Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (6 page)

Consider the reverse situation for a moment: Have you ever heard a woman claim that the reason why she is chronically mistreating her male partner is because a previous man abused her? I have never run into this excuse in the fifteen years I have worked in the field of abuse. Certainly I have encountered cases where women had trouble trusting another man after leaving an abuser, but there is a critical distinction to be made: Her past experiences may explain how she
feels,
but they are not an excuse for how she
behaves.
And the same is true for a man.

When a client of mine blames a past relationship for his cruel or controlling behavior in the present, I jump in with several questions: “Did your ex-partner ever say that she felt controlled or intimidated by you? What was her side of the story? Did you ever put your hands on her in anger, or did she ever get a restraining order?” By the time he has finished providing his answers, I usually can tell what happened: He abused that woman too.

It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing
anything
he tells you about that relationship and instead recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women. Track down his ex-partner and talk with her as soon as possible, even if you hate her. An abuser can mistreat partner after partner in relationships, each time believing that the problems are all the woman’s fault and that he is the real victim.

Whether he presents himself as the victim of an ex-partner, or of his parents, the abuser’s aim—though perhaps unconscious—is to play on your compassion, so that he can avoid dealing with his problem.

Excuses along these lines crop up frequently in my groups for abusive men. My clients say to me, “No one else gets me upset like she does. I just go out of my head sometimes because I have such strong feelings for her. The things she does really hurt me, and nobody else can get under my skin like that.” Abusers can use this rationalization successfully with their partners, friends, and relatives. There is a grain of truth to it: People we love
can
cause us deeper pain than anyone else. But what does this have to do with abuse?

The abuser would like us to accept the following simple but erroneous formula:

“F
EELINGS CAUSE BEHAVIOR.”

“When people feel hurt, they lash out at someone else in retaliation. When they feel jealous, they become possessive and accusatory. When they feel controlled, they yell and threaten.” Right?

Wrong. Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our
attitudes
and our
habits
. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.

There are other reasons not to accept the “love causes abuse” excuse. First, many people reserve their
best
behavior and kindest treatment for their loved ones, including their partners. Should we accept the idea that these people feel love less strongly, or have less passion, than an abuser does? Nonsense. Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and aggression are interwoven and that cruel verbal exchanges and bomblike explosions are the price you pay for a relationship that is exciting, deep, and sexy. Popular romantic movies and soap operas sometimes reinforce this image.

Most abusive men have close relationships with people other than their wives or girlfriends. My clients may feel deep fondness for one or both of their parents, a sibling, a dear friend, an aunt or uncle. Do they abuse their other loved ones? Rarely. It isn’t the love or deep affection that causes his behavior problem.

My colleagues and I refer to this belief as “The Boiler Theory of Men.” The idea is that a person can only tolerate so much accumulated pain and frustration. If it doesn’t get vented periodically—kind of like a pressure cooker—then there’s bound to be a serious accident. This myth has the ring of truth to it because we are all aware of how many men keep too much emotion pent up inside. Since most abusers are male, it seems to add up.

But it doesn’t, and here’s why:
Most of my clients are not unusually repressed.
In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing else matters as much as his feelings.

It is not
his
feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his
partner’s
feelings and his
children’s
feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to “get in touch with.” My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion
away
from how my clients feel and toward how they
think
(including their attitudes toward
their partners’ feelings
). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters.

For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser’s selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.

Part of why you may be tempted to accept “The Boiler Theory of Men” is that you may observe that your partner follows a pattern where he becomes increasingly withdrawn, says less and less, seems to be bubbling gradually from a simmer to a boil, and then erupts in a geyser of yelling, put-downs, and ugliness. It looks like an emotional explosion, so naturally you assume that it is. But the mounting tension, the pressure-cooker buildup of his feelings, is actually being driven by his lack of empathy for
your
feelings, and by a set of attitudes that we will examine later. And he explodes when he gives himself permission to do so.

Does your partner usually get along reasonably well with everyone else except you? Is it unusual for him to verbally abuse other people or to get in physical fights with men? If he does get aggressive with men, is it usually related somehow to you—for example, getting up in the face of a man who he thinks is checking you out? The great majority of abusive men are fairly calm and reasonable in most of their dealings that are unrelated to their partners. In fact, the partners of my clients constantly complain to me: “How come he can be so nice to everyone else but he has to treat me like dirt?” If a man’s problem were that he had an “aggressive personality,” he wouldn’t be able to reserve that side of himself just for you. Many therapists have attempted over the years to lead abusive men toward their more sensitive, vulnerable side. But the sad reality is that plenty of gentle, sensitive men are viciously—and sometimes violently—abusive to their female partners. The two-sided nature of abusers is a central aspect of the mystery.

The societal stereotype of the abuser as a relatively uneducated, blue-collar male adds to the confusion. The faulty equation goes: “Abusive equals muscle-bound caveman, which in turn equals lower class.” In addition to the fact that this image is an unfair stereotype of working-class men, it also overlooks the fact that a professional or college-educated man has roughly the same likelihood of abusing women as anyone else. A successful businessperson, a college professor, or a sailing instructor may be less likely to adopt a tough-guy image with tattoos all over his body but still may well be a nightmare partner.

Class and racial stereotypes permit the more privileged members of society to duck the problem of abuse by pretending that it is someone else’s problem. Their thinking goes: “It’s those construction-worker guys who never went to college; it’s those Latinos; it’s those street toughs—they’re the abusers. Our town, our neighborhood, isn’t like that. We’re not macho men here.”

But women who live with abuse know that abusers come in all styles and from all backgrounds. Sometimes the more educated an abuser, the more knots he knows how to tie in a woman’s brain, the better he is at getting her to blame herself, and the slicker is his ability to persuade other people that she is crazy. The more socially powerful an abuser, the more powerful his abuse can be—and the more difficult it can be to escape. Two of my early clients were Harvard professors.

Some women are attracted to the tough-guy image, and some can’t stand it. Take your pick. There are ways to tell whether a man is likely to turn abusive, as we will see in Chapter 5, but his gentle or macho personality style is not one of them. (But do beware of one thing: If a man routinely intimidates people, watch out. Sooner or later, he will turn his intimidation on you. At first it may make you feel safe to be with a man who frightens people, but not when your turn comes.)

Many years ago, I was interviewing a woman named Sheila by telephone. She was describing the rages that my client Michael would periodically have: “He just goes absolutely berserk, and you never know when he’s going to go off like that. He’ll just start grabbing whatever is around and throwing it. He heaves stuff everywhere, against the walls, on the floor—it’s just a mess. And he smashes stuff, important things sometimes. Then it’s like the storm just passes; he calms down; and he leaves for a while. Later he seems kind of ashamed of himself.”

I asked Sheila two questions. The first was, when things got broken, were they Michael’s, or hers, or things that belonged to both of them? She left a considerable silence while she thought. Then she said, “You know what? I’m amazed that I’ve never thought of this, but he only breaks my stuff. I can’t think of one thing he’s smashed that belonged to him.” Next, I asked her who cleans up the mess. She answered that she does.

I commented, “See, Michael’s behavior isn’t nearly as berserk as it looks. And if he really felt so remorseful, he’d help clean up.”

When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client
can always give me a reason.
Here are some common explanations:

And the most frequent response of all:

The response that I almost never heard—I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years—was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”

A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients:
An abuser almost never does anything that he himself con
siders morally unacceptable.
He may hide what he does because he thinks
other
people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short,
an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.