Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (8 page)

So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle—though often quite pervasive—sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don’t show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship.

Abusive men are often jealous and possessive, and their coercive and destructive behaviors can escalate when their partners attempt to break up with them. Some psychologists have glanced quickly at this pattern and concluded that abusers have an extreme fear of abandonment. But
many people,
both male and female, are afraid of abandonment and may reel from panic, heartbreak, or desperation when being left by a partner. If a person’s panicked reaction to being left could cause threats, stalking, or murder, our entire society would be a war zone. But postseparation homicides of intimate partners are committed almost exclusively by men (and there is almost always a history of abuse
before
the breakup). If fear of abandonment causes postseparation abuse, why are the statistics so lopsided? Do women have a much easier time with abandonment than men do? No, of course not. (We’ll examine the real causes of the extreme behaviors some abusers use postseparation in Chapter 9.)

A close cousin of the abandonment myth is the belief that abusive men “are afraid of intimacy,” which attempts to explain why most abusers mistreat only their partners and why most are male. According to this theory, the abuser uses his periodic cruelty to keep his partner from getting too close to him emotionally, a behavior which, in the language of psychologists, is called
mediating the intimacy
.

But there are several holes in this theory. First, abusive men usually have their worst incidents after a period of mounting tension and distance,
not
at the moments of greatest closeness. Some keep their emotional distance all the time so the relationship never gets close enough to trigger any fears of intimacy they might have, yet the abuse continues. Wife abuse occurs just as severely in some cultures where there is no expectation of intimacy between husbands and wives, where marriage has nothing to do with real emotional connection. And, finally, there are plenty of men who have powerful fears of intimacy who don’t abuse or control their partners—because they don’t have an abusive
mentality.

An abused woman tends to pour precious energy into supporting her abusive partner and massaging his ego, hoping against hope that if he is kept well stroked his next explosion might be averted. How well does this strategy work? Unfortunately, not very. You can’t manage an abuser except for brief periods. Praising him and boosting his self-opinion may buy you some time, but sooner or later he’ll jump back into chewing pieces out of you. When you try to improve an abuser’s feelings about himself, his problem actually tends to get worse. An abusive man expects catering, and the more positive attention he receives, the more he demands. He never reaches a point where he is satisfied, where he has been given enough. Rather, he gets used to the luxurious treatment he is receiving and soon escalates his demands.

My colleagues and I discovered this dynamic through a mistake we made in the early years of abuse work. A few times we asked clients who had made outstanding progress in our program to be interviewed on television or to speak to a group of high school students because we thought the public could benefit from hearing an abuser speak in his own words about his behaviors and his process of change. But we found that each time we gave a client public attention, he had a bad incident of mistreating his partner within a few days thereafter. Feeling like a star and a changed man, his head swelled from all the attention he had been given, he would go home and rip into his partner with accusations and put-downs. So we had to stop taking our clients to public appearances.

The self-esteem myth is rewarding for an abuser, because it gets his partner, his therapist, and others to cater to him emotionally. Imagine the privileges an abusive man may acquire: getting his own way most of the time, having his partner bend over backward to keep him happy so he won’t explode, getting to behave as he pleases, and then on top of it all, he gets
praise
for what a good person he is, and everyone is trying to help
him
feel better about himself!

Certainly an abuser can be remorseful or ashamed after being cruel or scary to his partner, especially if any outsider has seen what he did. But those feelings are a
result
of his abusive behavior, not a cause. And as a relationship progresses, the abusive man tends to get more comfortable with his own behavior and the remorse dies out, suffocated under the weight of his justifications. He may get nasty if he doesn’t receive the frequent compliments, reassurance, and deference he feels he deserves, but this reaction is not rooted in feelings of inferiority; in fact, the reality is almost the opposite, as we will see.

Think for a just a moment about how your partner’s degrading and bullying behavior has hurt
your
self-esteem. Have you suddenly turned into a cruel and explosive person? If low self-esteem isn’t an excuse for you to become abusive, then it’s no excuse for him either.

I call this myth “boss abuses man, man abuses woman, woman abuses children, children hit dog, dog bites cat.” The image it creates seems plausible, but too many pieces fail to fit. Hundreds of my clients have been popular, successful, good-looking men, not the downtrodden looking for a scapegoat for their inner torment. Some of the worst abusers I have worked with have been at the top of the management ladder—with no boss to blame. The more power these men have in their jobs, the more catering and submission they expect at home. Several of my clients have told me: “I have to order people around where I work, so I have trouble snapping out of that mode when I get home.” So while some abusers use the “mean boss” excuse, others use the opposite.

The most important point is this one: In my fifteen years in the field of abuse,
I have never once had a client whose behavior at home has improved because his job situation improved.

An abusive man is not
unable
to resolve conflicts nonabusively; he is
unwilling
to do so. The skill deficits of abusers have been the subject of a number of research studies, and the results lead to the following conclusion: Abusers have normal abilities in conflict resolution, communication, and assertiveness
when they choose to use them
. They typically get through tense situations at work without threatening anyone; they manage their stress without exploding when they spend Thanksgiving with their parents; they share openly with their siblings regarding their sadness over a grandparent’s death. But they don’t
want
to handle these kinds of issues nonabusively when it involves their partners. You can equip an abuser with the most innovative, New Age skills for expressing his deep emotions, listening actively, and using win-win bargaining, and then he will go home and continue abusing. In the coming chapter, we’ll see why.

There certainly are some women who treat their male partners badly, berating them, calling them names, attempting to control them. The negative impact on these men’s lives can be considerable. But do we see men whose self-esteem is gradually destroyed through this process? Do we see men whose progress in school or in their careers grinds to a halt because of the constant criticism and undermining? Where are the men whose partners are forcing them to have unwanted sex? Where are the men who are fleeing to shelters in fear for their lives? How about the ones who try to get to a phone to call for help, but the women block their way or cut the line? The reason we don’t generally see these men is simple: They’re rare.

I don’t question how embarrassing it would be for a man to come forward and admit that a woman is abusing him. But don’t underestimate how humiliated a woman feels when she reveals abuse; women crave dignity just as much as men do. If shame stopped people from coming forward, no one would tell.

Even if abused men didn’t want to come forward, they would have been discovered by now. Neighbors don’t turn a deaf ear to abuse the way they might have ten or twenty years ago. Now, when people hear screaming, objects smashing against walls, loud slaps landing on skin, they call the police. Among my physically abusive clients, nearly
one-third
have been arrested as a result of a call to the police that came from someone other than the abused woman. If there were millions of cowed, trembling men out there, the police would be finding them. Abusive men commonly like to play the role of victim, and most men who claim to be “battered men” are actually the perpetrators of violence, not the victims.

In their efforts to adopt victim status, my clients try to exaggerate their partners’ verbal power: “Sure, I can win a physical fight, but she is much better with her mouth than I am, so I’d say it balances out.” (One very violent man said in his group session, “She stabs me through the heart with her words,” to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.) But abuse is not a battle that you win by being better at expressing yourself. You win it by being better at sarcasm, put-downs, twisting everything around backward, and using other tactics of control—an arena in which my clients win hands down over their partners, just as they do in a violent altercation. Who can beat an abuser at his own game?

Men
can
be abused by other men, however, and women can be abused by women, sometimes through means that include physical intimidation or violence. If you are a gay man or lesbian who has been abused by a partner or who is facing abuse now, most of what I explain in this book will ring loud bells for you. The “he and she” language that I use obviously won’t fit your experience, but the underlying dynamics that I describe largely will. We’ll explore this issue further in Chapter 6.

My clients get over the pain of the abuse incidents far, far faster than their partners do. Recall Dale from Chapter 1, who insisted to me that the first ten years of his marriage had gone swimmingly, while Maureen recounted ten years of insults and cruelty? Certainly abusing one’s partner is not a healthy lifestyle, but the negative effects don’t hold a candle to the emotional and physical pain, loss of freedom, self-blame, and numerous other shadows that abuse casts over the life of its female target. Unlike alcoholics or addicts, abusive men don’t “hit bottom.” They can continue abusing for twenty or thirty years, and their careers remain successful, their health stays normal, their friendships endure. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, abusers actually tend to
benefit
in many ways from their controlling behaviors. An abuser can usually outperform his victim on psychological tests, such as the ones that are routinely required during custody disputes, because he isn’t the one who has been traumatized by years of psychological or physical assault. No one who listens carefully to the tragic accounts of abused women and then sees the abusers each week at a counseling group, as my colleagues and I have done, could be fooled into believing that life is equally hard for the men.

I address this myth in detail in Chapter 6 under “Racial and Cultural Differences in Abuse,” so here I offer only a brief overview. First, a majority of abusive men are white, many of them well educated and economically privileged, so discrimination couldn’t be a central cause of partner abuse. Second, if a man has experienced oppression himself, it could just as easily make him
more
sympathetic to a woman’s distress as less so, as is true for childhood abuse (see Myth #1). And in fact there are men of color among the most visible leaders in the United States in the movement against the abuse of women. So while discrimination against people of color is a terribly serious problem today, it should not be accepted as an excuse for abusing women.

So many men hide their abusiveness under the cover of alcoholism or drug addiction that I have chosen to devote Chapter 8 to explore the issue of addiction in detail. The most important point to be aware of is this: Alcohol cannot create an abuser, and sobriety cannot cure one. The only way a man can overcome his abusiveness is by dealing with his abusiveness. And you are not “enabling” your partner to mistreat you; he is entirely responsible for his own actions.

W
E HAVE NOW COMPLETED
our tour through a museum of myths about abusive men. You may find it difficult to leave these misconceptions behind. I was attached to my own myths years ago, but the abusers themselves kept forcing me to look at the realities, even as they stubbornly avoided doing so themselves. If you are involved with a man who bullies you or cuts you down, perhaps you feel even more confused than you did before reading this chapter. You may be thinking, “But if his problem doesn’t spring from these sources, where does it come from?”