Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (22 page)

I
S
H
E
G
OING TO
G
ET
V
IOLENT?

An abusive man can be scary. Even if he never raises a hand or makes a threat, his partner may find herself wondering what he is capable of. She sees how ugly he can turn, sometimes out of the blue. His desire to crush her emotionally is palpable at times. He sometimes tears into her verbally with a cruelty that she could never have imagined earlier in their relationship. When a man shows himself capable of viciousness, it is natural, and in fact wise, to wonder if he will go even further. Abused women ask me over and over again: “Do you think my partner could get violent? Am I overreacting? I mean, he’s not a
batterer
or something.”

Before I take you through a list of points to consider in examining this issue, make a mental note of the following:

R
ESEARCH INDICATES THAT A WOMAN’S INTUITIVE SENSE OF WHETHER OR NOT HER PARTNER WILL BE VIOLENT TOWARD HER IS A SUBSTANTIALLY MORE ACCURATE PREDICTOR OF FUTURE VIOLENCE THAN ANY OTHER WARNING SIGN.

So listen closely to your inner voices above all.

When a woman tells me of her concerns about her partner’s potential for violence, I first encourage her to pay close attention to her feelings. If he is scaring her, she should take her intuitive sense seriously, even if she doesn’t believe his frightening behavior is intentional. Next, I want to learn more about what has already happened:

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he’ll ever be violent;
he already has been
. In more than half of cases in which a woman tells me that her partner is verbally abusive, I discover that he is physically assaultive as well.

It is critical to use
common-sense—and legal—definitions of what constitute violence
,
not
the abuser’s definition.
An abuser minimizes his behavior by comparing himself to men who are worse than he is, whom he thinks of as “real” abusers. If he never threatens his partner, then to him threats define real abuse. If he only threatens but never actually hits, then real abusers are those who hit. Any abuser hides behind this mental process: If he hits her but never punches her with a closed fist…If he punches her but she has never had broken bones or been hospitalized…If he beats her up badly but afterward he apologizes and drives her to the hospital himself (as several clients of mine have done)…In the abuser’s mind,
his
behavior is never truly violent.

A related mental process reveals itself when a client says to me, as many do: “I’m not like one of those guys who comes home and beats his wife
for no reason.
” In other words, if he had adequate justification, then it isn’t violence. The abuser’s thinking tends to wend its way inside of the woman, too, like a tapeworm. The partners of my clients say things to me, such as “I really pushed him too far,” or “He’s never hit me; he just shoves me sometimes,” that almost certainly come from the abuser’s indoctrination.

To steer clear of these distortions, we need to wrestle the definition of violence out of the hands of the abusers and implement a proper one of our own.
Violence
is behavior that does any of the following:

• Physically hurts or frightens you, or uses contact with your body to control or intimidate you
  
• Takes away your freedom of movement, such as by locking you in a room or refusing to let you out of a car
  
• Causes you to believe that you will be physically harmed
  
• Forces you to have sexual contact or other unwanted physical intimacy
  

Drawing on the above definition, we can answer important questions that arise:

Q:
Is it violence if he tells me he will “kick the crap” out of me but he never does it?

A:
Yes. Threats of bodily harm are physical abuse. The woman ducks or cowers, she runs out of the room, she goes into hiding with her children. There are emotional effects as well, of course, as physical abuse is by nature psychologically abusive.

Q:
Is it violence if he pokes me?

A:
Probably. Noncoercive men don’t poke their partners in my experience. If it frightens you, causes you pain, controls you, or makes you start wondering what he will do next time, it’s violence. Whether it will have these effects partly depends on what his history of past intimidation has been and on what his motives appeared to be in the specific incident. If he is repeatedly emotionally abusive, then a poke is definitely violent. In other words, context matters.

The abuser will of course deny that he meant to intimidate his partner; he just “lost his cool” or “couldn’t take it anymore.” He may ridicule her for being so upset: “You call a poke
violent
?? That’s
abuse
?? You’re the most hysterical, melodramatic person in the world!” To me, this bullying response makes clear that he did indeed have power motives.

Q:
I slapped him in the face, and he punched me and gave me a black eye. He says what he did was self-defense. Is he right?

A:
No, it was revenge. My clients often report having hit their partners back “so that she’ll see what it’s like” or “to show her that she can’t do that to me.” That isn’t self-defense, which means using the
minimal
amount of force needed to protect oneself. He uses her hitting him as an opening to let his violence show, thereby putting her on notice about what might happen in the future if she isn’t careful. His payback is usually many times more injurious and intimidating than what she did to him, making his claims of self-defense even weaker; he believes that when he feels hurt by you, emotionally or physically, that gives him the right to do something far worse to you.

Q:
He says that
I’m
violent, because I’ve slapped him or shoved him a couple of times. Is he right?

A:
If your actions did not harm, frighten, or control him, they wouldn’t fit my definition of violence. He labels you as violent in order to shift the focus to what
you
do wrong, which will just lock you more tightly in his grip. However, I do recommend that you not assault him again, as he might seize on it as an excuse to injure you seriously. Some women persuade themselves that they are holding their own by using violence too, saying, “I can take it, but I can also dish it out.” But over time you will find that you are the one being controlled, hurt, and frightened. Besides, hitting a partner is just plain wrong, except in self-defense. Use your own behavior as a warning sign that you can’t manage your abusive partner, and call an abuse hot line now.

If your partner has not used any physical violence yet, how can you tell if he is likely to head in that direction? These are some of the rumblings that can tip you off that a violent storm may come some day:

• When he is mad at you, does he react by throwing things, punching doors, or kicking the car? Does he use violent gestures such as gnashing teeth, ripping at his clothes, or swinging his arms around in the air to show his rage? Have you been frightened when he does those things?
  
• Is he willing to take responsibility for those behaviors and agree to stop them, or does he justify them angrily?
  
• Can he hear you when you say that those behaviors frighten you, or does he throw the subject back on you, saying that you cause his behaviors, so it’s your own problem if you’re scared?
  
• Does he attempt to use his scary behaviors as bargaining chips, such as by saying that he won’t punch walls if you will stop going out with your friends?
  
• Does he deny that he even engaged in the scary behaviors, such as claiming that a broken door was caused by somebody else or that you are making up or exaggerating what happened?
  
• Does he ever make veiled threats, such as “You don’t want to see me mad,” or “You don’t know who you’re messing with”?
  
• Is he severely verbally abusive? (Research studies indicate that the
  best
  behavioral predictor of which men will become violent to their partners is
  their level of verbal abuse
  .)
  

Although these questions can help you determine the degree of your partner’s tendency to violence, it is important to contact a program for abused women regardless of your answers; the fact that you are even considering his potential for violence means that something is seriously wrong.

If your partner is hurting or scaring you, consider seeking legal protection. In many states, for example, you can seek a restraining order even if your partner has never hit or sexually assaulted you, as long as he has put you in fear. Some states offer a woman the option of obtaining an order that allows the man to continue residing in the home but that forbids him from behaving in frightening ways.

Some approaches to assessing how dangerous your partner may be are covered in “Leaving an Abuser Safely” in Chapter 9. The advantages and disadvantages of taking legal steps are discussed in “Should I Get a Restraining Order?” in Chapter 12.

R
ACIAL AND
C
ULTURAL
D
IFFERENCES IN
A
BUSE

I find that the fundamental thinking and behavior of abusive men cut across racial and ethnic lines. The underlying goal of these abusers, whether conscious or not, is to control their female partners. They consider themselves entitled to demand service and to impose punishments when they feel that their needs are not being met. They look down on their partners as inferior to them, a view that often extends to their outlook on women in general.

At the same time, the particular
shape
that abusiveness takes can vary considerably among races and cultures. Abusers rely heavily on the forms of abuse that are most acceptable among men of their background. My white American clients, for example, tend to be extremely rigid about how their partners are allowed to argue or express anger. If the partner of one of these clients raises her voice, or swears, or refuses to shut up when told to do so, abuse is likely to follow. Clients from certain other cultures are more focused on precisely how their partners care for the house and prepare meals. Their social lives revolve around food, so they expect to be waited on like royalty with a warm, creative, and tasty dinner every night. If the man shows up two hours late without calling, the meal is
still
expected to be warm somehow, or else. I find that clients from certain countries stand out for their fanatical jealousy, which can lead verbally to ripping into their partners for speaking to a stranger on the street for ten minutes or for dancing one number with another man at a party. Abusive men from one region of the world commonly hit their children with belts, a behavior that meets with stern disapproval from abusers from other parts of the world, who in turn may horrify the first group by taking custody of their children away from the mothers.

Not only abusive behaviors but also the excuses and justifications that accompany them are formed partly by an abusive man’s background. Men of one group may rely more on the excuse of having lost control of themselves, for example, whereas others admit that their behavior is a choice but justify it by saying that they have to resort to abuse to keep the family from spinning out of control.

As we will see in Chapter 13, abusiveness in relationships is a problem that is transmitted from generation to generation by cultural training and therefore takes a unique shape within each society. But for the women (and often children) who are the targets of this cruelty, the cultural variations don’t necessarily change the quality of life very much. Abusiveness can be thought of as a recipe that involves a consistent set of ingredients: control, entitlement, disrespect, excuses, and justifications (including victim blaming)—elements that are always present, often accompanied by physical intimidation or violence. Abusive men tend to use a little more of one ingredient and a little less of another, substituting different tactics and excuses depending on their culture, allowing their partners certain rights and taking away others. But, despite the variations, the flavor of abuse remains pretty much the same. Abusers—and therefore their abused partners—have a tremendous amount in common across national and racial lines.

I
S
A
BUSE OF
W
OMEN
A
CCEPTABLE IN
S
OME
C
ULTURES?

I commonly run into the misconception that men from some national or ethnic groups behave much more abusively toward women than those in the mainstream of the United States and Canada. Social workers sometimes say to me, for example, “The family I am working with right now comes from one of those cultures where domestic violence is considered normal and acceptable.” The reality, however, is that cultural approval for partner abuse is disturbingly high in our society, even among the privileged and educated (see Chapter 13), and our domestic-violence statistics, while not the worst in the world, are on the high end. The United States is the only industrialized nation that has failed to ratify the UN convention on eliminating discrimination against women, which specifically refers to violence against women as a form of discrimination. Pointing fingers at other countries can be a way to ignore the serious problems in our own.