Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (42 page)

A
BUSE AS A
F
ORM OF
O
PPRESSION

A home where a woman is abused is a small-scale model of much larger oppressive systems that work in remarkably similar ways. Many of the excuses an abusive man uses for verbally tearing his partner to shreds are the same ones that a power-mad boss uses for humiliating his or her employees. The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.” The divide-and-conquer strategies used by abusers are reminiscent of a corporate head who tries to break the labor union by giving certain groups of workers favored treatment. The making of an abuser is thus not necessarily restricted to the specific values his society teaches him about men’s relationships with women; without realizing it he may also apply attitudes and tactics from
other
forms of oppression that he has been exposed to as a boy or as a young adult and that he has learned to justify or even admire.

If you look at any oppressive organization or system, from a racist country club up to a military government, you will find most of the same behaviors and justifications by the powerful that I have described in this book. The tactics of control, the intimidation of victims who try to protest, the undermining of efforts at independence, the negative distortions about the victims in order to cast blame upon them, the careful cultivation of the public image of the oppressors—all are present, along with many other parallels. The people in power generally tell lies while simultaneously working hard to silence the voices of the people who are being dominated and to stop them from thinking, just as the abusive man strives to do. And the bottom line is the same: Oppressive systems stay in existence because the people in power enjoy the luxury of their position and become unwilling to give up the privileges they win through taking advantage of other people and keeping them down. In short,
the abusive mentality is the mentality of oppression.

The connection among different kinds of power abuses can add greatly to the stress experienced by an abused woman. If you already face discrimination as a woman of color or if you are a low-income woman or a lesbian, you may feel overwhelmed at times by how similar the control and abuse from your partner feel to other forms of oppression you have endured. Some abusive men even deliberately take advantage of their partner’s social vulnerabilities. I have had several clients, for example, whose partners are undocumented immigrants whom they have threatened to have deported if the women ever disclose the abuse. In some geographical areas you can find supportive services for specific groups of abused women, such as immigrants or lesbians, or locate agencies where there are staff people from your background who understand the additional challenges you face. (See “Resources.”)

W
HEN WE STEP BACK
and gaze upon the broad panorama of social influences on a boy’s development, we can see that it’s really no great wonder that he may learn the patterns of abuse. What he isn’t taught by the cultural messages around him that specifically support the abuse of women he can learn from the tactics of other abusers of power and from the blaming of other victims. In fact, the greater surprise is that so many boys do
not
grow up to abuse women. There must not be anything inherently abusive or power-hungry about men, or it would be impossible for so many to refuse to follow the path where their cultural training is propelling them. One of the best-known male crusaders against the abuse of women, a man with whom I have had the good fortune to work, grew up in a home where his mother was physically beaten. He could have modeled himself after his father, but he didn’t. He chose instead to think critically about his experience and take the opposite road. Many of the influential leaders of the movement against the abuse of women in the United States, Canada, and other countries are male, including men who have mentored me in my work.

The oppressive mentality can be taken apart and replaced with a new consciousness. The composer of “Amazing Grace,” you may have heard, was a slave trader who repented of his cruelty and became an abolitionist. Abusive men can learn respect and equality—if we insist that they do so. But they won’t make those changes unless they are subjected to tremendous pressure, because their cultural values as well as their privileges are pushing them so hard to stay the same.

There has never been a better time than the present to apply that pressure, to demand that abusers accept responsibility for the destruction they cause. We live in a period of mounting international pressure for the respect of human rights for
everyone,
of insistence on the recognition of the worth and dignity of each person, male or female, young or old, wealthy or poor, and of whatever color. The current context is probably the most hopeful one there has ever been for putting an end to the abuse of women, and to the range of abuses of power that follow its pattern. Resistance never disappears; it waits in the shadows, sometimes for many years, and then eventually sprouts again. You may have gone through dark times when you felt, “I just can’t fight this anymore, I give up,” yet you rebound after a while to try again to recover your rights. And one day you will succeed.

• An abuser is not born; he is made.
  
• In order to bring about change in an abuser, we have to reshape his attitude toward power and exploitation.
  
• Abusive behavior is reinforced by multiple societal messages, some of which are specific to the abuse of women and some of which reflect the overall culture of oppression.
  
• Your courageous resistance to partner abuse—and you
  have
  stood up for yourself (and your children) in many ways, whether you realize it or not—is a gift to everyone, because all forms of abuse are intertwined.
  

M
Y FIFTEEN YEARS OF WORKING
day in and day out with abusive men have left me certain of one thing: There are no shortcuts to change, no magical overnight transformations, no easy ways out. Change is difficult, uncomfortable work. My job as a counselor is to dive into the elaborate tangle that makes up an abuser’s thinking and assist the man to untie the knots. The project is not hopeless—if the man is willing to work hard—but it is complex and painstaking. For him, remaining abusive is in many ways easier than stepping out of his pattern. Yet there are some men who decide to dig down inside of themselves, root out the values that drive their abusive behavior, and develop a truly new way of interacting with a female partner. The challenge for an abused woman is to learn how to tell whether her partner is serious about overcoming his abusiveness.

The first challenge with an abusive man is to motivate him to work on himself. Because he becomes attached to the many rewards that his controlling and intimidating behaviors bring him, he is highly reluctant to make significant changes in his way of operating in a relationship. This reluctance cannot be overcome through gentle persuasion, pleading, or cajoling by the woman. I am sorry to say that I have never once seen such approaches succeed. The men who make significant progress in my program are the ones who know that their partners will definitely leave them unless they change, and the ones on probation who have a tough probation officer who demands that they really confront their abusiveness. In other words, the initial impetus to change is always
extrinsic
rather than self-motivated. Even when a man does feel genuinely sorry for the ways his behavior has hurt his partner, I have never seen his remorse alone suffice to get him to become a serious client.
After
a few months of deep work in the program, some men do start to develop intrinsic reasons for change, such as starting to feel real empathy for their partners’ feelings, developing awareness of how their behavior has been harming their children, or even sometimes realizing that they themselves enjoy life more when they aren’t abusive, despite all the privileges of abuse they have to give up. But it takes a long time for an abusive man to get to that point.

As I discussed in the Introduction, the majority of abusive men do not make deep and lasting changes even in a high-quality abuser program. However, if even a minority become nonabusive, or at least significantly less abusive, the job is worth doing. At least as important is that the program can help the abused woman develop clarity about her abuser’s patterns and manipulations and can share insights with her. For example, an abusive man’s underlying attitudes tend to leap out of him in the heat of debates and confrontations in his group, and the counselor can then assist the woman in identifying the thinking that is driving his behavior. Follow-up surveys by abuser programs have found that the support that the counselors give to
her
tends to be the aspect of the program that the woman finds most valuable. (These surveys indicate that an abuser program that is not focused on supporting the abused woman and that does not consider serving
her
to be its primary responsibility is severely limiting what it can accomplish and may even be contributing to her difficulties.)

For an abusive man to make genuine progress he needs to go through a complex and critical set of steps. To give my clients a road map of the process of change, I tell them the following story:

There once was a man whose neighbors had a large and beautiful maple tree growing behind their house. It gave shade in the hot summers, turned stunning colors of fire in the fall as it dropped its leaves, and stood against the winter snow as a magnificent wooden sculpture. But the man hated his neighbors’ tree, because the shade that it cast into his yard made his grass grow poorly and stunted his vegetable garden, which was his passion. He pressured the neighbors repeatedly to either cut the tree down or prune it drastically, and their response was always the same: “You are free to cut any branches that stick out over your property, but beyond that we are going to leave the tree alone, because it is beautiful and we love it. We are sorry about the shade it casts on your side, but that is what trees do.”

One summer the neighbors went away on vacation for a week, and the man decided to rid himself of his aggravation. He took a chainsaw and cut their tree to the ground, making careful cuts so that the tree would not fall on the neighbor’s house and destroy it but also directing it away from his own yard, so he wouldn’t have to clean it up. Then he walked home, fully satisfied if perhaps a little afraid. The next day he took his chainsaw, threw it in the dump, and prepared himself to deny having any idea who had brought the giant down, even though the truth would be obvious.

There was only one hole in his plan: He didn’t realize how popular his neighbors were, and he didn’t know how unbearable it would be to have the entire local population turn against him, to the point where no one would even look at him or talk to him. So the day finally came when the man realized his life would be wrecked for good unless he dealt with his destructive and selfish act. What steps did he have to take in order to set things right?

T
HE
S
TEPS TO
A
CCEPTING
R
ESPONSIBILITY

1. He had to
   admit,
   and
   admit fully,
   that he cut down the tree. He dreaded looking at people and saying, “Yeah, it was me”—even though they already knew—but he had to do it. He had to stop claiming that the neighbors had cut the tree down themselves so that they could blame him and turn everyone against him. And when he did admit his act, he also had to acknowledge what an old and impressive tree he had killed, rather than try to save face by insisting that it had been small and ugly.
   
2. He had to admit that he had cut it down
   on purpose,
   that his actions were a
   choice.
   He couldn’t claim that he had been so drunk or enraged that he didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t say, “Well, I just meant to put a little cut into the trunk as a warning to them, but I accidentally cut too far and the tree fell down.” In short, he had to
   stop making excuses.
   Furthermore, he had to admit that he had
   goals
   that he tried to further through his destructive behavior; he needed to be honest about his
   motives.
   
3. He had to acknowledge that what he did was
   wrong.
   This meant that he had to
   stop blaming
   the neighbors and playing up how victimized he had been by the shade. He had to make a sincere, heartfelt apology.
   
4. He had to
   accept the neighbors’ right to be angry
   about what he did, which meant that he had to be willing to
   truly acknowledge the effects of his actions.
   He had to take in the anguish he had caused. He had to stop asserting that they were “making too big a deal over one stupid tree” and that “it happened a long time ago and they should be over it by now.” Although apologizing was important, he also had to accept that saying he was sorry was only the beginning and that it meant nothing unless he also looked seriously at the damage he had done.
   
5. He had to
   accept the consequences of his actions.
   First, he had to provide reasonable monetary damage for the value of the destroyed tree. He then needed to plead guilty to the criminal charges, so that the neighbors would not have to go through the ordeal of testifying against him. He had to stop seeking sympathy from people for the problems he himself had caused, along the lines of: “Poor me, I had to pay out all this money that I can’t afford because of their tree when the only reason I cut it down was because they were wrecking my yard with it.”
   
6. He had to devote
   long-term and serious effort
   toward setting right what he had done. No amount of money can replace a mature tree; there’s no way to erase the effects of such a destructive act. The man therefore had to make amends. He needed to buy as large and healthy a young tree as he could find in a nursery and to plant it carefully behind the neighbors’ house. What’s more, he had to water the tree, protect it from deer, watch it for diseases, and fertilize it as necessary
   for years.
   A young tree takes a long time to securely establish itself.
   
7. He had to
   lay aside demands for forgiveness.
   He had to recognize that even if he sincerely were to take all of the steps I have described, the neighbors might still be left with pain, hurt, and bitterness, and the man had no right to tell them how long their bad feelings should last, especially since he was the cause. People might be nicer to him now that he had stopped denying what he did, but they wouldn’t necessarily ever like him. The neighbors might never want to be his friends—and why should they be? If they did decide to be friendly with him at some point, he should see their forgiveness as an act of kindness and
   not
   as his due for replacing the tree.
   
8. He had to
   treat the neighbors consistently well
   from that point forward. He couldn’t decide to stick it to them five years later by cutting down a rosebush, for example, and then say, “Okay, I messed up, but shouldn’t I get credit for the five years that I’ve been good? You can’t expect me to be perfect.” Asking someone not to cut down the neighbors’ flowers is not the same thing as expecting perfection.
   
9. He had to
   relinquish his negative view
   of his neighbors. He had to stop speaking badly about them to other people and accept that most—perhaps even all—of what he disliked about them actually had to do with their responses to the damage he had done and their refusal to be bullied by him. He had been the creator of their hostility toward him.
   

As I go over each of these responsibilities with my clients, I ask them if they have any disagreements. They concur that each of the above steps is fair and necessary—as long as we are talking about trees and neighbors. However, as soon as I start to go back through the story, reviewing how each piece applies to a man who has abused his partner, my clients begin backpedaling. They are reluctant to do the serious work of change, feeling that it would be easier to throw a new blanket over the moldy mattress and carry on with life as usual.

H
OW
T
HESE
S
TEPS
A
PPLY TO
A
BUSE

The box below summarizes how the steps in the tree story apply to an abusive man’s process of change.