Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.” For Adams this extreme narcissism is at the root of understanding batterers, and while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are
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