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

by Lundy Bancroft

even if your partner’s behavior doesn’t fit the definition of abuse, it may still have a serious effect on you. Any coercion or disrespect by a relationship partner is an important problem.

Some of the men I describe in the pages ahead change moods so drastically and so often that a woman could never feel sure what they are like, much less attach a label. Your partner may be arrogant, or may play mind games, or may act selfishly over and over again, but his better aspects may make you feel that he is miles away from being an “abuser.”

the female partners of these battering men were largely describing the same distresses in their lives that we were hearing about from women who had been psychologically abused, showing us that different forms of abuse have similar destructive impacts on women.

attacks by male partners are the number one cause of injury to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four.

one woman out of three will be a victim of violence by a husband or boyfriend at some point in her life.

The emotional effects of partner violence are a factor in more than one-fourth of...

fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.

When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive.

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.

Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.

the times when she puts her foot down the most firmly, he responds by becoming his angriest and most intimidating. When she stands up to him, he makes her pay for it—sooner or later.

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.

In other words, a bad childhood doesn’t cause a man to become an abuser, but it can contribute to making a man who is abusive especially dangerous.

For some abusive men, the blame-the-childhood approach has an additional reason for being appealing: By focusing on what his mother did wrong, he gets to blame a woman for his mistreatment of women.

His hostility toward the human race may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct.

a nonabusive man doesn’t use his past as an excuse to mistreat you. Feeling sorry for your partner can be a trap, making you feel guilty for standing up to his abusiveness.

“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.”

He may describe other wounds he received from a previous partner: She tried to control him; she wouldn’t let him have any freedom; she expected him to wait on her hand and foot; she turned their children against him; she even “had him arrested” out of vindictiveness. What he is describing usually are his own behaviors, but he attributes them to the woman so that he is the victim.

Mental illness doesn’t cause abusiveness any more than alcohol does. What happens is rather that the man’s psychiatric problem interacts with his abusiveness to form a volatile combination.

When you try to improve an abuser’s feelings about himself, his problem actually tends to get worse. 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.

Just as common as the abuser who blows up because dinner is late is the one who explodes because his partner gets tired of listening to him talk endlessly about himself, or because she wants to spend a little time doing something alone that she enjoys, or because she didn’t drop everything to soothe him when he was feeling down, or because she failed to anticipate needs or desires he hadn’t even expressed.

YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR ANGER.

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.

HE ISN’T ABUSIVE BECAUSE HE IS ANGRY; HE’S ANGRY BECAUSE HE’S ABUSIVE.

The abuser’s unfair and unrealistic expectations ensure that his partner can never follow all of his rules or meet all of his demands. The result is that he is frequently angry or enraged.

Objectification is a critical reason why an abuser tends to get worse over time. As his conscience adapts to one level of cruelty—or violence—he builds to the next. By depersonalizing his partner, the abuser protects himself from the natural human emotions of guilt and empathy, so that he can sleep at night with a clear conscience. He distances himself so far from her humanity that her feelings no longer count, or simply cease to exist.

The confusion of love with abuse is what allows abusers who kill their partners to make the absurd claim that they were driven by the depths of their loving feelings. The news media regrettably often accept the aggressors’ view of these acts, describing them as “crimes of passion.” But what could more thoroughly prove that a man did not love his partner? If a mother were to kill one of her children, would we ever accept the claim that she did it because she was overwhelmed by how much she cared? Not for an instant. Nor should we. 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.

In some ways manipulation is worse than overt abuse, especially when the two are mixed together. When a woman gets called “bitch,” or gets shoved or slapped, she at least knows what her partner did to her. But after a manipulative interaction she may have little idea what went wrong; she just knows that she feels terrible, or crazy, and that somehow it seems to be her own fault.

Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.

Another man may allow his partner to come and go as she pleases, even accepting her friendships with men, but there is hell to pay if she fails to wait on him hand and foot, or if she makes the mistake of asking him to clean up after himself.

This “gentle man” style of abuser tends to be highly self-centered and demanding of emotional catering. He may not be the man who has a fit because dinner is late but rather erupts because of some way his partner failed to sacrifice her own needs or interests to keep him content. He plays up how fragile he is to divert attention from the swath of destruction he leaves behind him.

The Victim is highly self-centered in relationships. Everything seems to revolve around his wounds, and he keeps himself at the center of attention.

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.

When an abusive man is being charming at the beginning of a relationship, is he already thinking ahead to abusing the woman? Does he have it all planned out? Is he deliberately hooking her emotionally so he can be cruel to her later? The answer is usually no. The abuser doesn’t picture himself yelling, degrading her, or hurling objects at her. As he falls in love, he dreams of a happy future of conjugal bliss, just as the woman does. So, if he isn’t laying plans to hurt her, what is going on in his mind? First, he is gazing longingly at the image he holds of the future, where the woman meets all of his needs, is beautiful and sexy at all times of the day and night, has no needs of her own, and is in awe of his brilliance and charm. He desires a woman who will cater to him and never complain about anything he does or darken his day with frustrations or unhappiness about her own life.

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.

He blames something or someone for anything that goes wrong. As time goes by, the target of his blame increasingly becomes you. This style of man also tends to make promises that he doesn’t keep, coming up with a steady stream of excuses for disappointing you or behaving irresponsibly, and perhaps taking serious economic advantage of you in the process.

He punches walls or kicks doors. He throws things around, even if they don’t hit you.

Another way he can retaliate against you for resisting his control is to switch into the role of victim. Suppose that you complain about being silenced by his constant interruptions during arguments. He then gets a huffy, hostile tone in his voice as if your objection were unfair to him and says sarcastically, “All right, I’ll just listen and you talk,” and acts as if you are oppressing him by calling him on his behavior. This is an effort to make you feel guilty for resisting his control and is the beginning of abuse.

“When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.”

In any relationship, it makes sense to use some sensitivity in deciding when and how to tackle a difficult relationship issue. There are ways to word a grievance that avoid making it sound like a personal attack, and if you mix in some appreciation you increase the chance that your partner will hear you. But with an abuser, no way to bring up a complaint is the right way. You can wait until the calmest, most relaxed evening, prepare your partner with plenty of verbal stroking, express your grievance in mild language, but he still won’t be willing to take it in.

Physical aggression by a man toward his partner is abuse, even if it happens only once. If he raises a fist; punches a hole in the wall; throws things at you; blocks your way; restrains you; grabs, pushes, or pokes you; or threatens to hurt you, that’s physical abuse. He is creating fear and using your need for physical freedom and safety as a way to control you.

The salient point about remorse, however, is that it matters little whether it is genuine or not. Clients who get very sorry after acts of abuse change at about the same rate as the ones who don’t. The most regretful are sometimes the most self-centered, lamenting above all the injury they’ve done to their own self-image. They feel ashamed of having behaved like cruel dictators and want to revert quickly to the role of benign dictators, as if that somehow makes them much better people.

If you do not have children with your abusive partner, keep it that way. Some women hope the arrival of a baby can cause an abuser to change his behaviors, but it can’t. It won’t make him settle down, become more responsible, or gain maturity. It won’t stop his jealous accusations by convincing him that you are committed to him,

If he feels he has lost the argument, he may respond by making a tactical retreat and gathering his forces to strike again later.

Periods of relative calm are followed by a few days or weeks in which the abuser becomes increasingly irritable. As his tension builds, it takes less and less to set him off on a tirade of insults. His excuses for not carrying his weight mount up, and his criticism and displeasure seem constant. Many women tell me that they learn to read their partner’s moods during this buildup and can sense when he is nearing an eruption. One day he finally hits his limit, often over the most trivial issue, and he bursts out with screaming, disgusting and hurtful put-downs, or frightening aggression. If he is a violent abuser, he turns himself loose to knock over chairs, hurl objects, punch holes in walls, or assault his partner directly, leaving her scared to death.

After he has purged himself, he typically acts ashamed or regretful about his cruelty or violence, at least in the early years of a relationship. Then he may enter a period when he reminds you of the man you fell in love with—charming, attentive, funny, kind. His actions have the effect of drawing you into a repetitive traumatic cycle in which you hope each time that he is finally going to change for good.

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.

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.