Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (18 page)

W
HEN
I
S
I
T
A
BUSE?

Since abuse can sneak up on a woman, beginning with subtle control or disrespect that gains intensity over time, some burning questions emerge: How do I know when my partner is being abusive? Is there a distinct line that I can keep my eye on, so that I know when he has crossed it? How much is too much? Since nobody’s perfect, how do I know the difference between a bad day when he’s just being a jerk and a pattern that adds up to something more serious?

It’s true that almost everyone does yell at one point or another in a relationship, and most people, male or female, call their partners a name from time to time, interrupt, or act selfish or insensitive. These behaviors are hurtful and worthy of criticism, but they aren’t all abuse, and they don’t all have the same psychological effects that abuse does. At the same time, all of these behaviors
are
abusive when they are part of a
pattern
of abuse. Being yelled at by a respectful partner feels bad, but it doesn’t cause the same chilled, ugly atmosphere that an abuser’s yells do.

The term
abuse
is about
power
; it means that a person is taking advantage of a power imbalance to exploit or control someone else. Wherever power imbalances exist, such as between men and women, or adults and children, or between rich and poor, some people will take advantage of those circumstances for their own purposes. (As I discuss in Chapter 13, partner abuse has been found not to exist in societies where males and females have equal power.) Thus the defining point of abuse is when the man starts to exercise power over the woman in a way that causes harm to her and creates a privileged status for him.

The lines where subtler kinds of mistreatment end and abuse begins include the following actions:

•
He retaliates against you for complaining about his behavior.

Let’s say your partner calls you a bitch one day. You are angry, and you let him know that you deeply dislike that word and don’t ever want to be called that again. However, he responds to your grievance
by making a point of calling you a bitch more often.
Maybe he even gets a certain look in his eye now when he does it because he knows it gets under your skin. Similarly, you may say to your partner in an argument, “Stop yelling at me, I hate being yelled at,” so he raises his voice
louder
and blames it on you. These are signs of abuse.

Another way he can retaliate against you for resisting his control is to switch into the role of victim. Suppose that you complain about being silenced by his constant interruptions during arguments. He then gets a huffy, hostile tone in his voice as if your objection were unfair to
him
and says sarcastically, “All right, I’ll just listen and
you
talk,” and acts as if you are oppressing him by calling him on his behavior. This is an effort to make you feel guilty for resisting his control and is the beginning of abuse.

And some men ridicule the woman when she complains of mistreatment, openly laughing at her or mimicking her. These behaviors remove all doubt about whether he is abusive.

Retaliation may not always be as clear and immediate as it is in these examples. But you can tell when your partner’s behavior is designed to punish you for standing up to him, even if it doesn’t come out until a couple of days later. He doesn’t believe that you have the right to defy him, and he tries to hurt you so that next time you won’t.

•
He tells you that your objections to his mistreatment are your own problem.

When a woman attempts to set limits on controlling or insensitive behavior, an abuser wants her to doubt her perceptions, so he says things such as:

Through comments like these, the abuser can try to persuade you that: (1) you have unreasonable expectations for his behavior, and you should be willing to live with the things he does; (2) you are actually reacting to something else in your life, not to what he did; and (3) you are using your grievances as a power move against
him.
All of these tactics are forms of
discrediting
your complaints of mistreatment, which is abusive. His discrediting maneuvers reveal a core attitude, which he never explicitly states and may not even be aware of consciously himself:
“You have no right to object to how I treat you.”
And you can’t be in a fair and healthy relationship if you can’t raise grievances.

•
He gives apologies that sound insincere or angry, and he demands that you accept them.

The following exchange illustrates how this dynamic plays out:

CLAIRE:
I still feel like you don’t understand why I was upset by what you did. You haven’t even apologized.

DANNY
(Angry and loud): All right, all right! I’m sorry,
I
’
M SORRY
!!

CLAIRE
(Shaking her head): You don’t get it.

DANNY:
What the fuck do you want from me?? I apologized already! What, you won’t be satisfied until you have your pound of flesh??

CLAIRE:
Your apology doesn’t mean anything to me when you obviously aren’t sorry.

DANNY:
What do you mean I’m not sorry?? Don’t tell me what I’m feeling, Little Ms. Analyst! You’re not inside my head.

This interaction only serves to make Claire feel worse, of course, as Danny adds insults and crazy-making denial to whatever she was already upset about. Danny feels that Claire should be grateful for his apology, even though his tone communicated the opposite of his words; he in fact feels
entitled
to forgiveness, and he demands it. (He also considers it his prerogative to insist that she accept his version of reality, no matter how much it collides with everything she sees and hears; in this sense, he apparently sees her
mind
as part of what he has the right to control.)

•
He blames you for the impact of his behavior.

Abuse counselors say of the abusive client: “When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.” In other words, he becomes upset and accusatory when his partner exhibits the predictable effects of chronic mistreatment, and then he adds insult to injury by ridiculing her for feeling hurt by him. He even uses her emotional injuries as
excuses to mistreat her further.
If his verbal assaults cause her to lose interest in having sex with him, for example, he snarls accusingly, “You must be getting it somewhere else.” If she is increasingly mistrustful of him because of his mistreatment of her, he says that her lack of trust is
causing her to perceive him as abusive,
reversing cause and effect in a mind-twisting way. If she is depressed or weepy one morning because he tore her apart verbally the night before, he says, “If you’re going to be such a drag today, why don’t you just go back to bed so I won’t have to look at you?”

If your partner criticizes or puts you down for being badly affected by his mistreatment, that’s abuse. Similarly, it’s abuse when he uses the effects of his cruelty as an excuse, like a client I had who drove his partner away with his verbal assaults and then told her that her emotional distancing was
causing
his abuse, thus reversing cause and effect. He is kicking you when you’re already down, and he knows it. Seek help for yourself quickly, as this kind of psychological assault can cause your emotional state to rapidly decline.

•
It’s never the right time, or the right way, to bring things up.

In any relationship, it makes sense to use some sensitivity in deciding when and how to tackle a difficult relationship issue. There are ways to word a grievance that avoid making it sound like a personal attack, and if you mix in some appreciation you increase the chance that your partner will hear you. But with an abuser, no way to bring up a complaint is the right way. You can wait until the calmest, most relaxed evening, prepare your partner with plenty of verbal stroking, express your grievance in mild language, but he still won’t be willing to take it in.

Initial defensiveness or hostility toward a grievance is common even in nonabusive people. Sometimes you have to leave an argument and come back to it in a couple of hours, or the next day, and then you find your partner more prepared to take in what is bothering you. With an abuser, however, the passage of time doesn’t help. He doesn’t spend the intervening period digesting your comments and struggling to face what he did, the way a nonabusive person might. In fact he does the opposite, appearing to mentally build up his case against your complaint as if he were preparing to go before a judge.

•
He undermines your progress in life.

Interference with your freedom or independence is abuse. If he causes you to lose a job or to drop out of a school program; discourages you from pursuing your dreams; causes damage to your relationships with friends or relatives; takes advantage of you financially and damages your economic progress or security; or tells you that you are incompetent at something you enjoy, such as writing, artwork, or business, as a way to get you to give it up, he is trying to undermine your independence.

•
He denies what he did.

Some behaviors in a relationship can be matters of judgment; what one person calls a raised voice another might call yelling, and there is room for reasonable people to disagree. But other actions, such as calling someone a name or pounding a fist on the table, either happened or they didn’t. So while a nonabusive partner might argue with you about how you are interpreting his behavior, the abuser denies his actions altogether.

•
He justifies his hurtful or frightening acts or says that you “made him do it.”

When you tell your partner that his yelling frightens you, for example, and he responds that he has every right to yell “because you’re not listening to me,” that’s abuse. The abuser uses your behavior as an excuse for his own. He therefore refuses to commit unconditionally to stop using a degrading or intimidating behavior. Instead, he insists on setting up a quid pro quo, where he says he’ll stop some form of abuse if you agree to give up something that bothers
him,
which often will be something that you have every right to do.

•
He touches you in anger or puts you in fear in other ways.

Physical aggression by a man toward his partner is abuse, even if it happens
only once.
If he raises a fist; punches a hole in the wall; throws things at you; blocks your way; restrains you; grabs, pushes, or pokes you; or threatens to hurt you, that’s physical abuse. He is creating fear and using your need for physical freedom and safety as a way to control you. Call a hot line as soon as possible if any of these things happens to you.

Sometimes a partner can frighten you inadvertently because he is unaware of how his actions affect you. For example, he might come from a family or culture where people yell loudly and wave their arms around during arguments, while those from your background are quiet and polite. The nonabusive man in these circumstances will be very concerned when you inform him that he is frightening you and will want to take steps to keep that from happening again—unconditionally.

Physical abuse is dangerous. Once it starts in a relationship, it can escalate over time to more serious assaults such as slapping, punching, or choking. Even if it doesn’t, so-called “lower-level” physical abuse can frighten you, give your partner power over you, and start to affect your ability to manage your own life. Any form of physical intimidation is highly upsetting to children who are exposed to it. No assault in a relationship, however “minor,” should be taken lightly.

I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: “It depends.” Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman’s aggressiveness. I object to any form of physical aggression in relationships except for what is truly essential for self-defense, but I reserve the word
abuse
for situations of control or intimidation.

A woman
can
intimidate another woman, however, and a man can be placed in fear by his male partner. Most of what I have described about the thinking and the tactics of heterosexual abusers is also true of abusive gay men and lesbians. We look more at this issue in Chapter 6.

•
He coerces you into having sex or sexually assaults you.

I have had clients who raped or sexually coerced their partners repeatedly over the course of the relationship but never once hit them. Sexual coercion or force in a relationship is abuse. Studies indicate that women who are raped by intimate partners suffer even deeper and longer-lasting effects than those who are raped by strangers or nonintimate acquaintances. If you have experienced sexual assault or chronic sexual pressure in your relationship, call an abuse hotline or a rape hotline, even if you don’t feel that the term
rape
applies to what your partner did.

•
His controlling, disrespectful, or degrading behavior is a pattern.