Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (10 page)

Physical caretaking
is the focus of the more traditionally minded abuser. He expects his partner to make dinner for him the way he likes it, look after the children, clean the house, and perform an endlessly continuing list of additional tasks. He sees her essentially as an unpaid servant. He grouches, “I work my butt off all day, and when I come home I expect a little peace and quiet. Is that too much to ask for?” He seems to expect a soft chair, a newspaper, and a footstool. On the weekends he expects everything in the home to be taken care of so that he can watch sports or tinker with his car, go golfing or bird watching, or sleep. If she doesn’t fulfill her myriad household responsibilities to his satisfaction, he feels entitled to dole out harsh criticism.

Although this style of abuser may seem out of date, he is alive and well. He did learn to use some prettier packaging for his regal expectations during the ’80s and ’90s, but the change is superficial. Fewer abusers look me in the eye nowadays and say, “I expect a warm, tasty dinner on the table when I come home,” but they may still explode if it isn’t there.

Interwoven with the abuser’s overvaluation of his own work is the devaluation of his partner’s labor. My clients grumble to me: “I don’t know what the hell she does all day. I come home and the house is a mess, the children haven’t been fed, and she’s talking on the telephone. She spends her time watching soap operas.” If she works outside the home—and few families can get by on one income—then he insists that her job is easy compared to his. Of course, if he attempts to do what she does—for example, if he is the primary parent for a while because he’s unemployed and she’s working—he does an abrupt about-face: Suddenly he declares that parenting and housekeeping are monumental and admirable tasks, requiring hours a day of rest for him to recuperate.

Emotional caretaking
can be even more important than homemaking services to the modern abuser. Remember Ray, who swore at Mary Beth for “ignoring” him for two days while she looked for her missing son? His problem was that he believed that nothing—not even a missing child—should interfere with Mary Beth’s duty to meet his emotional needs. 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.

Abusive men often hide their high emotional demands by cloaking them as something else. My client Bert, for example, would be furious if his girlfriend Kirsten didn’t get off the phone as soon as he came in the door. His excuse to tear into her would be “all the money she’s wasting on the phone bill when she knows we can’t afford it,” but we noticed that the issue only arose when he wanted her attention. If she called England when he wasn’t around, or if
he
spent an hour on the phone to his parents every Saturday morning, the expense was no big deal.

When I have new clients, I go to the board and draw a compass with the needle pointing straight up to a big N. “You want your partner to be this compass,” I say to them, “and you want to be North. No matter where the compass goes, it always points in the same direction. And no matter where she goes, or what she’s doing, or what’s on her mind, you expect her to always be focused on you.” My clients sometimes protest to me, “But that’s what being in a relationship is about. We’re
supposed
to focus on each other.” But I notice that when he focuses on her, most of what he thinks about is what she can do for him, not the other way around. And when he doesn’t feel like focusing on her at all, he doesn’t bother.

An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as
entitled,
so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.

Sexual caretaking
means that he considers it his partner’s duty to keep him sexually satisfied. He may not accept having his sexual advances rejected, yet turn
her
down whenever he feels like it. Even her pleasure exists for his benefit: If she doesn’t reach orgasm, for example, he may resent her for it because he wants the pleasure of seeing himself as a great lover.

Not all abusive men have great interest in sex. Some are too busy with outside relationships or use substances that diminish their sex drive. A few are gay, using their female partners for window dressing. Some of my clients can feel attracted to a woman only as part of a domination fantasy. This style of abuser loses interest in sex if his partner starts to assert herself as an equal human being deserving of respect, or he begins to coerce or assault her sexually. In short, he wants sex on his terms or not at all.

Deference
refers to the abuser’s entitlement to have his tastes and opinions treated as edicts. Once he has made the pronouncement that a certain movie is shallow, or that Louise was trying to seduce Jay at the picnic, or that Republicans don’t know how to manage the economy, his partner is supposed to accept his view unquestioningly. It is especially important to him that she not disagree with him in front of other people; if she does, he may later yell at her, “You made me look like a fool, you’re always out to show me up,” and similar accusations. His unstated rule is that she is not to question his ideas.

Freedom from accountability
means that the abusive man considers himself above criticism. If his partner attempts to raise her grievances, she is “nagging” or “provoking” him. He believes he should be permitted to ignore the damage his behavior is causing, and he may become retaliatory if anyone tries to get him to look at it. I had the following exchange with a man who was new to my program:

BANCROFT:
Can you explain to me why you are joining this abuser group?

HANK:
Well, I slapped my girl a few weeks ago, and now she says I can’t come back in the house unless I get counseling.

BANCROFT:
What led up to your abuse? Were you arguing?

HANK:
Yes. And she accused me of having an affair! That really pissed me off!

BANCROFT:
Well,
were
you having an affair?

HANK
(Pause, a little startled by my question): Well, yeah…but she had no proof! She shouldn’t go saying things like that when she has no proof!

Hank reserved for himself the privilege of being critical of his partner, a privilege that he exercised a great deal. Complaints against him, including drawing any attention to how his behavior had hurt other people in the family, he was quick to stifle. In Hank’s case, the retaliation took the form of a physical assault.

The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mind-set, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that
you
are controlling
him,
because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.

Many men feel specifically entitled to use violence. A recent study of college males studying psychology, published in 1997, found that 10 percent believed that it was acceptable to hit a female partner for refusing to have sex, and 20 percent believed that it was acceptable to do so if the man suspected her of cheating. Studies have found similar statistics regarding young men’s belief that they have the right to force a female to have sex if they have spent a substantial amount of money on the evening’s entertainment or if the woman started wanting sex but then changed her mind. These studies point to the importance of focusing on changing the entitled attitudes of abusers, rather than attempting to find something wrong in their individual psychology.

T
HE
A
BUSER’S
O
UTLOOK ON THE
W
OMAN’S
A
NGER

The abusive man’s problem with anger is almost the opposite of what is commonly believed. The reality is:

Y
OUR 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. When your anger does jump out of you—as will happen to any abused woman from time to time—he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are. Abuse can make you feel straitjacketed. You may develop physical or emotional reactions to swallowing your anger, such as depression, nightmares, emotional numbing, or eating and sleeping problems, which your partner may use as an excuse to belittle you further or make you feel crazy.

Why does your partner react so strongly to your anger? One reason may be that he considers himself above reproach, as I discussed above. The second is that on some level he senses—though not necessarily consciously—that there is
power in your anger
. If you have space to feel and express your rage, you will be better able to hold on to your identity and to resist his suffocation of you. He tries to take your anger away in order to snuff out your capacity to resist his will. Finally, he perceives your anger as a
challenge
to his authority, to which he responds by overpowering you with anger that is greater than your own. In this way he ensures that he retains the exclusive right to be the one who shows anger.

T
HE
A
BUSER’S
O
WN
A
NGER

Once you grasp the nature of entitlement, the following concept about the abusive man becomes clear:

H
E 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. This dynamic was illustrated on a recent talk show by a young man who was discussing his abuse of his present wife. He said that his definition of a good relationship was: “Never arguing and saying you love each other every day.” He told the audience that his wife “deserved” his mistreatment because she wasn’t living up to this unrealistic image. It wouldn’t do any good to send this young man, or any other abuser, to an anger-management program, because his entitlements would just keep producing more anger. His attitudes are what need to change.

Emile, a physically violent client with whom I worked, gave me the following account of his worst assault on his wife: “One day Tanya went way overboard with her mouth, and I got so pissed off that I grabbed her by the neck and put her up against the wall.” With his voice filled with indignation, he said, “Then she tried to knee me in the balls! How would you like it if a woman did that to you?? Of course I lashed out. And when I swung my hand down, my fingernails made a long cut across her face. What the hell did she expect?”

The abuser’s highly entitled perceptual system causes him to mentally
reverse aggression and self-defense.
When Tanya attempted to defend herself against Emile’s life-threatening attack, he defined her actions as violence toward
him.
When he then injured her further, he claimed he was defending himself against
her
abuse. The lens of entitlement the abuser holds over his eye stands everything on its head, like the reflection in a spoon.

Another client, Wendell, described an incident in which he stomped out of the house and slammed the door. “My wife Aysha nags at me for hours. I can only take so much of her complaining and telling me I’m no good. Yesterday she went on for a half hour, and I finally called her a bitch and took off.” I asked him what Aysha was upset about, and he said he didn’t know. “When she goes on like that I just tune her out.” A few days later I spoke with Aysha about the incident, and she told me that she had indeed been yelling at Wendell for five or ten minutes. However, he had failed to tell me that he had launched a verbal assault when she first woke up that morning and had continued berating her all day: “He totally dominates arguments; he repeats himself like a broken record; and I’m lucky if I can get a word in. And his language is awful—he must have called me a ‘bitch’ ten times that day.” She finally reached her limit and began standing up for herself forcefully, and that was when he stormed out for the evening.

Why does Wendell think that Aysha is the one who has been doing all the yelling and complaining? Because in his mind
she’s supposed to be listening, not talking.
If she expresses herself at all, that’s too much.

When I challenge my clients to stop bullying their partners, they twist my words around just as they do their partners’. They accuse me of having said things that have little connection to my actual words. An abuser says, “You’re saying I should lie down and let her walk all over me” because I told him that intimidating his partner is unacceptable no matter how angry he is. He says, “So you’re telling us that our partners can do anything they want to us, and we aren’t allowed to lift a finger to defend ourselves” because his partner told him that she was sick of his friends trashing the house and that he should “clean up his goddamned mess,” and I told him that was no excuse to call her a disgusting name. He says, “Your approach is that whatever she does is okay, because she’s a woman, but because I’m the man, there’s much stricter rules for me” because I pointed out
his
double standards and insisted that he should live by the same rules he applies to her.