he was abused as a child?

 

Multiple research studies have examined the question of whether men who abuse women tend to be survivors of childhood abuse, and the link has turned out to be weak; other predictors of which men are likely to abuse women have proven far more reliable, as we will see. Notably, men who are violent toward other men are often victims of child abuse—but the connection is much less clear for men who assault women. The one exception is that those abusers who are brutally physically violent or terrifying toward women often do have histories of having been abused as children. In other words, a bad childhood doesn’t cause a man to become an abuser, but it can contribute to making a man who is abusive especially dangerous.

If abusiveness were the product of childhood emotional injury, abusers could overcome their problem through psychotherapy. But it is virtually unheard of for an abusive man to make substantial and lasting changes in his pattern of abusiveness as a result of therapy. (In Chapter 14, we’ll

examine the differences between psychotherapy and a specialized abuser program, because the latter sometimes can bring good results.) He may work through other emotional difficulties, he may gain insight into himself, but his behavior continues. In fact it typically gets worse, as he uses therapy to develop new excuses for his behavior, more sophisticated arguments to

prove that his partner is mentally unstable, and more creative ways to make her feel responsible for his emotional distress. Abusive men are sometimes masters of the hard-luck story, and may find that accounts of childhood

abuse are one of the best ways to pull heartstrings.

For some abusive men, the blame-the-childhood approach has an additional reason for being appealing: By focusing on what his mother did wrong, he gets to blame a woman for his mistreatment of women. This explanation can also appeal to the abused woman herself, since it makes

sense out of his behavior and gives her someone safe to be angry at—since getting angry at him always seems to blow up in her face. The wider society, and the field of psychology in particular, has often jumped on this bandwagon instead of confronting the hard questions that partner abuse raises. Abuse of women by men is so rampant that, unless people can

somehow make it women’s own fault, they are forced to take on a number of uncomfortable questions about men and about much of male thinking. So it may seem easier to just lay the problem at the feet of the man’s mother?

My clients who have participated extensively in therapy or substance-

abuse recovery programs sometimes sound like therapists themselves—and a few actually have been—as they adopt the terms of popular psychology or textbook theory. One client used to try to lure me into intellectual debates with comments such as, “Well, your group follows a cognitive-behavioral model, which has been shown to have limitations for addressing a problem as deep as this one.” An abusive man who is adept in the language of

feelings can make his partner feel crazy by turning each argument into a therapy session in which he puts her reactions under a microscope and

assigns himself the role of “helping” her. He may, for example, “explain” to her the emotional issues she needs to work through, or analyze her reasons for “mistakenly” believing that he is mistreating her.

An abusive man may embellish his childhood suffering once he

discovers that it helps him escape responsibility. The National District Attorney’s Association Bulletin reported a revealing study that was conducted on another group of destructive men: child sexual abusers. The researcher asked each man whether he himself had been sexually victimized as a child. A hefty 67 percent of the subjects said yes. However, the researcher then informed the men that he was going to hook them up to a

lie-detector test and ask them the same questions again. Affirmative

answers suddenly dropped to only 29 percent. In other words, abusers of all varieties tend to realize the mileage they can get out of saying, “I’m abusive because the same thing was done to me.”

Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems result from mistreatment by his parents? The answer is both yes and no; it depends on which problem we’re talking about. His hostility toward the human race

may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct.

I am not saying that you should be unsympathetic to your partner’s childhood suffering. An abusive man deserves the same compassion that a nonabusive man does, neither more nor less. But a nonabusive man doesn’t use his past as an excuse to mistreat you. Feeling sorry for your partner can be a trap, making you feel guilty for standing up to his abusiveness.

I have sometimes said to a client: “If you are so in touch with your

feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own

fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.

 

Myth #2:

He had a previous partner who mistreated him terribly, and now he has a problem with women as a result. He’s a wonderful man, and that bitch made him get like this.

 

As we saw with Fran in Chapter 1, an abuser’s bitter tale of emotional destruction by a past wife or girlfriend can have a powerful impact on his current partner. In the most common version of this story, the man recounts how his ex-partner broke his heart by cheating on him, perhaps with several different men. If you ask him how he found out, he answers that

“everybody” knew about it or that his friends told him. He also may say, “I caught her cheating myself,” but when you press him on what he actually saw, it often turns out that he saw nothing, or that he saw her talking to

some guy or riding in his car late at night, “so I could tell.”

He may describe other wounds he received from a previous partner: She tried to control him; she wouldn’t let him have any freedom; she expected him to wait on her hand and foot; she turned their children against him; she even “had him arrested” out of vindictiveness. What he is describing

usually are his own behaviors, but he attributes them to the woman so that he is the victim. He can gain sympathy from his new partner in this fashion, especially because so many women know what it is like to be abused— unfortunately—so they can connect with his distress.

The abusive or controlling man can draw a rich set of excuses from his past relationships. For controlling his current partner’s friendships and for accusing her of cheating on him: “It’s because my ex-partner hurt me so badly by cheating on me so many times, and that’s why I’m so jealous and can’t trust you.” For throwing a tempter tantrum when she asks him to clean up after himself: “My ex-partner controlled my every move, and so now it makes me furious when I feel like you’re telling me what to do.” For having affairs of his own or keeping other love interests going on the side: “I got so hurt last time that now I am really afraid of committing, so I want to keep having involvements with other people.” He can craft an excuse to fit any of his controlling behaviors.

I recommend applying the following principle to assertions that an angry or controlling man makes about past women in his life:

IF IT IS AN EXCUSE FOR MISTREATING YOU, IT’S A DISTORTION.

A man who was genuinely mistreated in a relationship with a woman would not be using that experience to get away with hurting someone else.

Consider the reverse situation for a moment: Have you ever heard a woman claim that the reason why she is chronically mistreating her male partner is because a previous man abused her? I have never run into this excuse in the fifteen years I have worked in the field of abuse. Certainly I have encountered cases where women had trouble trusting another man after leaving an abuser, but there is a critical distinction to be made: Her

past experiences may explain how she feels, but they are not an excuse for how she behaves. And the same is true for a man.

When a client of mine blames a past relationship for his cruel or controlling behavior in the present, I jump in with several questions: “Did your ex-partner ever say that she felt controlled or intimidated by you?

What was her side of the story? Did you ever put your hands on her in anger, or did she ever get a restraining order?” By the time he has finished

providing his answers, I usually can tell what happened: He abused that woman too.

It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing anything he tells you about that relationship and instead

recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women. Track down his ex-partner and talk with her as soon as possible, even if you hate her. An abuser can mistreat partner after partner in relationships, each time believing that the problems are all the woman’s fault and that he is the real victim.

Whether he presents himself as the victim of an ex-partner, or of his parents, the abuser’s aim—though perhaps unconscious—is to play on your compassion, so that he can avoid dealing with his problem.

 

Myth #3:

He’s abusive because he feels so strongly about me.

People cause those they care about most deeply the most pain.

 

Excuses along these lines crop up frequently in my groups for abusive men. My clients say to me, “No one else gets me upset like she does. I just go out of my head sometimes because I have such strong feelings for her. The

things she does really hurt me, and nobody else can get under my skin like that.” Abusers can use this rationalization successfully with their partners, friends, and relatives. There is a grain of truth to it: People we love can

cause us deeper pain than anyone else. But what does this have to do with abuse?

The abuser would like us to accept the following simple but erroneous formula:

“FEELINGS CAUSE BEHAVIOR.”

“When people feel hurt, they lash out at someone else in retaliation.

When they feel jealous, they become possessive and accusatory. When they feel controlled, they yell and threaten.” Right?

Wrong. Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our

choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes

and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.

There are other reasons not to accept the “love causes abuse” excuse. First, many people reserve their best behavior and kindest treatment for their loved ones, including their partners. Should we accept the idea that these people feel love less strongly, or have less passion, than an abuser does? Nonsense. Outside of my professional life, I have known many

couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and aggression are interwoven and that cruel verbal exchanges and bomblike explosions are

the price you pay for a relationship that is exciting, deep, and sexy. Popular romantic movies and soap operas sometimes reinforce this image.

Most abusive men have close relationships with people other than their wives or girlfriends. My clients may feel deep fondness for one or both of their parents, a sibling, a dear friend, an aunt or uncle. Do they abuse their other loved ones? Rarely. It isn’t the love or deep affection that causes his behavior problem.

 

Myth #4:

He holds in his feelings too much, and they build up until he bursts. He needs to get in touch with his

emotions and learn to express them to prevent those explosive episodes.

 

My colleagues and I refer to this belief as “The Boiler Theory of Men.” The idea is that a person can only tolerate so much accumulated pain and frustration. If it doesn’t get vented periodically—kind of like a pressure cooker—then there’s bound to be a serious accident. This myth has the ring of truth to it because we are all aware of how many men keep too much emotion pent up inside. Since most abusers are male, it seems to add up.

But it doesn’t, and here’s why: Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some

nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their

feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing

else matters as much as his feelings.

It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partner’s

feelings and his children’s feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to “get in touch with.” My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion away from how my clients feel and toward how they think (including their attitudes toward their partners’ feelings). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters.

For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser’s selfish

focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.

Part of why you may be tempted to accept “The Boiler Theory of Men” is that you may observe that your partner follows a pattern where he

becomes increasingly withdrawn, says less and less, seems to be bubbling gradually from a simmer to a boil, and then erupts in a geyser of yelling,

put-downs, and ugliness. It looks like an emotional explosion, so naturally you assume that it is. But the mounting tension, the pressure-cooker buildup of his feelings, is actually being driven by his lack of empathy for your feelings, and by a set of attitudes that we will examine later. And he

explodes when he gives himself permission to do so.

 

Myth #5:

 

He has a violent, explosive personality. He needs to learn to be less aggressive.

Does your partner usually get along reasonably well with everyone else except you? Is it unusual for him to verbally abuse other people or to get in physical fights with men? If he does get aggressive with men, is it usually related somehow to you—for example, getting up in the face of a man who he thinks is checking you out? The great majority of abusive men are fairly calm and reasonable in most of their dealings that are unrelated to their partners. In fact, the partners of my clients constantly complain to me:

“How come he can be so nice to everyone else but he has to treat me like dirt?” If a man’s problem were that he had an “aggressive personality,” he wouldn’t be able to reserve that side of himself just for you. Many

therapists have attempted over the years to lead abusive men toward their more sensitive, vulnerable side. But the sad reality is that plenty of gentle, sensitive men are viciously—and sometimes violently—abusive to their

female partners. The two-sided nature of abusers is a central aspect of the mystery.

The societal stereotype of the abuser as a relatively uneducated, blue- collar male adds to the confusion. The faulty equation goes: “Abusive

equals muscle-bound caveman, which in turn equals lower class.” In addition to the fact that this image is an unfair stereotype of working-class men, it also overlooks the fact that a professional or college-educated man has roughly the same likelihood of abusing women as anyone else. A successful businessperson, a college professor, or a sailing instructor may

be less likely to adopt a tough-guy image with tattoos all over his body but still may well be a nightmare partner.

Class and racial stereotypes permit the more privileged members of society to duck the problem of abuse by pretending that it is someone else’s problem. Their thinking goes: “It’s those construction-worker guys who never went to college; it’s those Latinos; it’s those street toughs—they’re

the abusers. Our town, our neighborhood, isn’t like that. We’re not macho men here.”

But women who live with abuse know that abusers come in all styles and from all backgrounds. Sometimes the more educated an abuser, the more knots he knows how to tie in a woman’s brain, the better he is at

getting her to blame herself, and the slicker is his ability to persuade other people that she is crazy. The more socially powerful an abuser, the more powerful his abuse can be—and the more difficult it can be to escape. Two of my early clients were Harvard professors.

Some women are attracted to the tough-guy image, and some can’t stand it. Take your pick. There are ways to tell whether a man is likely to turn abusive, as we will see in Chapter 5, but his gentle or macho personality style is not one of them. (But do beware of one thing: If a man routinely intimidates people, watch out. Sooner or later, he will turn his intimidation on you. At first it may make you feel safe to be with a man who frightens people, but not when your turn comes.)

 

Myth #6:

He loses control of himself. He just goes wild.

 

Many years ago, I was interviewing a woman named Sheila by telephone. She was describing the rages that my client Michael would periodically have: “He just goes absolutely berserk, and you never know when he’s going to go off like that. He’ll just start grabbing whatever is around and throwing it. He heaves stuff everywhere, against the walls, on the floor— it’s just a mess. And he smashes stuff, important things sometimes. Then it’s like the storm just passes; he calms down; and he leaves for a while.

Later he seems kind of ashamed of himself.”

I asked Sheila two questions. The first was, when things got broken, were they Michael’s, or hers, or things that belonged to both of them? She left a considerable silence while she thought. Then she said, “You know what? I’m amazed that I’ve never thought of this, but he only breaks my

stuff. I can’t think of one thing he’s smashed that belonged to him.” Next, I asked her who cleans up the mess. She answered that she does.

I commented, “See, Michael’s behavior isn’t nearly as berserk as it looks. And if he really felt so remorseful, he’d help clean up.”

 

Question 2:

Is he doing it on purpose?

 

When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the

phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:

“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.” “I realized one of the children was watching.” “I was afraid someone would call the police.” “I could kill her if I did that.”

“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid neighbors would hear.”

And the most frequent response of all:

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”

The response that I almost never heard—I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years—was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”

A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself con siders morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other

people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted

sense of right and wrong.

I sometimes ask my clients the following question: “How many of you have ever felt angry enough at your mother to get the urge to call her a

bitch?” Typically, half or more of the group members raise their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have ever acted on that urge?” All the hands fly down, and the men cast appalled gazes on me, as if I had just asked whether they sell drugs outside elementary schools. So then I ask, “Well, why haven’t you?” The same answer shoots out from the men each time I do this exercise: “But you can’t treat your mother like that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!”

The unspoken remainder of this statement, which we can fill in for my clients, is: “But you can treat your wife or girlfriend like that, as long as you have a good enough reason. That’s different.” In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable. This insight has tremendous implications for how counseling work with abusers has to be done, as we will see.

When I was new to counseling abusive men, my own loss-of-control myth collided repeatedly with the realities contained in the stories of my early clients. Kenneth admitted that he used to dim the lights and then insist

to Jennifer that nothing had changed, trying to make her feel crazy. (He also stands out in my mind for his outspoken criticisms of his group mates for their insensitivity toward their partners, despite his own actions.) James told me that he sometimes would hide something his partner was looking for, such as her pocketbook or car keys, wait for her to become frantic and frustrated looking for it, and then put it back out in plain view and insist that it had been there all along. Mario measured the distance from his house to the supermarket, and when his wife reported going out to shop during the day, he would check the odometer of her car to make sure she hadn’t gone

anywhere else.

One year my colleagues David and Carole were preparing a skit on abuse for a conference, and they decided to perform a rehearsal for their

abuser group. Afterward, the group members rapid-fired their suggestions for improving the skit, directing them mostly at David: “No, no, you don’t make excuses for why you’re home late, that puts you on the defensive,

you’ve got to turn it around on her, tell her you know she’s cheating on

you.…You’re staying too far away from her, David. Take a couple of steps toward her, so she’ll know that you mean business.…You’re letting hersay too much. You’ve got to cut her off and stick to your points.” The

counselors were struck by how aware the clients were of the kinds of tactics they use, and why they use them: In the excitement of giving feedback on

the skit, the men let down their facade as “out-of-control abuser who doesn’t realize what he’s doing.”

As we review the stories of my clients throughout this book, you will

observe over and over the degree of consciousness that goes into their cruel and controlling actions. At the same time, I don’t want to make abusive men sound evil. They don’t calculate and plan out every move they make— though they use forethought more often than you would expect. It isn’t that each time an abuser sweeps a pile of newspapers onto the floor or throws a cup against the wall he has determined ahead of time to take that course.

For a more accurate model, think of an abuser as an acrobat in a circus ring who does “go wild” to some extent but who never forgets where the limits

are.

When one of my clients says to me, “I exploded” or “I just lost it,” I ask him to go step by step in his mind through the moments leading up to his

abusive behavior. I ask, “Did you really ‘just explode,’ or did you actually decide at one point to give yourself the green light? Wasn’t there a moment

when you decided you ‘had had enough’ or you ‘weren’t going to take it anymore,’ and at that instant you gave yourself permission, setting yourself free to do what you felt like doing?” Then I see a flicker of recognition

cross my client’s eyes, and usually he admits that there is indeed a moment at which he turns himself loose to begin the horror show.

Even the physically violent abuser shows self-control. The moment police pull up in front of the house, for example, he usually calms down immediately, and when the officers enter, he speaks to them in a friendly

and reasonable tone. Police almost never find a fight in progress by the time they get in the door. Ty, a physical batterer who now counsels other men,

describes in a training video how he would snap out of his rage when the police pulled up in front of the house and would sweet-talk the police,

“telling them what she had done. Then they would look at her, and she’d be the one who was totally out of control, because I had just degraded her and put her in fear. I’d say to the police, ‘See, it isn’t me.’” Ty managed to

escape arrest repeatedly with his calm demeanor and claims of self-defense.

 

Myth #7:

He’s too angry. He needs to learn anger-management

skills.

 

A few years ago, the partner of one of my clients went through an ordeal where her twelve-year-old son (from a previous marriage) disappeared for more than forty-eight hours. For two days Mary Beth’s heart was beating faster and faster as she drove around town looking for her son, made panicked phone calls to everyone she knew, and dropped her son’s photograph at police departments, newspapers, and radio stations. She barely slept. Meanwhile her new husband, Ray, who was in one of my groups, was slowly building to a boil inside. Toward the end of the second day he finally burst out yelling at her, “I am so sick of being ignored by you! It’s like I don’t even exist! Go fuck yourself!”

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing

cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury. A

nonabusive man would not expect his wife to be taking emotional care of him during a crisis of this gravity. In fact, he would be focused on what he could do for her and on trying to find the child. It would be futile to teach Ray to take a time-out to punch pillows, take a brisk walk, or concentrate on deep breathing, because his thinking process will soon get him enraged again. In Chapter 3, you will see how and why an abuser’s attitudes keep him furious.

When a new client says to me, “I’m in your program because of my anger,” I respond, “No you’re not, you’re here because of your abuse.” Everybody gets angry. In fact, most people have at least occasional times when they are too angry, out of proportion to the actual event or beyond what is good for their health. Some give themselves ulcers and heart attacks and hypertension. But they don’t necessarily abuse their partners. In Chapter 3, we’ll take a look at why abusive men tend to be so angry—and why at the same time their anger isn’t really the main problem.

The abuser’s explosive anger can divert your attention from all the disrespect, irresponsibility, talking over you, lying, and other abusive and controlling behaviors that he exhibits even at times when he isn’t especially upset. Is it anger that causes such a high proportion of abusers to cheat on their partners? Does an abuser’s rage cause him to conceal for years the fact that a former girlfriend went into hiding to get away from him? Is it a form of explosiveness when your partner pressures you into dropping your

friendships and spending less time with your siblings? No. Perhaps his loudest, most obvious, or most intimidating forms of abuse come out when he’s angry, but his deeper pattern is operating all the time.

 

Myth #8:

He’s crazy. He’s got some mental illness that he should

be medicated for.

 

When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his

partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill.

Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life

circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners

—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

Much of what appears to be crazy behavior in an abuser actually works well for him. We already met Michael, who never broke his own stuff, and Marshall, who did not believe his own jealous accusations. In the pages ahead, you will encounter many more examples of the method behind the abuser’s madness. You will also learn how distorted his view of his partner is—which can make him appear emotionally disturbed—and where those distortions spring from.

The most recent research shows that even in physically violent abusers the rate of mental illness is not high. Several of my brutal battering clients have had psychological evaluations, and only one of them was found to

have a mental illness. At the same time, some of my clients whom I have believed to be truly insane have not necessarily been among the most violent. Research does indicate that the most extreme physical batterers— the ones who choke their partners to unconsciousness, who hold guns to their heads, who stalk and kill—have increased rates of mental illness. But there is no particular mental health condition that is typical of these severe batterers; they can have a range of diagnoses, including psychosis,

borderline personality, manic depression, antisocial personality, obsessive- compulsive disorder, and others. (And, even among the most dangerous abusers, there are many who do not show clear psychiatric symptoms of any kind.)

How can all these different mental illnesses cause such similar behavioral patterns? The answer is, they don’t. Mental illness doesn’t cause abusiveness any more than alcohol does. What happens is rather that the man’s psychiatric problem interacts with his abusiveness to form a volatile combination. If he is severely depressed, for example, he may stop caring about the consequences his actions may cause him to suffer, which can

increase the danger that he will decide to commit a serious attack against

his partner or children. A mentally ill abuser has two separate—though interrelated—problems, just as the alcoholic or drug-addicted one does.

The basic reference book for psychiatric conditions, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), includes no condition that fits abusive men well. Some clinicians will stretch one of the

definitions to apply it to an abusive client—“intermittent explosive disorder,” for example—so that insurance will cover his therapy. However, this diagnosis is erroneous if it is made solely on the basis of his abusive behavior; a man whose destructive behaviors are confined primarily or entirely to intimate relationships is an abuser, not a psychiatric patient.

Two final points about mental illness: First, I occasionally hear someone who is discussing a violent abuser say, “He must be delusional to think he can get away with this.” But, unfortunately, it often turns out that he can get away with it, as we discuss in Chapter 12, so his belief is not a delusion at all. Second, I have received just a few reports of cases in which an abuser’s behavior has improved for a while as a result of taking medication prescribed by a psychiatrist. His overall abusiveness hasn’t stopped, but the most devastating or terrifying behaviors have eased. Medication is not a long-term solution, however, for two important reasons:

1. Abusers don’t like to be medicated because they tend to be too selfish to put up with the side effects, no matter how much the improvement may benefit their partners, so they almost always quit the medication after a few months. The medication then can

   become another tool to be used in psychological abuse. For example, the abuser can stop taking his pills when he is upset with her, knowing that this will make her anxious and afraid. Or when he wants to strike out at her dramatically he may deliberately

   overdose himself, creating a medical crisis.

2. No medication yet discovered will turn an abuser into a loving, considerate, appropriate partner. It will just take the edge off his absolute worst behaviors—if it even does that. If your abusive partner is taking medication, be aware that you are only buying time. Take advantage of the (more) peaceful period to get support in your own healing. Begin by calling a program for abused women.

 

Myth #9

He hates women. His mother, or some other woman, must have done something terrible to him.

 

The notion that abusive men hate women was popularized by Susan Forward’s book Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.

Dr. Forward’s descriptions of abusive men are the most accurate ones I have read, but she was mistaken on one point: Most abusers don’t hate women.

They often have close relationships with their mothers, or sisters, or female friends. A fair number are able to work successfully with a female boss and respect her authority, at least outwardly.

Disrespect for women certainly is rampant among abusive men, with attitudes toward women that fall on a continuum from those who can interact fairly constructively with most women (as long as they are not

intimately involved with them) to men who are misogynists and treat most women they encounter with superiority and contempt. In general, I find that my clients’ view that their partners should cater to their needs and are not worthy of being taken seriously does indeed carry over into how they view other females, including their own daughters. But, as we will see in Chapter 13, the disrespect that abusive men so often direct toward women in general tends to be born of their cultural values and conditioning rather than personal experiences of being victimized by women. Some abusive men use the excuse that their behavior is a response to such victimization because they want to be able to make women responsible for men’s abuse. It is important to note that research has shown that men who have abusive

mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons.

So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle—though often quite pervasive—sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don’t show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship.

 

Myth #10:

He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.

 

Abusive men are often jealous and possessive, and their coercive and

destructive behaviors can escalate when their partners attempt to break up with them. Some psychologists have glanced quickly at this pattern and concluded that abusers have an extreme fear of abandonment. But many people, both male and female, are afraid of abandonment and may reel from panic, heartbreak, or desperation when being left by a partner. If a person’s panicked reaction to being left could cause threats, stalking, or murder, our entire society would be a war zone. But postseparation homicides of

intimate partners are committed almost exclusively by men (and there is almost always a history of abuse before the breakup). If fear of abandonment causes postseparation abuse, why are the statistics so

lopsided? Do women have a much easier time with abandonment than men do? No, of course not. (We’ll examine the real causes of the extreme

behaviors some abusers use postseparation in Chapter 9.)

A close cousin of the abandonment myth is the belief that abusive men “are afraid of intimacy,” which attempts to explain why most abusers mistreat only their partners and why most are male. According to this theory, the abuser uses his periodic cruelty to keep his partner from getting too close to him emotionally, a behavior which, in the language of psychologists, is called mediating the intimacy.

But there are several holes in this theory. First, abusive men usually

have their worst incidents after a period of mounting tension and distance,

not at the moments of greatest closeness. Some keep their emotional

distance all the time so the relationship never gets close enough to trigger any fears of intimacy they might have, yet the abuse continues. Wife abuse occurs just as severely in some cultures where there is no expectation of intimacy between husbands and wives, where marriage has nothing to do with real emotional connection. And, finally, there are plenty of men who

have powerful fears of intimacy who don’t abuse or control their partners— because they don’t have an abusive mentality.

 

Myth #11:

He suffers from low self-esteem. He needs his self-

image shored up.

 

 

Question 3:

Is it because he feels bad about himself?

 

An abused woman tends to pour precious energy into supporting her abusive partner and massaging his ego, hoping against hope that if he is kept well stroked his next explosion might be averted. How well does this

strategy work? Unfortunately, not very. You can’t manage an abuser except for brief periods. Praising him and boosting his self-opinion may buy you some time, but sooner or later he’ll jump back into chewing pieces out of you. When you try to improve an abuser’s feelings about himself, his problem actually tends to get worse. An abusive man expects catering, and the more positive attention he receives, the more he demands. He never

reaches a point where he is satisfied, where he has been given enough. Rather, he gets used to the luxurious treatment he is receiving and soon escalates his demands.

My colleagues and I discovered this dynamic through a mistake we made in the early years of abuse work. A few times we asked clients who had made outstanding progress in our program to be interviewed on

television or to speak to a group of high school students because we thought the public could benefit from hearing an abuser speak in his own words about his behaviors and his process of change. But we found that each time we gave a client public attention, he had a bad incident of mistreating his partner within a few days thereafter. Feeling like a star and a changed man, his head swelled from all the attention he had been given, he would go

home and rip into his partner with accusations and put-downs. So we had to stop taking our clients to public appearances.

The self-esteem myth is rewarding for an abuser, because it gets his partner, his therapist, and others to cater to him emotionally. Imagine the

privileges an abusive man may acquire: getting his own way most of the time, having his partner bend over backward to keep him happy so he won’t explode, getting to behave as he pleases, and then on top of it all, he gets

praise for what a good person he is, and everyone is trying to help him feel better about himself!

Certainly an abuser can be remorseful or ashamed after being cruel or scary to his partner, especially if any outsider has seen what he did. But

those feelings are a result of his abusive behavior, not a cause. And as a relationship progresses, the abusive man tends to get more comfortable with his own behavior and the remorse dies out, suffocated under the weight of

his justifications. He may get nasty if he doesn’t receive the frequent compliments, reassurance, and deference he feels he deserves, but this reaction is not rooted in feelings of inferiority; in fact, the reality is almost the opposite, as we will see.

Think for a just a moment about how your partner’s degrading and bullying behavior has hurt your self-esteem. Have you suddenly turned into a cruel and explosive person? If low self-esteem isn’t an excuse for you to become abusive, then it’s no excuse for him either.

 

Myth #12:

His boss abuses him, so he feels powerless and

unsuccessful.

He comes home and takes it out on his family because that is the one place he can feel powerful.

 

I call this myth “boss abuses man, man abuses woman, woman abuses children, children hit dog, dog bites cat.” The image it creates seems plausible, but too many pieces fail to fit. Hundreds of my clients have been popular, successful, good-looking men, not the downtrodden looking for a scapegoat for their inner torment. Some of the worst abusers I have worked with have been at the top of the management ladder—with no boss to blame. The more power these men have in their jobs, the more catering and submission they expect at home. Several of my clients have told me: “I

have to order people around where I work, so I have trouble snapping out of that mode when I get home.” So while some abusers use the “mean boss” excuse, others use the opposite.

The most important point is this one: In my fifteen years in the field of abuse, I have never once had a client whose behavior at home has

improved because his job situation improved.

 

Myth #13:

He has poor communication, conflict-resolution, and stress-management skills. He needs training.

 

An abusive man is not unable to resolve conflicts nonabusively; he is unwilling to do so. The skill deficits of abusers have been the subject of a number of research studies, and the results lead to the following conclusion:

Abusers have normal abilities in conflict resolution, communication, and assertiveness when they choose to use them. They typically get through

tense situations at work without threatening anyone; they manage their

stress without exploding when they spend Thanksgiving with their parents; they share openly with their siblings regarding their sadness over a grandparent’s death. But they don’t want to handle these kinds of issues nonabusively when it involves their partners. You can equip an abuser with the most innovative, New Age skills for expressing his deep emotions, listening actively, and using win-win bargaining, and then he will go home and continue abusing. In the coming chapter, we’ll see why.

 

Myth #14:

There are just as many abusive women as abusive men.

Abused men are invisible because they are ashamed to

tell.

 

There certainly are some women who treat their male partners badly, berating them, calling them names, attempting to control them. The

negative impact on these men’s lives can be considerable. But do we see men whose self-esteem is gradually destroyed through this process? Do we see men whose progress in school or in their careers grinds to a halt because of the constant criticism and undermining? Where are the men whose

partners are forcing them to have unwanted sex? Where are the men who

are fleeing to shelters in fear for their lives? How about the ones who try to get to a phone to call for help, but the women block their way or cut the

line? The reason we don’t generally see these men is simple: They’re rare.

I don’t question how embarrassing it would be for a man to come forward and admit that a woman is abusing him. But don’t underestimate how humiliated a woman feels when she reveals abuse; women crave dignity just as much as men do. If shame stopped people from coming forward, no one would tell.

Even if abused men didn’t want to come forward, they would have been discovered by now. Neighbors don’t turn a deaf ear to abuse the way they might have ten or twenty years ago. Now, when people hear screaming,

objects smashing against walls, loud slaps landing on skin, they call the police. Among my physically abusive clients, nearly one-third have been arrested as a result of a call to the police that came from someone other than the abused woman. If there were millions of cowed, trembling men out there, the police would be finding them. Abusive men commonly like to play the role of victim, and most men who claim to be “battered men” are actually the perpetrators of violence, not the victims.

In their efforts to adopt victim status, my clients try to exaggerate their partners’ verbal power: “Sure, I can win a physical fight, but she is much better with her mouth than I am, so I’d say it balances out.” (One very violent man said in his group session, “She stabs me through the heart with her words,” to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.) But abuse is not a battle that you win by being better at expressing yourself. You win it by being better at sarcasm, put-downs, twisting everything around backward, and using other tactics of control—an arena in which my clients win hands down over their partners, just as they do in a violent altercation. Who can beat an abuser at his own game?

Men can be abused by other men, however, and women can be abused by women, sometimes through means that include physical intimidation or

violence. If you are a gay man or lesbian who has been abused by a partner or who is facing abuse now, most of what I explain in this book will ring loud bells for you. The “he and she” language that I use obviously won’t fit your experience, but the underlying dynamics that I describe largely will.

We’ll explore this issue further in Chapter 6.

 

Myth #15:

Abuse is as bad for the man who is doing it as it is for his partner. They are both victims.

 

My clients get over the pain of the abuse incidents far, far faster than their partners do. Recall Dale from Chapter 1, who insisted to me that the first ten years of his marriage had gone swimmingly, while Maureen recounted ten years of insults and cruelty? Certainly abusing one’s partner is not a healthy lifestyle, but the negative effects don’t hold a candle to the emotional and physical pain, loss of freedom, self-blame, and numerous other shadows that abuse casts over the life of its female target. Unlike

alcoholics or addicts, abusive men don’t “hit bottom.” They can continue abusing for twenty or thirty years, and their careers remain successful, their health stays normal, their friendships endure. As we’ll see in Chapter 6,

abusers actually tend to benefit in many ways from their controlling behaviors. An abuser can usually outperform his victim on psychological tests, such as the ones that are routinely required during custody disputes, because he isn’t the one who has been traumatized by years of

psychological or physical assault. No one who listens carefully to the tragic accounts of abused women and then sees the abusers each week at a counseling group, as my colleagues and I have done, could be fooled into believing that life is equally hard for the men.

 

Myth #16:

He is abusive because he has faced so much societal discrimination and disempowerment as a man of color,

so at home he needs to feel powerful.

 

I address this myth in detail in Chapter 6 under “Racial and Cultural Differences in Abuse,” so here I offer only a brief overview. First, a majority of abusive men are white, many of them well educated and economically privileged, so discrimination couldn’t be a central cause of partner abuse. Second, if a man has experienced oppression himself, it could just as easily make him more sympathetic to a woman’s distress as

less so, as is true for childhood abuse (see Myth #1). And in fact there are men of color among the most visible leaders in the United States in the movement against the abuse of women. So while discrimination against

people of color is a terribly serious problem today, it should not be accepted as an excuse for abusing women.

 

Myth #17:

The alcohol is what makes him abusive. If I can get him to stay sober, our relationship will be fine.

 

So many men hide their abusiveness under the cover of alcoholism or drug addiction that I have chosen to devote Chapter 8 to explore the issue of addiction in detail. The most important point to be aware of is this: Alcohol cannot create an abuser, and sobriety cannot cure one. The only way a man can overcome his abusiveness is by dealing with his abusiveness. And you are not “enabling” your partner to mistreat you; he is entirely responsible for his own actions.

WE HAVE NOW COMPLETED our tour through a museum of myths about abusive men. You may find it difficult to leave these misconceptions behind. I was attached to my own myths years ago, but the abusers

themselves kept forcing me to look at the realities, even as they stubbornly avoided doing so themselves. If you are involved with a man who bullies you or cuts you down, perhaps you feel even more confused than you did

before reading this chapter. You may be thinking, “But if his problem doesn’t spring from these sources, where does it come from?”

So our next step is to carefully weave back together the tangled strands we have just unraveled, to form a coherent picture. As we do so, you will gradually find yourself relieved to leave these eye-bending distortions behind. An energizing clarity can then take their place, and the mystery that abusers work so hard to create will vanish.

 

Key points to remember

 

 

An abusive man’s emotional problems do not cause his abusiveness. You can’t change him by figuring out what is bothering him, helping him feel better, or improving the dynamics of your relationship.

 

Feelings do not govern abusive or controlling behavior; beliefs, values, and habits are the driving forces.

 

The reasons that an abusive man gives for his behavior are simply excuses. There is no way to overcome a problem with abusiveness by focusing on tangents such as self-esteem, conflict resolution, anger management, or impulse control. Abusiveness is resolved by dealing with abusiveness.

 

Abusers thrive on creating confusion, including confusion about the abuse itself.

 

There is nothing wrong with you. Your partner’s abuse problem is his own.