The Abusive Man and Breaking Up

Friends tell me that he's really not doing well since we split up. I'm worried about him.

Last time I tried to leave him he scared me half to death. Sometimes it seems like he could kill me.

I don't want to take the children away from him; he's their father.

He was okay with our breakup until he found out I was dating somebody.

Van Spoke with A Raspy, modulated voice that complemented his sadly expressive blue eyes. His reddish-blond hair was always wrapped in a bandanna which, combined with his thick neck and upper arms, created a biker image. But his language did not fit the tough-guy stereotype.

He spoke of his pain, of the need to face up to oneself, of the process of denial and acceptance. He appeared to be his own harshest critic, referring frequently to his own selfishness, immaturity, and other “character flaws.” He stated openly that he was alcoholic and was attending at least one A.A meeting per day. He had not had a drink in almost eight months.

Van had, by his own description, nearly killed his partner Gail in a beating nine months earlier. He would gaze at the floor and speak slowly as he recalled this assault, the picture of remorse. “It was bad,” he would say. “Real bad. I'm lucky she's alive.” He was arrested and spent that night in jail, before his mother and brother bayled him out the next day. “I drank nonstop for three weeks afterward, trying to blot out what I had done, and then I woke up one morning with bruises all over me from some fight I had been in, I don't even know where, and I haven't had a drink since. I finally accepted the fact that I wasn't going to be able to run from myself forever, and I was going to have to deal with what I had done to Gail.” He did not join an abuser program until several months later, however, when he was required to do so by the court.

For weeks, Van was my star group member. He would challenge other men about their denial, about their efforts to blame their own behavior on their partners, about their need to take an honest and painful look at themselves. I pushed him a few times to stop using his alcoholism as an excuse for abusiveness and to examine more seriously his history of bullying of and violence toward Gail. He would react to my challenges with momentary irritation but then would soften and say, "I know I still have a lot of work left to do.” In short, he seemed like an abusive man who was interested in doing the hard work involved in making real changes.

Van and Gail had been separated since the severe beating. They were speaking from time to time but not sleeping together. Van said he thought it would be a long time before Gail would trust him again, and he would have to give her space.

However, over a period of three or four months, Van began to realize that Gail was not taking a break from their relationship in order to rebuild her trust in him, as he had believed. She was getting herself unhooked. As it dawned on him that she was thinking seriously about closing the door permanently, he started a rapid backslide before my eyes. First, he surprised me one day by saying that Gail "should really give our relationship another chance."

I was stunned. "Why on earth should a woman stay with a partner who gave her a beating that nearly killed her? I certainly wouldn't want to do it."

Van said, “The pain in our relationship wasn't all hers, you know. She hurt me a lot too.” I asked if that somehow justified battering her. “No,” he answered, “I'm not justifying it. I'm just saying it isn't like I was all bad and she was all good.”

"And so that means she owes you another chance? How many times do you get to beat a woman up before she stops owing you?" To this, Van just muttered under his breath and lightly shook his head.

At the next session I focused more time on Van, because separation is a time when abusers can be particularly destructive. Since the previous session, he had received the definitive word from Gail that their relationship was over and that she was going to start dating, making it particularly important for us to try to influence his thought process. He plunged quickly into a homily about how hard he was working on himself in contrast to Gail, “who is going nowhere and who isn't dealing with her issues at all.” I asked how Gail's progress was going to be assisted by getting back together with an abusive man. “Hey,” he said, “I'm a lot better for her than those losers she's hanging around with now. Most of them are still drinking and acting totally immature.”

Van's group was alarmed by his reversion, and members raced to try to get him back on track, pointing out to him that (1) he was claiming to have made great changes, but his entitled insistence that Gail owed him loyalty was evidence of an abuser who wasn't changing; he was slipping back into minimizing how destructive his abusiveness and violence had been to Gail, to an extreme where he was convincing himself that he was a more constructive presence in her life than other people were; and he was failing to accept the reality that a woman does not have to be “all good” in order to have the right to live free of abuse. I kept an additional thought to myself, which was that based on my conversation with her I was confident that Gail's life was not "going nowhere" and that her primary goal at that point was to heal from what he had done to her. When he made disparaging references to "her issues," he was ignoring the reality that her issues were 90 percent him. I remained silent on this point because I was concerned, given the state of mind he was in, that the better he understood her healing process, the more effectively he would take steps to sabotage it.

Van was not open to his group's feedback the way he had been in earlier months. His heels were dug in, as we could see in the digusted shaking of his head and the dismissive curl of his lip. The group had stumbled upon a core aspect of Van's entitlement—as tends to happen with each client sooner or later—and we weren't going to take it apart in a few short weeks. We hoped that we could reach him eventually though, for Van still had six months to go of the eleven the court had ordered him to spend in our program.

He never gave us the chance, unfortunately. Less than three weeks later, overwhelmed by his outraged entitlement, he approached Gail in a restaurant in front of numerous witnesses, called her a “fucking bitch,” and walked off flashing her the finger. His verbal assault violated a restraining order barring him from approaching her, and since he was already on probation for his grave attack on her, he was jailed for a minimum of six months. Gail had little desire to see Van behind bars, but in this case his incarceration was a blessing, as it gave her an uninterrupted opportunity to move on with her life, which she did. (Later in this chapter we will look at strategies for getting away from a frightening relationship safely.)

What an Abuser Does If You Are Leaving Him

Breaking up with an abuser can be very hard to do. In fact, leaving a nonabusive partner is generally easier, contrary to what many people believe. Few abusers readily allow themselves to be left. When they feel a partner starting to get stronger, beginning to think for herself more, slipping out from under domination, abusers move to their endgame. Some of their more common maneuvers include:

- Abusers Responses to A Possible Breakup Promising to change Entering therapy or an abuser program Not drinking, attending A.A Making apologies Telling you that you will be lost without him Telling you that no one else will want to be with you

Threatening suicide Saying that you are abandoning him, making you feel guilty

Threatening to kidnap or take custody of the children Threatening to leave you homeless or with no financial resources Turning very nice Getting other people to pressure you into giving him another chance Taking care of things that you have been complaining about for a long time (e. g., finally fixing a hazardous

situation in the house, getting a job, agreeing that you can go out with your friends)

Behaving in self-destructive ways so that you will worry or feel sorry for him (e.g., not eating, drinking heavily, skipping work, never talking to his friends)

Spreading rumors about you, trying to ruin your friendships or reputation

Starting a new relationship/affair to make you jealous or angry

Insisting that he already has changed Spreading confidential information about you to humiliate you

Threatening or assaulting anyone you try to start a new

relationship with, or anyone who is helping you

Getting you pregnant

Stalking you

Physically or sexually assaulting you

Trashing your house or car

Threatening to harm you or kill you

Each abuser uses a different mix of the above tactics, and some let go somewhat more easily than others. Strategies of control that appear contradictory may go hand in hand. For example, he may insist adamantly one day, “You should be able to tell that I've changed,” and then call the next night to say, “If you don't give this relationship another chance, you're going to find out what I'm really capable of.” One day on the phone he may tell you that his love for you will never die, but when his poetic language doesn't succeed in persuading you to meet him for a drink, he will abruptly switch to yelling: “I don't give a shit about you anyhow, so just let your life continue down the stinking hole it's in!” He doesn't care that these pieces don't fit together, because he is intently focused on a single desire: to get you back under his control.

He knows he used to be able to control you with charm, affection, and promises. He also remembers how well intimidation or aggression worked at other times. Now both of these tools are losing their effectiveness, so he tries to increase the voltages. He may switch erratically back and forth between the two like a doctor who cycles a patient through a range of antibiotics, trying to find the one that will get the infection under control. And the analogy is an apt one, because an abuser sees his (ex-) partner's growing strength and independence as a sickness rather than as the harbinger of health that it actually is.

Promises that an abuser makes during this period can be persuasive, especially if they are combined with sincere-sounding apologies or if he takes some concrete initiative such as quitting drinking, locating a therapist, or joining an abuser program. However, once he succeeds in getting you to reunite with him, he gradually plows his way back into the usual ruts, dropping counseling because he “can't afford it,” saying he will go back to “a little” drinking because he can “handle it,” and so forth. Before long, daily life has returned to its former contours.

My clients make flip-flopping statements during breakups about who is responsible for the dissolution of the relationship, bouncing between blaming everything on themselves and casting all fault on to the woman. Making it her fault is closer to their real thinking; the blaming of themselves is largely a way to win sympathy from other people, including abuse counselors, who can get drawn in by a theatrical show of pained guilt. And in an ironic twist, the more he says that the separation is his own fault, the more friends and relatives are tempted to pressure the woman to believe that he will change.

When one of my clients takes this mea culpa stance, I ask him to describe in detail how exactly his behavior drove his partner away. Eight times out of ten the man can give me only two or three examples, or none. In other words, he doesn't really believe that he is abusive, and my request for extensive specifics smokes him out. If he does manage to list a few things he did wrong, they often are far afield from the core of his destructiveness, as in comments like "I should have made her a higher priority; we didn't do things together enough," or they are actually backhanded remarks to get more digs in against her, such as, "I used to walk away from her because of the insane rages she goes into, but I should have realized that my leaving just made her feel even worse."

The volatile, abusive, and sometimes dangerous reactions that abusers can have when relationships draw to a close have often been considered, especially by psychologists, to be evidence of the man's “fear of abandonment.” But women have fears of abandonment that are just as great as men's, yet they rarely stalk or kill their partners after a breakup. Not only that, but many abusers are vicious to their ex-partners even when they do not desire a reunion or when they initiated the breakup themselves. The clue to how an abuser handles separation lies in the same thinking that has been causing his controlling and abusive behavior throughout the relationship and that has driven his partner away from him.

How Abusers View Separation

Van's internal process, and the destructive behavior it led him to, captures the essence of how an abusive man perceives the ending of a relationship. Let's look at the central elements of his outlook:

Abuse Is No Reason to End a Relationship.

Van was unwilling to accept that his brutal mistreatment of Gail was adequate reason for her to leave him. Why? First, he believed that the pain Gail sometimes caused him during their relationship outweighed his abuse of her. If Van can convince himself that he has an even balance sheet, despite his severe physical assault, imagine how easily a purely psychological abuser can do so (even though the reality is that emotional abuse can do just as much damage).

Second, Van believed that it was unreasonable to expect a man to be nonabusive unless his partner never hurt his feelings or failed to cater to him. He felt that we were being unfair and unrealistic about a man's inherent nature, as if we were asking a tiger to be vegetarian. Without saying so directly, he revealed his attitude that a woman needs to accept the fact that a certain amount of abuse just comes with the territory of being involved with a man, unless she can be perfect.

“When I Promise to Be Kinder in the Future, That Should Be Enough.”

No matter how many times in the past Van had broken his promises to change, he still believed that this time Gail should see that he really meant it and should give him another chance. There was no limit in his mind to how many “other chances” he should get; he felt entitled to an endless series.

To make matters worse, Van felt that Gail was supposed to accept his rose-colored vision of the future even though he was simultaneously blaring loud warning signals that he hadn't changed. My clients demand forgiveness while continuing to insult, threaten, demand immediate responses, attend only to their own needs, and more. According to his mind-set, she should believe that his abuse has stopped when he says it has stopped, regardless of what she sees in front of her own eyes.

“There Is No Limit to How Much She Should Be Willing to 'Work On' Our Relationship.”

The abuser feels entitled to end a relationship any time he feels like it, but he assigns no such privilege to his partner. Around breakup time, my clients grouse bitterly to me along the lines of:

- “Nowadays, people just throw relationships in the trash as soon as it gets difficult. There's no commitment anymore to sticking it out and making it work.”

- “I guess our marriage vows didn't mean anything to her.”

- “She says she cares so much about our children, but it's no big deal to her if they have a broken home.”

- “She's prepared to just throw away everything we had because she's found some other guy.”

No woman in any of my cases has ever left a man the first time he behaved abusively (not that doing so would be wrong). By the time she moves to end her relationship, she has usually lived with years of verbal abuse and control and has requested uncountable numbers of times that her partner stop cutting her down or frightening her. In most cases she has also requested that he stop drinking, or go to counseling, or talk to a clergyperson, or take some other step to get help. She has usually left him a few times, or at least started to leave, and then gotten back together with him.

Don't any of these actions on her part count as demonstrating her commitment? Has she ever done enough, and gained the right to protect herself? In the abuser's mind, the answer is no.

Once again, the abuser's double standards rule the day. He doesn't consider his chronic verbal abuse, or even violence, to constitute a failure to "love and cherish," but her decision to move away for safety does. His affairs automatically deserve forgiveness, whereas any affairs she may have he considers proof of her low moral character and lack of caring. And his exposure of the children to his degrading and bullying of their mother doesn't keep him from awarding himself the title of Children's Protector, the one who wants to give them a “stable family life” while their “selfish” mother tries to split them apart.

She Is Still Responsible for My Feelings and Well-being.

In the abusive man's self-serving value system, the woman may be responsible for his needs and feelings even after she declares that she isn't his partner anymore. So if he loses his job, or his new fling doesn't work out, or his mother gets ill, he still feels entitled to have her take care of him emotionally. In particular, he tends to make her endlessly responsible for his hurt feelings from their relationship or from their breakup.

“The Relationship Is Over When I Say It's Over.”

I repeatedly run into the following scenario: A new client in the abuse program is describing his most serious incident of abuse, as all participants are required to do, and he excuses his actions by saying, “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.

She Belongs to Me.

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. At worst, his efforts to reestablish his ownership may include following her and monitoring her movements, scaring people who try to assist her, threatening men she is interested in dating, kidnapping the children, and physically attacking her or people close to her. For abused women separation is a time of particularly high risk of homicide or attempted homicide, which can sometimes involve murderous assaults on her new boyfriend, her children, or on other people she cares about.

Numerous studies have found that mistreatment of women by abusers tends to continue for a substantial period after separation and commonly escalates to levels worse than those when the couple was together. Particularly common in postseparation is rape or other forms of sexual assault, which conveys a powerful message of ownership: “You continue to be mine, and I retain my rights to your body until I decide otherwise.”

If you are concerned that your partner may be capable of extreme violence—even if he has not been violent in the past—take careful safety precautions (see "Leaving an Abuser Safely," page 225).

Traumatic Bonding

One of the great tragedies of all forms of abuse is that the abused person can become emotionally dependent on the perpetrator through a process called traumatic bonding. The assaults that an abuser makes on the woman's self-opinion, his undermining of her progress in life, the wedges he drives between her and other people, the psychological effects left on her when he turns scary—all can combine to cause her to need him more and more. This is a bitter psychological irony. Child abuse works in the same way; in fact, children can become more strongly attached to abusive parents than to nonabusive ones.

Survivors of hostage-taking situations or of torture can exhibit similar effects, attempting to protect their tormentors from legal consequences, insisting that the hostage takers actually had their best interests at heart or even describing them as kind and caring individuals—a phenomenon known as the Stockholm syndrome. I saw these dynamics illustrated by a young boy who got a shock from touching an electric fence and was so frightened by it that he grabbed on to the fence for security—and wouldn't let go as each successive shock increased his panic, until his sister was able to reach him and pull him off.

Almost no abuser is mean or frightening all the time. At least occasionally he is loving, gentle, and humorous and perhaps even capable of compassion and empathy. This intermittent, and usually unpredictable, kindness is critical to forming traumatic attachments. When a person, male or female, has suffered harsh, painful treatment over an extended period of time, he or she naturally feels a flood of love and gratitude toward anyone who brings relief, like the surge of affection one might feel for the hand that offers a glass of water on a scorching day. But in situations of abuse, the rescuer and the tormentor are the very same person. When a man stops screaming at his partner and calling her a “useless piece of shit,” and instead offers to take her on a vacation, the typical emotional response is to feel grateful to him. When he keeps her awake badgering her for sex in the middle of the night and then finally quiets down and allows her to get some of the sleep that she so desperately craves, she feels a soothing peace from the relief of being left alone.

Your abusive partner's cycles of moving in and out of periods of cruelty can cause you to feel very close to him during those times when he is finally kind and loving. You can end up feeling that the nightmare of his abusiveness is an experience the two of you have shared and are escaping from together, a dangerous illusion that trauma can cause. I commonly hear an abused woman say about her partner, “He really knows me,” or “No one understands me the way he does.” This may be true, but the reason he seems to understand you well is that he has studied ways to manipulate your emotions and control your reactions. At times he may seem to grasp how badly he has hurt you, which can make you feel close to him, but it's another illusion; if he could really be empathic about the pain he has caused, he would stop abusing you for good.

Society has tended to label a woman "masochistic" or "joining with him in his sickness" for feeling grateful or attached to an abusive man. But, in fact, studies have shown that there is little gender difference in the traumatic bonding process and that males become as attached to their captors as women do.

The trauma of chronic abuse can also make a woman develop fears of being alone at night, anxiety about her competence to manage her life on her own, and feelings of isolation from other people, especially if the abuser has driven her apart from her friends or family. All of these effects of abuse can make it much more difficult to separate from an abusive partner than from a nonabusive one. The pull to reunify can therefore be great. Researchers have found that most abused women leave the abuser multiple times before finally being able to stay away for good. This prolonged process is largely due to the abuser's ongoing coercion and manipulation but also is caused by the trauma bonds he has engendered in his partner.

One exercise that can help you address this trap involves making a list of all the ways, including emotional ones, in which you feel dependent on your partner, then making another list of big or small steps you might take to begin to become more independent. These lists can guide you in focusing your energy in the directions you need to go.

Why He Doesn't Accept Your Request to “Take a Breather”

Have you ever attempted to take a brief period of separation from your partner? Perhaps you had been considering getting out of your relationship but were afraid of your partner's reaction, so you asked for “a little time apart” instead of breaking up outright. Or maybe you weren't sure what you wanted to do and just craved some time away to consider where to go from here without having to deal daily with his bullying, criticism, and watching over you. You may have attempted to reassure him that the relationship wasn't ending, that you still wanted to “work on getting back together,” but that you just needed a break. You probably requested that the two of you stay in separate places for a period of a few weeks or months and that you see each other little or not at all. You may have made other specific requests, such as not to speak at all, even by telephone, so that you could get a complete break. You may have asked for an agreement that you could each see other people during this period, or specifically requested the opposite. The great majority of the abused women I work with try at some point to get time out of the pressure cooker.

My clients, however, rarely honor their partners' requests. At the beginning the man presents himself as supporting the plan, saying, "I agree with her that we need some time apart to just let everything cool off, and then talk it over with level heads." But he doesn't think so for long.

He soon starts cutting around the edges of the agreement. If she asked that he not call for a while, he sends a card. Then he calls on some pretext, perhaps a bill that has to be paid or an invitation for her from his sister, and throws in offhandedly, "So, how are you?" to try to get a conversation started. He may keep showing up "by coincidence" at places where she happens to be. He keeps chipping away at her resolve as much as he can, until she cracks and sees him. Once they are face-to-face, he pours on the sweetness and charm, reminiscent of his romantic persona in the early, glory days of the relationship, and sees if he can cajole or manipulate her into bed; he may sense that once they've had sex, she'll be hooked in again, a strategy that I have often seen my clients succeed with. One way or another, the woman never seems to end up getting the decompression time that she knew was indispensable to her well-being.

Why doesn't he allow the break to happen? On a conscious level he may simply miss her, but down deep he has other interests. He experiences the separation as a declaration by his partner that she is capable of surviving without him, that she is the best judge of what is good for her, that her needs shouldn't always take a backseat to his, that her will has force. These messages represent a powerful summary of everything that he does not want in his relationship, and he feels driven to move quickly to prove them false.

The abuser is afraid of what his partner may discover if she succeeds in getting a respite from his control. She may see how good it feels to live without put-downs and pressure. She may notice that there are other people in the world, both women and men, who respect her and treat her well, and may even observe that some of her female friends are treated as equals by their partners.

She may start to think her own thoughts, without him there to monitor her reflections and channel them toward the views he wants her to have. Above all, she might discover how much better off she is without him. In short, he doesn't tolerate the break because on some level he senses that it is too healthy and healing for the woman. He wants her to hear his voice and see his face, because he believes he can destroy her resolve.

Does he think carefully through these concerns?

Probably not entirely. He reacts largely on automatic, based on ruts in his thinking and behavior that have been deepening for years. And yet, I also keep observing how much more aware my clients are of their own strategies than you might expect; when they are upset with me, as they so often are, they often forget to keep their masks on, and they blurt out their honest thoughts and plans.

The Abuser Who Wants the Relationship to End

What if your partner is the one who breaks off the relationship, or what if he's in complete agreement that you two don't belong together? The good news is that, if you don't have children with him, he may stay largely out of your hair. Perhaps he is interested in another woman or just wants to return to pursuing his fantasy of the dream girl who does everything for him and never challenges him. Or maybe something else altogether is occupying his mind.

I regret to say that even then peace is not an entirely sure thing (although I have not often heard of physical assaults by an abuser postseparation if he accepts the breakup, except in cases of ongoing conflicts over the children). Even the abusive man who is ready to be single again may still crave retaliation for all the ways he feels you hurt him, which in his distorted perceptual system may include all the times you defended yourself, questioned the superiority of his knowledge and judgment, or refused to simply be a carbon copy of him. So he may spread distorted stories about the history of your relationship or tell outright lies to try to turn people against you. Since he has to see himself as the more powerful one, he may declare that he broke things off while you “begged” him for another chance and that you “promised to change.” These kinds of aftershocks of abusive behavior can be painful.

An abuser who accepts the end of the relationship, or even desires it, may nonetheless continue to try to settle old scores with you through the children, a matter we explore further in Chapter 10.

There are cases, of course, where the woman genuinely wants to continue the relationship and the abuser does not. My clients sometimes leave a woman to punish her. Women in this position can experience the abuser's departure as one final slap in the face following a long line of previous ones —figuratively or literally—that leaves her feeling even more humiliated and unlovable.

Therefore it does not help an abused woman when people say to her: “What are you upset about? You're lucky to be rid of him.” Anyone who wants to support an abused woman's recovery and empowerment needs to have room for both her sadness and her outrage about being left and to understand that his exit was just one more way she was walked on.

Abusers who take off often leave other damage in their wake besides the emotional or physical injuries to the woman. Debts, destroyed belongings, pregnancy, or traumatized children may be dumped in her lap. Communities that want to support abused women need to recognize that the abuser can create difficulties that endure long beyond his departure.

Leaving an Abuser Safely

Attempting to determine the level of risk that a particular abuser will become physically violent is a complex and imprecise process. If you are concerned that your partner may react destructively or violently to being left, listen carefully to your intuitions even if he has not been violent, or not extremely so, in the past. A recent study found that women's own predictions regarding future violence by their abusive partners were far more accurate than assessments based on any other factor.

Separation can be an especially risky time. I was close to a case recently in which a woman left a psychological abuser who became increasingly threatening and scary over the months after she left him, to the point where she went as far as making arrangements with relatives regarding who should care for her two children in the event of her death. And although he had never hit her during their relationship, he tragically did in fact kill her, hiding a block away from the courthouse to ambush her as she was leaving a hearing where she had obtained a restraining order against him, after which he committed suicide. (As a result of a brief speech I gave about this homicide death, I have come to know her heartbroken parents personally.)

Assessing the Potential Violence of an Abuser

The danger signs below can be useful whether or not you are currently thinking of leaving your partner. Some combination of these elements has been found to be present frequently—though not always—in cases where abusers have committed the most seriously violent acts. Pay attention to your own inner voice as you consider these indicators:

Danger Signs in Abusive Men

- He is extremely jealous and possessive.

- His violent behavior and threats have been escalating.

- He follows you, monitors your whereabouts, or stalks you in other ways.

- You are taking steps to end the relationship or have already done so.

- He was violent toward you during one or more of your pregnancies.

- He has been sexually violent toward you.

- He has threatened to kill you or hurt you badly, has choked you, or has threatened you with a weapon.

- He has access to weapons and is familiar with their use.

• He seems obsessed with you.

- He is depressed, suicidal, or shows signs of not caring what happens to him.

• He isn't close to anyone.

- He has a significant criminal history.

- He uses or threatens violence against other people.

• He abuses substances heavily.

• He has been abusive to children.

- His past violence toward you, or toward other partners, has been frequent or severe.

- He has killed or abused pets, or has used other terror tactics.

• He uses pornography.

- He exhibited extreme behaviors when you made previous attempts to leave.

- He is familiar with your routines, the addresses of your friends and relatives, the location of your workplace, or other personal information he can use to locate you.

There is, regrettably, no science to using these indicators. It would be misleading for me to say, for example, “Three to five 'yes' answers reflect moderate danger, six and up mean 'severe danger,”” or offer a similar interpretation, because the reality is not that simple. Some guides to assessing the risk of violence from abusers have created such “low-, moderate-, and high-risk” categories and by so doing can encourage women to underestimate the danger they are in by causing them to ignore their intuition. A small number of abusers who kill or severely injure their partners do so with few or none of the above elements known to be present, which is all the more reason to rely ultimately on your own “gut” feelings of how dangerous he is.

Safety Planning

The fact that you are even wondering how far your partner's abuse might go suggests to me that you have already seen aspects of him that are disquietingly mysterious or frightening. I urge you to seek assistance from a program for abused women (see "Resources") and to create a strategic safety plan with an abuse specialist through that program. Safety plans can involve two different sets of steps, one for increasing your safety while living with your partner and another for if and when you decide to leave him. Bear in mind that the process of leaving an abusive man can be risky, so if you are preparing for a breakup put some extra thought into the kinds of precautions that you can take. Specialists who work with abused women report that those women who succeed in leaving and staying away almost always have a plan before they go.

A safety plan while you are living with your abusive partner can include the following elements, among many others:

- Plan different escape routes from your house in case your partner becomes violent, and plan where you would go if you needed to stay away overnight.

- Hide spare car keys and important documents (birth certificates, health cards, bank cards) in places where they are safe and where you could grab them and leave quickly.

- Try to get out of dangerous places during arguments, such as leaving the kitchen where there are knives and other sharp objects the abuser could use to assault you.

- Obtain a private post office box or some other address you can use to receive confidential mail.

- Set code words with friends or relatives and with your children that indicate an emergency, and plan how they are to respond if you say the code word in person or over the telephone.

- Open a secret bank account so that you will have access to funds should you need to flee.

- Keep a working phone in a room with a door that locks so that you will be able to call for help in an emergency.

• Carry a cell phone.

- Obtain a firearm permit so that you can carry pepper spray.

- Stay away from drugs or alcohol yourself to make sure that your judgment is never impaired, and seek substance-abuse treatment for yourself if necessary.

- Call the abused women's hotline if you are afraid, and call the police if the danger is immediate.

After you leave your abusive partner, there are additional items you can add to your safety plan, a few of which include:

• Change the locks on your home.

- Inform neighbors of the danger and give them descriptions or photographs of the abuser and his car.

- Inform people at your workplace of the potential danger to you.

- Tell your children not to talk to the abuser and to seek assistance immediately if they see him.

- Advise the local police department of the risk to you, including any past threats or violence by your ex-partner, and ask what special services or protections might be available.

- Inform the children's schoolteachers and administrators of the risk, and provide them with a photograph of the abuser and other information, including a copy of your restraining order if you have one.

- Teach your children how to dial 911 from home and cell phones.

- Vary the routes that you and your children travel.

• If you plan to involve the court, such as by seeking a restraining order, contact a court advocate if one is available, and develop an additional safety plan with the advocate that specifically addresses how you can most safely use the court process. If you do obtain a restraining order, keep a copy on your person at all times and leave additional copies in your home, vehicles, and workplace.

These are selected examples of plans you can make, ideally with the assistance of an abuse specialist, to increase your safety and protect your children. You can call an abuse hotline and develop a safety plan without even providing your name or telephone number, ensuring your complete privacy. If you can go to the abused women's program and meet with an advocate face-to-face, all the better. I also strongly recommend the books When Love Goes Wrong and It's My Life Now, both listed in the “Resources” section, for any woman who is struggling to get safe from a frightening partner.

If you are afraid of your abusive partner it is important to make a safety plan even if you do not plan to leave him at this point. If he has demonstrated that he has a capacity for violence, or you suspect that he does, there is every reason to start planning now for how you will keep yourself and your children safe should a dangerous situation arise in the future.

Some psychologically abused women feel confident that their partners would never escalate to violence or threats. However, my experience is that most abusive men—though not all—do become physically frightening sooner or later, even if they never follow through with using violence. It makes sense for every abused woman to spend some time considering how she will respond if the unexpected happens.

If you are prepared to leave your relationship, safety planning becomes even more important. If you are afraid of your partner, don't tell him that you are breaking up with him until you have a clear plan and feel that you can inform him in a safe way. Then break all contact with him. Staying out of touch with an abusive ex-partner can be very difficult.

The more afraid you are of him, the more tempted you may feel to check up on how he is doing, because in the past your safety may have depended on your constant awareness of his moods and readiness to respond to them. But making contact with him can be very dangerous as he may sound friendly and say that he just wants to see you for one final talk or to say good-bye, and then use that opportunity to attack you physically or sexually. I have been aware of a few cases where the man made an innocent-sounding excuse to get together “just once” and then murdered the woman for having left him. It is natural to have the hope of staying friends with an ex-partner, but this is rarely possible with an abusive man and is absolutely impossible with one who is physically dangerous to you. And if he doesn't choose to hurt you, he may lure you into becoming reinvolved with him instead.

Abused Women With Children

Ending a relationship with an abusive man can be considerably more complicated for a woman with children, especially if the abuser is the children's legal father (biological or adoptive). The risk that the abuser will try to harm the children, turn them against you, or attempt to win custody of them through the legal system requires an additional strategic planning process. These issues are examined in detail in the next chapter.

If you do decide to flee abruptly, take your children with you if you possibly can and take their birth certificates, social security cards, and passports. Some women are in so much danger that they are forced to leave their children behind, but the abuser then may go to court for custody, saying that she "abandoned" them.

Key Points to Remember

- When a breakup happens against an abuser's will, he may define his ex-partner's decision as a provocative declaration of independence and may go to war to prove that she belongs to him.

- Leaving an abuser is hard to do, but with time and planning you can succeed.

- As a relationship dissolves, and for a long while thereafter, an abused woman should be especially alert to her own safety and take steps to protect herself.

- After breaking up with an abusive man, wait at least a few months before becoming involved with a new partner. Taking time to heal emotionally from the abuse you have endured can be critical to helping you choose a nonabusive partner next time.

• Read It's My Life Now (see “Resources”).

• Your life belongs to no one but you.

Part 3

The Abusive Man in the World

Abusive Men as Parents

He's terrible to me, but he's a really good father.

He took no interest in the children until I left him, and then right away he filed for custody.

My children are freaked out and don't want to go on visitation with him, but the court won't listen to me.

I couldn't manage without him, because the children don't listen to me.

It is Saturday Afternoon, and excitement is high in the Turner family. Randy, who is eleven, and his big sister, Alex, thirteen, are getting ready to go with their parents to a big birthday bash for their twin cousins. Their mother, Helen, is helping them get their presents wrapped and choose what to wear, and periodically intervening to sort out quarrels between the two of them, which seem to erupt every few minutes. Tom, the father, is in the garage trying to fix Randy's dirt bike and is covered with grease.

Helen's anxiety is mounting as the hour gets later, because Tom is doing nothing about getting ready to leave and keeps saying, “Get off my fucking back, I already told you I'd be ready on time. I can't drop this in the middle.” Tensions between Randy and Alex are also escalating, and Randy finally jumps on Alex and starts punching her. Helen hears Alex screaming, goes running in to pull Randy off her, and in the process gets punched twice by Alex herself. Randy yells at her, “You always side with Alex, you bitch,” and goes into his room and slams the door. Alex is crying hard and says to her mother, “You have to do something about him; I can't take it anymore. I swear, if he hits me one more time I'm going to kill him. He's out of control!”

Helen stays with Alex for a few minutes, then starts to put things into the car. The time to leave has passed. Tom finally comes in from the garage and starts to scrub his hands in a leisurely fashion.

He then starts to look at the newspaper, and Helen snaps at him, “What are you doing? We need to go.” Tom cuts her with a glare that makes her heart stop and says, “I was just seeing what time the game is on tonight. But since you mention it, maybe I should check out what else might be interesting.” Then, with a cold sneer on his face, he takes the newspaper to the couch, puts up his feet, and begins to peruse the pages in earnest. Helen storms furiously upstairs. Ten minutes later Tom is still sitting on the couch.

Helen calls to him, “We're already going to be nearly a half hour late; the children are afraid of missing the games.”

Tom's lips form an icy smile, and he answers, “I guess you should have thought of that before deciding to give me a ration of your shit.”

Helen yells, “Oh, you asshole!”

At this point Randy emerges from his room and starts down the stairs. “I see you're hysterical, as usual,” he tosses flippantly at his mother as he goes. When he gets downstairs, he sees that his father is nowhere near ready to go, and he looks at the clock. He considers saying something but thinks better of it; he recognizes the signs of his father's anger, even when they are not outwardly obvious, and he doesn't want to make himself the target. So he goes back upstairs, tells Alex what is happening, and they both go looking for Helen, who is sitting crying on her bed.

Alex says urgently, “Come on, Mom, let's just go without Dad. The party's already started, we're missing it.” Helen shakes her head no. Alex pleads, “Why not? Why can't we just go?”

Helen responds simply, “We're not going without him," not wanting to explain to the children how their father would make her pay if they did.

Randy then says, “Please go and apologize to him, Mom. You know that's all he's looking for, and then he'll get up and we can go.”

Helen's tears stop, and her voice gets a hard edge. “I didn't do anything to him, Randy. Why don't you go ask him to apologize to me? What did I do?”

Randy's voice turns condescending, as if his mother is being stupid. “Right, Mom. When has Dad ever apologized for anything? Don't be ridiculous. I guess we can forget going to the party —that's basically what you're saying.”

Then their father calls from downstairs, “Come on, let's get going.” He has quietly put away his paper and cleaned himself up. Randy and Alex brighten and run off to grab their things. Helen can barely lift herself to her feet, feeling psychologically assaulted from all sides. She looks ashen for an hour or more afterward.

When they are almost out the door, Tom sees for the first time Alex's outfit, which he considers too sexy, and he barks at her, "You go right back upstairs, young lady, and put on something decent. You aren't going to the party looking like a prostitute."

Alex is on the verge of tears again, because she had been excited about what she was going to wear. "But Mom and I picked my clothes out together," she protests, a helpless whine in her voice. "She said I looked fine."

Tom glares at Helen, and his voice lays down the law: “If you aren't changed in two minutes, we're leaving and you're staying here!” Alex runs crying upstairs to throw on a different outfit.

In the car on the way to the party, Tom snaps out of his grumpiness, joking with the children. His humor includes cutting references to Helen's emotional outbursts and overanxiety, which are cleverly funny in their viciousness. The children can't help laughing, although Alex feels resentful toward both parents and guilty toward her mother even as she giggles. Helen is silent.

At the party, Tom acts as if nothing is wrong. Helen makes an excuse about being sick, since it is obvious to people that she is not herself. Tom is entertaining to both the adults and the children at the party, to the extent of giving each child a twirl around in the yard. Helen can see the impression that Tom makes on people and feels that it would be few-tul to attempt to describe to anyone what transpired before the party.

There are a few unfamiliar people at the party, to whom Tom introduces Alex as his "girlfriend," which he considers a charming joke. At one point he comments to some relatives on Alex's appearance, saying, "She's developing into quite an attractive young lady, isn't she?" Alex is nearby and feels humiliated.

Tom sees her discomfort and says, "What, can't you take a compliment?" and there is laughter all around. He then gives her a hug, kisses her on the head, and tells his amused audience, “She's a great kid.” Alex forces a smile.

When they get home from the party and the children are upstairs, Helen mentions to Tom that Randy hit Alex again that afternoon and that this time he hurt her. Tom responds, “Helen, welcome to the world. Siblings fight, okay?

Or maybe you haven't heard, maybe that hasn't been on Oprah yet. Alex is two years older than Randy, and she's bigger. She loves to really play up being hurt, because she knows Mommy will come running and feel sorry for her, and it will be Big Bad Randy who's to blame, while Alex is all innocence. You're so naive.”

Helen smarts from the series of barbs but forces herself to answer calmly, “I think we should talk to the school psychologist about it and get some suggestions.”

Tom rises rapidly to his feet, instantly transformed as if he had just caught fire. He takes two steps toward Helen, pointing his finger and yelling, causing her heart to race. “You get those people in our business and you'll be sorry! You have no fucking idea what you are doing. You should use some damned judgment, you stupid idiot!” He stomps out to the garage, turns on the light, and goes back to work on Randy's bike, listening to the game on the radio. He does not come back in until after Helen has fallen asleep.

Life with an Abuser in the home can be as stressful and confusing for the children as it is for their mother. They watch the arguments; they feel the tension. When they hear screaming and name-calling, they worry about their parents' feelings.

They have visions of the family splitting up; if the abuser is their father or a father figure, the prospect of separation is a dreaded one. If the abuser is physically scary, sometimes punching walls, knocking over chairs, or striking their mother, then a sharper kind of fear grips the children and may preoccupy them even during the calm periods in the home. Following incidents of abuse they may be wracked with guilt, feeling that they either caused their mother to be abused or should have found some way to have prevented it.

Witnessing incidents of abuse is just the beginning of what the children endure, however. Abuse sends out shock waves that touch every aspect of family functioning. Hostility creeps into mothers' relationships with their children, and siblings find themselves pitted against one other.

Factions form and shift. Children's feelings about each parent can swing to extremes, from times of hating the abuser to periods of idealizing him and blaming the mother for the fighting. Mothers struggle to keep their relationships with their children strong in the face of the wedges driven in by the abuser, and siblings find ways to support one another and offer protection. These wild cross-currents make family life turbulent.

(For simplicity, I refer in this chapter to the abuser as the children's “father,” but most of the themes I describe can apply equally to a stepfather or to a mother's live-in partner.)

Why Abusiveness So Often Extends to Parenting Issues

Question 14:

What Are Abusive Men Like As Fathers?

Although I have worked with some clients who draw sharp lines around their mistreatment of their partners, so that their children neither see the abusive dynamics nor get pulled into them, most abusers exhibit aspects of their abusive mentality in their role as parents. There are various reasons why a man's abusiveness tends to affect his parenting choices, including the following:

1. Each important decision that parents make has an impact on everyone in the family. Consider, for example, the decision that many parents grapple with concerning whether a six-year-old is ready to start first grade or should wait a year. Delaying a year may mean another year during which the mother can't work many hours outside the home, which affects the family finances. The child may have to be up and out early to catch the bus, which affects how much sleep the parents get.

A younger sibling may suddenly not have the first-grader at home as a playmate anymore and so may be moody and demanding of attention during the day. How is an abuser likely to respond to this complex picture? He is likely to continue his usual tendency to consider his own judgment superior to his partner's and to be selfishly focused on how any changes will affect him, rather than on what works best for the family as a whole. Just because there are children involved, is his entire approach to decision making going to suddenly change? Not likely.

2. At the core of the abusive mind-set is the man's view of his partner as a personal possession. And if he sees her as his fiefdom, how likely is he to also see the children as being subject to his ultimate reign? Quite. If he is the children's legal father, he sees them as extensions of himself; otherwise he tends to see them as extensions of her. Either way, his mentality of ownership is likely to shape his parental actions.

3. It is next to impossible for the abuser to keep his treatment of the mother a complete secret from the children the way he does with other people, because they are almost always around. So he chooses instead to hook them into the patterns and dynamics of the abuse, manipulating their perceptions and trying to win their loyalty.

4. Children are a tempting weapon for an abuser to use against the mother. Nothing inflicts more pain on a caring parent, male or female, than hurting one of his or her children or causing damage to the parent-child relationship. Many abusers sense that they can gain more power by using the children against their partners than by any method other than the most overtly terrorizing assaults or threats. To their destructive mind-set, the children are just too tempting a tool of abuse to pass up.

Revisiting the Abusive Mind-Set: Parenting Implications

I return now to the Turners, whom we met at the opening of this chapter, to look piece by piece at the dynamics that are being played out. The central elements of the abusive mind-set act as our guide:

Control

From observing Tom's behavior, we learn one of his unspoken rules:

You Do Not Tell Me to Hurry Up. I Get to Take as Long as I Please. If You Pressure Me, I Will Punish You by Taking a Lot Longer.

Tom is not about to abandon his system of rules and punishments—which are fundamental to an abusive behavior pattern—just because the children are bearing the brunt of it. In fact, he is somewhat pleased that the punishment falls largely on them, because he knows that makes Helen feel even worse.

We also see Tom control Alex directly, ruling dictatorially over her clothing and overruling Helen's decision, thereby undermining her parental authority. He also seizes power over a process to which he has contributed nothing; if he wanted the right to have a say in what the children wore, he should have involved himself in the work of getting the family ready to go. The abuser does not believe, however, that his level of authority over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of effort or sacrifice on their behalf, or to how much knowledge he actually has about who they are or what is going on in their lives. He considers it his right to make the ultimate determination of what is good for them even if he doesn't attend to their needs or even if he only contributes to those aspects of child care that he enjoys or that make him look like a great dad in public.

Like Tom, abusers tend to be authoritarian parents. They may not be involved that much of the time, but when they do step in, it's their way or the highway. My clients defend authoritarian parenting even though a large collection of psychological studies demonstrates that it's destructive: Children do best when parents are neither overly strict nor overly permissive, providing firm structure but also allowing for dialogue, respectful conflict, and compromise.

The abuser's coerciveness thus comes into his treatment of the children and his behavior regarding the children, including his bullying of decisions in which the mother should have an equal voice.

Entitlement

Tom doesn't accept that a couple's choice to have children requires major lifestyle changes and sacrifices. He'll work on Randy's dirt bike because he enjoys it, but whatever else needs to be done for the children is not his problem. Yet at the party he goes to great lengths to present himself as Mr. Dad, because he likes the image and status of fatherhood.

The selfishness and self-centeredness that his entitlement produces cause role reversal in his relationships with his children, in that he considers it their responsibility to meet his needs. Tom behaves flirtatiously with his teenage daughter at the birthday party, introducing her as his “girlfriend,” commenting obliquely on her sexual development and kissing her in the midst of her embarrassment. The discomfort he causes Alex is obvious, but he can't be bothered to pay attention to that fact. He meets his own needs through the fantasy of having an attractive young partner while simultaneously taking pride as a parent in her attractiveness.

Children of abusers often find their father's attention and approval hard to come by. This scarcity has the effect of increasing his value in their eyes, as any attention from him feels special and exciting. Ironically, their mother can come to seem less important to them because they know they can count on her.

The abuser's entitled attitude that he should be above criticism makes it hard for his partner to intervene with him on her children's behalf. When Helen tries to get Tom to hurry up for the children's sake, he considers her efforts "a ration of shit" and punishes them all by deliberately taking even longer. Alex and Randy don't realize the price that their mother pays, and that they themselves pay, when she tries to stand up for them against him, so they wind up feeling that she doesn't care.

Externalization of Responsibility

Tom makes the children late for their party but then tells Helen it's her own fault. He also says that her overly sympathetic responses to Alex are the reason why the children's fights become a big deal. It never enters his mind that Randy's behavior toward females might be related to what he himself has modeled. Everything that goes wrong in the family is someone else's fault, usually Helen's.

Children who are exposed to the abuse of their mother often have trouble paying attention in school, get along poorly with their peers, or act out aggressively. In fact, they have been found to exhibit virtually every symptom that appears in children who are being abused directly. The abuser attributes all of these effects to the mother's poor parenting or to inherent weaknesses in the children.

When a family affected by partner abuse splits up, some children discover how much more pleasant life is without their father in the home and may choose to distance themselves from him. This can be a sign of emotional health and recovery. The abuser then often claims, predictably, that the mother is turning the children against him; in his mind, what else could it be?

Manipulativeness

As the Turner family drives off toward the party, Tom abruptly shifts into good humor, joking with the children and inducing them to bond with him against their mother. It is hard to stay angry at him when he is being playful. The children are ashamed of laughing at their mother—consciously for Alex, less so for Randy—but they are also drawn into an alliance with their father.

In certain ways children actually have an easier time living with an abusive parent who is mean all the time—at least then they know what they are dealing with and who is at fault. But the typical abuser is constantly changing faces, leaving his children confused and ambivalent and increasing the likelihood that they will identify with him in hopes of staying on his good side.

One critical category of manipulation involves the various tactics an abusive man may use to keep children from revealing to outsiders that their mother is being abused. Your partner may reward the children for maintaining secrecy or may make them feel that they would bring shame on the family, including themselves, if anyone were to find out. In some cases the man uses more overt pressure, including threats to enforce secret-keeping. Children who do disclose the abuse going on at home sometimes suffer emotional or physical retaliation by the abuser. (Some children are also pressured by their mother not to tell, because she is afraid of what her partner will do to her or to them if word leaks out.) It is important to take steps to relieve any burden of secrecy that your children may be carrying, as I discuss at the end of this chapter.

Superiority, Disrespect

Tom openly ridicules Helen for being concerned with Randy's assaultiveness toward Alex. Her parenting is thus one of the things about which he abuses her. Children growing up in this atmosphere can gradually come to look down on their mother as a parent, having absorbed the abuser's messages that she is immature, irrational, illogical, and incompetent. Even those children who take their mother's side in most conflicts, as many daughters and some sons of abused women do, nonetheless can come to see her as inferior to other people and to themselves. Randy's behavior reveals this dynamic when he remarks condescendingly to his mother: "I see you're hysterical as usual." He has learned to see his mother through Tom's eyes.

Possessiveness

Tom treats Alex like an object that belongs to him. When he makes her change before the party, we might think, “He doesn't want his daughter to get sexualized at such a young age, which is good.” But what we discover at the party is that he doesn't object to her sexualization, he just wants to be in control of it, and he wants it oriented toward his gratification. His demand that she not show off her body is not based on the viewpoint of a responsible parent but rather is more like the attitude of a jealous boyfriend.

Not all abusers perceive their children as owned objects, but many do. A man who already considers his partner a possession can find it easy to see his children the same way. But children are not things, and parents who see their children in an objectified way are likely to cause psychological harm because they don't perceive children as having rights.

Public Image

It is confusing for children to see people responding to their abusive father as if he were a charming and entertaining person. What are Alex and Randy to make of how popular Tom is at the party? They are left to assume that his behavior at home is normal, which in turn means that they, and their mother, must be at fault.

The Abusive Man as Child Abuser

Multiple studies have demonstrated that men who abuse their partners are far more likely than other men to abuse children. The extent of the risk to children from a particular abuser largely depends on the nature of his pattern of mistreatment toward their mother, although other factors such as his own childhood also can play an important role. The increased risks include the following.

Physical Abuse

The abuser who is most likely to hit children is the one who is quite physically assaultive or threatening toward the mother. A battering partner is seven times more likely than a nonbattering man to physically abuse children, and the risk increases with the frequency of his violence toward the mother. However, there are also some abusers who hit the children but not the mother. The man in this category tends to be: (a) a particularly harsh and authoritarian parent, (b) a controlling and dictatorial partner, and, (c) a man who was physically abused by his own parents while he was growing up.

Sexual Abuse

Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and their tactics. They tend to be highly entitled, self-centered, and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs. Like Tom, they are often controlling toward their daughters (or sons) and view them as owned objects and tend to use seduction and sweetness to lure their victims in. In fact, Tom exhibits many of the warning signs of a sexually abusive father, including his apparent jealousy toward Alex and his penchant for giving a romantic and sexual tone to his interactions with her.

As in cases of physical abuse of children, multiple research studies have found that men who abuse their partners perpetrate incest at a much higher rate than do nonabusive men. These studies suggest that the incest perpetrator is not necessarily severely violent to the mother, but some degree of assault on her is common. The mentality and tactics of the incest perpetrator are very similar to those of the partner abuser, including self-centeredness and demands that his needs be catered to, manipulation, cultivation of a charming public persona, requiring the victim to keep the abuse secret, and others. Although the percentage of outright sexual abuse appears to be fairly low, even among abusive men, partners of my clients frequently raise concerns about subtler kinds of boundary violations and other sexually inappropriate behaviors along the lines of those exhibited by Tom at the party. A man who perceives his child as an owned object, as Tom did, is likely to disregard her rights to privacy or to integrity in her own body.

Boys are at some risk of being violated by abusive men as well, although most incest perpetrators choose to offend against a girl if one is available. Boys appear to be at particular risk when they are very young, while the vulnerability of girls remains steady and may even increase during adolescence.

Psychological Abuse

Partners of my clients frequently share their distress with me over the mental cruelty the abuser visits upon the children. Name-calling, belittling, attacking their self-confidence, humiliating them in front of other people, shaming boys with regard to their masculinity, and insulting—or inappropriately complimenting—girls on the basis of their physical development and appearance are all common parenting behaviors among the abusive men in my groups. They tend to hurt their children's feelings further by failing to show up for important events, not following through on promises to take them on outings, or by showing no interest. Watching their children get rejected by their fathers in these ways is a source of pain for many of the abused women I speak with.

The Abuser as Role Model

What are Randy and Alex learning from Tom's treatment of Helen and from the messages he gives them about her? Parents' statements and behaviors are probably the single greatest influence on the development of children's values and on how they perceive other people and themselves—at least as powerful as their parents' words (which sometimes convey opposite messages). Children exposed to partner abuse learn the following lessons from the dynamics they are caught in the middle of:

“The Target of Abuse Is at Fault, Not the Abuser.”

Tom makes it clear to his children that Helen brings abuse upon herself by being too emotional, by questioning his decisions, or by being overly angry. Randy (and perhaps Alex as well) is likely to exhibit problems in how he treats other people, because he has been taught how to blame others, especially females, for his actions. Alex may believe that other people, especially males, have the right to mistreat her and that it is her own fault if they do.

Satisfaction in Life Comes Through Controlling and Manipulating Others.

Tom's behavior communicates to his children that having power over other people is a desirable goal. The possibility that sharing, equality, cooperation, and mutual respect can lead to a fulfilling life may be beyond their conceptual reach. When the sons of abusers reach adolescence, for example, they commonly begin manipulating girls into relationships that are sexually or emotionally exploitative. They may lack empathy for their victims, having been conditioned by their fathers to shut themselves off to caring about the feelings of females.

Boys and Men Should Be in Control, and Females Should Submit to That Control.

Unless they can find strong counter-examples among their friends or relatives, Alex and Randy run the risk of internalizing a rigid, abuse-prone view of what men and women inherently are. Children's parents are their first and most important source of sex-role definition and identification.

Women Are Weak, Incompetent, and Illogical.

Tom is teaching his children—whether intentionally or not—to perceive women in the same degrading light that he casts on Helen. He reinforces these messages by treating Alex disrespectfully in public. Daughters of abusive men often have profound self-esteem problems. Why wouldn't they? Look at what the abuser is teaching them about how valuable and worthy of respect females are. Sons of abusive men in turn tend to be disparaging of and superior to girls and women, especially when the boys become old enough to begin dating.

Mommies Do the Hard, Constant, Responsible Daily Work of Parenting, While Daddies Step in to Make the Key Decisions and Share the Fun Times.

Alex and Randy are led to regard their mother as the brawn of the family operation and their father as the brains. They associate Helen with routine and structure, whereas they connect Tom with times that are special and exciting. Despite how grumpy he often is, Dad still comes out seeming like the fun parent; they notice how entertaining he is at the party, for example, while their mother is sullen and withdrawn.

People That Love You Get to Abuse You.

Children who grow up exposed to an abusive man's behavior learn that abuse is the price people pay if they want to receive love. This training can make it harder for children to recognize when they are being mistreated and to stand up for themselves.

As an abuser passes on his thinking to the next generation, he, in effect recruits his sons to the ranks of abusive men. He does not literally want his son to mistreat women—he doesn't believe he does so himself, after all—but he wants his son to think as he thinks, including adopting his same excuses and justifications, so the outcome is the same. And to a lesser extent he also recruits his daughters to join the ranks of abused women.

How Abusers Affect Mother-Child Relationships

Question 15:

Why Is Everyone in the Family Mad at Each Other Instead of at Him?

Tom's behavior drives wedges between the members of his family that expand over time. Many of the divisions he has sown are already bearing their poisonous fruit. How is he affecting Helen's relationships with her children? And how is he shaping—and distorting—how they view her?

Undermining Her Authority

It isn't hard for Alex and Randy to figure out where primary parental authority is vested in their family, because they see that Helen's decisions can be overruled. Children who detect such an imbalance learn to play one parent against the other and try to curry favor with the one who has the ultimate say. They also learn to defy the authority of the abused parent. Some abusive men further undermine the mother's authority by speaking badly about the mother to the children, characterizing her as crazy, alcoholic, or uncaring.

Even when a man does not directly undercut the mother's parenting as Tom does, his abuse undermines her authority by its very nature. Children who see or hear their father belittle their mother, silence her, walk away and ignore her, or physically intimidate her, learn that such behaviors toward her are both acceptable and effective. Most children of abused women are aware that their father does these things—even if the parents don't think they know—and they experiment with imitating his behaviors to see if it will help them get their way.

Children may also hope to win their father's approval by joining him in the abuse of their mother. This effort succeeds in some cases, but other abusers lay down the law quickly to establish that the privilege of disrespecting Mom belongs only to Dad. In this case the children may repress what they are learning until Mom and Dad split up; then, with the abuser out of the house, they let loose, re-creating his put-downs and intimidation of her, sometimes rapidly making themselves unmanageable.

Children of abusers absorb his expectations of constant catering from the mother. The son of an abused woman tends, for example, to become enraged at her for not waiting on him hand and foot, for pressing him to meet his responsibilities, or for challenging his inappropriate behaviors. His father is a direct model for his angry, verbally abusive responses in these particular circumstances.

Interfering With Her Parenting

The evening after the birthday party, Tom forbids Helen to involve the school psychologist in addressing Randy's assaults on his sister. He doesn't say exactly what her punishment will be if she defies him, but she knows him well enough to not want to find out. She is thus forbidden to parent her children.

Dozens of abused women have complained to me of my clients' direct interference with their parenting. The most common complaint is that of being prevented from comforting a crying or frightened baby or young child. The men sometimes admit the interference openly.

A recent client of mine, Jacob, told me that he was sick of the way his partner, Patricia, would pick up their eleven-month-old baby Willy when he cried and "fawn over him," and he blocked her from going into the baby's room. That was just the beginning. An older daughter of theirs was hospitalized for weeks in a city that was nearly two hours away with severe hepatitis.

Patricia would rush to the hospital each night as soon as she got off work, visit briefly with her daughter, and then rush back home in hopes of seeing Willy before he fell asleep. However, if Patricia didn't make it back home by the nightly deadline that Jacob had set, Jacob would not permit her to go into Willy's room to see him, even if Willy was still awake. On at least one occasion the boy realized that Patricia was home and started yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” and Jacob still blocked her from entering. His excuse to me? “I didn't set that deadline,” he said. “We agreed to it mutually.” (This would have been an unacceptable excuse even if it were true, but Patricia told me she never agreed to such a deadline.)

I think it is important to mention that Jacob never hit Patricia in their ten years together and that he was a college professor living in an unusually luxurious neighborhood. He provides a powerful illustration of the depth of the psychological cruelty an abuser can perpetrate with little or no physical violence and keep hidden behind the most impressive facade.

I Speak With Some Mothers Who Have

developed psychiatric symptoms from being abused, such as nightmares, severe anxiety, or depression. Research studies have found that these conditions and related ones, including posttraumatic stress disorder, are not uncommon in women who have been abused by their partners. The abuser may have indoctrinated his children to perceive their abused mother as emotionally troubled, but he also may have actually caused her to become somewhat unstable. In either case, his behavior damages mother-child relationships, and it can take both time and outside assistance for mothers and children to reestablish a strong and trusting connection.

Using the Children as Weapons of Abuse

One of my clients many years ago was a mousy and mild-mannered young father named Wayne who characterized himself as a feminist. He was upset one morning about some things his wife, Nancy, had said to him before leaving the home, and he stormed around itching to make her really regret her words. He was looking in the refrigerator for milk for their ten-month-old baby when he came across a bottle from a few days earlier that had spoiled. He recognized the bottle immediately as the ultimate weapon and proceeded to give the baby the spoiled milk to drink, making him violently ill.

Few other acts could have had an impact on Nancy as devastating as this one. The controlling effect was potent: Nancy was terrified for a long time after to defy Wayne or upset him in any way. She was also filled with anxiety as she left for work each morning.

Another client of mine described how he had told his wife during an argument, "If you don't shut up, you're going to be really sorry," and when she continued yelling at him, he went into their teenage daughter's closet and cut her prom dress to ribbons with a pair of scissors. The daughter's pain, I learned from the mother, was indescribable. Fueling this type of cruelty to children is the abuser's awareness that the mother's empathy for her children's emotional pain will hurt her more than anything he could do to her directly.

Shaping the Child's Perceptions of the Abuse

Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors, able to distract children's attention from what is before them and get them confused about the obvious. Consider the following scenario. A nasty argument breaks out between a mother and a father, with yelling and name-calling on both sides.

Their children can barely follow what the fighting is about, partly because their stomachs are tied in knots from the tension. For the rest of the day, their mother is distant and depressed, snapping at them over trivial frustrations. Their father disappears for two or three hours, but when he turns up again he is in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children as if nothing had happened. (An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.) So which parent will seem to these children to have been responsible for shattering the calm of their home earlier? Probably the grouchy one. It is therefore not surprising that abusers are sometimes able to reverse their children's perceptions so that they see Mom as the volatile or unreasonable one despite the abuse they witness.

Placing the Mother in a Double Bind

When Tom punishes Helen by deliberately making the children late, Randy and Alex become upset with her for not capitulating. They feel that if she would just cater to their father and manage his emotions they would get what they need, so they see her as the one who is hurting them. They know it's out of the question for him to do anything different. The abuser gets rewarded for his bullying behavior because the children give up on influencing his side of the equation and pour their energy into getting their mother to fix what's wrong.

Yet this is only half of the problem. On some other issue, Helen may give in to Tom precisely to avoid the kind of abuse and retaliation that resulted this time, and then the children will feel critical of her for that. They may say: “Why do you let Dad push you around like that? Why do you put up with that?” They may grumble: “When Dad is being mean to us, Mom doesn't do anything about it.” Children of abused women thus feel angry and upset with their mother for standing up to the abuser and for not standing up to him. Their reactions in this regard are entirely understandable, but the mother can find herself in an impossible bind that leads to more distance and tension between her and her children.

Child protective services sometimes accuse an abused woman of “failing to protect” her children from exposure to an abusive man, without understanding the many efforts she may have made to keep them safe and the many tactics the abuser may have used to interfere with her parenting.

How Abusive Men Sow Divisions in Families

Randy and Alex are bitter adversaries one minute and loyal allies the next. They are like pebbles at the edge of the sea, with each wave of abuse toward their mother washing over them and changing their position in relation to each other. Randy's violence toward Alex is no surprise; boys who are exposed to the abuse of their mother are often disrespectful of and aggressive toward their peers, targeting females in particular for their hostility.

Sons of abusers learn to look down on females, so they feel superior to their sisters and mothers and thus expect catering from them. Violence among siblings occurs at much higher rates in homes where there is partner abuse.

Abuse is inherently divisive; family members blame each other for the abuser's behavior because it is unsafe to blame him. If an incident of abuse began with an argument over one child's misbehavior, then an older sibling might say, "Daddy screamed at Mom and made her cry because he was mad that you were making so much noise. You should have listened to me when I told you to quiet down."

Tom contributes further to divisiveness through his favoritism: He treats Randy like a buddy and fixes his dirt bike, while ignoring Alex except when showing her off in public. Favoritism is rampant in the parenting of abusive men. They may favor boys over girls because of their own negative attitudes toward females. They favor children whom they see as siding with them and are rejecting of those who are sympathetic or protective of the mother. Children experience powerful emotional rewards from the abuser for distancing themselves from their mother and from any siblings who are allied with her.

My clients exhibit a range of other divisive tactics, including openly shaming children—especially boys—for being close to their mother, telling family members lies about each other, and making children feel like members of a special and superior club when they are part of his team. Finally, they use collective punishment, requiring all the children to pay a price for one child's behavior, which can be devastating in its ability to turn children against each other.

Why does an abuser sow divisions in these ways? One reason is that his power is decreased if the family remains unified. I have had a number of clients whose partners and children have consistently supported each other, and the client is always bitter about it, gripping, “They've all turned against me,” or, even more commonly, “She's brainwashed the children to be on her side.” Many abusers take steps to avoid this outcome, using the principle of “divide and conquer”: If people in the family are busy fighting with each other, attention is diverted from the man's cruelty or control.

Resilience in Mother-Child and Sibling Relationships

Almost miraculously, some family members of abusers manage to stay close to each other and unified. Several factors play a role in helping family relationships rebound from the effects of the abuser's behavior and grow strong:

1. Access to good information about abuse: When a mother receives assistance from a program for abused women, for example, she has an easier time unraveling the convoluted dynamics of abuse, and then can assist her children to achieve greater clarity. It also helps her not blame her children for how they've been affected by the abuse.

2. Access to children's services: Many programs for abused women now offer free counseling for their children as well, and specialized counseling for children who have witnessed abuse is sometimes available through other sources such as hospitals or mental health centers. Family relationships benefit greatly when children get an opportunity to work through some of the dynamics we have been examining.

3. Safety from the abuser: Family members are more likely to stay by each other if their community stays by them, helping them to either leave the abuser or demand that he change. For the violent abuser, the police and courts can play a critical role in supporting the family, or they can drop the ball. The actions taken by family and juvenile courts can also be pivotal in protecting children from the effects of an abuser's behavior.

4. Access to supportive community resources: I have observed, for example, that children tend to do better simply by having the good fortune to live in a neighborhood where there are plenty of children to play with. If children have the opportunity to participate in sports, drama, or other activities that give them pleasure and help them feel good about themselves, they are less likely to channel their distress into hurting their siblings and their mother. Adults outside the family who devote attention to the children and engage them in activities can help them unhook themselves psychologically from the abuser, even without any direct mention of the abuse.

Support for the mother is as important as support for the children. Seek out a trustworthy friend or relative, and take the leap of talking about how you are being mistreated in your relationship. Breaking your isolation is critical to healing both you and your children.

5. A mother who works hard at her parenting and gets help with it: It is important for an abused mother to get community support and not to try to be a superhero. At the same time, there are helpful steps you can take. Try as hard as you can not to take your rage and frustration out on your children. Look for books or lectures about parenting and discipline strategies. Seek support for your parenting from friends and relatives, and try to be open to suggestions or constructive criticism from others. These are all extraordinary challenges for an abused mother; no one should blame you if you can't do all of these things, especially all at once. But I find that many abused women discover ways to be the best mothers they can under the circumstances, and their children feel the difference in the long run.

6. An abuser who is a poor manipulator: Some abusive men simply aren't as clever or persuasive in shaping the children's outlook, with the result that the children don't become as confused and ambivalent and cast less blame on to their mothers, their siblings, and themselves.

How Children Look at Their Abusive Fathers

In his children's eyes, the abuser is simultaneously hated and revered. They resent his bullying and selfishness but are attracted to his charm and power. They soak up the delicious moments when he is kind and attentive, partly because they may be so few. They may have an active fantasy life about getting big enough to stand up to him, and often dream of hurting him. If he is depressed or alcoholic, they worry about him.

They observe that when their father is happy peace reigns in the family and that when he is unhappy he makes everyone else miserable, too, so they invest themselves in keeping him content. These many powerful mixed feelings are confusing and uncomfortable for children.

Children also are subject to traumatic bonding with the abuser, just as their mothers are, even if he does not abuse them directly. When child protective workers or custody evaluators assess a family in which there is partner abuse, they commonly conclude that the children are highly bonded to their father—as I find in their written reports—without examining whether or not that attachment is the result of trauma and manipulation rather than of extensive positive time spent together.

The abuser shapes how the children and the mother see him as a parent. It is common for a partner of one of my clients to say: “He treats me terribly, but he's a good father.” But when I then ask detailed questions about the kinds of behaviors I have reviewed in this chapter, three times out of four the woman reports multiple important problems; she just hadn't been able to sort them out. You therefore may be finding that uncomfortable questions are arising for you about your own partner's parenting as you read along. When you are already struggling with how you are being treated yourself, it can be painful to consider that your children may be at risk of mistreatment as well. In the pages ahead, you will find suggestions for helping your children meet their own challenges.

The Abuser as Parent Postseparation

What happens to the parenting of abusers when couples split up? Some abusive men simply vanish from their children's lives, taking the attitude, "The children are her problem. If she wanted help with them, she should have treated me better. I don't want restrictions on my freedom." He thinks of having children as a reversible process, reminiscent of jokes about recovering one's virginity. He may pay little or no child support, and the children may not even receive birthday cards from him.

Children may actually fare better in the long term from having the abuser drop out of their lives rather than having him continue his manipulations and divisiveness for years, but these are both poor choices. When an abusive father disappears, children feel rejected and abandoned. In one of my current cases, the child keeps insisting that the reason for the disappearance of the father is “because he didn't like me,” although the mother tells him that isn't so. Depending on their neighborhood or community, children also may suffer from the stigma of having a father who “ran off.”

When abusive fathers stay involved, a different set of problems typically arise. First, the mother is generally the one who ended the relationship, and abusers do not take well to being left. They may use the children as weapons to retaliate against the mother or as pawns to try to get her back.

I had a client named Nate, for example, who moved into an apartment when he and his wife separated and kept his new place as dingy and depressing as possible. He threw a bare mattress on the floor, put no pictures on the walls or rugs on the floors, and acquired little other furniture, although he could have afforded to make the place look decent. When the children came to visit him on weekends, they were shocked by his living conditions. He cried in front of them about how much he missed them and their mother and how bad it felt to be alone and outside of the family. He dressed sloppily, barely combed his hair, and rarely shaved, giving himself a pathetic mien. The children were crushed and could think of nothing other than their father's pain and loneliness. Naturally they began pressuring their mother to let him come back home.

Children can be used even more directly as weapons. A partner of one of my clients told me that she had left him about a year earlier but then got back together with him, “because he told me if I didn't let him back in the house he was going to sexually abuse our daughter.” She had not reported this threat to a family court, because she assumed she would not be believed—family courts are widely reputed to treat women's sexual abuse allegations with strong disbelief.

Abused women have reported to me countless ways in which their ex-partners try to hurt or control them through the children, including:

• Pumping them for information about the mother's life, especially about new partners

- Returning them from visits dirty, unfed, or sleep-deprived

• Discussing with them the possibility of coming to live with him instead

- Continuing to drive wedges between them and their mother

- Undermining her authority by making his house a place where there are no rules or limits, permitting the children to eat whatever junk food they want, watch movies that are inappropriately violent or sexual, and ignore their homework, so that they chafe against normal discipline when they get back to her house

• Hurting the children psychologically, physically, or sexually in order to upset the mother

- Threatening to take the children away from her

• Seeking custody or increased visitation through the courts

- Insisting on taking the children for visitation only to leave them most of the time in someone else's care, usually his mother's or new partner's

Why He Uses the Children as Weapns Postseparation

What is going on in the abuser's mind as he hurts his ex-partner through the children?

1. He wants her to fail.

The last thing an abuser wants is for his partner to thrive after they split up, since that would prove that he was the problem. So he tries to make her parenting life as difficult as possible so that her life will stay stuck. She ends up feeling like she was never really permitted to leave him, feeling his presence around her all the time through his maneuvers involving the children. Many abusers cause more damage to mother-child relationships after separation than they did before.

2. He is losing most of his other avenues for getting at her.

Separation means that the abuser doesn't get his daily opportunities to control the woman and cut her down. He may still be able to get at her through various financial dealings, and he can stalk or assault her if he is willing to risk arrest. But the children become one of his only vehicles to keep a hook into her for the long term.

3. He considers the children his personal possessions.

While the abuser may believe that the work of raising children is his partner's responsibility, he assigns the rights regarding them to himself. He feels outraged postseparation that he is losing control not only of his ex-partner but of the children as well. This ownership mentality was illustrated neatly by a client of mine who went to court seeking sole legal custody but requesting that the mother retain physical custody; in other words, he wanted her to look after the child, but the right to make the decisions would be his. (Fortunately, his request was denied.)

An abusive father may go ballistic if his ex-partner begins a new relationship because, as clients often say to me: “I don't want another man around my children.” In my experience, abused women often get involved with a more respectful man on the next go round, because their painful experience has taught them some signs of abuse to watch out for. Her children may then gravitate to the new man as if toward a magnet, thrilled to discover that they can get caring and appropriate male attention, a situation to which an abusive man may have a hostile reaction.

4. His perceptions of his ex-partner are highly distorted.

Many of my clients genuinely believe that they are doing what is best for their children by driving them away from their mother, because they have swallowed their own propaganda about how bad she is. An abuser strives to prove that his ex-partner is a poor mother by pointing to symptoms that are actually the effects that his cruelty has had on her: her depression, her emotional volatility, her difficulty managing the children's disrespect of her. He feels that he needs to save them from her, a stark and disturbing distortion.

Do All Abusers Harm Their Children Emotionally Postseparation?

Fortunately not. I have worked with abusers who have substantially more compassion for the children than they have for their partners and who do not use them as weapons postseparation. These men tend to be:

1. The ones who behaved the most responsibly toward the children prior to separation: The divorced or separated abuser who is kind to the children, cares for them responsibly, and does not try to damage their relationships with their mother is a man who was also operating this way while the couple was together. He generally didn't degrade her right in front of the children and didn't abuse her during a pregnancy. He is usually less selfish and self-centered than the average abuser. The parenting of abusive men rarely improves postseparation, unlike that of some nonabusive fathers. I have had clients who put on a big show of being nicer to their children and spending more time with them because they were seeking custody, or because they were trying to turn the children against their mother. These are not genuine improvements in parenting; once their campaign is over, win or lose, they revert to their old ways. The only question about an abuser's treatment of his children postseparation is "Will it stay the same or will it get worse?"

2. The ones who are not intent upon settling old scores: If he is willing to move on with life without having to punish you—or get back together with you—the picture for the children can brighten somewhat.

3. The ones who do not use the legal system to pursue custody or increased visitation: For a variety of reasons, many abusive men do not choose to use family courts as a venue for taking power over the woman and her children. Once the court becomes involved, the road to peace can be a long and painful one.

The Abuser in Family Court

I have frequently served as a custody evaluator, or guardian ad litem. A custody evaluator is appointed by a court to investigate the children's circumstances in cases of divorce or separation and to make recommendations to the judge regarding custody and visitation. In my first case of this kind several years ago, a man named Kent was seeking to win custody of his three-year-old daughter from his ex-partner, Renée. Kent was in the military, so he did not have “flex-time” options; he told me that if he gained custody, his parenting plan was to put Tracy in day care forty hours a week. Tracy was currently in the full-time care of her mother. Kent was not critical of Renée's parenting; he said simply that he wanted Tracy to live with him because he could care for her even better. More important, he was offering to allow Renée liberal visitation, whereas Renée was restricting his contact with Tracy to a set schedule. “That way Tracy could have both parents,” he said.

Kent informed me with audible outrage that Renée was accusing him of having been abusive, “but she has never provided one shred of evidence of her laughable allegations.” He then went on, in response to my detailed questions, to describe thirteen different occasions on which he had physically assaulted Renée, including repeated incidents of pushing her down and one time when he knew her so hard in the pelvic area that she got a large dark bruise. He claimed never to have punched or slapped her; apparently this is why he considered her reports of abuse such a joke.

That isn't all. Kent went on to tell me that he had participated only minimally in Tracy's care during her first year of life and not dramatically more during the subsequent two years. (Most abusers in custody disputes are craftier than Kent was. His entitlement was so severe that he didn't think I would see anything wrong with this picture.)

Why did Kent want to take a little girl out of the full-time care of a competent mother in order to put her into full-time day care? I was forced to conclude that he craved power over Renée, wanted contact with her and saw winning custody as the way to put the cards back in his hands.

Unfortunately, few custody evaluators or judges understand the nature of an abusive man's problem. If they find him likable, they assume the abuse allegations must be greatly exaggerated. And once they adopt that stance, it can become extraordinarily difficult to get them to listen carefully to what has gone on or to investigate the evidence.

The world of family courts, where legal struggles over custody and visitation take place, is a nightmare in the lives of many thousands of abused women across the United States and Canada. A woman who has overcome so many obstacles to finally free herself from abuse can suddenly find herself jerked back into the abuser's grip, because he is the legal father of her children and chooses to continue his abuse through the legal system.

The typical abusive man enters the court with self-assurance, assuming that court personnel will be malleable in his charming and manipulative hands. He typically tells lies chronically and comfortably. He looks and acts nothing like the social stereotype of an abuser and plays on the prevailing myths and prejudices concerning abuse. Imagine how Tom, the father in the scenario that opened this chapter, would appear in the courthouse; would anyone believe that he could be an abuser?

The Abuser's Tactics in Custody

Disputes

Here are just a few of the strategies an abuser tends to use in custody and visitation disputes:

Taking Advantage of His Financial Position

Most men are in a better economic position than their ex-partners for at least the first few years following separation. This imbalance is greater for abusers because they may control and manipulate the finances while the couple is together and sometimes make dramatic attempts to destroy their partner economically as the relationship dissolves. An abuser can often afford to spend a great deal more than the woman on legal expenses, or he can get himself into a nice house to sway both the children and the custody evaluator. He may be able to completely ruin his ex-partner's financial position by dragging her back into court over and over again.

Asking for Psychological Evaluations

Most abusers do not show significant

psychopathology on psychological tests, but their partners often do as a result of enduring years of abuse. The evaluating psychologist may report that the woman is depressed, hysterical, or vindictive; few evaluators take the abused woman's actual past experience or current circumstances into account. If she reports that she is being followed, for example, because the abuser is stalking her, she is likely to be labeled “paranoid” and her reports of abuse discredited on that basis. A psychologist's report on the abusive man may be based on a related set of misconceptions. I have read several evaluations that state that the man is unlikely to have perpetrated the reported acts of abuse because he is not mentally ill or because he doesn't show signs of aggressiveness in the evaluator's office. (On this erroneous basis, most abusive men could be declared to be victims of false accusations.) Unfortunately, many psychologists who take court appointments have been slow to accept that their standard array of theories and tests can lead to serious errors when applied to domestic-abuse cases.

Playing the Role of Peacemaker

A great number of my clients use a routine that goes like this: “There was a lot of fighting and bad feeling in our relationship, and I can understand that she is bitter about some things, but we need to put that all behind us for the good of the children. She is so focused on getting revenge against me that she is forgetting about the children's needs. That's why I'm asking for joint custody, so that the children would get lots of time with each of us, while she's asking for me to have only every other Saturday.”

This piece of acting seeks to take advantage of the myth that women are more vindictive than men when relationships end (in the case of abuse, however, the reality is very much the opposite) and that men are frequently victims of false accusations of abuse by women who want to keep them away from their children. The abuser's goal with this and all other strategies is to get court personnel to disbelieve his ex-partner and ignore any evidence she presents.

Feigning Remorse over the Abuse

A surprising number of judges and custody evaluators consider a man's abuse of his partner irrelevant to custody and visitation decisions. They are either unaware or uninterested in the role that an abusive man plays as a role model for his children, the damage he can do to mother-child relationships, and the way he may use the children as weapons. So if an abuser says he regrets his verbal or physical assaults on the mother, that can be enough to manipulate court personnel into saying, “Let's leave all that in the past.”

Confusing the Court with Crossaccusations

Most of my clients can lie persuasively, with soulful facial expressions, good eye contact, and colorful details. Court personnel have trouble believing that such a pleasant-seeming man could simply be inventing most or all of his accusations against the abused woman. In various cases of mine, court personnel have told me, “He accuses her of the same things, so I guess they abuse each other.” In such cases, the court may accept his counteraccusations at face value, rather than look closely at the evidence.

Accusing Her of Trying to Turn the Children Against Him

Some abusive men do not succeed in turning children against their mother, and some don't even try. Children sometimes see the abuse for what it is and take whatever steps they can to protect themselves, each other, and their mother, including perhaps disclosing the abuser's treatment of her (or of them) to outsiders. The abusive man's typical response to this is to claim that the mother is turning the children against him. Some prominent psychologists have, unfortunately, contributed through their writings to the myth that it is unhealthy for children to distance themselves from an abusive father and that the mother is probably the cause of their desire to do so. Family courts tend to be unaware of how important it is to children not to be exposed to the negative role modeling of their abusive father and to his hostility and contempt toward their mother. Regrettably, a growing number of abusive men succeed in using such claims of “parental alienation” to win custody or ample unsupervised visitation, even in cases where there is extensive evidence that the man has abused not only the mother but the children as well.

The reality is that a mother who attempts to restrict her children's contact with the man who abused her is generally acting as an appropriate protective parent. She is also supporting healthy self-protective instincts in her children; children who are not supported or encouraged in this way to protect themselves from exposure to abuse will be at greater risk for accommodating abuse by others as they go through life.

I have noticed that charges of “parental alienation” are sometimes leveled against the most competent mothers, because of their strong and supportive bonds with their children—which the abuser terms enmeshment or overdependence—and because the children have learned to see through the abuser's facade and therefore choose to try to keep away from him.

Appealing to Popular Misconceptions

Several misleading arguments appear repeatedly in statements that abusers make during family court litigation. 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 is almost impossible for a woman to do with an abusive ex-partner. Abusive men also assert falsely that there is a rampant problem of women's false allegations of abuse, that child support obligations are unfairly high, that domestic abuse is irrelevant to custody decisions, and that men are abused in relationships just as much as women.

the Success of these strategies relies heavily on the ignorance, and sometimes gender bias, of court personnel regarding women who disclose histories of partner abuse and on their stereotypes regarding men who are “just not the type” to be abusers. Prejudicial attitudes often take the place of careful investigation and consideration of the evidence. Unfortunately, family courts have generally not made the kinds of progress in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse that many other social institutions, such as the police and criminal courts, have (though serious work remains to be done in those arenas as well, as we see in Chapter 12).

Mixed Social Messages to Abused Mothers

What should a mother's role be in protecting her children from exposure to their father's abusiveness? Abused women can get caught in the profound societal ambivalence that exists regarding this question. While couples are together, professionals and other community members are highly critical of a mother who continues to live with an abusive man. They say things to her such as, “You are choosing your partner over your children,” or “You must not care about what things are like for them.” Child protection officials sometimes threaten to take a mother's children away from her for “failure to protect” if she won't leave a man who is abusing her. If she believes that the man has the potential to change, they are likely to say she is “in denial” or “unrealistic” for harboring such fantasies.

These critics ignore the huge challenges she faces as a parent and how difficult it is to leave an abuser.

But when an abused mother does break up the relationship, society tends to do an abrupt aboutface. Suddenly she hears from court officials and from other people:

“Well, maybe he abused you, but that's no reason to keep the children away from him. He is their father, after all.”

“Don't you think your own resentments are clouding your judgment about your children?”

“Don't you believe that people ever change?

Why don't you give him the benefit of the doubt?"

In other words, a woman can be punished for exposing children to a man in one situation but then punished for refusing to expose them to the same man in another situation. And the second case is potentially even more dangerous than the first, because she is no longer able to keep an eye on what he does with the children or to prevent the postseparation escalation that is so common in abusive fathers.

Abused mothers are typically required by family courts across the United States and Canada to send their children on unsupervised visitation—or into custody—with their abusive fathers. When the children then begin to show predictable symptoms such as school behavior and attention problems, sleep disorders, unwillingness to respect their mother's authority, or emotional deterioration, court personnel and court-appointed evaluators commonly declare that these are normal reactions to divorce or that the children are actually responding to their mother's emotions rather than to their own. I have been involved in several cases where the abuser has physically or sexually abused the children in addition to abusing the mother, and the court still forced the mother to allow visitation with no professional supervision. Abused women across the continent report that it can become extraordinarily difficult to persuade the court to examine the evidence objectively once the mother has been labeled "vindictive" or "overemotional" or has been accused (however baselessly) of having influenced her children's statements.

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. Fortunately, over the past few years, women and men (including many nonabusive fathers) across the United States and Canada have been waking up to the severity of this problem with the result that there are multiple initiatives currently in motion to demand family court reform. I have been part of one such effort, assisting a well-funded organization that is preparing a human rights report for the international community on the revictimization of abused women and their children through custody and visitation litigation. (For more information, see “Battered Mothers Testimony Project” in the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

Preparing for Custody Battles Just in Case

If you have not experienced custody litigation, or at least not yet, please bear the following points in mind:

- It is important to keep records of your partner's abusive behaviors toward you

- or the children. If he writes scary or twisted letters to you, keep them. If friends or neighbors see him mistreat you or the children, ask them to describe in writing what they witnessed. If you have ever called the police, try to get a record of the call, whether they came or not. If he leaves abusive or threatening messages on your answering machine, keep a copy on tape.

- Seek legal representation if you can possibly afford it. If you have no resources, apply for a legal service attorney. In choosing an attorney, try to find one who is experienced in domestic abuse and who treats abused women with patience and respect. The fact that a lawyer is well known does not mean that he or she necessarily understands the issues involved in disputing custody or visitation with an abuser.

- Move cautiously. Avoid abruptly denying him visitation, for example, even if you have concerns about how your children are being affected. Courts can be quick to accuse women of trying to cut the children's father out of their lives even if she has good reason to be worried.

- Involve your children with a therapist if you can find a good one in your community. It is important to have professionals involved so that you are not the only one reporting the distress that your children's relationship with their father is causing them. In situations where it is just your word against his, he may be able to charm court personnel with his skillful lying and winning manner.

- If one of your children discloses to you sexual abuse by their father—which is an extraordinarily upsetting experience—it

- is especially important that you approach the court and your local child protection agency with as calm an appearance as you possibly can. If you get labeled as “hysterical about sexual abuse,” no matter how justified your reactions, your reports may be discredited. If you are in this situation, read the excellent book A Mother's Nightmare—Incest, listed in “Resources,” for further guidance on managing the legal system.

- Most abused women do succeed in keeping custody of their children. But the better you plan, the more likely you are to avoid a horrible surprise. For a free packet of information for abused women and their attorneys regarding custody and visitation litigation, call the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody at 1-800-527-3223.

the Subject of abusive men as parents, including their behavior in custody and visitation disputes, is a complex one; I have only touched the surface here. Readers who wish to pursue a more in-depth discussion should see my book The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics (written with Dr. Jay Silverman), which addresses the full range of issues touched on in this chapter. Although that book focuses on the physically violent abuser, you will find that most of what we say applies to psychologically abusive men as well.

The more you are aware of how your children may be affected by their exposure to your partner's abuse of you, and to the problems in his style as a parent, the better able you will be to protect them from emotional harm. They need to know that you are a parent they can count on to be consistently kind and safe, since the abuser is unpredictable and at times intimidating. If they are giving you difficult behavioral challenges, are having some problems focusing their attention, or are prone to withdrawal or depression, bear in mind that these are all normal responses in children whose mothers are abused. Your patience and understanding are critical to them, including your ability to show them that you do not believe they are bad. Remember that growing up around an abusive father or stepfather is very confusing and anxiety producing for children even if he does not mistreat them directly.

Make your own healing—as well as your emotional and physical safety—a priority. Children of an abused woman can feel the difference when their mother starts to get help for herself and becomes more able to recognize abuse for what it is, blaming neither herself nor her children for the abusive man's behavior.

Here are some other actions you can take:

Insist on complete respect from your children. Children can absorb your partner's rude or bullying approach to you and begin to exhibit behaviors toward you that they have learned from him. Try to put a stop to this behavior as quickly as possible before it gets a chance to snowball. You may not be able to be firm with the children in front of your partner if he actively undermines you, but put your foot down as much as you can, especially when he isn't around.

Insist on respect for females in general. Your partner's control or abuse toward you creates an atmosphere in which negative attitudes toward females can grow like mold. Interrupt these whenever you see them appearing in your sons or daughters.

Confront your partner's undermining of your parenting. Unless you are afraid of how your partner will retaliate, name his undermining for what it is and demand that it stop.

Don't lie on your partner's behalf or cover for his behavior. You may feel that you should protect your children's image of your partner by making excuses for him, telling them what happened was your fault, or lying about what he did. Your relationships with your children will be damaged in the long run if your cover for him, however, and that is the outcome you most want to avoid. In addition, you increase their vulnerability to him if you encourage them to deny their own self-protective instincts. (However, you may need to lie to him to protect them sometimes.)

Be the best parent you can. As unfair as it is, the reality is that an abused woman has to be an outstanding parent in order to help her children process and heal from the abuse they have been exposed to. Draw on every resource you can, including parenting books and training courses, parent support groups, and play groups that may exist in your area. (For specific suggestions, see the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

Consider leaving your relationship, at least for a while, if you can do so safely. One of the best ways to help children heal is for them to be free from witnessing abuse. As I discussed earlier, however, it is important to plan carefully in order to make it harder for your abusive partner to hurt the children through his visitation with them or through legal actions for custody.

If your partner has already succeeded in causing some distance in your relationships with your children, or has turned them against each other, it is still possible to heal those divisions and rebuild healthy connections. Make your relationships a priority and draw on counseling services in your community to help you work through the barriers that your abusive partner has erected. Encourage your children to talk about the upsetting interactions they have witnessed in the home, with the help of counselors if necessary; it is especially important to relieve any burden the children have felt to keep the abuse secret. Some abused women's programs have group counseling for children, which is an excellent environment in which they can break the secret about the abuse, gain insight into their own emotional reactions, and learn that the abusive man's behavior is neither their mother's fault nor their own.

Above all, don't give up. Healing ruptured relationships takes time and perseverance. In a case I am involved in currently in which the parents are divorced, the mother was on the verge of losing hope that she would ever be on good terms again with her teenage boy, who was allied with his abusive father and imitating his attitudes and behaviors—including threats of violence—toward the mother. But she persevered, despite many moments of despair over a three-year period, and now the boy has finally begun to recognize his father's bullying and manipulation and is gradually repairing his connection to his mother.

Key Points to Remember

• An abuser in the home affects everybody.

- A good father does not abuse his children's mother.

- Abusers drive wedges between people, by accident or by design. Abused mothers and their children should seek support to heal as individuals and to heal their relationships with each other (see “About General Parenting Issues” in “Resources” in the back of this book).

- If you are preparing to leave an abuser with whom you have children, seek out legal advice regarding custody issues as soon as you can.

You have reached the end of the document.