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

by Lundy Bancroft

Mr. Right considers himself the ultimate authority on every subject under the sun; you might call him “Mr. Always Right.” He speaks with absolute certainty, brushing your opinions aside like annoying gnats. He seems to see the world as a huge classroom, in which he is the teacher and you are his student. He finds little of value in your thoughts or insights, so he seeks to empty out your head and fill it up with his jewels of brilliance.

The impact on a woman of all these subtle tactics is that either her blood temperature rises to a boil or she feels stupid and inferior, or some combination of the two. In an argument, she may end up yelling in frustration, leaving the room crying, or sinking into silence. The Water Torturer then says, “See, you’re the abusive one, not me.

You’re the one who’s yelling and refusing to talk things out rationally. I wasn’t even raising my voice. It’s impossible to reason with you.”

If you are involved with a Water Torturer, you may struggle for years trying to figure out what is happening. You may feel that you overreact to his behavior and that he isn’t really so bad. But the effects of his control and contempt have crept up on you over the years. If you finally leave him, you may experience intense periods of delayed rage, as you become conscious of how quietly but deathly oppressive he was.

He criticizes her clothing, tells her whether she can go out or not, interferes with her work. He wants her to have no one close to her, so he ruins her relationships with friends and relatives or simply forbids her to see them. He may listen to her phone calls or read her mail, or require the children to report on her activities any time he is away. If she isn’t home by his appointed curfew at night, she is at risk for abuse. She feels like a little girl living with a tyrannical father, with no more freedom than an eight-year-old would have.

The Drill Sergeant is often fanatically jealous. He verbally assaults his partner with accusations that she is cheating on him or checking out other men and tosses crass and disturbing sexual terms into his tirades. He may augment his hateful remarks about his partner with hideous comments about females in general, such as, “All women are whores.” The emotional experience of these verbal attacks can be similar to that of a sexual assault: The woman is left feeling violated, debased, and traumatized. At the same time, this style of abuser more often than not is out having affairs himself. It isn’t fidelity he cares about; it’s possession.

Although mental health issues do not cause abusiveness, they can intensify a man’s violent tendencies. If he sometimes seems to become convinced of things that are obviously not true, has trouble getting along with people in general, was severely abused or neglected as a child, or has other indications of mental illness, you need to take even greater caution.

Often he has participated extensively in therapy or twelve-step programs, or reads all the big self-help books, so he speaks the language of popular psychology and introspection. His vocabulary is sprinkled with jargon like developing closeness, working out our issues, and facing up to hard things about myself.

Rambo is aggressive with everybody, not just his partner. He gets a thrill out of the sensation of intimidating people and strives to handle all life situations by subtly or overtly creating fear. He has an exaggerated, stereotypical view of what a man is supposed to be, which goes hand in hand with seeing women as delicate, inferior, and in need of protection. Rambo often comes from a home or neighborhood where he was the target of violence himself and learned that the only way to feel safe is to be stronger, tougher, and less caring than everybody else. He has little patience for weakness, fragility, or indecision. Often he has a criminal record for violence, theft, drunk driving, or drug dealing.

Life has been hard and unfair for the Victim. To hear him tell it, his intelligence has been chronically underestimated; he has been burned by people he trusted; and his good intentions have been misunderstood. The Victim appeals to a woman’s compassion and desire to feel that she can make a difference in his life. He often tells persuasive and heart-rending stories about how he was abused by his former partner, sometimes adding the tragic element that she is now restricting or preventing his contact with his children.

If you listen carefully, you often can hear the difference between anger toward an ex-partner, which would not be worrisome in itself, and disrespect or contempt, which should raise warning flags. A man who has left a relationship with bitterness should nonetheless be able to talk about his ex-partner as a human being, with some understanding of what her side of the conflicts was and some ways he might have contributed to what went wrong. If he speaks in degrading or superior ways about her, or makes everything that went wrong in the relationship her fault, be careful, because it is likely that he was the abusive one.

Often the Victim claims to be victimized not only by you but also by his boss, his parents, the neighbors, his friends, and strangers on the street. Everyone is always wronging him, and he is always blameless.

If you are involved with the Victim and want to escape his abuse, you may find that you feel guilty toward him, despite his treatment of you, and have difficulty ending the relationship as a result. You may feel that because his life has been so hard, you are reluctant to add to his pain by abandoning him. You may worry that he won’t take care of himself if you leave, that he will wither away from depression, won’t eat or sleep, or might even try to kill himself. The Victim knows how to present himself as helpless and pathetic so that you will find it harder to take your own life back.

“THE GARDEN OF EDEN”—that’s what I call the beginning of a relationship with an abuser. For the first few weeks or months, or longer, the woman is walking on air.

This pattern is common in abusive relationships; an abusive man is often unusually good at expressing an intensity of caring early in a relationship and can make you feel so special and chosen—as if you were the only person who could ever matter so much to him.

Fran, whom we also got to know in Chapter 1, was quiet and withdrawn early on, and Barbara was the pursuer. She was drawn powerfully to him because of his sweetness and sensitivity and for the challenge of drawing him out. What a triumph it was when she finally got him to open up and then won him over! Sadness and mistrust were gnawing at his heart, she could see that, but she saw herself healing him, like a tender nurse. She was excited by her confident belief that she could bring out the person he was capable of being.

He may truly believe his own promises, because he wants to see himself as a generous and thoughtful partner, one who does not use or disrespect women. Later, when he begins to control the woman and take advantage of her, he will find ways to convince himself that it’s not happening or that it is her fault. Abuse is not his goal, but control is, and he finds himself using abuse to gain the control he feels he has a right to.

The common view of abusive men as evil, calculating brutes can make it difficult for a woman to recognize her partner’s problem. She tends to think: My partner really cares about me and has a good side to him. He has feelings; he’s not a sadist. He couldn’t be an abuser. She doesn’t realize that he can have all these positive qualities and still have an abuse problem.

At the other end of the spectrum we find an equally common—and equally misleading—view of abusers: the abuser as a man whose gentle humanity is just barely hidden under his abusive surface and who can be transformed by love, compassion, and insight. One morning he will wake up to realize how hurtful he has been and will renounce his cruelty, particularly if he has the love of a good woman. This outlook is portrayed and supported in popular songs, movies, romantic novels, and soap operas. The painful reality is that bringing about change in abusers is difficult.

An abuser learns manipulative and controlling behavior from several sources, including key male role models, peers, and pervasive cultural messages (see Chapter 13). By the time he reaches adulthood, he has integrated manipulative behavior to such a deep level that he acts largely on automatic. He knows what he is doing but not necessarily why.

Disrespect also can take the form of idealizing you and putting you on a pedestal as a perfect woman or goddess, perhaps treating you like a piece of fine china. The man who worships you in this way is not seeing you; he is seeing his fantasy, and when you fail to live up to that image he may turn nasty. So there may not be much difference between the man who talks down to you and the one who elevates you; both are displaying a failure to respect you as a real human being and bode ill.

He drops comments about your clothes or your looks (too sexy or not sexy enough); is a little negative about your family or one of your good friends; starts to pressure you to spend more time with him or to quit your job or to get a better job that pays more; starts to give too much advice about how you should manage your own life and shows a hint of impatience when you resist his recommendations; or begins to act bothered that you don’t share all of his opinions about politics, personal relationships, music, or other tastes.

All of these behaviors are about ownership, not love.

Jealous feelings are not the same as behaviors. A man with some insecurities may naturally feel anxious about your associations with other men, especially ex-partners, and might want some reassurance. But if he indicates that he expects you to give up your freedom to accommodate his jealousy, control is creeping up. Your social life shouldn’t have to change because of his insecurities.

Possessiveness shows that he doesn’t love you as an independent human being but rather as a guarded treasure. After a while, you will feel suffocated by his constant vigilance.

One way that this warning sign manifests itself is in cases of men who are attracted to women (or girls) who are much younger than they are. Why, for example, does a twenty-two-year-old man pursue a sixteen-year-old adolescent? Because he is stimulated and challenged by her? Obviously not. They are at completely different developmental points in life with a dramatic imbalance in their levels of knowledge and experience. He is attracted to power and seeks a partner who will look up to him with awe and allow him to lead her. Of course, he usually tells her the opposite, insisting that he wants to be with her because of how unusually mature and sophisticated she is for her age. He may even compliment her on her sexual prowess and say how much power she has over him, setting up the young victim so that she won’t recognize what is happening to her. 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.

Finally, be aware that as an abuser begins his slide into abuse, he believes that you are the one who is changing. His perceptions work this way because he feels so justified in his actions that he can’t imagine the problem might be with him. All he notices is that you don’t seem to be living up to his image of the perfect, all-giving, deferential woman.

When you tell your partner that his yelling frightens you, for example, and he responds that he has every right to yell “because you’re not listening to me,” that’s abuse. The abuser uses your behavior as an excuse for his own. He therefore refuses to commit unconditionally to stop using a degrading or intimidating behavior. Instead, he insists on setting up a quid pro quo, where he says he’ll stop some form of abuse if you agree to give up something that bothers him, which often will be something that you have every right to do.

Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman’s aggressiveness.

Each verbal battle with an abuser is a walk through a minefield, and each field is different. Jesse appears to be a mixture of the Water Torturer and the Victim, with a sprinkling of Mr. Right. Perhaps an argument on the same subject with the Drill Segreant or the Player would go quite differently. But, regardless of specific style, very little of what an abuser does in an argument is as irrational or emotional as it seems.

The abusive man’s goal in a heated argument is in essence to get you to stop thinking for yourself and to silence you, because to him your opinions and complaints are obstacles to the imposition of his will as well as an affront to his sense of entitlement.

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.

Abusers nurse their grievances. One of my former colleagues referred to this habit as The Garden of Resentments, a process through which an abuser plants a minor complaint and then cultivates it carefully while it grows to tremendous dimensions, worthy of outrage and abuse.

The abusive man tends to mentally collect resentments toward you until he feels that you deserve a punishment. Once he’s ready to blow, the tiniest spark will ignite him.

The abusive man does not, however, want to look seriously at himself; he is merely looking to paste up some wallpaper to cover the holes he has made—figuratively or literally—and return to business as usual. The good period can’t last because nothing has changed. His coercive habits, his double standards, his contempt, are all still there. The cycle is repeated because there is no reason why it wouldn’t be.

While you are feeling more trusting, you expose more of your true feelings about different issues in your life and you show him more caring, which creates vulnerability that he can use later to control you (though he probably doesn’t consciously plan to do this).

The abusive man gains power through his coercive and intimidating behaviors—a sensation that can create a potent, thrilling rush. The wielder of power feels important and effective and finds a momentary relief from life’s normal distresses.

It is important not to underestimate the impact of these kinds of day-to-day decisions. Your happiness in a relationship depends greatly on your ability to get your needs heard and taken seriously. If these decisions are taken over by an abusive or controlling partner, you experience disappointment after disappointment, the constant sacrificing of your needs. He, on the other hand, enjoys the luxury of a relationship where he rarely has to compromise, gets to do the things he enjoys, and skips the rest. He shows off his generosity when the stakes are low, so that friends will see what a swell guy he is.

My clients don’t make the connection that someone takes care of the work; they think of it as just mysteriously getting done and refer to women as “lazy.” Yet on a deeper level the abuser seems to realize how hard his partner works, because he fights like hell not to have to share that burden. He is accustomed to his luxury and often talks exaggeratedly about his exhaustion to excuse staying on his rear end.

Certainly the abusive man also loses a great deal through his abusiveness. He loses the potential for genuine intimacy in his relationship, for example, and his capacity for compassion and empathy. But these are often not things that he values, so he may not feel their absence. And even if he would like greater intimacy, that wish is outweighed by his attachment to the benefits of abuse.

your actions did not harm, frighten, or control him, they wouldn’t fit my definition of violence. 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.

The underlying goal of these abusers, whether conscious or not, is to control their female partners. They consider themselves entitled to demand service and to impose punishments when they feel that their needs are not being met.

My white American clients, for example, tend to be extremely rigid about how their partners are allowed to argue or express anger. If the partner of one of these clients raises her voice, or swears, or refuses to shut up when told to do so, abuse is likely to follow.

else. I find that clients from certain countries stand out for their fanatical jealousy, which can lead verbally to ripping into their partners for speaking to a stranger on the street for ten minutes or for dancing one number with another man at a party.

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.

If I could just get him to stop drinking and smoking pot, the abuse would stop.

He can be a terror when he doesn’t have pot. He’s a lot easier to deal with when he’s stoned.

Alcohol or drugs cannot make an abuser out of a man who is not abusive.

Friends tell me that he’s really not doing well since we split up. I’m worried about him.

Entering therapy