Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (44 page)

“No” answers to any of the above questions are signs of work that your partner still needs to do. If he is committed to changing, he will take you seriously when you voice your continued concerns and he will acknowledge that he needs to continue working on his attitudes and habits. On the other hand, if he is impatient with or critical of you for not being satisfied with the gestures of change he has already made, that is a sign that his overt abusive behaviors will be coming back before long. My experience with abusive men is that small or even medium-level improvements generally slip away over time; the man who actually maintains his progress is usually the one who changes completely even though that process tends to take considerable time. Thus, when you are attempting to preserve a relationship with a man who has abused you, you need to some extent to hold him to an even higher standard than you would a nonabusive partner.

Sometimes when a woman reports to me that her abusive partner has been doing better, it turns out that he hasn’t been doing anything at all. He isn’t swearing at her or scaring her, but he also isn’t spending time with her, talking to her, or showing her any affection. He’s avoiding abusiveness simply by disconnecting from the relationship. As a partner of one of my clients said to me: “It’s like he’s got two gears: angry and neutral.”

Distancing himself can be worse than avoidance; it can be a way to punish you for putting your foot down about the way he treats you. A certain number of my clients leave their partners once they realize that their abuse really isn’t going to be tolerated anymore. But the more typical approach is to remain physically present but to retool the machinery to churn out passive aggression instead of open hostility. He learns how to hurt her through what he
doesn’t
do instead of through what he does.

The previous questions can help you to distinguish between genuine change and an abusive man’s usual pattern of going through a “good” period. If your partner is truly on the road to renouncing abuse, you will notice a dramatic difference in him. Partners of my successful clients say that they feel almost as though they were living with a different person and that now they sense a deeper change that involves a real shift in attitudes rather than just his usual use of superficial sweetness to smooth things over.

C
LEAR
S
IGNS OF AN
A
BUSER
W
HO
I
SN’T
C
HANGING

Your partner can make several statements or behave in several ways that clearly indicate he
isn’t
making progress:

B
E
S
TRAIGHT WITH
Y
OURSELF

To use good judgment and make wise decisions about the prospects for change in your abusive partner, you need to be honest
with yourself.
Because you love him, or you have children with him, or leaving him would be difficult for other reasons, you may be sorely tempted to get overly hopeful about small concessions that he finally makes. If he doesn’t budge for five years, or twenty years, and then he finally moves an inch, your exhaustion can make you think,
Hey! An inch! That’s progress!
You may wish to overlook all the glaring signs indicating that his basic attitudes and strategies remain intact. Beware of his deception and your own self-deception. I have heard such heart-rending sadness in the voices of many dozens of abused women who have said to me: “I wish I could somehow recover all those years I wasted waiting around for him to deal with his issues.” Save yourself that sadness if you can, by insisting on nothing less than complete respect.

T
HE
A
BUSER IN
C
OUPLES
T
HERAPY

Attempting to address abuse through couples therapy is like wrenching a nut the wrong way; it just gets even harder to undo than it was before. Couples therapy is designed to tackle issues that are
mutual.
It can be effective for overcoming barriers to communication, for untangling the childhood issues that each partner brings to a relationship, or for building intimacy. But you can’t accomplish any of these goals in the context of abuse. There can be no positive communication when one person doesn’t respect the other and strives to avoid equality. You can’t take the leaps of vulnerability involved in working through early emotional injuries while you are feeling emotionally unsafe—because you
are
emotionally unsafe. And if you succeed in achieving greater intimacy with your abusive partner, you will soon get hurt even worse than before because greater closeness means greater vulnerability for you.

Couples counseling sends both the abuser and the abused woman the wrong message. The abuser learns that his partner is “pushing his buttons” and “touching him off” and that she needs to adjust her behavior to avoid getting him so upset. This is precisely what he has been claiming all along. Change in abusers comes only from the reverse process, from completely stepping out of the notion that his partner plays
any
role in causing his abuse of her. An abuser also has to stop focusing on his feelings and his partner’s behavior, and look instead at
her feelings
and
his behavior.
Couples counseling allows him to stay stuck in the former. In fact, to some therapists, feelings are all that matters, and reality is more or less irrelevant. In this context, a therapist may turn to you and say, “But
he
feels abused by
you,
too.” Unfortunately, the more an abusive man is convinced that his grievances are more or less equal to yours, the less the chance that he will ever overcome his attitudes.

The message to you from couples counseling is: “You can make your abusive partner behave better toward you by changing how
you
behave toward
him.
” Such a message is, frankly, fraudulent.
Abuse is not caused by bad relationship dynamics.
You can’t manage your partner’s abusiveness by changing your behavior, but he wants you to think that you can. He says, or leads you to believe, that “if you stop doing the things that upset me, and take better care of my needs, I will become a nonabusive partner.” It never materializes. And even if it worked, even if you could stop his abusiveness by catering to his every whim, is that a healthy way to live? If the way you behave in the relationship is a response to the threat of abuse, are you a voluntary participant? If you have issues you would like to work on with a couples counselor, wait until your partner has been
completely abuse-free
for two years. Then you might be able to work on some of the problems that truly are mutual ones.

A professional book I recently read offers a powerful example of how couples therapy works with an abuser. The therapist made an agreement with the couple that the man would avoid his scary behaviors and in return the woman would stop making her friends such an important part of her life “because her friendships were causing so much tension in the marriage.” The therapist had, in effect, assisted the man in using the threat of violence to get his way, cutting his partner off from social connections and sources of support that were important to her. What the therapist portrayed as a voluntary agreement was actually coercion, although the authors of the book showed no signs of realizing this.

Couples counseling can end up being a big setback for the abused woman. The more she insists that her partner’s cruelty or intimidation needs to be addressed, the more she may find the therapist looking down at her, saying, “It seems like you are determined to put all the blame on him and are refusing to look at your part in this.” The therapist thereby inadvertently echoes the abuser’s attitude, and the woman is forced to deal with yet another context in which she has to defend herself, which is the last thing she needs. I have been involved in many cases where the therapist and the abuser ended up as a sort of tag team, and the abused woman limped away from yet another psychological assault. Most therapists in such circumstances are well intentioned but fail to understand the dynamics of abuse and allow the abuser to shape their perceptions.

The therapist’s reassuring presence in the room can give you the courage to open up to your partner in ways that you wouldn’t normally feel safe to do. But this isn’t necessarily positive; an abuser can retaliate for a woman’s frank statements during couples sessions. Later, when he is screaming at you, “You humiliated me in front of the therapist, you made me look like the bad guy, you told things that were too private!” and delivering a nonstop diatribe, you may regret your decision to open up.

Irene, an abused woman who tells her own story in public and has appeared on several panels with me, shares the following account: She had been in couples counseling for about six months with her husband, Quentin, when one day the therapist decided it was time to get the ball rolling. He said, “These session have gradually stopped going anywhere, and I think I know why. Irene, you’re not opening up very much, and I think you need to take more emotional risks.” Irene felt that the therapist was right; she
had
been exposing very little week to week. So she decided to take the plunge. She told the therapist about Quentin’s abuse of her, which included considerable physical violence and the downward emotional spiral she had been in as a result. Quentin appeared moved and shaken, his eyes reddening as if he might cry at any moment. “I have really been in denial about my violence,” he told the therapist, “and I haven’t been facing how badly it has been affecting Irene.” The therapist felt that a crucial barrier to progress had been overcome. “Now,” he declared, “I think your couples work can begin to yield results for you.”

On the drive home from the session, Quentin kept one hand on the steering wheel. In the other hand he clutched a large handful of Irene’s hair as he repeatedly slammed her head into the dashboard, screaming, “I told you to never fucking talk to anyone about that, you bitch! You promised me! You’re a fucking liar!” and similar insults in a nonstop rant. After hearing Irene’s account, I was careful to never again underestimate the risk to an abused woman of conjoint therapy.

If couples counseling is the only type of help your partner is willing to get—because he wants to make sure that he can blame the problem on you—you may think,
Well, it’s better than not getting any counseling at all. And maybe the therapist will see the things he does and convince him to get help.
But even if the therapist were to confront him, which is uncommon, he would just say: “You turned the therapist against me”—the same way he handles any other challenges.

Some couples therapists have said to me: “Before I work with a couple whose relationship has involved abuse, I insist on clear agreements that there won’t be any abuse while they are in therapy with me and no paybacks for anything that gets said in a session.” Such agreements are meaningless, unfortunately, because abusers feel no obligation to honor them;
virtually every abuser I’ve ever worked with feels entitled to break his word if he has “good enough reason,
” which includes any time that he is really upset by his partner. Increasingly, therapists across the United States and Canada are refusing to engage in couples or family sessions with an abuser, which is the responsible course of action.

T
HE
A
BUSIVE
M
AN IN
I
NDIVIDUAL
T
HERAPY

The more psychotherapy a client of mine has participated in, the more impossible I usually find it is to work with him. The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight. Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: “From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn’t really her I was hitting. It was my mother!” He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation. “No,” he said, “you were hitting your wife.”

I have yet to meet an abuser who has made any meaningful and lasting changes in his behavior toward female partners through therapy, regardless of how much “insight”—most of it false—that he may have gained. The fact is that if an abuser finds a particularly skilled therapist and if the therapy is especially successful, when he is finished he will be a happy, well-adjusted
abuser
—good news for him, perhaps, but not such good news for his partner. Psychotherapy can be very valuable for the issues it is devised to address, but partner abuse is not one of them; an abusive man needs to be in a specialized program, as we will see.