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

by Lundy Bancroft

He may scream in arguments, but if you raise your voice, you’re “hysterical.”

What was he trying to get out of what he just did? What is the ultimate benefit to him? Thinking through these questions can help you clear your head and identify his tactics.

abuser minimizes his behavior by comparing himself to men who are worse than he is, whom he thinks of as “real” abusers.

He uses her hitting him as an opening to let his violence show,

He says that I’m violent, because I’ve slapped him or shoved him a couple of times. Is he right?

He labels you as violent in order to shift the focus to what you do wrong, which will just lock you more tightly in his grip. However, I do recommend that you not assault him again, as he might seize on it as an excuse to injure you seriously. Some women persuade themselves that they are holding their own by using violence too, saying, “I can take it, but I can also dish it out.” But over time you will find that you are the one being controlled, hurt, and frightened.

allowing their partners certain rights and taking away others.

For the most part, an abusive man uses verbally aggressive tactics in an argument to discredit your statements and silence you. In short, he wants to avoid having to deal seriously with your perspective in the conflict.

Arguments that seem to spin out of control “for no reason” actually are usually being used by the abusive man to achieve certain goals, although he may not always be conscious of his own motives. His actions and statements make far more sense than they appear to.

Violence is not just punches and slaps; it is anything that puts you in physical fear or that uses your body to control you.

Be cautious, and seek out assistance. You don’t deserve to live like this, and you don’t have to. Try to block his words out of your mind and believe in yourself. You can do it.

He may put some effort into creating pleasure for his partner, but probably not because her satisfaction, or sharing a mutual experience, is important to him. He is invested in having her reach orgasm so that he can see himself as a great lover.

He craves, in short, a sexual partner with no mind or will of her own.

He may lose interest rapidly in a real-life woman whose body changes over time (from childbearing, for example, or simply from age) or one who, on close examination, is revealed to have blemishes or imperfections, as any real human being does.

Some abusive men unfortunately have difficulty in achieving sexual arousal once they discover that a woman is determined to be her own person.

As I have discussed, abusive men tend to move between extremes, from loving and attentive to hateful and intimidating, from being overly involved in the minute details of your life to expressing no interest, from showing exclusive concern with what is good for you to being unboundedly selfish.

Abusive men do not grasp how ugly they appear when acting cruel.

Abusive men love to portray themselves as unable to control their hormonal urges, which is nonsense.

Most pornographic images regrettably fit well with the abusive mind-set. The woman is available and submissive. Reduced to a body, and usually further reduced to just her sexual organs, she is depersonalized. The man owns her, literally, because he owns the video or magazine or computer image. The woman is sometimes even depicted as being sexually excited by verbal abuse, roughness, violence, or even torture.

Abusive men absolutely need to be kept away from pornography, as it feeds the precise thinking that drives their abusiveness.

Over the years I have had many clients use such sociobiological arguments with me, saying that from a genetics standpoint males have reason to desire sex with as many different females as possible, while females succeed best—in evolutionary terms—if they choose their partners carefully. You might call this the “human beings are basically baboons” argument. In reality, there are plenty of examples of stable monogamy in nature.

Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

abusers can be male or female, abusive partners are overwhelmingly male.

One of the causes of mounting abuse is that the abuser gets frustrated by the effects of his own abusiveness, which he then uses as an excuse for more abuse. For example, you as the partner of an abuser may have become increasingly depressed over time (because chronic mistreatment is depressing), and now he gets angry about the ways in which your decreased energy make you cater to him less enthusiastically. Similarly, abuse may diminish your drive for sex, and then he is hurt and enraged about your lack of desire for him.

when she becomes inured to his abusiveness and starts to stand up to him more. He then increases his abusiveness because he sees that it takes more to frighten or control her than it used to.

It takes tremendous courage for a man to be honest with himself, to reevaluate his ways of thinking about his partner, and to accept how much emotional injury he has caused her.

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.

No woman in any of my cases has ever left a man the first time he behaved abusively (not that doing so would be wrong). By the time she moves to end her relationship, she has usually lived with years of verbal abuse and control and has requested uncountable numbers of times that her partner stop cutting her down or frightening her.

Has she ever done enough, and gained the right to protect herself? In the abuser’s mind, the answer is no.

You can end up feeling that the nightmare of his abusiveness is an experience the two of you have shared and are escaping from together, a dangerous illusion that trauma can cause.

I commonly hear an abused woman say about her partner, “He really knows me,” or “No one understands me the way he does.” This may be true, but the reason he seems to understand you well is that he has studied ways to manipulate your emotions and control your reactions. At times he may seem to grasp how badly he has hurt you, which can make you feel close to him, but it’s another illusion; if he could really be empathic about the pain he has caused, he would stop abusing you for good.

One exercise that can help you address this trap involves making a list of all the ways, including emotional ones, in which you feel dependent on your partner, then making another list of big or small steps you might take to begin to become more independent.

After breaking up with an abusive man, wait at least a few months before becoming involved with a new partner. Taking time to heal emotionally from the abuse you have endured can be critical to helping you choose a nonabusive partner next time.

Your life belongs to no one but you.

I used to feel close to his mom, but now she seems to hate me.

No one wants to believe that his or her own son or brother is an abusive man. Parents don’t want the finger pointed at them, so they say: “Our child wouldn’t abuse his partner. We brought him up right.”

Anyone who tries to get her to share responsibility is adopting the abuser’s perspective.

he recounts how mean and unreasonable you were and how you called him abusive whenever he refused to bow to your control.

If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place.

I have almost never worked with an abused woman who overlooked her partner’s humanity. The problem is the reverse: He forgets her humanity.

It is the abuser’s perspective that she is being mean to him by speaking bluntly about the damage he has done.

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.”

Since he can’t accept the idea that he is abusive, he has to find something wrong with everyone else—another

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.

cases where a client of mine is telling the truth that his egress was blocked, he still had other options besides assault, including going out the back door.

abused women sometimes do develop alcohol or drug problems, usually because of the abuser’s behavior. However, her addiction is no excuse to abuse her further.

Although the abuser may say, “You put me in jail!”, the reality is that he put himself there,

He knows what he needs to change in order to keep the police from being called the next time. It’s on him.

Abusers rarely change if they aren’t forced to suffer any consequences.

Women in music videos never mean “no” when they say it, and when they run away, they really want to be chased and caught. What could more perfectly capture the abusive mentality?