Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (15 page)

The Victim is highly self-centered in relationships. Everything seems to revolve around his wounds, and he keeps himself at the center of attention. If you have children, he tries to get them to feel sorry for him as well. He seems forever to be telling you: “You don’t understand me, you don’t appreciate me, you hold my mistakes over my head.” Yet you sense that the dynamic is actually the other way around. If you stand up to him about these distortions, he tells you that you are abusing him or says, “You just can’t tolerate my standing up to your bullying.” This recurring inversion of reality is similar to what happens with Mr. Sensitive, but without the introspective psychology, gentle man, or recovering alcoholic routines. If you leave him, you risk his seeking custody of your children, presenting himself to the court as the victim of your abuse and of your efforts to turn the children against him.

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.

When the Victim joins an abuser group, his story tends to go like this: “I put up with my partner’s mistreatment of me for years, and I never fought back or even tried to defend myself. But I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and I started to give her back a little taste of what she was doing to me. So now I’ve been labeled abusive. Women are allowed to do those things and nobody cares, but as soon as a man does it he’s a pariah.”

This line of reasoning many times develops into a discussion of how men are the victims of women
overall
in society, because women run the world. This is a startling distortion, given which gender actually dominates almost all legislatures, police departments, judgeships, businesses, and so on ad nauseam. When I point out this reality to the Victim, he describes a kind of paranoid fantasy in which women are behind the scenes secretly pulling the strings, largely by getting men to feel sorry for them. His capacity for turning things into their opposites in this way is a central cause of his abusiveness.

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.

T
HE
T
ERRORIST

I worked for a few months with an abused woman named Gloria who was wondering how much longer she would be alive. Her husband, Gerald, would glare at her, drum his fingers methodically on the table, and say: “You have six months left. Things better shape up around here. Six months.” Her head would swim and her heart would race with fear, and she would plead with him to tell what exactly he planned to do to her at the end of that period. And he would answer, with maybe just a hint of a cold smile: “Just wait and see, just wait and see. Six months, Gloria.” Gerald had never laid a hand on Gloria in the five years they had been together, but she was terrified. She started working with me on making an escape plan to run away with their two-year-old son.

The Terrorist tends to be both highly controlling and extremely demanding. His worst aspect, however, is that he frequently reminds his partner that he could physically rip her to pieces or even kill her. He doesn’t necessarily beat her, however; some abusers know how to terrorize their partners with threats, strange veiled statements, and bizarre behaviors. One of my violent clients cut an article out of the newspaper about a woman who had been murdered by her husband, and he taped it up on the refrigerator. Another man responded to his partner’s announcement that she was leaving him by spilling the blood of an animal in front of the house. Another client would take out his gun when he was angry at his partner but would insist that he was just going to clean it and that it had nothing to do with her.

Unlike most other abusers, the Terrorist often seems to be sadistic: He gets enjoyment out of causing pain and fear and seems to find cruelty thrilling. He is likely to have been severely abused as a child, which generally is not true of other abusers. However,
you cannot help him to heal.
This may be difficult to accept, since the hope of helping him overcome his problems may be what gets you through the terror of living with him. The Terrorist’s problems are much too deep for a partner to solve, as they involve a complex weave of serious psychological problems with the typical destructive nature of an abuser. You need to focus instead on getting yourself safe. The Terrorist’s top goal is to paralyze you with fear so that you won’t dare think of leaving him or cheating on him. The great majority of abusers who make lethal threats against their partners never carry them out, but that still leaves many who do. The trauma of living with this kind of terror can be profound and can make it extremely difficult for you to think clearly about strategies for escaping to safety. However,
most women
do
manage to get out.
The critical first step is to seek confidential help as soon as possible. Begin by calling an abuse hotline as soon as you safely can (see “Resources”). There are more suggestions in Chapter 9.

When a woman does leave the Terrorist, he may stalk or threaten her, and this dangerous harassment can continue for a long time. If the couple has children, he may attempt to get custody or unsupervised visitation, so that he can terrorize or control her through the children. He also may use information he has about her, such as where she works or where her parents live, to track her and to threaten her loved ones.
It is essential that friends, relatives, courts, and communities understand the realities of these risks and give the woman the most complete support and protection possible,
while simultaneously taking steps to hold the abuser accountable.
It may be possible to stop the Terrorist from escalating to murder, but only if he gets a strong message that stalking and threatening an ex-partner is unacceptable, that he is responsible for his own actions, and that the community is prepared to jail him if his threatening behavior does not stop immediately. Actions short of these are often insufficient.

Chapter 10 contains more information for a woman who is involved in a custody or visitation battle with an abuser or for those who are concerned that one may start.

T
HE
M
ENTALLY
I
LL OR
A
DDICTED
A
BUSER

This last category is not actually separate from the others; an abusive man of any of the aforementioned styles can also have psychiatric or substance-abuse problems, although the majority do not. Even when mental illness or addiction is a factor, it is not the
cause
of a man’s abuse of his partner, but it can contribute to the severity of his problem and his resistance to change. When these additional problems are present, it is important to be aware of the following points:

1. Certain mental illnesses can increase the chance that an abuser will be dangerous and use physical violence. These include paranoia, severe depression, delusions or hallucinations (psychosis), obsessive-compulsive disorder, and antisocial personality disorder known as psychopathy or sociopathy). These psychiatric conditions also make it next to impossible for an abuser to change, at least until the mental illness has been brought under control through therapy and/or medication, which can take years. Even if the mental illness is properly treated, his
   abusiveness
   won’t necessarily change.
   
2. An abuser’s reactions to going on or off medication are unpredictable. A woman should take extra precautions for her safety at such a time. Abusers tend to go off medication before long—I have had few clients who were consistent and responsible about taking their meds in the long term. They don’t like the side effects, and they are too selfish to care about the implications of the mental illness for their partners or children.
   
3. The potential danger of a mentally ill abuser has to be assessed by looking at the severity of his psychiatric symptoms
   in combination with
   the severity of his abuse characteristics. Looking at his psychiatric symptoms alone can lead to underestimating how dangerous he is.
   
4. Antisocial personality disorder is present in only a small percentage of abusers but can be important. Those who suffer from this condition lack a conscience and thus are repeatedly involved in behaviors that are harmful to others. Some signs of this condition include: (a) He started getting into illegal behavior when he was still a teenager; (b) his dishonest or aggressive behavior involves situations unrelated to his partner, rather than being restricted to her; (c) he periodically gets into trouble at workplaces or in other contexts for stealing, threatening, or refusing to follow instructions and is likely to have a considerable criminal record by about age thirty, though the offenses may be largely minor ones; (d) he is severely and chronically irresponsible in a way that disrupts the lives of others or creates danger; and (e) he tends to cheat on women a lot, turn them against each other, and maintain shallow relationships with them. The psychopath’s physical violence is not necessarily severe, contrary to the popular image, but he may be very dangerous nonetheless. Antisocial personality disorder is very difficult to change through therapy, and there is no effective medication for treating it. It is highly compatible with abusiveness toward women.
   
5. Those who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder have a highly distorted self-image. They are unable to accept that they might have faults and therefore are unable to imagine how other people perceive them. This condition is highly compatible with abusiveness, though it is present in only a small percentage of abusive men. Clues to the presence of this disorder include: (a) Your partner’s self-centeredness is severe, and it carries over into situations that don’t involve you; (b) he seems to relate everything back to himself; and (c) he is outraged whenever anyone criticizes him and is incapable of considering that he could ever be anything other than kind and generous. This disorder is highly resistant to therapy and is not treatable with medication. The abuser with this disorder is not able to change substantially through an abuser program either, although he sometimes makes some minor improvements.
   
6. Many abusers who are not mentally ill want women to think that they are, in order to avoid responsibility for their attitudes and behavior.
   

Substance abuse, like mental illness, does not cause partner abuse but can increase the risk of violence. Like the mentally ill abuser, the addicted abuser doesn’t change unless he deals with his addiction, and even that is only the first step. Chapter 8 examines the role that substances play in partner abuse.

The attitudes driving the mentally ill or addicted batterer are the same as those of other abusers and will likely follow the pattern of one of the nine styles described above. In addition, the following attitudes tend to be present:

Although I have focused on the emotionally abusive styles of these different kinds of abusers, any of them may also use physical violence, including sexual assault. Although the Terrorist and the Drill Sergeant are especially likely to become dangerous, they are not the only ones who may do so. Many abusers occasionally use physical violence or threats as a way to intimidate you when they feel that their power or control over you is slipping; violence for them is a kind of “trump card” they use when their normal patterns of psychological abuse are not getting them the degree of control they feel entitled to. If you are concerned about how dangerous your partner may be, see “Is He Going to Get Violent?” in Chapter 6 and “Leaving an Abuser Safely” in Chapter 9.

• Tremendous variation exists among abusive styles. Your abusive partner may be of a type I haven’t encountered yet, but that doesn’t make him any less real. Many men are mixtures of different aspects.
  
• An abuser may change so much from day to day that he couldn’t belong to
  any
  type. This style of abuser is so unpredictable that his partner can never make sense out of what she is living with.
  
• An abuser of any type can have days when he turns loving, attentive, and thoughtful. At these times, you may feel that his problem has finally gone away and that the relationship will return to its rosy beginning. However, abuse always comes back eventually unless the abuser has dealt with his abusiveness.