Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (28 page)

“W
HEN
I
PROMISE TO BE KINDER IN THE FUTURE, THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH.
”

No matter how many times in the past Van had broken his promises to change, he still believed that
this time
Gail should see that he really meant it and should give him another chance. There was no limit in his mind to how many “other chances” he should get; he felt entitled to an endless series.

To make matters worse, Van felt that Gail was supposed to accept his rose-colored vision of the future even though he was simultaneously blaring loud warning signals that he
hadn’t
changed. My clients demand forgiveness while continuing to insult, threaten, demand immediate responses, attend only to their own needs, and more. According to his mind-set, she should believe that his abuse has stopped when
he
says it has stopped, regardless of what she sees in front of her own eyes.

“T
HERE IS NO LIMIT TO HOW MUCH SHE SHOULD BE WILLING TO ‘WORK ON’ OUR RELATIONSHIP.
”

The abuser feels entitled to end a relationship any time he feels like it, but he assigns no such privilege to his partner. Around breakup time, my clients grouse bitterly to me along the lines of:

No woman in any of my cases has ever left a man the first time he behaved abusively (not that doing so would be wrong). By the time she moves to end her relationship, she has usually lived with years of verbal abuse and control and has requested uncountable numbers of times that her partner stop cutting her down or frightening her. In most cases she has also requested that he stop drinking, or go to counseling, or talk to a clergyperson, or take some other step to get help. She has usually left him a few times, or at least started to leave, and then gotten back together with him. Don’t any of these actions on her part count as demonstrating her commitment? Has she ever done enough, and gained the right to protect herself? In the abuser’s mind, the answer is no.

Once again, the abuser’s double standards rule the day. He doesn’t consider his chronic verbal abuse, or even violence, to constitute a failure to “love and cherish,” but her decision to move away for safety does. His affairs automatically deserve forgiveness, whereas any affairs
she
may have he considers proof of her low moral character and lack of caring. And his exposure of the children to his degrading and bullying of their mother doesn’t keep him from awarding himself the title of Children’s Protector, the one who wants to give them a “stable family life” while their “selfish” mother tries to split them apart.

“S
HE IS STILL RESPONSIBLE FOR MY FEELINGS AND WELL-BEING.
”

In the abusive man’s self-serving value system, the woman may be responsible for his needs and feelings even
after
she declares that she isn’t his partner anymore. So if he loses his job, or his new fling doesn’t work out, or his mother gets ill, he still feels entitled to have her take care of him emotionally. In particular, he tends to make her endlessly responsible for his hurt feelings from their relationship or from their breakup.

“T
HE RELATIONSHIP IS OVER WHEN
I
SAY IT’S OVER.
”

I repeatedly run into the following scenario: A new client in the abuse program is describing his most serious incident of abuse, as all participants are required to do, and he excuses his actions by saying, “It happened because I found out she was cheating on me.” When I contact the woman, however, I find out that, although he may be right about her seeing another man,
she and my client were broken up at the time.
In other words, in the abuser’s mind any relationship that she has is “an affair” if it happens during a period when
he
still wishes they were back together, because he feels entitled to determine when she can be free to see other people.

“S
HE BELONGS TO ME.
”

The abuser’s dehumanizing view of his partner as a personal possession can grow even uglier as a relationship draws to a close. I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy. At worst, his efforts to reestablish his ownership may include following her and monitoring her movements, scaring people who try to assist her, threatening men she is interested in dating, kidnapping the children, and physically attacking her or people close to her. For abused women separation is a time of particularly high risk of homicide or attempted homicide, which can sometimes involve murderous assaults on her new boyfriend, her children, or on other people she cares about.

Numerous studies have found that mistreatment of women by abusers tends to continue for a substantial period after separation and commonly escalates to levels worse than those when the couple was together. Particularly common in postseparation is rape or other forms of sexual assault, which conveys a powerful message of ownership:
“You continue to be mine, and I retain my rights to your body until
I
decide otherwise.”

If you are concerned that your partner may be capable of extreme violence—even if he has not been violent in the past—take careful safety precautions (see “Leaving an Abuser Safely,” page 225).

T
RAUMATIC
B
ONDING

One of the great tragedies of all forms of abuse is that the abused person can become emotionally dependent on the perpetrator through a process called
traumatic bonding
. The assaults that an abuser makes on the woman’s self-opinion, his undermining of her progress in life, the wedges he drives between her and other people, the psychological effects left on her when he turns scary—all can combine to cause her to
need him
more and more. This is a bitter psychological irony. Child abuse works in the same way; in fact, children can become
more
strongly attached to abusive parents than to nonabusive ones. Survivors of hostage-taking situations or of torture can exhibit similar effects, attempting to protect their tormentors from legal consequences, insisting that the hostage takers actually had their best interests at heart or even describing them as kind and caring individuals—a phenomenon known as the
Stockholm syndrome.
I saw these dynamics illustrated by a young boy who got a shock from touching an electric fence and was so frightened by it that he grabbed on to the fence for security—and wouldn’t let go as each successive shock increased his panic, until his sister was able to reach him and pull him off.

Almost no abuser is mean or frightening all the time. At least occasionally he is loving, gentle, and humorous and perhaps even capable of compassion and empathy. This intermittent, and usually unpredictable, kindness is critical to forming traumatic attachments. When a person, male or female, has suffered harsh, painful treatment over an extended period of time, he or she naturally feels a flood of love and gratitude toward anyone who brings relief, like the surge of affection one might feel for the hand that offers a glass of water on a scorching day. But in situations of abuse,
the rescuer and the tormentor are the very same person.
When a man stops screaming at his partner and calling her a “useless piece of shit,” and instead offers to take her on a vacation, the typical emotional response is to feel
grateful
to him. When he keeps her awake badgering her for sex in the middle of the night and then finally quiets down and allows her to get some of the sleep that she so desperately craves, she feels a soothing peace from the relief of being left alone.

Your abusive partner’s cycles of moving in and out of periods of cruelty can cause you to feel very close to him during those times when he is finally kind and loving. You can end up feeling that the nightmare of his abusiveness is an experience the two of you have
shared
and are escaping from together, a dangerous illusion that trauma can cause. I commonly hear an abused woman say about her partner, “He really knows me,” or “No one understands me the way he does.” This may be true, but the reason he seems to understand you well is that he has studied ways to manipulate your emotions and control your reactions. At times he may seem to grasp how badly he has hurt you, which can make you feel close to him, but it’s another illusion; if he could really be empathic about the pain he has caused, he would stop abusing you for good.

Society has tended to label a woman “masochistic” or “joining with him in his sickness” for feeling grateful or attached to an abusive man. But, in fact, studies have shown that there is little gender difference in the traumatic bonding process and that males become as attached to their captors as women do.

The trauma of chronic abuse can also make a woman develop fears of being alone at night, anxiety about her competence to manage her life on her own, and feelings of isolation from other people, especially if the abuser has driven her apart from her friends or family. All of these effects of abuse can make it much more difficult to separate from an abusive partner than from a nonabusive one. The pull to reunify can therefore be great. Researchers have found that most abused women leave the abuser multiple times before finally being able to stay away for good. This prolonged process is largely due to the abuser’s ongoing coercion and manipulation but also is caused by the trauma bonds he has engendered in his partner.

One exercise that can help you address this trap involves making a list of all the ways, including emotional ones, in which you feel dependent on your partner, then making another list of big or small steps you might take to begin to become more independent. These lists can guide you in focusing your energy in the directions you need to go.

W
HY
H
E
D
OESN’T
A
CCEPT
Y
OUR
R
EQUEST TO
“T
AKE A
B
REATHER
”

Have you ever attempted to take a brief period of separation from your partner? Perhaps you had been considering getting out of your relationship but were afraid of your partner’s reaction, so you asked for “a little time apart” instead of breaking up outright. Or maybe you weren’t sure what you wanted to do and just craved some time away to consider where to go from here without having to deal daily with his bullying, criticism, and watching over you. You may have attempted to reassure him that the relationship wasn’t ending, that you still wanted to “work on getting back together,” but that you just needed a break. You probably requested that the two of you stay in separate places for a period of a few weeks or months and that you see each other little or not at all. You may have made other specific requests, such as not to speak at all, even by telephone, so that you could get a complete break. You may have asked for an agreement that you could each see other people during this period, or specifically requested the opposite. The great majority of the abused women I work with try at some point to get time out of the pressure cooker.

My clients, however, rarely honor their partners’ requests. At the beginning the man presents himself as supporting the plan, saying, “I agree with her that we need some time apart to just let everything cool off, and then talk it over with level heads.” But he doesn’t think so for long. He soon starts cutting around the edges of the agreement. If she asked that he not call for a while, he sends a card. Then he calls on some pretext, perhaps a bill that has to be paid or an invitation for her from his sister, and throws in offhandedly, “So, how are you?” to try to get a conversation started. He may keep showing up “by coincidence” at places where she happens to be. He keeps chipping away at her resolve as much as he can, until she cracks and sees him. Once they are face-to-face, he pours on the sweetness and charm, reminiscent of his romantic persona in the early, glory days of the relationship, and sees if he can cajole or manipulate her into bed; he may sense that once they’ve had sex, she’ll be hooked in again, a strategy that I have often seen my clients succeed with. One way or another, the woman never seems to end up getting the decompression time that she knew was indispensable to her well-being.

Why doesn’t he allow the break to happen? On a conscious level he may simply miss her, but down deep he has other interests. He experiences the separation as a declaration by his partner that she is capable of surviving without him, that she is the best judge of what is good for her, that her needs shouldn’t always take a backseat to his, that her
will
has force. These messages represent a powerful summary of everything that he
does not
want in his relationship, and he feels driven to move quickly to prove them false.

The abuser is afraid of what his partner may discover if she succeeds in getting a respite from his control. She may see how good it feels to live without put-downs and pressure. She may notice that there are other people in the world, both women and men, who respect her and treat her well, and may even observe that some of her female friends are treated as equals by their partners. She may start to think her own thoughts, without him there to monitor her reflections and channel them toward the views
he
wants her to have. Above all, she might discover how much better off she is without him. In short, he doesn’t tolerate the break because on some level he senses that
it is too healthy and healing for the woman.
He wants her to hear his voice and see his face, because he believes he can destroy her resolve.