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

by Lundy Bancroft

Telling you that you will be lost without him

Telling you that no one else will want to be with you

Spreading rumors about you, trying to ruin your friendships or reputation

Spreading confidential information about you to humiliate you

My clients demand forgiveness while continuing to insult, threaten, demand immediate responses, attend only to their own needs,

The trauma of chronic abuse can also make a woman develop fears of being

alone at night, anxiety about her competence to manage her life on her own, and feelings of isolation from other people, especially if the abuser has driven her apart from her friends or family.

Even the abusive man who is ready to be single again may still crave retaliation for all the ways he feels you hurt him, which in his distorted perceptual system may include all the times you defended yourself, questioned the superiority of his knowledge and judgment, or refused to simply be a carbon copy of him.

So he may spread distorted stories about the history of your relationship or tell outright lies to try to turn people against you.

He is extremely jealous and possessive.

He isn’t close to anyone.

Your life belongs to no one but you.

Name-calling, belittling, attacking their self-confidence, humiliating them in front of other people, shaming boys with regard to their masculinity, and insulting—or inappropriately complimenting—girls on the basis of their physical development and appearance are all common parenting behaviors among the abusive men in my groups.

They tend to hurt

their children’s feelings further by failing to show up for important events, not following through on promises to take them on...

Abuse is inherently divisive; family members blame each other for the abuser’s behavior because it is unsafe to blame him.

depressed or alcoholic, they worry about him. They observe that when their father is happy peace reigns in the family and that when he is unhappy he makes everyone else miserable, too, so they invest themselves in keeping him content. These many powerful mixed feelings are confusing and uncomfortable for children.

litigation. First is the claim that fathers are widely discriminated against by family courts in custody disputes. The research actually shows the opposite, that in fact fathers have been at a distinct advantage in custody battles in the United States since the late 1970s, when the maternal preference went out of vogue. Next often comes the myth that children of divorce fare better in joint custody, when the research shows overwhelmingly that they in fact do worse, except in those cases where their parents remain on good terms after the divorce and can co-parent cooperatively—which

is almost impossible for a woman to do with an abusive ex-partner.

Abusive men also assert falsely that there is a rampant problem of women’s false allegations of abuse, that child support obligations are unfairly high, that domestic abuse is irrelevant to custody decisions, and t...

When people take a neutral stand between you and your abusive partner, they are in effect supporting him and abandoning you, no matter how much they may claim otherwise.

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.