Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

by Lundy Bancroft

Your abusive partner wants to deny your experience. He wants to pluck your view of reality out of your head and replace it with his. When someone has invaded your identity in this way enough times, you naturally start to lose your balance. But you can find your way back to center.

An abusive man often considers it his right to control where his partner goes, with whom she associates, what she wears, and when she needs to be back home. He therefore feels that she should be grateful for any freedoms that he does choose to grant her,

One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him. No matter how badly he treats you, he believes that your voice shouldn’t rise and your blood shouldn’t boil. The privilege of rage is reserved for him alone. When your anger does jump out of you—as will happen to any abused woman from time to time—he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can.

He doesn’t want her to develop sources of strength that could contribute to her independence. Although it is often largely unconscious, abusive men are aware on some level that a woman’s social contacts can bring her strength and support that could ultimately enable her to escape his control

Abusiveness is not a product of a man’s emotional injuries or of deficits in his skills. In reality, abuse springs from a man’s early cultural training, his key male role models, and his peer influences. In other words, abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology. When someone challenges an abuser’s attitudes and beliefs, he tends to reveal the contemptuous and insulting personality that normally stays hidden, reserved for private attacks on his partner.

He exaggerates and overvalues his own contributions. If he was generous one day back in 1997, you are probably still hearing about it today as proof of how wonderfully he treats you and how ungrateful you are. He seems to keep a mental list of any favors or kindnesses he ever does and expects each one paid back at a heavy interest rate. He thinks you owe him tremendous gratitude for meeting the ordinary responsibilities of daily life—when he does—but takes your contributions for granted.

When Mr. Right decides to take control of a conversation, he switches into his Voice of Truth, giving the definitive pronouncement on what is the correct answer or the proper outlook. Abuse counselors call this tactic defining reality. Over time, his tone of authority can cause his partner to doubt her own judgment and come to see herself as not very bright.

In short, Mr. Right finds some way to ensure that his partner regrets her insistence on having her own mind.

AN ABUSER IS A HUMAN BEING, NOT AN EVIL MONSTER, BUT HE HAS A PROFOUNDLY COMPLEX AND DESTRUCTIVE PROBLEM THAT SHOULD NOT BE UNDERESTIMATED.

AN ABUSER’S BEHAVIOR IS PRIMARILY CONSCIOUS—HE ACTS DELIBERATELY RATHER THAN BY ACCIDENT OR BY LOSING CONTROL OF HIMSELF—BUT THE UNDERLYING THINKING THAT DRIVES HIS BEHAVIOR IS LARGELY NOT CONSCIOUS.

Even without a chronological age difference, some abusive men are drawn to women who have less life experience, knowledge, or self-confidence, and who will look up to the man as a teacher or mentor.

But in a day or two his guilt is vanquished, driven out by his internal excuse-making skills. The effects of the incident last much longer for the abused woman, of course, and pretty soon the abuser may be snapping at her: “What, aren’t you over that yet? Don’t dwell on it, for crying out loud. Let’s put it behind us and move forward.” His attitude is: “I’m over it, so why isn’t she?”

Abuse loses some of its power when you have names for its weapons.

He tells her that she is unaware that other people look down on her and don’t take her seriously and calls her “naive.”

Returning now to the day of the argument, we can see that Jesse launches into attributing many of his own characteristics to Bea, saying that she is full of herself, that she dwells on grievances, that she yells, that she doesn’t care about him. This behavior in abusers is sometimes mistakenly referred to as projection, a psychological process through which people attribute their own fears or flaws to those around them.

The tension-building phase During this period, your partner is collecting negative points about you and squirreling them away for safekeeping. Every little thing that you have done wrong, each disappointment he has experienced, any way in which you have failed to live up to his image of the perfect selfless woman—all goes down as a black mark against your name.

Since he considers you responsible for fixing everything for him, he logically chooses you as his dumping ground for all of life’s normal frustrations and disappointments.

After the apologies are over, the abuser may enter a period of relative calm. He appears to have achieved a catharsis from opening up the bomb bays and raining abuse down on his partner. He feels rejuvenated and may speak the language of a fresh start, of steering the relationship in a new direction. Of course, there is nothing cathartic for his partner about being the target of his abuse (she feels worse with each cycle), but in the abuser’s self-centered way he thinks she should feel better now because he feels better.

Or, if he is one of the few abusers who carries his weight in these areas, then he exploits her emotionally instead, sucking her dry of attention, nurturing, and support, and returning only a trickle.

The differences between abusing women and abusing substances are great enough that they have to be addressed in separate ways.

According to his mind-set, she should believe that his abuse has stopped when he says it has stopped, regardless of what she sees in front of her own eyes.

A good father does not abuse his children’s mother.

As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her master-work Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral.

The person who says: “These abuse activists are anti-male.” How is it anti-male to be against abuse? Are we supposed to pretend we don’t notice that the overwhelming majority of abusers are male? This accusation parallels the abuser’s words to his partner: “The reason you think I’m abusive is because you have a problem with men!” One of the best counters to this piece of side-tracking is to point out how many men are active in combating the abuse of women. Remember also that abused women are the sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends of men; men’s lives are affected by abuse, because it happens to women we know and care about.

Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence. The great majority of allegations of abuse—though not all—are substantially accurate. And an abuser almost never “seems like the type.”

just because she remembers the incident differently doesn’t mean her version is wrong and his is right; in fact, abused women typically have memories of what occurred that are clearer and more accurate than those of the abuser, because of the hyperalert manner in which people react to any danger.

The reason it takes so long to figure out an abuser is that he knows how to keep himself hidden in constantly shifting shadows. If abusers were so easy to figure out, there would be no abused women.

Abusers spend much of their time in jail brooding over their grievances against the abused women and plotting their revenge. Men’s jails do not help them to overcome their oppressive attitudes toward women; in fact, they are among the more anti-female environments on the planet.

Many sons of abused women whom I have known, including police officers, writers, therapists, and activists, have dedicated their lives to opposing the abuse of women. The example set by these men shows that a boy’s family influences are only the beginning of the story and that he can make the choice to channel his childhood distress into constructive action—if

The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.”

Your courageous resistance to partner abuse—and you have stood up for yourself (and your children) in many ways, whether you realize it or not—is a gift to everyone, because all forms of abuse are intertwined.

The men who make significant progress in my program are the ones who know that their partners will definitely leave them unless they change, and the ones on probation who have a tough probation officer who demands that they really confront their abusiveness. In other words, the initial impetus to change is always extrinsic rather than self-motivated. Even when a man does feel genuinely sorry for the ways his behavior has hurt his partner, I have never seen his remorse alone suffice to get him to become a serious client.

Make amends for the damage he has done. He has to develop a sense that he has a debt to you and to your children as a result of his abusiveness. He can start to make up somewhat for his actions by being consistently kind and supportive, putting his own needs on the back burner for a couple of years, talking with people whom he has misled in regard to the abuse and admitting to them that he lied, paying for objects that he has damaged, and many other steps related to cleaning up the emotional and literal messes that his behaviors have caused. (At the same time, he needs to accept that he may never be able to fully compensate you.)

he cannot justify his abusive behaviors by saying, “But I’ve done great for five months; you can’t expect me to be perfect,” as if a good period earned him chips to spend on occasional abuse.

An abuser often tries to use the promise of change to cut deals, since he believes that his partner’s behaviors are just as wrong as his: “I’ll agree not to call you ‘bitch’ anymore if you don’t bug me to help clean up the children’s mess when I’m trying to watch the game. I won’t call you ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ if you give up talking to your male friends. I won’t push you up against the wall if you drop your side of an argument whenever you see that I’m really upset.” To him, these seem like fair deals, but in reality they require a woman to sacrifice her rights and freedom in return for not being abused—a coercive bargain that is in itself abusive.

You are the only one who can judge your partner’s change.

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.

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.

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?

At the same time, an abuser program possesses no more magic than anyone else. The man who makes major life changes as a result of attending an abuser program is the one who chooses to work the program, not the one who sits back and waits for the program to “help” him, expecting service as he usually does.

I regret to say that a majority of abusers choose not to do the work. It isn’t that they can’t change (any abuser who doesn’t have a major mental illness can change) but that they decide they don’t wish to. They run a sort of cost-benefit analysis in their heads and decide that the rewards of remaining in control of their partners outweigh the costs.

keep your own life moving forward, focusing on your own healing process, not on the man’s process of change. Waiting around for him to get serious about developing respect for you could be a long stall in your own growth and development. Don’t sell yourself short.

You are the best judge of whether or not he is truly developing respect for you and for your rights. Don’t put anyone else’s opinions ahead of your own.

Abusiveness is like poison ivy, with its extensive and entrenched root system. You can’t eradicate it by lopping off the superficial signs. It has to come out by the roots, which are the man’s attitudes and beliefs regarding partner relationships.

If I were asked to select one salient characteristic of my abusive clients, an aspect of their nature that stands out above all the others, I would choose this one: They feel profoundly justified. Every effort to reach an abuser must be based on the antidote to this attitude: Abuse is wrong; you are responsible for your own actions; no excuse is acceptable; the damage you are doing is incalculable; your problem is yours alone to solve. Who has the opportunity to have an impact on an abuser’s thinking, and what can they do?

I understand and value the loyalty of family members to each other. There is a natural temptation to speak out forcefully against abuse until the man whose behavior is under the microscope is one of our own, and then we switch sides. But we can’t have it both ways. Abuse won’t stop until people stop making exceptions for their own brothers and sons and friends.