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

by Lundy Bancroft

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.

If abusiveness were the product of childhood emotional injury, abusers could overcome their problem through psychotherapy. But it is virtually unheard of for an abusive man to make substantial and lasting changes in his pattern of abusiveness as a result of therapy.

The researcher asked each man whether he himself had been sexually victimized as a child. A hefty 67 percent of the subjects said yes. However, the researcher then informed the men that he was going to hook them up to a lie-detector test and ask them the same questions again. Affirmative answers suddenly dropped to only 29 percent. In other words, abusers of all varieties tend to realize the mileage they can get out of saying, “I’m abusive because the same thing was done to me.”

“But you can’t treat your mother like that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!” The unspoken remainder of this statement, which we can fill in for my clients, is: “But you can treat your wife or girlfriend like that, as long as you have a good enough reason. That’s different.” In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable. This insight has tremendous implications for how counseling work with abusers has to be done, as we will see.

It is important to note that research has shown that men who have abusive mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons.

Abusers have normal abilities in conflict resolution, communication, and assertiveness when they choose to use them.

In their efforts to adopt victim status, my clients try to exaggerate their partners’ verbal power: “Sure, I can win a physical fight, but she is much better with her mouth than I am, so I’d say it balances out.” (One very violent man said in his group session, “She stabs me through the heart with her words,” to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.)

An abuser can usually outperform his victim on psychological tests, such as the ones that are routinely required during custody disputes, because he isn’t the one who has been traumatized by years of psychological or physical assault.

If your partner is a Drill Sergeant, your situation is a dangerous one. You may have to use some courage—as well as careful vigilance—to even get the opportunity to read this book. Perhaps you are hiding it under a mattress or reading it at someone else’s house in quick bits. Don’t give up. Many women have gone through this kind of captivity and have found a way to escape, even if it takes some time.

Pay attention to how he talks and thinks about abused women. A genuine male victim tends to feel sympathy for abused women and support their cause. The Victim, on the other hand, often says that women exaggerate or fabricate their claims of abuse or insists that men are abused just as much as women are.

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. I object to any form of physical aggression in relationships except for what is truly essential for self-defense, but I reserve the word abuse for situations of control or intimidation.

“It happened because I found out she was cheating on me.” When I contact the woman, however, I find out that, although he may be right about her seeing another man, she and my client were broken up at the time. In other words, in the abuser’s mind any relationship that she has is “an affair” if it happens during a period when he still wishes they were back together, because he feels entitled to determine when she can be free to see other people.

The abuser’s dehumanizing view of his partner as a personal possession can grow even uglier as a relationship draws to a close. I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy.

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

The treatment that protective mothers so often receive at the hands of family courts is among the most shameful secrets of modern jurisprudence. This is the only social institution that I am aware of that so frequently forbids mothers to protect their children from abuse.

WHEN THE POLICE go to a home on a domestic-abuse call, the woman sometimes scrambles to cover for her abusive partner. Consider her position: She knows that in a few minutes the police will leave her house and she will remain there alone, either with the abuser or without him. If the police do arrest him, it is only a matter of time until he is released—and angrier than ever. She calculates that her safest position is beside her partner; if she teams up with him, he might not rip her to pieces when the police car disappears up the street. Even if she called for help herself, she wasn’t necessarily looking for an arrest; most women call to get a scary experience to stop. They want the police to calm the man down and typically would like him removed from the home for the night.

The abuser’s distortions regarding the abuser program follow the same lines of his thinking about his partner. If I tell a loquacious client that he can’t dominate the entire group discussion and needs to be quiet for a while, he tells his probation officer, “The counselors say we can only listen and we’re not allowed to talk at all.” If I set limits on a man’s disruptiveness in the group, he turns in his seat, drops his head like a victim, and says sarcastically, “Right, I get it: We’re always wrong, and the women are always right.” If I terminate a man from the program after three warnings for inappropriate behavior, he says, “If we don’t tell you exactly what you want to hear, you kick us out, and you don’t give anyone a second chance.” His twisted reports on our statements provide important glimpses into how he discredits his partner at home—and why she may feel so angry, frustrated, and ready to scream.

In the late nineteenth century some legal consequences were finally legislated for some of the most extreme beatings of women, but they were rarely enforced until the 1970s and were not enforced consistently at all until the 1990s!

(In fact, any male who is older than ten or fifteen years of age today is unlikely to have ever seen his father prosecuted for domestic violence, since such prosecution was uncommon before 1990).

The most influential religious scriptures in the world today, including the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and major Buddhist and Hindu writings, explicitly instruct women to submit to male domination.

The only time an abusive man will deal with his issues enough to become someone you can live with is when you prove to him, and to yourself, that you are capable of living without him.

We all have a stake in ending abuse, if not for ourselves, then for our loved ones who may be targets or bystanders or who may find themselves mired in an abusive relationship someday. Anyone who chooses to can play an important role in chasing this scourge out of our homes, our communities, and our nations.

One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner. If the woman feels unable or unready to end her relationship, or if she does separate for a period but then goes back to him, people who have attempted to help tend to feel that their effort failed and often channel this frustration into blaming the abused woman. A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman’s right to run her own life—which the abusive man does not do—and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety. If you stay focused on these goals you will feel less frustrated as a helper and will be a more valuable resource for the woman.

Some people feel threatened by the concept that abuse is a solvable problem, because if it is, there’s no excuse for not solving it. Abusers and their allies are reluctant to face up to the damage they have done, make amends, and live differently in the future, so they may choose to insult those who address the problem of abuse. But the taunts and invalidation will not stop you, nor will they stop the rest of us, because the world has come too far to go back. There are millions of people who have taken stands against partner abuse across the globe and are now unwilling to retreat, just like the woman who gets a taste of life without the abuser and then can’t live under his control anymore, because the taste of freedom and equality is too sweet.