Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (19 page)

This item is as important as the others but requires the most judgment and ability to trust your instincts. When exactly does a behavior become a pattern? If it happens three times a year? If it happens once a week? There is no answer that applies to all actions or to all people. You will need to form your own conclusions about whether your partner’s mistreatment of you has become repetitive.

•
You show signs of being abused.

All of the other indicators of abuse discussed above involve examining what the man does and how he thinks. But it is equally important to look at
yourself,
examining such questions as:

These are signs that you may be involved with an abusive partner.

You may notice that the above distinguishing features of abuse include little mention of
anger.
While chronic anger can be one warning sign of abusiveness, the two are sometimes quite separate. There are cool, calculating abusers who rarely explode in ire, for example, and at the same time some nonabusive men feel or express anger often. You might decide that you don’t want to be with a partner who is angry all the time—I wouldn’t care for it—but it isn’t abuse in itself.

W
HAT
I
F
H
E’S
S
ORRY?

Almost every time that I speak on abuse, hands go up with the following two questions: (1) When an abuser acts remorseful, is he really? and (2) If he’s really sorry, does that make him less likely to be abusive again?

The good news is that remorse is often genuine; the bad news is that it rarely helps. To make sense out of this contradiction, we need to look first at a crucial aspect of what is going on inside an abuser:
Abusers have numerous contradictory attitudes and beliefs operating simultaneously in their minds.
A few examples of the typical contradictions include:

When a man feels sorry for his abusive behavior, his regrets collide with his entitlement. The contradictory chatter inside his head sounds something like this:

Let’s follow the path that this man’s internal dialogue takes. First, his remorse is not primarily focused on the way his verbal assault wounded his partner. What he feels bad about mostly is: (1) He damaged his image in other people’s eyes; (2) he offended his own sense of how he would like to be; and (3) he feels he should be able to control his partner without resorting to abuse. From those thoughts he slides into blaming his outburst on his partner, which he feels entitled to do, and in this way rids himself of his feelings of guilt. By the end of his self-talk, he is holding his partner responsible for everything, including the effects that
he
has just had on their children. The abuser’s self-focus and victim-blaming orientation tend to cause his remorse to fade in this way.

An abuser’s show of emotion after early incidents of abuse can be dramatic: I have had clients who cry, beg their partners for forgiveness, and say, “You deserve so much better, I don’t know why you are even with a jerk like me.” His remorse can create the impression that he is reaching out for real intimacy, especially if you’ve never seen him looking so sad before. But in a day or two his guilt is vanquished, driven out by his internal excuse-making skills. The effects of the incident last much longer for the abused woman, of course, and pretty soon the abuser may be snapping at her: “What, aren’t you over that
yet
? Don’t dwell on it, for crying out loud. Let’s put it behind us and move forward.” His attitude is: “I’m over it, so why isn’t she?”

Genuine remorse and theatricality are not mutually exclusive. Most abusers are truly sorry—though perhaps largely for themselves—while
also
playing up their emotions somewhat to win sympathy. A man’s dramatic remorse shifts the center of attention back to him; his partner may almost forget his earlier bullying as compassion for his guilt and self-reproach washes over her. She may soon find herself reassuring him that she won’t leave him, that she still loves him, that she doesn’t think he’s a terrible person. If they have children, she may find herself covering up what he did so that the children won’t blame him, because she doesn’t want him to feel even worse. He thus reaps soothing attention as a reward for his abusiveness, and his actions have the effect of keeping the family focused on his needs.

Remorse usually tends to decline as abusive incidents pile up. The genuine aspect fades as the abusive man grows accustomed to acting abusively and tuning out his partner’s hurt feelings. The theatrical part fades as he becomes less concerned about losing the relationship, confident now that she is fully under his control and won’t leave him.

The salient point about remorse, however, is that
it matters little whether it is genuine or not.
Clients who get very sorry after acts of abuse change at about the same rate as the ones who don’t. The most regretful are sometimes the most self-centered, lamenting above all the injury they’ve done to their own self-image. They feel ashamed of having behaved like cruel dictators and want to revert quickly to the role of
benign
dictators, as if that somehow makes them much better people.

I
F
B
EING
S
ORRY
A
FTER AN
I
NCIDENT
D
OESN’T
H
ELP
, W
HAT
W
OULD

The following steps could help prevent his next incident of abuse, in a way that apologies cannot:

• Giving you some extended room to be angry about what he did, rather than telling you that you’ve been angry too long or trying to stuff your angry feelings back down your throat
  
• Listening well to your perspective without interrupting, making excuses, or blaming his actions on you
  
• Making amends for anything he did, for example, by picking up anything that he threw, admitting to friends that he lied about you, or telling the children that his behavior was unacceptable and wasn’t your fault
  
• Making unconditional agreements to immediately change behaviors
  
• Going to get help
  without
  you having to put a lot of pressure on him to do it
  

If he is willing to take all of these steps after an incident of mistreatment—and actually follow through on them—there’s some chance that he may not be deeply abusive. Without such clear action, however, the abuse will return.

T
AKE
S
ELF-PROTECTIVE
S
TEPS
Q
UICKLY

Many women take a “wait and see” attitude when signs of abuse appear in a partner’s behavior. They tell themselves: “It’s so hard to leave him right now because I still love him. But if he gets worse, that will lessen my feelings for him, and then breaking up will be easier.” This is a dangerous trap. The longer you are with an abuser, and the more destructive he becomes, the
harder
it can be to extricate yourself, for the following reasons:

• The more time he has to tear down your self-opinion, the more difficult it will be for you to believe that you deserve better treatment.
  
• The more time he has to hurt you emotionally, the more likely your energy and initiative are to diminish, so that it gets harder to muster the strength to get out.
  
• The more damage he does to your relationships with friends and family, the less support you will have for the difficult process of ending the relationship.
  
• The longer you have been living with his cycles of intermittent abuse and kind, loving treatment, the
  more
  attached you are likely to feel to him, through a process known as
  traumatic bonding
  (see Chapter 9).
  

For all of these reasons, act sooner rather than later.

At the same time, if you have already been in a relationship with an abuser for five years, or ten, or thirty, it is never too late to recover your rights and to get free. Help is available to you no matter how long your relationship has lasted and how deep the effects have been (see “Resources”).

One final word of caution: If you do not have children with your abusive partner,
keep it that way.
Some women hope the arrival of a baby can cause an abuser to change his behaviors, but it can’t. It won’t make him settle down, become more responsible, or gain maturity. It won’t stop his jealous accusations by convincing him that you are committed to him, nor will it get him to stop cheating on you. The presence of children in the home won’t make him stop abusing you. Having children with an abusive partner will just make your life more stressful than it was before, as you begin to worry about the effects that his behavior is having on your children. And if you decide later that you do want to leave him, having children will make that choice much harder and will raise the possibility that he will threaten to seek custody of them (see Chapter 10). I have yet to encounter a case where the arrival of children solved a woman’s problems with an abusive man, or even lessened them.

• The early warning signs of abuse are usually visible if you know what to look for.
  
• If the warning signs are there, act quickly either to set limits or to get out of the relationship. The more deeply you become involved with an abuser, the harder it is to get out.
  
• You do not cause your partner’s slide into abusiveness, and you cannot stop it by figuring out what is bothering him or by increasing your ability to meet his needs. Emotional upset and unmet needs have little to do with abusiveness.
  
• Certain behaviors and attitudes are definitional of abuse, such as ridiculing your complaints of mistreatment, physically intimidating you, or sexually assaulting you. If any of these is present, abuse has already begun.
  
• Abused women aren’t “codependent.” It is abusers, not their partners, who create abusive relationships.
  
• Call a hotline for support, or use one of the resources listed in the back of this book, as soon as you start to have questions about abuse. Don’t wait until you’re certain.
  

O
VER THE FIFTEEN YEARS
I have worked with abusive men, I have spent many hundreds of hours on the telephone listening to the partners of my clients describe their lives. My job is to see my client through the woman’s eyes, using my imagination to enter her home and absorb the atmosphere that he creates day in and day out. By assuming her perspective, I begin to see beneath my client’s exterior.

At the same time, I don’t see exactly the same man the abused woman sees. The circumstances under which I see him have several unusual aspects:

• It is safe for me to challenge and confront him, because I am sitting in a room full of witnesses, including my co-leader. In many cases, I have some power over the man because he is on probation, so a negative report from me could get him brought before a judge.
  
• I have names and descriptions for his tactics. He finds it difficult to confuse or intimidate me, or to make me feel bad about myself, because I keep pointing out his maneuvers and his motives. Abuse loses some of its power when you have names for its weapons.
  
• I don’t have to live with this man, so he has few opportunities to retaliate against me for standing up to him.
  
• Some of the men in the group who are attempting to apply the concepts of the program may challenge the man on his attitudes and behaviors. These challenges from other abusers make it harder for him to blame everything on his partner, or on women in general.
  

I also learn about a man from seeing his reactions to discussions in his group. For example, he tends to express disapproval of other clients whose abuse is
different
from his—because he considers anything he wouldn’t do to be “real” abuse—and while tending to express sympathy for and support of any fellow abuser who employs the
same
tactics or justifications that he does, turns to me to say: “But what do you expect the poor man to do given his circumstances?”

The abused woman and I thus try to form a team so that we can share our observations about the man and help each other to recognize patterns or dynamics. I am eager to learn
from
her about my client and at the same time eager to share
with
her any observations I have that might help her to protect herself or unravel what he is doing to her mind.

One of the earliest lessons I learned from abused women is that to understand abuse you can’t look just at the explosions; you have to examine with equal care the spaces
between
the explosions. The dynamics of these periods tell us as much about the abuse as the rages or the thrown objects, as the disgusting name-calling or the jealous accusations. The abuser’s thinking and behavior during the calmer periods are what cause his big eruptions that wound or frighten. In this chapter, we enter the mind of the abuser at various points in daily life to better understand what sparks his abusive actions.

T
HE
A
BUSIVE
M
AN IN
A
RGUMENTS

I will begin by examining in detail an argument between an abusive man and his partner, the kind that I hear about routinely from my clients and their partners. Jesse and Bea are walking along in their town. Jesse is sullen and clearly annoyed.

BEA:
What’s going on with you? I don’t understand what you’re upset about.

JESSE:
I’m not upset; I just don’t feel like talking right now. Why do you always have to read something into it? Can’t I just be a little quiet sometimes? Not everybody likes to talk, talk, talk all the time just because you do.

BEA:
I don’t talk, talk, talk all the time. What do you mean by that? I just want to know what’s bothering you.

JESSE:
I just finished telling you,
nothing
’s bothering me…and give me a break that you don’t talk all the time. When we were having dinner with my brother and his wife, I couldn’t believe how you went on and on about your stupid journalism class. You’re forty years old, for Christ sake; the world isn’t excited about your fantasies of being famous. Grow up a little.

BEA:
Fantasies of being famous? I’m trying to get a job, Jesse, because the travel agency jobs have all moved downtown. And I wasn’t going on about it. They were
interested
; they were asking me a lot of questions about it—that’s why we were on that subject for a while.

JESSE:
Oh, yeah, they were real interested. They were being
polite
to you because you’re so full of yourself. You’re so naive you can’t even tell when you’re being patronized.

BEA:
I don’t believe this. That dinner was almost two weeks ago. Have you been brewing about it all this time?

JESSE:
I don’t brew, Bea, you’re the one that brews. You love to get us confused. I’ll see you later. I’m really not in the mood for this shit.

BEA:
In the mood for what shit?? I haven’t done anything! You’ve had it in for me since I arrived to meet you!

JESSE:
You’re yelling at me, Bea. You know I hate being yelled at. You need to get help; your emotions just fly off the handle. I’ll see you later.

BEA:
Where are you going?

JESSE:
I’ll walk home, thank you. You can take the car. I’d rather be alone.

BEA:
It’s going to take you more than a half hour to walk home, and it’s freezing today.

JESSE:
Oh, now suddenly you care about me so much. Up yours. Bye.
Walks off.
)

The lives of abused women are full of these kinds of exchanges. Jesse didn’t call Bea any degrading names; he didn’t yell; he didn’t hit her or threaten her. Bea will be in a tough spot when the time comes to explain to a friend how upset she is, because Jesse’s behavior is hard to describe. What can she say? That he’s sarcastic? That he holds on to things? That he’s overly critical? A friend would respond: “Well, that sounds hard, but I wouldn’t call it
abuse.
” Yet, as Jesse walks away, Bea feels as if she has been slapped in the face.

W
HAT
I
S
G
OING
O
N IN
T
HIS
A
RGUMENT?

We will look first at what Jesse is
doing
and then examine how his
thinking
works. The first point to illuminate is:

T
HE ABUSER’S PROBLEM IS NOT THAT HE RESPONDS INAPPROPRIATELY TO CONFLICT. HIS ABUSIVENESS IS OPERATING
PRIOR
TO THE CONFLICT: IT USUALLY
CREATES
THE CONFLICT, AND IT DETERMINES THE
SHAPE
THE CONFLICT TAKES.

Therapists often try to work with an abuser by analyzing his responses to disagreements and trying to get him to handle conflicts differently. But such an approach misses the point: His abusiveness was what caused the tension to begin with.

Jesse uses an array of conversational control tactics, as most abusers do:

• He denies being angry, although he obviously is, and instead of dealing with what is bothering him, he channels his energy into criticizing Bea about something else.
  
• He insults, belittles, and patronizes Bea in multiple ways, including saying that she likes to talk all the time and has fantasies of becoming famous, stating that she should “grow up,” and telling her that she accuses him of stewing over things when it’s actually her.
  
• He tells her that she is unaware that other people look down on her and don’t take her seriously and calls her “naive.”
  
• He criticizes her for raising her voice in response to his stream of insults.
  
• He tells her that
  she
  is mistreating
  him.
  
• He stomps off and plays the victim by putting himself in the position of having to take a long, cold walk home.
  

Bea is now left miserable—feeling like a scratching post that a cat has just sharpened its claws on. Part of why she is so shaken up by this experience is that she never knows when one of these verbal assaults is going to happen or what sets it off. On a different day she might have met Jesse to take him home and had a pleasant conversation with him about his workday. Thus she is left imagining that something bad must have happened to him at work and that he is taking it out on her—which may be true in a way but actually has little to do with what is happening.

So, what
is
going on? The story began two weeks earlier, when Jesse and Bea were out to dinner with Jesse’s relatives. What we have just learned from their argument is that Jesse does not like Bea to be the center of attention for any length of time. Why not? There are a few reasons:

1. He considers it her job to play a supporting role to him. This is the same as the attitude that “behind every great man standsa woman.” So if either of them is going to be the center of attention, it should be him, and if he is feeling like being quiet she should be, too, remaining in his shadow.
   
2. He is constantly focused on her faults, so he assumes everyone else is, too.
   
3. He doesn’t like having her appear in public as smart, capable, and interesting, because that collides with his deeply held belief that she is irrational, incompetent, and worthy of being ignored—a view of her that he may want others to share with him.
   
4. He is afraid on some level that if she gets enough support for her strengths, she will leave him—and he’s quite likely right.
   

Notice that numbers two and three are almost opposites: He assumes that she comes off badly, which embarrasses him, but he is also concerned that she may have come off very well, because then other people might see her as a capable person. He reacts strongly to both possibilities.

We also see the signs that Jesse finds Bea’s journalism class threatening to his control over her. In fact, this is probably what he has been dwelling on most over the past two weeks, causing his grumpy mood. Abusive men are uncomfortable when they see signs of budding independence in their partners and often look for ways to undermine the woman’s progress in the days ahead.

Returning now to the day of the argument, we can see that Jesse launches into attributing many of his own characteristics to Bea, saying that she is full of herself, that she dwells on grievances, that she yells, that she doesn’t care about him. This behavior in abusers is sometimes mistakenly referred to as
projection,
a psychological process through which people attribute their own fears or flaws to those around them. But as we saw in Chapter 3, the process through which an abuser turns reality on its head is not quite the same as projection. Jesse perceives Bea to be yelling because one of his core values is that she’s not supposed to get angry at him, no matter what he does. He thinks she doesn’t care about him because in his mind she can’t care about him unless she cares
only
about him, and not at all about herself or other people. He thinks she is full of herself because she sometimes gets excited about her own goals or activities, when he believes she should be most excited about what
he’s
doing. He thinks she dwells on her grievances because she sometimes attempts to hold him accountable rather than letting him stick her with cleaning up his messes—literally and figuratively.

Jesse is also using projection as a control tactic. Part of why Jesse accuses Bea of doing all the selfish or abusive things that he does is to make it hard for her to get anywhere with her grievances. I have had many clients tell me: “Oh, I knew what I was saying about her wasn’t true, but it’s a way to really get to her.” (It is surprising how common it is for abusers to admit—if they are caught off guard—to deliberate use of abusive and controlling behaviors.) For all of these reasons, saying simply that “he’s projecting” doesn’t adequately capture the reasons for an abuser’s distorted accusations.

The final behavior we need to examine is Jesse’s decision to take a long, cold walk home by himself. Why does he make himself a victim?

• He is drawn to making Bea feel sorry for him so that his feelings can remain the center of attention, crowding hers out. She will feel as though she shouldn’t pursue her complaints about the ways in which he has just assaulted her verbally, because he is suffering so much.
  
• He also wants other people to feel sorry for him. He can describe to friends or relatives how the argument led to a miserable walk for him, and they will think: “The poor man.” And he will probably adjust the story to his advantage—abusers usually spruce up their accounts—perhaps saying that she was furious and drove off without him, and he was left to walk shivering all the way home. He doesn’t consciously plan these maneuvers ahead of time, but experience has taught him on a deeper level that playing the victim increases the sympathy he receives.
  
• He may want her to worry about what other people will think. She won’t want to come out looking like the mean one, so she’ll take steps to smooth over the fight.
  
• On some level he enjoys walking alone for half an hour, wallowing in self-pity, because it helps him feel more justified about his recurring pattern of cruelty and undermining toward Bea. It’s a way of reassuring himself that she’s the bad one, not him. An abuser is a human being, and somewhere inside him, buried under thick layers of entitlement and disrespect, there is a heart that knows that what he is doing is wrong. This heart periodically tries to send a few beats up through the layers, so the abuser has to stomp them back down.
  

Each verbal battle with an abuser is a walk through a minefield, and each field is different. Jesse appears to be a mixture of the Water Torturer and the Victim, with a sprinkling of Mr. Right. Perhaps an argument on the same subject with the Drill Segreant or the Player would go quite differently. But, regardless of specific style, very little of what an abuser does in an argument is as irrational or emotional as it seems.

F
OUR
C
RITICAL
C
HARACTERISTICS OF AN
A
BUSIVE
A
RGUMENT