Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (30 page)

If you do decide to flee abruptly,
take your children with you if you possibly can
and take their birth certificates, social security cards, and passports. Some women are in so much danger that they are forced to leave their children behind, but the abuser then may go to court for custody, saying that she “abandoned” them.

K
EY
P
OINTS TO
R
EMEMBER

• When a breakup happens against an abuser’s will, he may define his ex-partner’s decision as a provocative declaration of independence and may go to war to prove that she belongs to him.
  
• Leaving an abuser is hard to do, but with time and planning you can succeed.
  
• As a relationship dissolves, and for a long while thereafter, an abused woman should be especially alert to her own safety and take steps to protect herself.
  
• After breaking up with an abusive man, wait at least a few months before becoming involved with a new partner. Taking time to heal emotionally from the abuse you have endured can be critical to helping you choose a nonabusive partner next time.
  
• Read
  It’s
  My
  Life Now
  (see “Resources”).
  
• Your life belongs to no one but you.
  

I
T’S
S
ATURDAY
A
FTERNOON
, and excitement is high in the Turner family. Randy, who is eleven, and his big sister, Alex, thirteen, are getting ready to go with their parents to a big birthday bash for their twin cousins. Their mother, Helen, is helping them get their presents wrapped and choose what to wear, and periodically intervening to sort out quarrels between the two of them, which seem to erupt every few minutes. Tom, the father, is in the garage trying to fix Randy’s dirt bike and is covered with grease. Helen’s anxiety is mounting as the hour gets later, because Tom is doing nothing about getting ready to leave and keeps saying, “Get off my fucking back, I already told you I’d be ready on time. I can’t drop this in the middle.” Tensions between Randy and Alex are also escalating, and Randy finally jumps on Alex and starts punching her. Helen hears Alex screaming, goes running in to pull Randy off her, and in the process gets punched twice by Alex herself. Randy yells at her, “You always side with Alex, you bitch,” and goes into his room and slams the door. Alex is crying hard and says to her mother, “You have to
do
something about him; I can’t take it anymore. I swear, if he hits me one more time I’m going to
kill
him. He’s out of control!”

Helen stays with Alex for a few minutes, then starts to put things into the car. The time to leave has passed. Tom finally comes in from the garage and starts to scrub his hands in a leisurely fashion. He then starts to look at the newspaper, and Helen snaps at him, “What are you
doing
? We need to go.” Tom cuts her with a glare that makes her heart stop and says, “I was just seeing what time the game is on tonight. But since you mention it, maybe I
should
check out what else might be interesting.” Then, with a cold sneer on his face, he takes the newspaper to the couch, puts up his feet, and begins to peruse the pages in earnest. Helen storms furiously upstairs. Ten minutes later Tom is still sitting on the couch. Helen calls to him, “We’re already going to be nearly a half hour late; the children are afraid of missing the games.”

Tom’s lips form an icy smile, and he answers, “I guess you should have thought of that before deciding to give me a ration of your shit.”

Helen yells, “Oh, you asshole!”

At this point Randy emerges from his room and starts down the stairs. “I see you’re hysterical, as usual,” he tosses flippantly at his mother as he goes. When he gets downstairs, he sees that his father is nowhere near ready to go, and he looks at the clock. He considers saying something but thinks better of it; he recognizes the signs of his father’s anger, even when they are not outwardly obvious, and he doesn’t want to make himself the target. So he goes back upstairs, tells Alex what is happening, and they both go looking for Helen, who is sitting crying on her bed.

Alex says urgently, “Come on, Mom, let’s just go without Dad. The party’s already started, we’re missing it.” Helen shakes her head no. Alex pleads, “Why not? Why can’t we just go?”

Helen responds simply, “We’re not going without him,” not wanting to explain to the children how their father would make her pay if they did.

Randy then says, “Please go and apologize to him, Mom. You know that’s all he’s looking for, and then he’ll get up and we can go.”

Helen’s tears stop, and her voice gets a hard edge. “I didn’t
do
anything to him, Randy. Why don’t you go ask
him
to apologize to
me
? What did
I
do?”

Randy’s voice turns condescending, as if his mother is being stupid. “Right, Mom. When has Dad ever apologized for anything? Don’t be ridiculous. I guess we can forget going to the party—that’s basically what you’re saying.”

Then their father calls from downstairs, “Come on, let’s get going.” He has quietly put away his paper and cleaned himself up. Randy and Alex brighten and run off to grab their things. Helen can barely lift herself to her feet, feeling psychologically assaulted from all sides. She looks ashen for an hour or more afterward.

When they are almost out the door, Tom sees for the first time Alex’s outfit, which he considers too sexy, and he barks at her, “You go right back upstairs, young lady, and put on something decent. You aren’t going to the party looking like a prostitute.”

Alex is on the verge of tears again, because she had been excited about what she was going to wear. “But Mom and I picked my clothes out together,” she protests, a helpless whine in her voice. “She said I looked fine.”

Tom glares at Helen, and his voice lays down the law: “If you aren’t changed in two minutes, we’re leaving and you’re staying here!” Alex runs crying upstairs to throw on a different outfit.

In the car on the way to the party, Tom snaps out of his grumpiness, joking with the children. His humor includes cutting references to Helen’s emotional outbursts and overanxiety, which are cleverly funny in their viciousness. The children can’t help laughing, although Alex feels resentful toward both parents and guilty toward her mother even as she giggles. Helen is silent.

At the party, Tom acts as if nothing is wrong. Helen makes an excuse about being sick, since it is obvious to people that she is not herself. Tom is entertaining to both the adults and the children at the party, to the extent of giving each child a twirl around in the yard. Helen can see the impression that Tom makes on people and feels that it would be futile to attempt to describe to anyone what transpired before the party.

There are a few unfamiliar people at the party, to whom Tom introduces Alex as his “girlfriend,” which he considers a charming joke. At one point he comments to some relatives on Alex’s appearance, saying, “She’s developing into quite an attractive young lady, isn’t she?” Alex is nearby and feels humiliated. Tom sees her discomfort and says, “What, can’t you take a compliment?” and there is laughter all around. He then gives her a hug, kisses her on the head, and tells his amused audience, “She’s a great kid.” Alex forces a smile.

When they get home from the party and the children are upstairs, Helen mentions to Tom that Randy hit Alex again that afternoon and that this time he hurt her. Tom responds, “Helen, welcome to the world. Siblings fight, okay? Or maybe you haven’t
heard,
maybe that hasn’t been on
Oprah
yet. Alex is two years older than Randy, and she’s bigger. She loves to really play up being hurt, because she knows Mommy will come running and feel sorry for her, and it will be Big Bad Randy who’s to blame, while Alex is all innocence. You’re so naive.”

Helen smarts from the series of barbs but forces herself to answer calmly, “I think we should talk to the school psychologist about it and get some suggestions.”

Tom rises rapidly to his feet, instantly transformed as if he had just caught fire. He takes two steps toward Helen, pointing his finger and yelling, causing her heart to race. “You get those people in our business and you’ll be sorry! You have no fucking idea what you are doing. You should use some damned judgment, you stupid idiot!” He stomps out to the garage, turns on the light, and goes back to work on Randy’s bike, listening to the game on the radio. He does not come back in until after Helen has fallen asleep.

L
IFE WITH AN ABUSER
in the home can be as stressful and confusing for the children as it is for their mother. They watch the arguments; they feel the tension. When they hear screaming and name-calling, they worry about their parents’ feelings. They have visions of the family splitting up; if the abuser is their father or a father figure, the prospect of separation is a dreaded one. If the abuser is physically scary, sometimes punching walls, knocking over chairs, or striking their mother, then a sharper kind of fear grips the children and may preoccupy them even during the calm periods in the home. Following incidents of abuse they may be wracked with guilt, feeling that they either caused their mother to be abused or should have found some way to have prevented it.

Witnessing incidents of abuse is just the beginning of what the children endure, however. Abuse sends out shock waves that touch every aspect of family functioning. Hostility creeps into mothers’ relationships with their children, and siblings find themselves pitted against one other. Factions form and shift. Children’s feelings about each parent can swing to extremes, from times of hating the abuser to periods of idealizing him and blaming the mother for the fighting. Mothers struggle to keep their relationships with their children strong in the face of the wedges driven in by the abuser, and siblings find ways to support one another and offer protection. These wild cross-currents make family life turbulent.

(For simplicity, I refer in this chapter to the abuser as the children’s “father,” but most of the themes I describe can apply equally to a stepfather or to a mother’s live-in partner.)

W
HY
A
BUSIVENESS
S
O
O
FTEN
E
XTENDS TO
P
ARENTING
I
SSUES

Although I have worked with some clients who draw sharp lines around their mistreatment of their partners, so that their children neither see the abusive dynamics nor get pulled into them, most abusers exhibit aspects of their abusive mentality in their role as parents. There are various reasons why a man’s abusiveness tends to affect his parenting choices, including the following:

1. Each important decision that parents make has an impact on everyone in the family. Consider, for example, the decision that many parents grapple with concerning whether a six-year-old is ready to start first grade or should wait a year. Delaying a year may mean another year during which the mother can’t work many hours outside the home, which affects the family finances. The child may have to be up and out early to catch the bus, which affects how much sleep the parents get. A younger sibling may suddenly not have the first-grader at home as a playmate anymore and so may be moody and demanding of attention during the day. How is an abuser likely to respond to this complex picture? He is likely to continue his usual tendency to consider his own judgment superior to his partner’s and to be selfishly focused on how any changes will affect
   him,
   rather than on what works best for the family as a whole. Just because there are children involved, is his entire approach to decision making going to suddenly change? Not likely.
   
2. At the core of the abusive mind-set is the man’s view of his partner as a personal possession. And if he sees her as his fiefdom, how likely is he to also see the children as being subject to his ultimate reign? Quite. If he is the children’s legal father, he sees them as extensions of himself; otherwise he tends to see them as extensions of her. Either way, his mentality of ownership is likely to shape his parental actions.
   
3. It is next to impossible for the abuser to keep his treatment of the mother a complete secret from the children the way he does with other people, because they are almost always around. So he chooses instead to hook them into the patterns and dynamics of the abuse, manipulating their perceptions and trying to win their loyalty.
   
4. Children are a tempting weapon for an abuser to use against the mother. Nothing inflicts more pain on a caring parent, male or female, than hurting one of his or her children or causing damage to the parent-child relationship. Many abusers sense that they can gain more power by using the children against their partners than by any method other than the most overtly terrorizing assaults or threats. To their destructive mind-set, the children are just too tempting a tool of abuse to pass up.
   

R
EVISITING THE
A
BUSIVE
M
IND-SET
: P
ARENTING
I
MPLICATIONS

I return now to the Turners, whom we met at the opening of this chapter, to look piece by piece at the dynamics that are being played out. The central elements of the abusive mind-set act as our guide:

C
ONTROL

From observing Tom’s behavior, we learn one of his unspoken rules:

“Y
OU DO NOT TELL ME TO HURRY UP.
I
GET TO TAKE
AS LONG AS
I
PLEASE.
I
F YOU PRESSURE ME,
I
WILL PUNISH YOU BY TAKING A LOT LONGER.
”

Tom is not about to abandon his system of rules and punishments—which are fundamental to an abusive behavior pattern—just because the children are bearing the brunt of it. In fact, he is somewhat pleased that the punishment falls largely on them, because he knows that makes Helen feel even worse.

We also see Tom control Alex directly, ruling dictatorially over her clothing and
overruling
Helen’s decision, thereby undermining her parental authority. He also seizes power over a process to which he has contributed nothing; if he wanted the right to have a say in what the children wore, he should have involved himself in the work of getting the family ready to go. The abuser does not believe, however, that his level of
authority
over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of
effort
or
sacrifice
on their behalf, or to how much
knowledge
he actually has about who they are or what is going on in their lives. He considers it his right to make the ultimate determination of what is good for them even if he doesn’t attend to their needs or even if he only contributes to those aspects of child care that he enjoys or that make him look like a great dad in public.

Like Tom, abusers tend to be authoritarian parents. They may not be involved that much of the time, but when they do step in, it’s their way or the highway. My clients defend authoritarian parenting even though a large collection of psychological studies demonstrates that it’s destructive: Children do best when parents are neither overly strict nor overly permissive, providing firm structure but also allowing for dialogue, respectful conflict, and compromise.