Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (26 page)

P
ARTNER
A
BUSE
D
OESN’T
G
O
A
WAY
W
HEN AN
A
DDICT
R
ECOVERS

Over the years, dozens of my clients have gone into recovery from addiction while they were participating in my program, sometimes because of pressure from me. No significant improvement has occurred as a result, except in those men who also worked seriously on their partner abuse issues. During the first several months of recovery, a man’s harsh daily criticism and control sometimes soften, and any physical violence he was using may lessen or cease for a period, raising the hopes of the abused woman. She interprets this respite as confirmation that the addiction did indeed cause his abusiveness, but his behavior toward her gradually, or abruptly, reverts to being as destructive as it was while he was drinking, or nearly so.

Ironically, the man’s backsliding tends to begin precisely
as his recovery from addiction starts to take solid hold.
The early period of recovery is all-consuming: The compulsion to drink is intense, so the alcoholic fights a daily internal battle, often holding on by a thread. He may be attending one or more substance abuse meetings per day, which occupy his time and maintain his focus. One result of this Herculean effort is that the man has little time, energy, or mental space to devote to controlling or manipulating his partner. He is entirely self-focused and absorbed. But when he starts to come out the other end of this white-knuckle process of early recovery, his energy and attention are redirected toward his partner, and his desire to bully her reemerges.

It is not uncommon for abusers to actually get
worse
when they are in recovery, partly because they may become irritable from not drinking and take it out on family members. Other abusers become more controlling when sober than they were while drunk, standing guard with eyes that are no longer clouded by alcohol.

Perhaps even more important is that an abuser’s recovery program tends itself to become a weapon to use against his partner. Once he stops drinking, for example, he may turn around and insist that she is alcoholic too, even if she actually drinks moderately. He starts to criticize her for being “in denial” about her own drinking, a concept he has learned at his meetings and about which he now considers himself an expert. Insulting comments about her drinking habits and pressure on her to give up alcohol and join AA are likely to follow.

The abuser also can use specific concepts from AA against his partner. For example, AA encourages participants to review their own faults and misdeeds and make an inventory of them and discourages criticizing or focusing on the shortcomings of others, which is known as “taking someone else’s inventory.” The abuser turns this concept against his partner, so that any time she attempts to complain about his abusive behavior and how it affects her, he says to her, “You should work on your own issues instead of taking my inventory.” Similarly, he uses the danger that he might drink as an excuse to control her. For example, when he is bothered by something she does, such as confront him about his bullying, he says, “You’re getting me stressed, and you
know
I might drink if I get under too much stress.” The accusation “You’re threatening my sobriety!” becomes a new tool that the abuser uses to hammer and silence his partner. Abusers thus develop new excuses for abuse to make up for the fact that they no longer can blame it on being drunk.

The philosophy of twelve-step programs includes elements that could be valuable to abusers, but I find that my clients tend to ignore the principles that could help. For example, according to AA the alcoholic has a responsibility to make amends for all the damage he has done to other people while he was drinking. Abusers choose instead to take an almost opposite view, arguing that their partners should not raise grievances about past abuse, “because that was when I was drinking and I’m not like that anymore, so she should let go of the past.” They think of recovery from addiction as a gigantic, self-awarded amnesty program that should cause their partners’ resentments and mistrust to simply vanish.

Abusers in recovery can be just as committed to blaming their behavior on alcohol as they were while drinking. They choose to misinterpret the AA philosophy to mean that they were not responsible for their actions while they were drinking—which is
not
what AA proposes—and that therefore alcohol is a full and adequate explanation for all the cruelty and selfishness to which they have subjected women. Some of my clients use their recovery to try to escape their responsibilities, saying that they can’t help with the children, get a job, or contribute in other ways, “because the program says I need to keep my focus on myself.” In this way recovery can feed an abusive man’s self-centeredness and excuse making. A woman who hears the abuser express these attitudes may find herself doubting that he is really changing, and her skepticism is well advised. Her partner may tell her, “You just have no faith in people” or “You don’t believe anyone can change” (as if putting her down were the way to persuade her that he is no longer abusive!), but her instincts are correctly telling her that he is very much the same.

I have had clients who made significant changes from a
combination
of recovery from alcoholism
and
working seriously on taking responsibility for their abusiveness. Only then does an abuser’s recovery from addiction become a significant step.

A
LCOHOL
H
AS
N
O
B
IOLOGICAL
C
ONNECTION TO
A
BUSE OR
V
IOLENCE

Alcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior—anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine—but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Alcohol and other substances thus contribute to partner abuse in two ways:

1. A man’s beliefs about the effects of the substance will largely be borne out. If he believes that alcohol can make him aggressive, it will, as research has shown. On the other hand, if he doesn’t attribute violence-causing powers to substances, he is unlikely to become aggressive even when severely intoxicated.
   
2. Alcohol provides an abuser with an
   excuse
   to freely act on his desires. After a few drinks, he turns himself loose to be as insulting or intimidating as he feels inclined to be, knowing that the next day he can say, “Hey, sorry about last night, I was really trashed,” or even claim to have completely forgotten the incident, and his partner, his family, or even a judge will let him off the hook. (Courts tend to be especially lenient with abusers who blame their violence on a drinking problem.) And the alcohol is an excuse that
   he
   accepts, so he isn’t kept awake at night with gnawing guilt about having hurt his partner.
   

I have had several physically violent clients admit that they made the decision to assault their partners
before
they had any alcohol in their systems. They went out, as a few of the men have put it, “to grease the wheels,” drinking for a couple of hours before coming home to start a vicious, scary fight. The alcohol arms the abuser with an excuse and helps him to overcome any shame or embarrassment that might hold him back. Beware of the man who believes that drugging or drinking makes him violent. If he thinks it will, he’ll be right.

W
HAT
A
BOUT THE
M
AN
W
HO
I
S
A
BUSIVE
O
NLY
W
HEN
H
E
D
RINKS?

I could count on one hand the number of clients I have had whose abusiveness is entirely restricted to times of intoxication. However, I have worked with dozens of men whose
worst
incidents are accompanied by alcohol use but whose controlling and disrespectful behaviors are a pattern even when they are sober. These abusers tend to fit into one of the following categories:

1. The verbally abusive man who escalates to physical violence or threats only when intoxicated:
   When I ask the partner of such a man to describe his day-to-day behavior, she usually reports that he gets meaner and scarier when he’s drinking but that his name-calling, disrespect, and selfishness are the same, whether he is drunk or sober. She tends to feel that his physically scary behaviors would stop if she could get him into recovery and that she could manage the rest of his abusive behaviors. This soothing hope is a false one for two reasons: (a) When this style of abuser gets sober, he gradually accustoms himself to using violence without the assistance of alcohol, usually over a period of one or two years; and (b) even if he is among the small number of exceptions to this rule, the woman usually discovers that his psychological abuse can be as destructive to her as his violence was, which tosses her back into having to figure out what to do.
   
2. T
   he verbal abuser who becomes even more cruel and degrading when drinking but doesn’t escalate to violence:
   He is doing the same thing that the physically assaultive abuser does: using alcohol as an excuse. If he gets sober, he gradually comes up with new excuses, including learning to use his recovery as an excuse, and life goes on more or less as before.
   
3. The assaultive abuser who becomes even more violent when intoxicated:
   I find this style the most common among substance-addicted partner abusers. When this abuser is not intoxicated, he mostly refrains from his scariest forms of violence, like punching, kicking, choking, or threatening to kill her. His partner may say, “He is only violent when he drinks,” but she then goes on to tell me that he shoves or grabs her, walks toward her in menacing ways, is sexually rough, or uses other forms of physical intimidation or assault even when sober—behaviors that the abuser has succeeded in convincing her not to define as
   violence.
   

If your partner’s behavior becomes much worse when he’s intoxicated, you may tend to focus your attention on trying to manage his drinking, so that you never fully realize how abusive he is when he’s sober. His substance-abuse problem can thereby create a huge diversion from critical issues.

Alcohol does not a change a person’s fundamental
value system.
People’s personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People’s conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.

A
BUSERS
M
AKE
C
ONSCIOUS
C
HOICES
E
VEN
W
HILE
I
NTOXICATED

One of my first abusive clients, almost fifteen years ago now, was a physically assaultive husband named Max who worked for a utility company. He had gone out drinking after work one evening, and by the time he arrived at his front door he was “trashed.” He told me that as soon as he came in the house, his wife, Lynn, began “nagging” him. He “saw red” and started to scream at her and soon was tearing into her with his fists. Max sheepishly recounted this event to me, going on to admit that he had torn off some of Lynn’s clothes and had “partly” tied her to a chair. (I’m not sure how you “partly” tie someone to a chair; they are either tied or they’re not.) As Max sat in my office, he seemed to be a likable, mild-mannered line worker. It was not easy to imagine what he must have looked like through Lynn’s eyes that night.

I asked him to describe Lynn’s injuries, and he told me that she had black-and-blue marks and welts up and down both of her legs. I inquired about any other injuries, and he said there were none. I was surprised, given the brutality of the attack. “Lynn had no bruises on her arms, or on her face? Why not?” Max’s face changed shape, suddenly peering at me as if I must not be very bright, and he sputtered, “Oh, well, of course I wasn’t going to do anything that would
show.
”

Lynn confirmed to me later that Max had indeed been stumbling drunk that night. But had his inebriation caused him to lose control? Clearly not. He had remained focused on his desire to protect his own reputation and to avoid putting himself at risk of arrest, and so he had restricted Lynn’s injuries to places where they would be covered by clothing the next day. He could scarcely be termed “out of control.”

I could provide countless similar examples of the consciousness and decision making that my clients exhibit while drunk or on drugs. They may not choose their words quite as carefully, and they may not have perfect coordination of their movements, but they protect their self-interest: They avoid damaging their own prized belongings and usually don’t let their friends and relatives see their most overt and cruel forms of verbal or physical abuse or anything that they feel wouldn’t be adequately covered by the “I was drunk” excuse.

When I criticize my clients about their drunken abusiveness, they sometimes respond: “But I was in a blackout.” However, a blackout is a memory disconnection that happens
after
a drunk person passes out, causing the person to no longer know what occurred upon awakening. The person was still conscious
during
the event. If you ask an extremely drunk but still-awake person what happened earlier that evening, he or she can tell you. Thus there is no such thing as being “in” a blackout; the loss of memory happens later.