Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (32 page)

“P
EOPLE THAT LOVE YOU GET TO ABUSE YOU.”

Children who grow up exposed to an abusive man’s behavior learn that abuse is the price people pay if they want to receive love. This training can make it harder for children to recognize when they are being mistreated and to stand up for themselves.

As an abuser passes on his thinking to the next generation, he, in effect recruits his sons to the ranks of abusive men. He does not literally want his son to mistreat women—he doesn’t believe he does so himself, after all—but he wants his son
to think as he thinks,
including adopting his same excuses and justifications, so the outcome is the same. And to a lesser extent he also recruits his daughters to join the ranks of abused women.

H
OW
A
BUSERS
A
FFECT
M
OTHER-CHILD
R
ELATIONSHIPS

Tom’s behavior drives wedges between the members of his family that expand over time. Many of the divisions he has sown are already bearing their poisonous fruit. How is he affecting Helen’s relationships with her children? And how is he shaping—and distorting—how they view her?

U
NDERMINING
H
ER
A
UTHORITY

It isn’t hard for Alex and Randy to figure out where primary parental authority is vested in their family, because they see that Helen’s decisions can be overruled. Children who detect such an imbalance learn to play one parent against the other and try to curry favor with the one who has the ultimate say. They also learn to defy the authority of the abused parent. Some abusive men further undermine the mother’s authority by speaking badly about the mother to the children, characterizing her as crazy, alcoholic, or uncaring.

Even when a man does not directly undercut the mother’s parenting as Tom does, his abuse undermines her authority
by its very nature.
Children who see or hear their father belittle their mother, silence her, walk away and ignore her, or physically intimidate her, learn that such behaviors toward her are both acceptable and effective. Most children of abused women are aware that their father does these things—even if the parents don’t think they know—and they experiment with imitating his behaviors to see if it will help them get their way.

Children may also hope to win their father’s approval by joining him in the abuse of their mother. This effort succeeds in some cases, but other abusers lay down the law quickly to establish that the privilege of disrespecting Mom belongs only to Dad. In this case the children may repress what they are learning until Mom and Dad split up; then, with the abuser out of the house, they let loose, re-creating his put-downs and intimidation of her, sometimes rapidly making themselves unmanageable.

Children of abusers absorb his expectations of constant catering from the mother. The son of an abused woman tends, for example, to become enraged at her for not waiting on him hand and foot, for pressing him to meet his responsibilities, or for challenging his inappropriate behaviors. His father is a direct model for his angry, verbally abusive responses in these particular circumstances.

I
NTERFERING WITH
H
ER
P
ARENTING

The evening after the birthday party, Tom forbids Helen to involve the school psychologist in addressing Randy’s assaults on his sister. He doesn’t say exactly what her punishment will be if she defies him, but she knows him well enough to not want to find out. She is thus forbidden to parent her children.

Dozens of abused women have complained to me of my clients’ direct interference with their parenting. The most common complaint is that of being prevented from comforting a crying or frightened baby or young child. The men sometimes admit the interference openly. A recent client of mine, Jacob, told me that he was sick of the way his partner, Patricia, would pick up their eleven-month-old baby Willy when he cried and “fawn over him,” and he blocked her from going into the baby’s room. That was just the beginning. An older daughter of theirs was hospitalized for weeks in a city that was nearly two hours away with severe hepatitis. Patricia would rush to the hospital each night as soon as she got off work, visit briefly with her daughter, and then rush back home in hopes of seeing Willy before he fell asleep. However, if Patricia didn’t make it back home by the nightly deadline that Jacob had set, Jacob
would not permit
her
to go into Willy’s room to see him, even if Willy was still awake. On at least one occasion the boy realized that Patricia was home and started yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” and Jacob
still
blocked her from entering. His excuse to me? “I didn’t set that deadline,” he said. “We agreed to it mutually.” (This would have been an unacceptable excuse even if it were true, but Patricia told me she never agreed to such a deadline.)

I think it is important to mention that Jacob never hit Patricia in their ten years together and that he was a college professor living in an unusually luxurious neighborhood. He provides a powerful illustration of the depth of the psychological cruelty an abuser can perpetrate with little or no physical violence and keep hidden behind the most impressive facade.

I SPEAK WITH
some mothers who have developed psychiatric symptoms from being abused, such as nightmares, severe anxiety, or depression. Research studies have found that these conditions and related ones, including posttraumatic stress disorder, are not uncommon in women who have been abused by their partners. The abuser may have indoctrinated his children to perceive their abused mother as emotionally troubled, but he also may have actually
caused her
to become somewhat unstable. In either case, his behavior damages mother-child relationships, and it can take both time and outside assistance for mothers and children to reestablish a strong and trusting connection.

U
SING THE
C
HILDREN AS
W
EAPONS OF
A
BUSE

One of my clients many years ago was a mousy and mild-mannered young father named Wayne who characterized himself as a feminist. He was upset one morning about some things his wife, Nancy, had said to him before leaving the home, and he stormed around itching to make her really regret her words. He was looking in the refrigerator for milk for their ten-month-old baby when he came across a bottle from a few days earlier that had spoiled. He recognized the bottle immediately as the ultimate weapon and
proceeded to give the baby the spoiled milk to drink,
making him violently ill. Few other acts could have had an impact on Nancy as devastating as this one. The controlling effect was potent: Nancy was terrified for a long time after to defy Wayne or upset him in any way. She was also filled with anxiety as she left for work each morning.

Another client of mine described how he had told his wife during an argument, “If you don’t shut up, you’re going to be really sorry,” and when she continued yelling at him, he went into their teenage daughter’s closet and cut her prom dress to ribbons with a pair of scissors. The daughter’s pain, I learned from the mother, was indescribable. Fueling this type of cruelty to children is the abuser’s awareness that the mother’s empathy for her children’s emotional pain will hurt her more than anything he could do to her directly.

S
HAPING THE
C
HILD’S
P
ERCEPTIONS OF THE
A
BUSE

Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors, able to distract children’s attention from what is before them and get them confused about the obvious. Consider the following scenario. A nasty argument breaks out between a mother and a father, with yelling and name-calling on both sides. Their children can barely follow what the fighting is about, partly because their stomachs are tied in knots from the tension. For the rest of the day, their mother is distant and depressed, snapping at them over trivial frustrations. Their father disappears for two or three hours, but when he turns up again he is in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children as if nothing had happened. (An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.) So which parent will seem to these children to have been responsible for shattering the calm of their home earlier? Probably the grouchy one. It is therefore not surprising that abusers are sometimes able to reverse their children’s perceptions so that they see Mom as the volatile or unreasonable one despite the abuse they witness.

P
LACING THE
M
OTHER IN A
D
OUBLE
B
IND

When Tom punishes Helen by deliberately making the children late, Randy and Alex become upset with
her
for not capitulating. They feel that if she would just cater to their father and manage his emotions they would get what they need, so they see her as the one who is hurting them. They know it’s out of the question for him to do anything different. The abuser gets rewarded for his bullying behavior because the children give up on influencing his side of the equation and pour their energy into getting their mother to fix what’s wrong.

Yet this is only half of the problem. On some other issue, Helen may give in to Tom precisely to avoid the kind of abuse and retaliation that resulted this time, and then the children will feel critical of her for
that.
They may say: “Why do you let Dad push you around like that? Why do you put up with that?” They may grumble: “When Dad is being mean to us, Mom doesn’t do anything about it.” Children of abused women thus feel angry and upset with their mother for
standing up
to the abuser and for
not standing up
to him. Their reactions in this regard are entirely understandable, but the mother can find herself in an impossible bind that leads to more distance and tension between her and her children.

Child protective services sometimes accuse an abused woman of “failing to protect” her children from exposure to an abusive man, without understanding the many efforts she may have made to keep them safe and the many tactics the abuser may have used to interfere with her parenting.

H
OW
A
BUSIVE
M
EN
S
OW
D
IVISIONS IN
F
AMILIES

Randy and Alex are bitter adversaries one minute and loyal allies the next. They are like pebbles at the edge of the sea, with each wave of abuse toward their mother washing over them and changing their position in relation to each other. Randy’s violence toward Alex is no surprise; boys who are exposed to the abuse of their mother are often disrespectful of and aggressive toward their peers, targeting females in particular for their hostility. Sons of abusers learn to look down on females, so they feel superior to their sisters and mothers and thus expect catering from them. Violence among siblings occurs at much higher rates in homes where there is partner abuse.

Abuse is inherently divisive; family members blame each other for the abuser’s behavior because it is unsafe to blame him. If an incident of abuse began with an argument over one child’s misbehavior, then an older sibling might say, “Daddy screamed at Mom and made her cry because he was mad that you were making so much noise. You should have listened to me when I told you to quiet down.”

Tom contributes further to divisiveness through his
favoritism
: He treats Randy like a buddy and fixes his dirt bike, while ignoring Alex except when showing her off in public. Favoritism is rampant in the parenting of abusive men. They may favor boys over girls because of their own negative attitudes toward females. They favor children whom they see as siding with them and are rejecting of those who are sympathetic or protective of the mother. Children experience powerful emotional rewards from the abuser for distancing themselves from their mother and from any siblings who are allied with her.

My clients exhibit a range of other divisive tactics, including openly shaming children—especially boys—for being close to their mother, telling family members lies about each other, and making children feel like members of a special and superior club when they are part of his team. Finally, they use collective punishment, requiring all the children to pay a price for one child’s behavior, which can be devastating in its ability to turn children against each other.

Why does an abuser sow divisions in these ways? One reason is that his power is decreased if the family remains unified. I have had a number of clients whose partners and children have consistently supported each other, and the client is always bitter about it, griping, “They’ve all turned against me,” or, even more commonly, “She’s brainwashed the children to be on her side.” Many abusers take steps to avoid this outcome, using the principle of “divide and conquer”: If people in the family are busy fighting with each other, attention is diverted from the man’s cruelty or control.

R
ESILIENCE IN
M
OTHER
-C
HILD AND
S
IBLING
R
ELATIONSHIPS

Almost miraculously, some family members of abusers manage to stay close to each other and unified. Several factors play a role in helping family relationships rebound from the effects of the abuser’s behavior and grow strong:

1. Access to good information about abuse:
   When a mother receives assistance from a program for abused women, for example, she has an easier time unraveling the convoluted dynamics of abuse, and then can assist her children to achieve greater clarity. It also helps her not blame her children for how they’ve been affected by the abuse.
   
2. Access to children’s services:
   Many programs for abused women now offer free counseling for their children as well, and specialized counseling for children who have witnessed abuse is sometimes available through other sources such as hospitals or mental health centers. Family relationships benefit greatly when children get an opportunity to work through some of the dynamics we have been examining.
   
3. Safety from the abuser:
   Family members are more likely to stay by each other if their community stays by them, helping them to either leave the abuser or demand that he change. For the violent abuser, the police and courts can play a critical role in supporting the family, or they can drop the ball. The actions taken by family and juvenile courts can also be pivotal in protecting children from the effects of an abuser’s behavior.
   
4. Access to supportive community resources:
   I have observed, for example, that children tend to do better simply by having the good fortune to live in a neighborhood where there are plenty of children to play with. If children have the opportunity to participate in sports, drama, or other activities that give them pleasure and help them feel good about themselves, they are less likely to channel their distress into hurting their siblings and their mother. Adults outside the family who devote attention to the children and engage them in activities can help them unhook themselves psychologically from the abuser, even without any direct mention of the abuse.
   Support for the mother is as important as support for the children. Seek out a trustworthy friend or relative, and take the leap of talking about how you are being mistreated in your relationship. Breaking your isolation is critical to healing both you and your children.
   
5. A mother who works hard at her parenting and gets help with it:
   It is important for an abused mother to get community support and not to try to be a superhero. At the same time, there are helpful steps you can take. Try as hard as you can not to take your rage and frustration out on your children. Look for books or lectures about parenting and discipline strategies. Seek support for your parenting from friends and relatives, and try to be open to suggestions or constructive criticism from others. These are all extraordinary challenges for an abused mother; no one should blame you if you can’t do all of these things, especially all at once. But I find that many abused women discover ways to be the best mothers they can under the circumstances, and their children feel the difference in the long run.
   
6. An abuser who is a poor manipulator:
   Some abusive men simply aren’t as clever or persuasive in shaping the children’s outlook, with the result that the children don’t become as confused and ambivalent and cast less blame on to their mothers, their siblings, and themselves.