Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (4 page)
Read Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men Online
Authors: Lundy Bancroft
All of these people are trying to help, and they are all talking about the same abuser. But he looks different from each angle of view.
The woman knows from living with the abusive man that there are no simple answers. Friends say: “He’s mean.” But she knows many ways in which he has been good to her. Friends say: “He treats you that way because he can get away with it. I would never let someone treat
me
that way.” But she knows that the times when she puts her foot down the most firmly, he responds by becoming his angriest and most intimidating. When she stands up to him, he makes her pay for it—sooner or later. Friends say: “Leave him.” But she knows it won’t be that easy. He will promise to change. He’ll get friends and relatives to feel sorry for him and pressure her to give him another chance. He’ll get severely depressed, causing her to worry whether he’ll be all right. And, depending on what style of abuser he is, she may know that he will become dangerous when she tries to leave him. She may even be concerned that he will try to take her children away from her, as some abusers do.
How is an abused woman to make a sensible picture out of this confusion? How can she gain enough insight into the causes of his problem to know what path to choose? The questions she faces are urgent ones.
F
IVE
P
UZZLES
Professionals who specialize in working with abusive and controlling men have had to face these same perplexing issues at work. I was a codirector of the first counseling program in the United States—and perhaps in the world—for abusive men. When I began leading groups for abusers fifteen years ago, they were as much of a mystery to me as they are to the women they live with. My colleagues and I had to put a picture together from the same strange clues faced by Kristen, Barbara, and Laura. Several themes kept confronting us over and over again in our clients’ stories, including:
H
IS VERSION OF THE ABUSE IS WORLDS APART FROM HERS.
A man named Dale in his mid-thirties gave the following account when he entered my group for abusive men:
My wife Maureen and I have been together for eleven years. The first ten years we had a good marriage, and there was no problem with abuse or violence or anything. She was a great girl. Then about a year ago she started hanging around with this bitch she met named Eleanor who really has it in for me. Some people just can’t stand to see anyone else happy. This girl was single and was obviously jealous that Maureen was in a good marriage, so she set out to wreck it. Nobody can get along with Eleanor, so of course she has no relationships that last. I just had the bad luck that she ran into my wife.
So this bitch started planting a lot of bad stuff about me in Maureen’s head and turning her against me. She tells Maureen that I don’t care about her, that I’m sleeping with other girls, all kinds of lies. And she’s getting what she wants, because now Maureen and I have started having some wicked fights. This past year we haven’t gotten along at all. I tell Maureen I don’t want her hanging around with that girl, but she doesn’t listen to me. She sneaks around and sees her behind my back. And, look, I’m not here to hide anything. I’ll tell you straight out, it’s true that two or three times this year I finally couldn’t take all the accusations and yelling anymore, and I’ve hauled off and slapped her. I need help, I’m not denying it. I have to learn to deal with the stress better; I don’t want her to get me arrested. And maybe I can still figure out how to persuade Maureen not to throw a great thing away, because at the rate we’re going we’ll be broken up in six months.
I always interview the partner of each of my clients as soon as possible after he enrolls in the program. I reached Maureen by phone several days later, and heard her account:
Dale was great when I first met him, but by the time we got married something was already wrong. He had gone from thinking I was perfect to constantly criticizing me, and he would get in such bad moods over the littlest things. I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get him to feel better. Only a couple of months after the wedding he shoved me for the first time, and after that some explosion would happen about two or three times a year. Usually he would break something or raise a fist, but a few times he shoved me or slapped me. Some years he didn’t do it at all, and I would think it was all over, but then it would happen again—it sort of came in waves. And he was always, always, putting me down and telling me what to do. I couldn’t do anything right.
Anyhow, about a year ago I made a new friend, Eleanor. She started telling me that what Dale was doing was abuse, even though he had never punched me or injured me, and that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. At first I thought she was exaggerating, because I’ve known women that got it so much worse than me. And Dale can be really sweet and supportive when you least expect it. We’ve had a lot of good times, believe it or not. Anyhow, Eleanor kind of opened my eyes up. So I started standing up to Dale about how he talks to me, and told him I was thinking of moving out for a while. And what’s happened is that he’s gone nuts. I swear, something has happened to him. He’s backhanded me twice in the last eight months, and another time he threw me over a chair and my back went out. So I finally moved out. For now I’m not planning to get back with him, but I guess it depends partly on what he does in the abuser program.
Notice the striking contrasts. Dale describes the first ten years of his marriage as abuse-free, while Maureen remembers put-downs and even physical assaults during those years. Maureen says that Eleanor helps and supports her, while Dale sees her as corrupting Maureen and turning her against him. Dale says that they are still together, while Maureen reports that they have already broken up. Each one thinks the other has developed a problem. How can their perceptions clash so strongly? In the chapters ahead, we will explore the thinking of abusive men to answer the question of why Dale’s view contains such serious distortions.
H
E GETS INSANELY JEALOUS, BUT IN OTHER WAYS HE SEEMS ENTIRELY RATIONAL.
In a group session one day, a young client named Marshall was recounting a confrontation with his partner that had occurred in the previous week:
My wife and I had plans to meet in the lobby of the building where she works to go out for lunch. I was waiting around near the elevators, and when she finally came out I saw that she’d been alone on the elevator with this good-looking guy. He had a look on his face, and she did too, I can’t really describe it, but I could tell something was up. I said, “What was that all about?,” and she pretended like she didn’t know what I was talking about. That really pissed me off, and I guess I kind of blew up at her. I may have gotten a little louder than I should have. I was mad, though, and I was saying, “You were making it with that guy on the elevator, weren’t you? Don’t lie to me, you slut, I’m not a fool.” But she kept on playing dumb, saying she doesn’t even know him, which is a crock.
Marshall was extremely jealous, but I had worked with him long enough to know that he wasn’t crazy. He was lucid and logical in group, had a stable work history and normal friendships, and showed no signs of living in a world of fantasy or hallucination. He simply did not have symptoms of the type of serious mental illness that could convince a man that his wife could have sex in an elevator, fully clothed and standing up, between floors of a busy office building. Marshall had to know that his accusation wasn’t true. And when I confronted him, he admitted it.
Given that even very jealous abusers turn out to have a reasonable grasp on reality, why do they make these insane-seeming accusations? Is there something about acting crazy that they enjoy? What does this behavior accomplish for them? (I answer these questions in Chapter 3, where we consider the issue of
possessiveness.
)
H
E SUCCEEDS IN GETTING PEOPLE TO TAKE HIS SIDE AGAINST HER.
Martin, a man in his late twenties, joined my abuser group while also seeing an individual therapist. He told me the first day that he was confused about whether he had a problem or not, but that his long-time girlfriend Ginny was preparing to break up with him because she considered him abusive. He went on to describe incidents of insulting or ignoring Ginny and of deliberately causing her emotional pain “to show her how it feels when she hurts me.” He also admitted to times of humiliating her in front of other people, being flirtatious with women when he was mad at her, and ruining a couple of recent important events in her life by causing big scenes. He justified all of these behaviors because of ways he felt hurt by her.
As a routine part of my assessment of Martin, I contacted his private therapist to compare impressions. The therapist turned out to have strong opinions about the case:
THERAPIST:
I think it’s a big mistake for Martin to be attending your abuser program. He has very low self-esteem; he believes anything bad that anyone says about him. If you tell him he’s abusive, that will just tear him down further. His partner slams him with the word
abusive
all the time, for reasons of her own. Ginny’s got huge control issues, and she has obsessive-compulsive disorder. She needs treatment. I think having Martin in your program just gets her what she wants.
BANCROFT:
So you have been doing couples counseling with them?
THERAPIST:
No, I see him individually.
BANCROFT:
How many times have you met with her?
THERAPIST:
She hasn’t been in at all.
BANCROFT:
You must have had quite extensive phone contact with her, then.
THERAPIST:
No, I haven’t spoken to her.
BANCROFT:
You haven’t spoken to her? You have assigned Ginny a clinical diagnosis based only on Martin’s descriptions of her?
THERAPIST:
Yes, but you need to understand, we’re talking about an unusually insightful man. Martin has told me many details, and he is perceptive and sensitive.
BANCROFT:
But he admits to serious psychological abuse of Ginny, although he doesn’t call it that. An abusive man is not a reliable source of information about his partner.
What Martin was getting from individual therapy, unfortunately, was an official seal of approval for his denial, and for his view that Ginny was mentally ill. How had he shaped his therapist’s view of his partner to get her to adopt this stance? How can abusers be so adept at recruiting team members in this way, including sometimes ones with considerable status or influence, and why do they want to? (These questions are the focus of Chapter 11, “Abusive Men and Their Allies.”)
D
URING SOME INCIDENTS HE SEEMS TO LOSE CONTROL, BUT CERTAIN OTHER CONTROLLING BEHAVIORS OF HIS APPEAR VERY CALCULATED.
Several years ago, a young man named Mark came to one of my abuser groups. When a client joins the program, I set behavioral goals with him as soon as possible. I often begin by asking, “What are the top three or four complaints your partner has about you?” Mark’s response was:
One of the things Eileen gets on me about the most is that she says I ignore her. She says I make her a low priority and always want to do other things instead of be with her, so she feels like she’s nothing. I like to have time to myself a lot, or to relax and watch television. I guess I kind of tune her out.
Based on Mark’s account, I wrote near the top of his Behavior Plan:
“Spend more time with Eileen. Make her a higher priority.”
Eileen was very difficult to reach by phone, but three weeks later she finally called me, with a surprising story to tell:
A few weeks before Mark started your program, I told him that I needed a total break from the relationship. I just couldn’t take it anymore, the yelling and the selfishness. He won’t even let me sleep. So I didn’t even want to talk to him for a while; I had to have time away to get myself together. I reassured him that the relationship wasn’t over, and we’d work on getting back together in a couple of months, after a breather.
Then, a couple of weeks later, he called me and said that he had enrolled in an abuser program. He said that his counselor wants him to spend more time with me and had written it on his sheet, and that the program told him that being with me was part of how he needed to work on his issues. I wasn’t ready for that yet at all, but I also didn’t want to interfere with his program. So I started seeing him again. I want whatever is going to work best to help him change. I could have used a little more time apart, to tell you the truth, but if that’s what your program recommends…
Mark had succeeded in twisting the abuser program to suit his own purposes. I explained to Eileen what had happened and apologized for the way my program had added to the many difficulties she already had with him. The high degree of manipulativeness that Mark used is not uncommon among abusive men, unfortunately. How can abusers be capable of such calculation yet at other times appear to be so out of control? What’s the connection? The answers can be found in Chapter 2, where we examine the excuses that abusive men use to justify their behavior.
S
OMETIMES HE SEEMS TO BE REALLY CHANGING, BUT IT TENDS TO VANISH.
Carl was a twenty-six-year-old man who had been arrested repeatedly for domestic assaults and had finally served a few months in jail. He said to me in a group session:
Going to jail was the last straw. I finally got it that I have to stop blaming my problems on everybody else and take a look at myself instead. People in jail said the same thing to me: If you don’t want to be back in here, get real with yourself. I have a bad temper, and kind of a mean streak to tell you the truth, and I have to deal with it. I don’t want to be back inside for anything.
At the end of each counseling session, Carl would make comments such as, “I can see that I’ve really got to work on my attitude” and “I learned a lot tonight about how excuses keep me from changing.” One night he looked at me and said, “I’m really glad I met you, because I think if I wasn’t hearing the things you are saying, I would be headed straight back to being locked up. You’re helping me get my head on straight.”
