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

by Lundy Bancroft

Words like control and abuse can be loaded ones, and you may not feel that they fit your particular circumstances.

You may feel ashamed of having a partner who sometimes behaves in unkind or bullying ways, and you may fear that people will be critical of you for not leaving him right away. Or you might have the opposite concern: that people around you are so fond of your partner that you question whether they will believe you when you describe

how mean or abusive he can be. But, regardless of these anxieties, it is essential not to stay isolated with your distress or confusion about what is happening in your relationship.

He’s two different people. I feel like I’m living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Why couldn’t Fran trust her, and why was he isolating her from other people? Why couldn’t he see that he had a problem, and get help? Was he going to hurt her badly some day? Would her life ever get better?

One of the obstacles to recognizing chronic mistreatment in relationships is that most abusive men simply don’t seem like abusers. They have many good qualities, including times of kindness, warmth, and humor, especially in the early period of a relationship.

The symptoms of abuse are there, and the woman usually sees them: the escalating frequency of put-downs. Early generosity turning more and more to selfishness. Verbal explosions when he is irritated or when he doesn’t get his way. Her grievances constantly turned around on her, so that everything is her own fault. His growing attitude that he knows what is good for her better than she does. And, in many relationships, a mounting sense of fear or intimidation. But the woman also sees that her partner is a human being who can be caring and affectionate at times, and she loves him. She wants to figure out why he gets so upset, so that she can help him break his pattern of ups and downs. She gets drawn into the complexities of his inner world, trying to uncover clues, moving pieces around in an attempt to solve an elaborate puzzle.

At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable.

All of these people are trying to help, and they are all talking about the same abuser. But he looks different from each angle of view.

Part of how the abuser escapes confronting himself is by convincing you that you are the cause of his behavior, or that you at least share the blame. But abuse is not a product of bad relationship dynamics, and you cannot make things better by changing your own behavior or by attempting to manage your partner better. Abuse is a problem that lies entirely within the abuser.

Why many abusive men seem to be mentally ill—and why they usually aren’t

“If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.

The abusive or controlling man can draw a rich set of excuses from his past relationships. For controlling his current partner’s friendships and for accusing her of cheating on him: “It’s because my ex-partner hurt me so badly by cheating on me so many times, and that’s why I’m so jealous and can’t trust you.”

IF IT IS AN EXCUSE FOR MISTREATING YOU, IT’S A DISTORTION.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers 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.

When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill.

Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

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

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.

When I work with an abused woman, my first goal is to help her to regain trust in herself; to get her to rely on her own perceptions, to listen to her own internal voices. You don’t really need an “expert” on abuse to explain your life to you; what you do need above all is some support and encouragement to hold on to your own truth. 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.

He considered it his right to punish Harriet—in the most severe way he could think of—if she took steps to recover ownership of her life. He talked proudly of how he had “allowed” her various freedoms while they were together, as if he were her parent, and defended his right to remove her privileges when he thought the time had come.

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,

He expects his partner to give him a medal for his generosity, not to criticize him for his oppressiveness. He sees himself as a reasonably permissive parent—toward his adult partner—and he does not want to meet with a lot of resistance on the occasions when he believes that he needs to put his foot down.

Sometimes this control is exercised through wearing the woman down with constant low-level complaints, rather than through yelling or barking orders. The abuser may repeatedly make negative comments about one of his partner’s friends, for example, so that she gradually stops seeing her acquaintance to save herself the hassle. In fact, she might even believe it was her own decision, not noticing how her abuser pressured her into it.

Interwoven with the abuser’s overvaluation of his own work is the devaluation of his partner’s labor.

But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.

Deference refers to the abuser’s entitlement to have his tastes and opinions treated as edicts. Once he has made the pronouncement that a certain movie is shallow, or that Louise was trying to seduce Jay at the picnic, or that Republicans don’t know how to manage the economy, his partner is supposed to accept his view unquestioningly.

Freedom from accountability means that the abusive man considers himself above criticism. If his partner attempts to raise her grievances, she is “nagging” or “provoking” him. He believes he should be permitted to ignore the damage his behavior is causing, and he may become retaliatory if anyone tries to get him to look at it.

The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mind-set, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.

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. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are.

The abuser’s highly entitled perceptual system causes him to mentally reverse aggression and self-defense.

The abusive man has another reason to exaggerate and ridicule his partner’s statements (and mine): He wants to avoid having to think seriously about what she is saying and struggle to digest it. He feels entitled to swat her down like a fly instead.

This tendency in abusers is known as objectification or depersonalization. Most abusers verbally attack their partners in degrading, revolting ways. They reach for the words that they know are most disturbing to women, such as bitch, whore, and cunt, often preceded by the word fat. These words assault her humanity, reducing her to an animal, a nonliving object, or a degraded sexual body part. The partners of my clients tell me that these disgusting words carry a force and an ugliness that feel like violence. Through these carefully chosen epithets—and my clients sometimes admit that they use the most degrading words they can think of—abusers make their partners feel both debased and unsafe.

Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.

These desires are important aspects of what romantic love means to him. He may well be capable of feeling genuine love for you, but first he will have to dramatically reorient his outlook in order to separate abusive and possessive desires from true caring, and become able to really see you.

Genuine love means respecting the humanity of the other person, wanting what is best for him or her, and supporting the other person’s self-esteem and independence. This kind of love is incompatible with abuse and coercion.

Entitled at home but critical of other men who disrespect or assault women

Abusive men are masters of excuse making. In this respect they are like substance abusers, who believe that everyone and everything except them is responsible for their actions. When they aren’t blaming their partners, they blame stress, alcohol, their childhood, their children, their bosses, or their insecurities. More important, they feel entitled to make these excuses; when I point out that other men under the same pressures choose not to be abusive, they tend to become irate or contemptuous.

Possessiveness is at the core of the abuser’s mind-set, the spring from which all the other streams spout; on some level he feels that he owns you and therefore has the right to treat you as he sees fit.

For many abusers, possessiveness takes the form of sexual jealousy. This style of man monitors his partner’s associations carefully, expects her to account for her whereabouts at all times, and periodically rips into her with jealous accusations, as Fran did in Chapter 1. Ironically, the most accusatory abusers are among the ones most likely to be cheating themselves; possessiveness and entitlement make the abuser feel that it is acceptable for him to have affairs, but not her.

An equally important reason for the extreme jealousy exhibited by so many abusive men is the desire to isolate their partners. In Chapter 1 we met Marshall, who did not believe his own hysterical accusations of infidelity against his wife. So what was driving his behavior? An abusive man who isolates his partner does so primarily for two reasons:

THE QUALITIES THAT MAKE UP an abusive man are like the ingredients in a recipe: The basics are always present, but the relative amounts vary greatly. One man may be so severely controlling that his partner can’t make a move without checking with him first, and yet, oddly, he contributes substantially to the domestic work and child care.

Viewed from another angle, however, abuse doesn’t vary that much. One man uses a little more of one ingredient and a little less of the other, but the overall flavor of the mistreatment has core similarities: assaults on the woman’s self-esteem, controlling behavior, undermining her independence, disrespect. Each abused woman has times of feeling that a riptide is dragging her under the sea, and she struggles for air. Confusion has been part of the experience of almost every one of the hundreds of abused women I have spoken with. Whether because of the abuser’s manipulativeness, his popularity, or simply the mind-bending contrast between his professions of love and his vicious psychological or physical assaults, every abused woman finds herself fighting to make sense out of what is happening.

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.

At the same time, the Demand Man is likely to be furious if anything is demanded of him. Not only are you not supposed to demand any favors, you aren’t even supposed to ask him to take care of his own obligations. If you ask him to clean up a mess he’s left, he responds, “I’m not your fucking servant.” If you ask him to pay money he owes you or to work more hours to help out with the household expenses, he says, “You’re a typical woman, all you want from me is my money.” If you complain to him of how rarely he is there for you, he’ll say, “You are a needy, controlling bitch.” He keeps twisting things around backward in these ways, so that any effort you make to

discuss your needs or his responsibilities switches abruptly to being about his needs and your responsibilities.