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

by Lundy Bancroft

Above all, the abusive man wants to avoid having you zero in on his abusiveness itself.

often begin with a simple exercise. I ask the audience members to write down everything they have ever heard, or ever believed, about where an abuser’s problem comes from.

THE MYTHS ABOUT ABUSERS He was abused as a child. His previous partner hurt him. He abuses those he loves the most. He holds in his feelings too much. He has an aggressive personality. He loses control. He is too angry. He is mentally ill. He hates women. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment. He has low self-esteem. His boss mistreats him. He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution. There are as many abusive women as abusive men. His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner. He is a victim of racism. He abuses alcohol or drugs.

Multiple research studies have examined the question of whether men who abuse women tend to be survivors of childhood abuse, and the link has turned out to be weak;

other predictors of which men are likely to abuse women have proven far more reliable, as we will see.

Notably, men who are violent toward other men are often victims of child abuse—but the connection is much less ...

He may work through other emotional difficulties, he may gain insight into himself, but his behavior continues. In fact it typically gets worse, as he uses therapy to develop new excuses for his behavior, more sophisticated arguments to prove that his partner is mentally unstable, and more creative ways to make her feel responsible for his emotional distress. Abusive men are sometimes masters of the hard-luck story, and may find that accounts of childhood abuse are one of the best ways to pull heartstrings.

revealing study that was conducted on another group of destructive men: child sexual abusers. 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.

other words, abusers of all varieties tend to realize the mileage they can get out of saying, “I’m abusive becaus...

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.

We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world.

MYTH #4: He holds in his feelings too much, and they build up until he bursts. He needs to get in touch with his emotions and learn to express them to prevent those explosive episodes.

Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men.

Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all.

An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can f...

When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until so...

His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing else matte...

It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partner’s feelings an...

It looks like an emotional explosion, so naturally you assume that it is. But the mounting tension, the pressure-cooker buildup of his feelings, is actually being driven by his lack of empathy for your feelings, and by a set of attitudes that we will examine later.

And he explodes when he gives himself permission to do so.

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.

A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: 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.

In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable.

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury. A nonabusive man would not expect his wife to be taking emotional care of him during a crisis of this gravity.

In Chapter 3, you will see how and why an abuser’s attitudes keep him furious.

When a new client says to me, “I’m in your program because of my anger,” I respond, “No you’re not, you’re here because of your abuse.” Everybody gets angry.

Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

How can all these different mental illnesses cause such similar behavioral patterns? The answer is, they don’t. 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.

If he is severely depressed, for example, he may stop caring about the consequences his actions may cause him to suffer, which can increase the danger that he will decide to commit ...

mentally ill abuser has two separate—though interrelated—problems, just as the alcoholic ...

Some clinicians will stretch one of the definitions to apply it to an abusive client—“intermittent explosive disorder,” for example—so that insurance will cover his therapy.

However, this diagnosis is erroneous if it is made solely on the basis of his abusive behavior; a man whose destructive behaviors are confined primarily or entirely to intimate relationships is an abuser, not a psychiatric patient.

cases in which an abuser’s behavior has improved for a while as a result of taking medication prescribed by a psychiatrist. His overall abusiveness hasn’t stopped, but the most devastating or terrifying behaviors have eased.

Medication is not a long-term solution,

Abusers don’t like to be medicated because they tend to be too selfish to put up with the side effects, no matter how much the improvement may benefit their partners, so they almost always quit the medication after a few months. The medicatio...

No medication yet discovered will turn an abuser into a loving, considerate, appropriate partner. It will just take the edge off his absolute worst behaviors—if it even does that.

your abusive partner is taking medication, be aware that you are only buying time. Take advantage of the (more) peaceful period to get support in your own healing.

but she was mistaken on one point: Most abusers don’t hate women. They often have close relationships with their mothers, or sisters, or female friends. A fair number are able to work successfully with a female boss and respect her authority, at least outwardly.

general, I find that my clients’ view that their partners should cater to their needs and are not worthy of being taken seriously does indeed carry over into how they view other females, including their own daughters.

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.

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 psychologists have glanced quickly at this pattern and concluded that abusers have an extreme fear of abandonment.

But many people, both male and female, are afraid of abandonment and may reel from panic, heartbreak, or desperation when being left by a partner.

If a person’s panicked reaction to being left could cause threats, stalking, or murder, our entire...

If fear of abandonment causes postseparation abuse, why are the statistics so lopsided? Do women have a much easier time with abandonment than men do? No, of course not.

A close cousin of the abandonment myth is the belief that abusive men “are afraid of intimacy,” which attempts to explain why most abusers mistreat only their partners and why most are male.

abusive men usually have their worst incidents after a period of mounting tension and distance, not at the moments of greatest closeness.

And, finally, there are plenty of men who have powerful fears of intimacy who don’t abuse or control their partners—because they don’t have an abusive mentality.

MYTH #11: He suffers from low self-esteem. He needs his self-image shored up.