Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (20 page)

You may find that each disagreement with your partner is unique and can start in any of a thousand ways, yet it can only arrive at four or five different endings—all of them bad. Your gnawing sensation of futility and inevitably is actually coming from the abusive man’s thinking about verbal conflict. His outlook makes it impossible for an argument to proceed toward anything other than the fulfillment of his wishes—or toward nowhere at all. Four features stand out:

1. The abuser sees an argument as war.

His goal in a verbal conflict is not to negotiate different desires, understand each other’s experiences, or think of mutually beneficial solutions. He wants only to
win.
Winning is measured by who talks the most, who makes the most devastating or “humorous” insults (none of which is funny to his partner), and who controls the final decision that comes out of the debate. He won’t settle for anything other than victory. If he feels he has lost the argument, he may respond by making a tactical retreat and gathering his forces to strike again later.

Under this layer there is an even deeper stratum in many abusive men where we unearth his attitude that
the whole relationship is a war.
To this mind-set, relationships are dichotomous, and you’re on either one end or the other: the dominator or the submitter, the champ or the chump, the cool man or the loser. He can imagine no other way.

2. She is always wrong in his eyes.

It is frustrating, and ultimately pointless, to argue with someone who is certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that his perspective is accurate and complete and that yours is wrong and stupid. Where can the conversation possibly go?

The question isn’t whether he argues forcefully or not. Many nonabusive people express their opinions with tremendous conviction and emotion yet still allow themselves to be influenced by the other person’s point of view. On the other hand, it isn’t hard to tell when someone is refusing to grapple in good faith with your ideas and instead is just reaching for whatever stick he thinks will deal the heaviest blow to your side. When your partner says to you disparagingly, “Oh, the real reason why you complain about how I argue is that you can’t deal with my having strong opinions,” he’s diverting attention from the tactics he uses. He is also reversing reality, which is that
he
can’t accept
your
differences of opinion and doesn’t want to let his thinking be influenced by yours. (And on the rare occasions when he does adopt your ideas, he may claim they were his to begin with.)

3. He has an array of control tactics in conflicts.

My clients have so many ways to bully their way through arguments that I couldn’t possibly name them all, but the abuser’s most common tactics are listed in the box below:

Conversational control tactics are aggravating no matter who uses them, but they are especially coercive and upsetting when used by an abusive man because of the surrounding context of emotional or physical intimidation. I have rarely met an abuser who didn’t use a wide array of the above tactics in conflicts; if you consider an argument with a partner to be a war, why not use every weapon you can think of? The underlying mind-set makes the behaviors almost inevitable.

The abusive man wants particularly to
discredit
your perspective, especially your grievances. He may tell you, for example, that the “real” reasons why you complain about the way he treats you are:

• You don’t want him to feel good about himself.
  
• You can’t handle it if he has an opinion that differs from yours, if he is angry, or if he is right.
  
• You are too sensitive, you read too much into things, or you take things the wrong way.
  
• You were abused as a child or by a former partner, so you think everything is abuse.
  

These are all strategies he uses to avoid having to think seriously about your grievances, because then he might be obligated to change his behaviors or attitudes.

The abusive man’s goal in a heated argument is in essence to get you to
stop thinking for yourself
and to
silence you,
because to him your opinions and complaints are obstacles to the imposition of his will as well as an affront to his sense of entitlement.
If you watch closely, you will begin to notice how many of his controlling behaviors are aimed ultimately at discrediting and silencing you.

4. He makes sure to get his way—by one means or another.

The bottom line with an abuser in an argument is that he wants what he wants—today, tomorrow, and always—and he feels he has a right to it.

T
HE
A
BUSIVE
M
AN’S
C
YCLES

Life with an abuser can be a dizzying wave of exciting good times and painful periods of verbal, physical, or sexual assault. The longer the relationship lasts, the shorter and farther apart the positive periods tend to become. If you have been involved with an abusive partner for many years, the good periods may have stopped happening altogether, so that he is an unvarying source of misery.

Periods of relative calm are followed by a few days or weeks in which the abuser becomes increasingly irritable. As his tension builds, it takes less and less to set him off on a tirade of insults. His excuses for not carrying his weight mount up, and his criticism and displeasure seem constant. Many women tell me that they learn to read their partner’s moods during this buildup and can sense when he is nearing an eruption. One day he finally hits his limit, often over the most trivial issue, and he bursts out with screaming, disgusting and hurtful put-downs, or frightening aggression. If he is a violent abuser, he turns himself loose to knock over chairs, hurl objects, punch holes in walls, or assault his partner directly, leaving her scared to death.

After he has purged himself, he typically acts ashamed or regretful about his cruelty or violence, at least in the early years of a relationship. Then he may enter a period when he reminds you of the man you fell in love with—charming, attentive, funny, kind. His actions have the effect of drawing you into a repetitive traumatic cycle in which you hope each time that he is finally going to change for good. You then begin to see the signs of his next slow slide back into abuse, and your anxiety and confusion rise again.

Women commonly ask me: “What is going on inside his mind during this cycle? Why can’t he just stay in the good period, what can I do to keep him there?” To answer these questions, let’s look through his eyes during each phase:

•
The tension-building phase

During this period, your partner is collecting negative points about you and squirreling them away for safekeeping. Every little thing that you have done wrong, each disappointment he has experienced, any way in which you have failed to live up to his image of the perfect selfless woman—all goes down as a black mark against your name.

Abusers nurse their grievances. One of my former colleagues referred to this habit as The Garden of Resentments, a process through which an abuser plants a minor complaint and then cultivates it carefully while it grows to tremendous dimensions, worthy of outrage and abuse. Jesse, for example, planted the dinner-table conversation in his Garden of Resentments and then harvested it two weeks later to throw in Bea’s face, lumping it together with several other issues into one big ugly ball.

To defend against any complaints you attempt to express, the abuser stockpiles his collected grievances like weapons to protect his precious terrain of selfishness and irresponsibility. And some of his negativity about you is just plain habit. An abuser falls into a routine of walking around dwelling on his partner’s purported faults. Since he considers you responsible for fixing everything for him, he logically chooses you as his dumping ground for all of life’s normal frustrations and disappointments.

•
The eruption

The abusive man tends to mentally collect resentments toward you until he feels that you deserve a punishment. Once he’s ready to blow, the tiniest spark will ignite him. Occasionally an abused woman may decide to touch her partner off herself at this point, as scary as that is, because the fear of waiting to see what he will do and when he will do it is worse. The explosion of verbal or physical assault that results is horrible, but at least it’s over.

After he blows, the abuser absolves himself of guilt by thinking of himself as having lost control, the victim of his partner’s provocations or his own intolerable pain. Whereas at other times he may say that men are stronger and less emotional than women, he now switches, saying, “There is only so much a man can take,” or “She really hurt my feelings, and I couldn’t help going off.” He may consider women’s emotional reactions—such as breaking into tears—contemptible, even when they hurt no one, but when a man has powerful emotions, even violence may be excusable. Some of my most tough-guy clients unabashedly use their painful feelings to excuse their cruel behavior.

•
The “hearts and flowers” stage

After the apologies are over, the abuser may enter a period of relative calm. He appears to have achieved a catharsis from opening up the bomb bays and raining abuse down on his partner. He feels rejuvenated and may speak the language of a fresh start, of steering the relationship in a new direction. Of course, there is nothing cathartic for his partner about being the target of his abuse (she feels worse with each cycle), but in the abuser’s self-centered way he thinks she should feel better now because
he
feels better.

During this period, an abuser works to rebuild the bridge that his abusiveness just burned down. He wants to be back in his partner’s good graces; he may want sex; and he seeks reassurance that she isn’t going to leave him—or expose him. Cards and gifts are common in this phase; hence the name “hearts and flowers.” The abusive man does not, however, want to look seriously at himself; he is merely looking to paste up some wallpaper to cover the holes he has made—figuratively or literally—and return to business as usual. The good period can’t last because nothing has changed. His coercive habits, his double standards, his contempt, are all still there. The cycle is repeated because there is no reason why it wouldn’t be.

Some abusive men don’t follow a discernable cycle like the one I have just described. Your partner’s abusive incidents may follow no pattern, so you can never guess what will happen next. I have had clients who seemed almost to get a thrill out of their own unpredictability, which further increased their power. Random abuse can be particularly deleterious psychologically to you and to your children.

A C
LOSER
L
OOK AT THE
G
OOD
P
ERIODS

When an alcohol abuser goes a month or two without a drink, we say the person is “on the wagon.” The dry period is a break from the pattern and inspires some hope of a positive trend. But, with partner abuse, the periods when the man is being good—or at least not at his worst—are
not
really outside of his pattern. They are generally an integral aspect of his abusiveness, woven into the fabric of his thinking and behavior.

What functions do the good periods play? They perform several, including the following:

• His spurts of kindness and generosity help him to feel good about himself. He can persuade himself that you are the one who is messed up, “because look at me, I’m a great guy.”
  
• You gradually feel warmer and more trusting toward him. The good periods are critical to hooking you back into the relationship, especially if he doesn’t have another way to keep you from leaving, such as financial control or the threat of taking the children.
  
• While you are feeling more trusting, you expose more of your true feelings about different issues in your life and you show him more caring, which creates vulnerability that he can use later to control you (though he probably doesn’t consciously plan to do this). During one of Jesse’s bad periods, for example, Bea would probably protect herself by telling him that she was taking a journalism class “just to get the English credits toward my college degree.” But during a more intimate period, she might open up about her dream of pursuing a career in journalism, and he would say it was a great idea. And still later, when he was back in abuse mode, he would be armed with knowledge about her inner life with which to hurt her, as we saw in their argument.
  
• He uses the good periods to shape his public image, making it harder for you to get people to believe that he’s abusive.
  

I have not encountered any case, out of the roughly two thousand men I have worked with, in which one of an abuser’s good periods has lasted into the long term, unless the man has also done deep work on his abusive attitudes. Being kind and loving usually just becomes a different approach to control and manipulation and gradually blends back into more overt abuse. I recognize how painful or frightening it can be for an abused woman to accept this reality, because those times of kindness, and the hope that comes with them, can feel like all you have left to hold on to, given how much he has taken away from you. But illusions of change also keep you trapped and can increase your feelings of helplessness or disappointment when he returns to his old ways. Real change looks very different from a typical good period—so different that you could scarcely mistake the two, as we will see in Chapter 14.