Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (35 page)

T
HE SUBJECT OF
abusive men as parents, including their behavior in custody and visitation disputes, is a complex one; I have only touched the surface here. Readers who wish to pursue a more in-depth discussion should see my book
The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics
(written with Dr. Jay Silverman), which addresses the full range of issues touched on in this chapter. Although that book focuses on the physically violent abuser, you will find that most of what we say applies to psychologically abusive men as well.

The more you are aware of how your children may be affected by their exposure to your partner’s abuse of you, and to the problems in his style as a parent, the better able you will be to protect them from emotional harm. They need to know that you are a parent they can count on to be consistently kind and safe, since the abuser is unpredictable and at times intimidating. If they are giving you difficult behavioral challenges, are having some problems focusing their attention, or are prone to withdrawal or depression, bear in mind that these are all normal responses in children whose mothers are abused. Your patience and understanding are critical to them, including your ability to show them that you do not believe they are bad. Remember that growing up around an abusive father or stepfather is very confusing and anxiety producing for children even if he does not mistreat them directly.

Make your own healing—as well as your emotional and physical safety—a priority. Children of an abused woman can feel the difference when their mother starts to get help for herself and becomes more able to recognize abuse for what it is, blaming neither herself nor her children for the abusive man’s behavior.

Here are some other actions you can take:

Insist on complete respect from your children.
Children can absorb your partner’s rude or bullying approach to you and begin to exhibit behaviors toward you that they have learned from him. Try to put a stop to this behavior as quickly as possible before it gets a chance to snowball. You may not be able to be firm with the children in front of your partner if he actively undermines you, but put your foot down as much as you can, especially when he isn’t around.

Insist on respect for females in general.
Your partner’s control or abuse toward you creates an atmosphere in which negative attitudes toward females can grow like mold. Interrupt these whenever you see them appearing in your sons or daughters.

Confront your partner’s undermining of your parenting.
Unless you are afraid of how your partner will retaliate, name his undermining for what it is and demand that it stop.

Don’t lie on your partner’s behalf or cover for his behavior.
You may feel that you should protect your children’s image of your partner by making excuses for him, telling them what happened was your fault, or lying about what he did. Your relationships with your children will be damaged in the long run if your cover for him, however, and that is the outcome you most want to avoid. In addition, you increase their vulnerability to him if you encourage them to deny their own self-protective instincts. (However, you may need to lie to
him
to
protect them
sometimes.)

Be the best parent you can.
As unfair as it is, the reality is that an abused woman has to be an outstanding parent in order to help her children process and heal from the abuse they have been exposed to. Draw on every resource you can, including parenting books and training courses, parent support groups, and play groups that may exist in your area. (For specific suggestions, see the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

Consider leaving your relationship, at least for a while, if you can do so safely.
One of the best ways to help children heal is for them to be free from witnessing abuse. As I discussed earlier, however, it is important to plan carefully in order to make it harder for your abusive partner to hurt the children through his visitation with them or through legal actions for custody.

If your partner has already succeeded in causing some distance in your relationships with your children, or has turned them against each other, it is still possible to heal those divisions and rebuild healthy connections. Make your relationships a priority and draw on counseling services in your community to help you work through the barriers that your abusive partner has erected. Encourage your children to talk about the upsetting interactions they have witnessed in the home, with the help of counselors if necessary; it is especially important to relieve any burden the children have felt to keep the abuse secret. Some abused women’s programs have group counseling for children, which is an excellent environment in which they can break the secret about the abuse, gain insight into their own emotional reactions, and learn that the abusive man’s behavior is neither their mother’s fault nor their own.

Above all, don’t give up. Healing ruptured relationships takes time and perseverance. In a case I am involved in currently in which the parents are divorced, the mother was on the verge of losing hope that she would ever be on good terms again with her teenage boy, who was allied with his abusive father and imitating his attitudes and behaviors—including threats of violence—toward the mother. But she persevered, despite many moments of despair over a three-year period, and now the boy has finally begun to recognize his father’s bullying and manipulation and is gradually repairing his connection to his mother.

• An abuser in the home affects everybody.
  
• A good father does not abuse his children’s mother.
  
• Abusers drive wedges between people, by accident or by design. Abused mothers and their children should seek support to heal as individuals and to heal their relationships with each other (see “About General Parenting Issues” in “Resources” in the back of this book).
  
• If you are preparing to leave an abuser with whom you have children, seek out legal advice regarding custody issues as soon as you can.
  

I
N EACH OF
the following examples, all of which come from cases I have been involved in, something is happening that is very difficult to account for:

• A woman flees into hiding because she is terrified of her abusive husband. He looks everywhere for her and cannot track her down. When all else fails, he pays a visit to her parents. He tells them how sorry he is about how he treated their daughter and says he misses her terribly and is going to change. He cries and begs for her address, “just so that I can send her a letter and tell her how I feel,”
  and her parents give it to him.
  
• A man joins an abuser program that has been denied certification by his state’s Department of Public Health because it violates state regulations. While in the program, the man complains that his girlfriend sometimes hits him, too, and the counselor, who is a licensed psychologist, responds by
  encouraging the abuser to get a restraining order against the abused woman.
  The psychologist admits this openly to me.
  
• The daughter of a divorced abused woman discloses in explicit detail that she is being sexually abused by her father during visitation. The mother goes to court to request a professional evaluation of her daughter. The mother’s sister arrives at court that day
  with the abuser,
  with whom she has now become friends despite the fact that she hated him before the divorce. The sister not only tells the judge that the sexual abuse allegations are lies but actually asks the judge to take custody of the girl away from the mother and give it to her. (Fortunately, the judge doesn’t allow the sister to take the girl. The evaluation goes forward and winds up confirming the sexual abuse.)
  
• An abusive man’s therapist assigns a psychological diagnosis to the abused woman
  without having met her or even talked to her,
  relying entirely on the man’s descriptions of his partner, despite knowing that he is accused of abusing her.
  
• A mother flees with her children to a shelter for abused women because her house is vandalized. She can tell it was her physically abusive ex-husband who did it, and she takes the damage as a clear threat. Within several days of fleeing, she contacts the court-appointed custody evaluator to let him know where she is. The custody evaluator, however, shoots off a report to the court stating that the woman has no reason to be afraid of her husband, although she has told him of her partner’s history of violence and threats, and recommends that the children be taken away from the mother and given to the father. He does not mention the woman’s phone call to him from the shelter in his report. On the basis of the custody evaluator’s report, all three children, including a girl who is only three years old, are sent to live at the abuser’s home, and the mother is permitted only brief
  supervised
  visits, because she is now labeled a “flight risk.”
  

How are abusive men able to attract allies to their cause? And why do some people become such enthusiastic, and at times vicious, agents of the abuser? To answer these questions we need to look not only at the mind-set of abusive men but also at the socially acceptable attitudes and styles of interaction that an abusive man can use to prevail upon other people to do his dirty work.

W
HY THE
A
BUSIVE
M
AN
S
EEKS
A
LLIES

Controlling and intimidating a partner is not that easy. A man has a better chance of dominating a woman than vice versa, but it is still a challenge. Very few people willingly consent to having their rights systematically denied. The abusive man thus is faced repeatedly with the problem—from his perspective—of his partner’s continued resistance to his control. Over time he gets tired of bullying her all by himself.

Certain other impediments can trip up the abuser. Changes in societal attitudes toward abuse, including improvements in some important laws and policies, are making it harder to get away with. The physically frightening or sexually assaultive abuser, for example, is much more likely to be arrested than he would have been ten or fifteen years ago. His partner now has the option of seeking a court order to keep him away from her.

Perhaps most important is that the
silence
surrounding abuse is being broken. In a current case of mine involving a psychological abuser, close friends of the woman sat her down one day and staged an “intervention,” in which they supportively pressed her to recognize the impact her husband’s abuse was having on her. Unlike the situation years ago, there are now various ways in which an abused woman can find assistance—or assistance can find her, as it did in this case.

In this context, an abuser has to work harder than ever to keep his partner blaming herself and to fend off helping hands that might reach her. One great way to keep people off of her side is to win them over to his side first. Besides, he feels that he
deserves
allies, because he considers himself the victim.

You may wonder why, if abusive men feel so justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn’t want to have to explain his worst behaviors—his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence—to people who might find those acts distasteful, and he may not feel confident that his justifications will be accepted. Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging self-doubt. He considers his guilt feelings a weakness to be overcome. And, last, he may lie because he has convinced himself of his own distortions. The narcissistic abuser, for example, considers his fabrications real, which is one of the reasons why lie-detector tests are unreliable in cases of abuse (including child sexual abuse).

The list of people an abuser can potentially persuade to act as his agents is a long one: friends, relatives, teachers, psychologists, clergypeople, police and judges,
her
relatives, and, following a breakup, his new partner. Let’s take a look at several of these people from the abused woman’s perspective, examining both how the abuser recruits them and why they are willing to be his front people.

T
HE
A
BUSER’S
R
ELATIVES

As these statements by partners of my clients illustrate, one fundamental dynamic has changed little despite three decades of progress in social attitudes toward abuse: No one wants to believe that his or her own son or brother is an abusive man. Parents don’t want the finger pointed at them, so they say: “
Our
child wouldn’t abuse his partner. We brought him up right.” Allegations of abuse by the son can draw uncomfortable attention to the dynamics of the previous generation; abusive men are three times more likely than nonabusers to come from homes in which their father or stepfather abused their mother. And if the father or stepfather is abusive, he shares the son’s entitled attitudes and victim-blaming tendencies.

Family loyalty and collective denial of family problems are powerful binding agents. The abuser shapes his relatives’ views of his partner over a period of years. They have perhaps seen with their own eyes how she “overreacts” to certain things he does in public, because with no idea of what he has been doing to her behind closed doors, they can’t accurately judge her behavior. So they oppose abuse in the abstract, but they fight fiercely for the abuser when he is their own.

T
HE
A
BUSED
W
OMAN’S
R
ELATIVES AND
F
RIENDS

As if the support an abuser receives from his own relatives weren’t bad enough, I keep encountering cases where
the woman’s relatives
also come to his aid. At a conference I spoke at recently, a lawyer stood up to ask: “Why do some of my clients find themselves in situations where their own families are helping the abusers win custody?”

Every family has tensions within it, and abusers use their manipulative skills to take advantage of those rifts. In one case, for example, an abuser named Ian heard that his ex-wife Tina had fallen out with her parents because they were upset that she had stopped attending church. Ian made a point of starting to make a regular appearance at Sunday services and one day found his way to “coincidentally” sit near Tina’s relatives. He engaged them in a conversation about his “concerns” about her loss of faith and how bad he felt that Tina wasn’t giving their children the benefits of consistent church attendance. He also slipped in a few assertions that he knew would bring to mind the kind of person who skips services, saying, “Our children tell me she’s been drinking heavily and bringing a lot of different men around the house.” Pretty soon a minor tiff had turned into a gigantic one.

It is uncomfortable for a woman to tell her family the details of her partner’s abuse of her. She feels ashamed and wants to avoid having them ask: “Well, then, why are you with him?” But the abuser can take advantage of how much her family doesn’t know. He is careful not to create the impression he’s bad-mouthing her, while subtly planting his poisonous seeds. He might say, for example: “She’s telling people now that I was
abusive
to her, and that really hurts me. It’s gotten so I don’t want to show my face places ’cause of what she’s saying. I’m not keeping any secrets; I’ll tell you right out that I did slap her one day, which I know is wrong. She has this thing about saying that my mother is a ‘whore’ ’cause she’s been divorced twice, and that really gets to me, but I know I should have handled it differently.”

When he leaves, her parents find themselves ruminating: “Gee, she didn’t mention anything about insulting his mother in that incident. That makes it a little different. She can have quite a mouth on her, I’ve noticed that myself. He shouldn’t slap her, but he’s obviously feeling guilty about it now. And he’s willing to admit that it’s partly his fault, while she blames it all on him. She does that in conflicts with us sometimes; she doesn’t realize it takes two to tango.”

The part about the woman calling his mother a degrading name may never have even happened; my clients smoothly make up stories to cover their worst incidents. But whether or not he is telling the truth is almost beside the point; he is playing to the societal value, still widely held, that a man’s abuse toward a woman is significantly less serious if she has behaved rudely herself.

There continues to be social pressure on women to “make the relationship work” and “find a way to hold the family together,” regardless of abuse. Since so many people accept the misconception that abuse comes from bad relationship dynamics, they see the woman as sharing responsibility equally for “getting things to go better.” Into this context steps the abuser, telling his partner’s friends, “I still really want to work things out, but she isn’t willing to try. I guess it isn’t worth the effort to her. And she’s refusing to look at her part in what went wrong; she puts it all on me.”

What her family and friends may not know is that when an abused woman refuses to “look at her part” in the abuse, she has actually taken a powerful step out of self-blame and toward emotional recovery. She
doesn’t
have any responsibility for his actions. Anyone who tries to get her to share responsibility is adopting the abuser’s perspective.

Despite the challenges, many, many friends and relatives of abused women stay by them. Their presence is critical, for it is the level of loyalty, respect, patience, and support that an abused woman receives from her own friends and family that largely determines her ability to recover from abuse and stay free. (People wishing to support or assist an abused woman they care about should read
To Be an Anchor in the Storm
by Susan Brewster. See “Resources.”)

T
HERAPISTS AND
E
VALUATORS

We need to take a large step back in time for a moment, to the early part of Freud’s era, when modern psychology was born. In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.

Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually
desires
sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him
had never taken place
; they were simply fantasies of events the women had
wished for
when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.