Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (36 page)

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered
mutually
caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.

I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Hoping to find that the mental health field was changing for the better, I recently reviewed the current catalogues for various graduate professional training programs in clinical and counseling psychology, including those from programs considered to be on the cutting edge. I was unable not only to locate a single course on any form of abuse, whether toward partners or children, but to locate any
reference
to abuse in the descriptions of courses on any other subject. I proceeded to call one of the schools that trains clinical psychologists and asked whether they ever offer any classes on abuse, and was told: “Well, if there is a particular interest in that subject among the students, they sometimes organize a student-led seminar.”

The influence of the history of psychological thinking remains particularly potent in the field of custody evaluation, where mental health professionals routinely ignore or minimize allegations of partner abuse and child abuse, assume that women are hysterical and vindictive, and treat all problems as mutual in origin. Custody evaluators sometimes become fervent advocates for abusive men, joining them in accusing the women of alienating children from their fathers and refusing to consider the evidence of abuse.

Similar kinds of errors abound in the work of many individual and couples therapists. I’ve had couples counselors say to me, for example: “He just isn’t the type to be abusive; he’s so pleasant and insightful, and she’s so
angry.
” Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her. I have saved for years a letter that a psychologist wrote about one of my clients, a man who admitted to me that his wife was covered with blood and had broken bones when he was done beating her and that she could have died. The psychologist’s letter ridiculed the system for labeling this man a “batterer,” saying that he was too reasonable and insightful and should not be participating in my abuser program any further. The content of the letter indicated to me that the psychologist had neglected to ever ask the client to describe the brutal beating that he had been convicted of.

Outside the mainstream of psychological thinking there are many, many excellent practitioners and theorists, ones who take the impact of trauma and abuse seriously and who believe that most victims are telling the truth. The writings of theorists and practitioners such as Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Jaffe, Angela Browne, John Myers, Susan Schechter, Anna Salter, Beverly James, and countless others serve to counter the hostility toward the oppressed of the prevailing professional atmosphere. I have come to know dozens of therapists who treat female clients with respect and play an empowering role in women’s recovery from abuse. But psychologists who are trained in the area of trauma remain exceptional, and the battle to reform psychological thinking has just begun. Before selecting a therapist for yourself or for your child, be sure to interview possible choices carefully, exploring their knowledge of and values concerning trauma and abuse. As for conjoint counseling for you and your abusive partner, I recommend that you strictly avoid it, for reasons that we will see further ahead.

A
N
A
BUSER’S
N
EW
P
ARTNER AS
H
IS
L
EADING
A
LLY

Back in the first chapter, we met a man named Paul who had divorced his wife and was now seeing Laura. Laura felt terrible for Paul because he was such a sweet man and his ex-wife was accusing him of having abused her. Laura was determined to “be there” for Paul, and even hoping to help him win custody because his ex-wife was “out of control.” Dozens of ex-partners of my clients have described how the abusive man’s new partner takes on a role similar to Laura’s: “His girlfriend is worse than he is. She talks to me like I’m dirt and she spreads bad things about me. I’d almost rather deal with him. I think she puts him up to some of the stuff he does. She’s a bitch.”

Perhaps his new partner really is a mean, hostile woman, but there is an equally good chance that she isn’t. Look through her eyes for a moment. The abuser is re-creating the same dynamic he set up with you, beginning with loving, attentive treatment in the early months of dating. He speaks to her with downcast eyes that well up with tears as he recounts how mean and unreasonable you were and how you called him abusive whenever
he
refused to bow to
your
control. If you have children with him, his girlfriend’s heart is bleeding because he cries in front of her about how much he misses them and says that you are keeping them away from him out of pure vindictiveness or out of a desire to turn them over to another man to be their dad. I currently have a case, for example, where the abusive father decided not to see his son for six months—he even put his decision in writing, in a document that I read—and then complained publicly that he was being denied visits. Paul has probably misled Laura in some similar ways. His girlfriend sees a kind, loving parent whose desire to maintain a relationship with his children is being thwarted; how could she not hate you?

He may remain on good behavior with his new girlfriend even longer than he did with you because he is motivated by his campaign against you. Of course, his other side will slip out sooner or later, but by that time he can blame it all on how badly you have hurt him. His girlfriend thus gets sucked into breaking her back trying to prove that she’s a good woman—unlike you. She hopes that if she demonstrates her loyalty to him, he’ll become loving and available to her once again, as he was at the beginning. So she wants to show him she is really there for him by joining with—or even outdoing—his hostility toward and blaming of you.

By the time his selfish and abusive side finally gets so bad that his new girlfriend can’t rationalize it away any more, she’s in pretty deep. She may even have married him by that time. For her to accept that he is an abuser, she would have to face what a terrible wrong she did to you, and that would be quite a bitter pill to swallow. So what tends to happen instead is that his new partner becomes angrier and angrier at
you
for the way she is being treated by him, believing that you “made him this way” by hurting him so badly.

A couple of years ago I worked with a woman who said to me, “I really hated his ex-girlfriend, but now I’m realizing he must have done the same stuff to her he’s doing to me.” Her guilt weighed heavily upon her. Women tend to need a long time before they can accept having been used in this way.

In the story of Paul and Laura we never meet Paul’s ex-wife, but I have talked to two dozen or more women in her position among the ex-partners of my clients. It is difficult to capture the pain I hear in the voices of women whose abusive ex-partners are attempting to take their children away from them through the legal system, and the fact that they have a female ally helping them carry out that nefarious plan is almost too much to bear. The mothers ask me: “Does she realize what she is doing? Has she bothered to think about what it’s like for a mother to be threatened with losing her children? What if he turns around years from now and does the same thing to her?”

At the same time, I believe it’s important not to judge the new partner too harshly. I sometimes say to women, “You know how manipulative he can be, and he is sure to be feeding her carefully crafted distortions. I’m not saying you should excuse her actions, I’m just reminding you that the one behind it all is him, not her. If you pour energy into hating her, you are inadvertently serving his interests.” We do, however, need to create a social ethic that makes it clear that anyone who chooses to go to bat for a man accused of abuse has a responsibility to get
all
the facts and not just the view that he promotes. The abuse of women is simply too rampant for anyone to assume that an allegation is false or exaggerated without checking it out very, very carefully.

Finally, I have had several cases in which the abuser’s new partner was a man who became a gunner for the abuser against the abused woman just as a new female partner sometimes does. Some peer groups of gay men have negative attitudes toward women and become cheerleaders for abuse just as straight male peers can.

O
THER
A
BUSERS OF
P
OWER AS
A
LLIES OF
A
BUSIVE MEN

You have undoubtedly come in contact at some point in your life with a person driven by a deep attraction to exercising power over others. Partner abusers have no monopoly on the desire to intimidate or manipulate, or on the skills for accumulating power and using it for selfish purposes or emotional gratification. Among professionals, for example—including those who are expected to respond constructively to abusers and their partners—there are some individuals who are motivated not by caring and respect but by hunger for control. Not everyone who enters police work wishes to be a public servant; there are those who look forward primarily to carrying a gun, pushing their weight around, and being above the law. I know many humane judges who take an interest in the challenges that people face and seek fair and practical responses. But I watch others who appear to get satisfaction out of insulting those who come before them, dismissing their concerns and perspectives, and acting with impunity. Among therapists there are plenty whose goal is teamwork, while others look down on their clients and speak condescendingly, making pronouncements about what each person “really” thinks, feels, and needs to do. There are custody evaluators who are eager to lend a hand through the painful process of divorce, but a tragically large number appears to be enamored with the power over the lives of men, women, and children that their custody recommendations give them.

People who are attracted to power and tend to abuse it have important common ground with a man who abuses women. For example, a dictatorial boss is bound to encounter some occasions when an employee finally gets fed up enough to swear at her, stomp out of the office, and quit. A manager who coerces his female subordinates into sexual contact with him may get reported for sexual harassment sooner or later. The abuser of power feels outraged when his or her victims attempt to defend themselves in these ways and considers them to be the unreasonable or aggressive ones. So it is not surprising that such a person, when looking at a woman who is complaining of abuse by a man, might have the following thoughts: “This woman is another one of those people who likes the role of victim. I know what they’re like because I have to deal with them myself: They are never grateful no matter how much you do for them; they don’t know their place; and everything turns into an accusation of mistreatment.” The abuser of power thus may personalize the woman’s resistance to oppression and feel a strong desire to retaliate on behalf of the abusive man, and in fact I have often observed this disturbing eagerness among some professionals to jump on abused women with both feet. Their statements have sometimes confirmed to me that they do indeed have the kind of thought process I have just described—coupled of course with the usual myths regarding women’s hysterical exaggerations and their provocation of men’s abuse.

A professional who is drawn to abusing power seems to have particularly strong reactions if the woman challenges his or her actions in any way or attempts to explain the effects the abuser has had on her. The underlying attitude sometimes appears to be: “How
dare
you continue to attempt to think for yourself when I am here before you with my obviously superior knowledge, status, judgment, and insight?” An abused woman can walk away from an interaction with such a professional feeling like she has just been beaten up, re-creating the ugliness of the verbal or physical abuse she has suffered from her partner. A number of abused women have said to me, for example, “The police came to my house one time after he pushed me around, but they were angry and insulting to me and kind of buddied up to him, and when I complained about how they were treating me they told me if I didn’t shut up they would arrest
me.
” I have been involved in cases where some judges and custody evaluators—both male and female—go out of their way to discredit and demean women who report abuse and request protection for themselves or their children, and if the woman protests the professional response they explode into verbally abusing her or retaliating against her. In this way the mentality and tactics of certain professionals can closely parallel those of abusers, and the result is revictimization of the woman.

In some institutions whose own power dynamics have tended to fall badly on abused women in these ways, such as police departments, courts, and child protective services, social pressure has brought about the creation of positions for abused women’s advocates or domestic-violence specialists whose job it is to make sure that the abused woman is not revictimized by the system that should be there to protect her rights. If you are involved with one of these systems, find out whether an abuse specialist is on staff and, if so, request to bring that person into your case.