The Abusive Man in Everyday Life

The Abusive Man in Everyday Life

I feel like I'm going crazy.

Sometimes I can just tell it's one of those days; no matter what I do, I'm going to get it sooner or later.

He's a teddy bear underneath.

I never know what to expect; he can just turn on me, out of the blue.

I wouldn't call him an abuser. I mean, he can be really nice for weeks at a time.

I really love him.

Over the Fifteen Years I have worked with abusive men, I have spent many hundreds of hours on the telephone listening to the partners of my clients describe their lives. My job is to see my client through the woman's eyes, using my imagination to enter her home and absorb the atmosphere that he creates day in and day out. By assuming her perspective, I begin to see beneath my client's exterior.

At the same time, I don't see exactly the same man the abused woman sees. The circumstances under which I see him have several unusual aspects:

- It is safe for me to challenge and confront him, because I am sitting in a room full of witnesses, including my co-leader. In many cases, I have some power over the man because he is on probation, so a negative report from me could get him brought before a judge.

- I have names and descriptions for his tactics. He finds it difficult to confuse or intimidate me, or to make me feel bad about myself, because I keep pointing out his maneuvers and his motives. Abuse loses some of its power when you have names for its weapons.

- I don't have to live with this man, so he has few opportunities to retaliate against me for standing up to him.

- Some of the men in the group who are attempting to apply the concepts of the program may challenge the man on his attitudes and behaviors. These challenges from other abusers make it harder for him to blame everything on his partner, or on women in general.

I also learn about a man from seeing his reactions to discussions in his group. For example, he tends to express disapproval of other clients whose abuse is different from his—because he considers anything he wouldn't do to be "real" abuse—and while tending to express sympathy for and support of any fellow abuser who employs the same tactics or justifications that he does, turns to me to say: "But what do you expect the poor man to do given his circumstances?"

The abused woman and I thus try to form a team so that we can share our observations about the man and help each other to recognize patterns or dynamics. I am eager to learn from her about my client and at the same time eager to share with her any observations I have that might help her to protect herself or unravel what he is doing to her mind.

One of the earliest lessons I learned from abused women is that to understand abuse you can't look just at the explosions; you have to examine with equal care the spaces between the explosions. The dynamics of these periods tell us as much about the abuse as the rages or the thrown objects, as the disgusting name-calling or the jealous accusations. The abuser's thinking and behavior during the calmer periods are what cause his big eruptions that wound or frighten. In this chapter, we enter the mind of the abuser at various points in daily life to better understand what sparks his abusive actions.

The Abusive Man in Arguments

I will begin by examining in detail an argument between an abusive man and his partner, the kind that I hear about routinely from my clients and their partners. Jesse and Bea are walking along in their town. Jesse is sullen and clearly annoyed.

E.A: What's going on with you? I don't understand what you're upset about.

S.S.E: I'm not upset; I just don't feel like talking right now. Why do you always have to read something into it? Can't I just be a little quiet sometimes? Not everybody likes to talk, talk, talk all the time just because you do.

E.A: I don't talk, talk, talk all the time. What do you mean by that? I just want to know what's bothering you.

S.S.E: I just finished telling you, nothing's bothering me…and give me a break that you don't talk all the time. When we were having dinner with my brother and his wife, I couldn't believe how you went on and on about your stupid journalism class. You're forty years old, for Christ sake; the world isn't excited about your fantasies of being famous. Grow up a little.

E.A: Fantasies of being famous? I'm trying to get a job, Jesse, because the travel agency jobs have all moved downtown. And I wasn't going on about it. They were interested; they were asking me a lot of questions about it—that's why we were on that subject for a while.

S.S.E: Oh, yeah, they were real interested. They were being polite to you because you're so full of yourself. You're so naive you can't even tell when you're being patronized.

E.A: I don't believe this. That dinner was almost two weeks ago. Have you been brewing about it all this time?

S.S.E: I don't brew, Bea, you're the one that brews. You love to get us confused. I'll see you later. I'm really not in the mood for this shit.

E.A: In the mood for what shit?? I haven't done anything! You've had it in for me since I arrived to meet you!

S.S.E: You're yelling at me, Bea. You know I hate being yelled at. You need to get help; your emotions just fly off the handle. I'll see you later.

E.A: Where are you going?

S.S.E: I'll walk home, thank you. You can take the car. I'd rather be alone.

E.A: It's going to take you more than a half hour to walk home, and it's freezing today.

S.S.E: Oh, now suddenly you care about me so much. Up yours. Bye. Walks off.)

The lives of abused women are full of these kinds of exchanges. Jesse didn't call Bea any degrading names; he didn't yell; he didn't hit her or threaten her. Bea will be in a tough spot when the time comes to explain to a friend how upset she is, because Jesse's behavior is hard to describe. What can she say? That he's sarcastic?

That he holds on to things? That he's overly critical? A friend would respond: "Well, that sounds hard, but I wouldn't call it abuse." Yet, as Jesse walks away, Bea feels as if she has been slapped in the face.

What Is Going On in This Argument?

We will look first at what Jesse is doing and then examine how his thinking works. The first point to illuminate is:

The Abuser's Problem Is Not That He Responds Inappropriately to Conflict. His Abusiveness Is Operating Prior to the Conflict: It Usually Creates the Conflict, and It Determines the Shape the Conflict Takes.

Therapists often try to work with an abuser by analyzing his responses to disagreements and trying to get him to handle conflicts differently. But such an approach misses the point: His abusiveness was what caused the tension to begin with.

Jesse uses an array of conversational control tactics, as most abusers do:

- He denies being angry, although he obviously is, and instead of dealing with what is bothering him, he channels his energy into criticizing Bea about something else.

- He insults, belittles, and patronizes Bea in multiple ways, including saying that she likes to talk all the time and has fantasies of becoming famous, stating that she should "grow up," and telling her that she accuses him of stewing over things when it's actually her.

- He tells her that she is unaware that other people look down on her and don't take her seriously and calls her "naive."

- He criticizes her for raising her voice in response to his stream of insults.

• He tells her that she is mistreating him.

- He stomps off and plays the victim by putting himself in the position of having to take a long, cold walk home.

Bea is now left miserable—feeling like a scratching post that a cat has just sharpened its claws on. Part of why she is so shaken up by this experience is that she never knows when one of these verbal assaults is going to happen or what sets it off. On a different day she might have met Jesse to take him home and had a pleasant conversation with him about his workday. Thus she is left imagining that something bad must have happened to him at work and that he is taking it out on her—which may be true in a way but actually has little to do with what is happening.

So, what is going on? The story began two weeks earlier, when Jesse and Bea were out to dinner with Jesse's relatives. What we have just learned from their argument is that Jesse does not like Bea to be the center of attention for any length of time. Why not? There are a few reasons:

1. He considers it her job to play a supporting role to him. This is the same as the attitude that “behind every great man stands woman.” So if either of them is going to be the center of attention, it should be him, and if he is feeling like being quiet she should be, too, remaining in his shadow.

2. He is constantly focused on her faults, so he assumes everyone else is, too.

3. He doesn't like having her appear in public as smart, capable, and interesting, because that collides with his deeply held belief that she is irrational, incompetent, and worthy of being ignored—a view of her that he may want others to share with him.

4. He is afraid on some level that if she gets enough support for her strengths, she will leave him—and he's quite likely right.

Notice that numbers two and three are almost opposites: He assumes that she comes off badly, which embarrasses him, but he is also concerned that she may have come off very well, because then other people might see her as a capable person. He reacts strongly to both possibilities.

We also see the signs that Jesse finds Bea's journalism class threatening to his control over her. In fact, this is probably what he has been dwelling on most over the past two weeks, causing his grumpy mood. Abusive men are uncomfortable when they see signs of budding independence in their partners and often look for ways to undermine the woman's progress in the days ahead.

Returning now to the day of the argument, we can see that Jesse launches into attributing many of his own characteristics to Bea, saying that she is full of herself, that she dwells on grievances, that she yells, that she doesn't care about him. This behavior in abusers is sometimes mistakenly referred to as projection, a psychological process through which people attribute their own fears or flaws to those around them. But as we saw in Chapter 3, the process through which an abuser turns reality on its head is not quite the same as projection. Jesse perceives Bea to be yelling because one of his core values is that she's not supposed to get angry at him, no matter what he does. He thinks she doesn't care about him because in his mind she can't care about him unless she cares only about him, and not at all about herself or other people.

He thinks she is full of herself because she sometimes gets excited about her own goals or activities, when he believes she should be most excited about what he's doing. He thinks she dwells on her grievances because she sometimes attempts to hold him accountable rather than letting him stick her with cleaning up his messes—literally and figuratively.

Jesse is also using projection as a control tactic. Part of why Jesse accuses Bea of doing all the selfish or abusive things that he does is to make it hard for her to get anywhere with her grievances. I have had many clients tell me: “Oh, I knew what I was saying about her wasn't true, but it's a way to really get to her.” (It is surprising how common it is for abusers to admit—if they are caught off guard—to deliberate use of abusive and controlling behaviors.) For all of these reasons, saying simply that “he's projecting” doesn't adequately capture the reasons for an abuser's distorted accusations.

The final behavior we need to examine is Jesse's decision to take a long, cold walk home by himself. Why does he make himself a victim?

• He is drawn to making Bea feel sorry for him so that his feelings can remain the center of attention, crowding hers out. She will feel as though she shouldn't pursue her complaints about the ways in which he has just assaulted her verbally, because he is suffering so much.

He also wants other people to feel sorry for him. He can describe to friends or relatives how the argument led to a miserable walk for him, and they will think: "The poor man." And he will probably adjust the story to his advantage —abusers usually spruce up their accounts—perhaps saying that she was furious and drove off without him, and he was left to walk shivering all the way home. He doesn't consciously plan these maneuvers ahead of time, but experience has taught him on a deeper level that playing the victim increases the sympathy he receives.

- He may want her to worry about what other people will think. She won't want to come out looking like the mean one, so she'll take steps to smooth over the fight.

- On some level he enjoys walking alone for half an hour, wallowing in self-pity, because it helps him feel more justified about his recurring pattern of cruelty and undermining toward Bea. It's a way of reassuring himself that she's the bad one, not him. An abuser is a human being, and somewhere inside him, buried under thick layers of entitlement and disrespect, there is a heart that knows that what he is doing is wrong. This heart periodically tries to send a few beats up through the layers, so the abuser has to stomp them back down.

Each verbal battle with an abuser is a walk through a minefield, and each field is different.

Jesse appears to be a mixture of the Water Torturer and the Victim, with a sprinkling of Mr. Right. Perhaps an argument on the same subject with the Drill Segreant or the Player would go quite differently. But, regardless of specific style, very little of what an abuser does in an argument is as irrational or emotional as it seems.

Four Critical Characteristics Of an Abusive Argument

You may find that each disagreement with your partner is unique and can start in any of a thousand ways, yet it can only arrive at four or five different endings—all of them bad. Your gnawing sensation of futility and inevitably is actually coming from the abusive man's thinking about verbal conflict. His outlook makes it impossible for an argument to proceed toward anything other than the fulfillment of his wishes—or toward nowhere at all. Four features stand out:

1. The abuser sees an argument as war.

His goal in a verbal conflict is not to negotiate different desires, understand each other's experiences, or think of mutually beneficial solutions. He wants only to win. Winning is measured by who talks the most, who makes the most devastating or “humorous” insults (none of which is funny to his partner), and who controls the final decision that comes out of the debate. He won't settle for anything other than victory. If he feels he has lost the argument, he may respond by making a tactical retreat and gathering his forces to strike again later.

Under this layer there is an even deeper stratum in many abusive men where we unearth his attitude that the whole relationship is a war. To this mind-set, relationships are dichotomous, and you're on either one end or the other: the dominator or the submitter, the champ or the chump, the cool man or the loser. He can imagine no other way.

2. She is always wrong in his eyes.

It is frustrating, and ultimately pointless, to argue with someone who is certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that his perspective is accurate and complete and that yours is wrong and stupid. Where can the conversation possibly go?

The question isn't whether he argues forcefully or not. Many nonabusive people express their opinions with tremendous conviction and emotion yet still allow themselves to be influenced by the other person's point of view. On the other hand, it isn't hard to tell when someone is refusing to grapple in good faith with your ideas and instead is just reaching for whatever stick he thinks will deal the heaviest blow to your side. When your partner says to you disparagingly, “Oh, the real reason why you complain about how I argue is that you can't deal with my having strong opinions,” he's diverting attention from the tactics he uses. He is also reversing reality, which is that he can't accept your differences of opinion and doesn't want to let his thinking be influenced by yours. (And on the rare occasions when he does adopt your ideas, he may claim they were his to begin with.)

3. He has an array of control tactics in conflicts.

My clients have so many ways to bully their way through arguments that I couldn't possibly name them all, but the abuser's most common tactics are listed in the box below:

Sarcasm

Ridicule

Distorting what you say

Distorting what happened in an earlier interaction

Sulking

Accusing you of doing what he does, or thinking the way he thinks

Using a tone of absolute certainty and - final authority—"“defining reality”” Interrupting Not listening, refusing to respond Laughing out loud at your opinion or perspective Turning your grievances around to use against you Changing the subject to his grievances Criticism that is harsh, undeserved, or frequent Provoking guilt Playing the victim Smirking, rolling his eyes, contemptuous facial expressions Yelling, out-shouting Swearing

- Name-calling, insults, put-downs

Walking out

Towering over you

Walking toward you in an intimidating way

Blocking a doorway

Other forms of physical intimidation, such as getting too close while he's angry

Threatening to leave you

Threatening to harm you

Conversational control tactics are aggravating no matter who uses them, but they are especially coercive and upsetting when used by an abusive man because of the surrounding context of emotional or physical intimidation. I have rarely met an abuser who didn't use a wide array of the above tactics in conflicts; if you consider an argument with a partner to be a war, why not use every weapon you can think of? The underlying mind-set makes the behaviors almost inevitable.

The abusive man wants particularly to discredit your perspective, especially your grievances. He may tell you, for example, that the “real” reasons why you complain about the way he treats you are:

• You don't want him to feel good about himself.

- You can't handle it if he has an opinion that differs from yours, if he is angry, or if he is right.

- You are too sensitive, you read too much into things, or you take things the wrong way.

- You were abused as a child or by a former partner, so you think everything is abuse.

These are all strategies he uses to avoid having to think seriously about your grievances, because then he might be obligated to change his behaviors or attitudes.

The abusive man's goal in a heated argument is in essence to get you to stop thinking for yourself and to silence you, because to him your opinions and complaints are obstacles to the imposition of his will as well as an affront to his sense of entitlement. If you watch closely, you will begin to notice how many of his controlling behaviors are aimed ultimately at discrediting and silencing you.

4. He makes sure to get his way—by one means or another.

The bottom line with an abuser in an argument is that he wants what he wants—today, tomorrow, and always—and he feels he has a right to it.

The Abusive Man's Cycles

Life with an abuser can be a dizzying wave of exciting good times and painful periods of verbal, physical, or sexual assault. The longer the relationship lasts, the shorter and farther apart the positive periods tend to become. If you have been involved with an abusive partner for many years, the good periods may have stopped happening altogether, so that he is an unvarying source of misery.

Periods of relative calm are followed by a few days or weeks in which the abuser becomes increasingly irritable. As his tension builds, it takes less and less to set him off on a tirade of insults. His excuses for not carrying his weight mount up, and his criticism and displeasure seem constant. Many women tell me that they learn to read their partner's moods during this buildup and can sense when he is nearing an eruption. One day he finally hits his limit, often over the most trivial issue, and he bursts out with screaming, disgusting and hurtful put-downs, or frightening aggression. If he is a violent abuser, he turns himself loose to knock over chairs, hurl objects, punch holes in walls, or assault his partner directly, leaving her scared to death.

After he has purged himself, he typically acts ashamed or regretful about his cruelty or violence, at least in the early years of a relationship. Then he may enter a period when he reminds you of the man you fell in love with—charming, attentive, funny, kind. His actions have the effect of drawing you into a repetitive traumatic cycle in which you hope each time that he is finally going to change for good. You then begin to see the signs of his next slow slide back into abuse, and your anxiety and confusion rise again.

Women commonly ask me: “What is going on inside his mind during this cycle? Why can't he just stay in the good period, what can I do to keep him there?” To answer these questions, let's look through his eyes during each phase:

• The tension-building phase

During this period, your partner is collecting negative points about you and squirreling them away for safekeeping. Every little thing that you have done wrong, each disappointment he has experienced, any way in which you have failed to live up to his image of the perfect selfless woman

—all goes down as a black mark against your name.

Abusers nurse their grievances. One of my former colleagues referred to this habit as The Garden of Resentments, a process through which an abuser plants a minor complaint and then cultivates it carefully while it grows to tremendous dimensions, worthy of outrage and abuse. Jesse, for example, planted the dinner-table conversation in his Garden of Resentments and then harvested it two weeks later to throw in Bea's face, lumping it together with several other issues into one big ugly ball.

To defend against any complaints you attempt to express, the abuser stockpiles his collected grievances like weapons to protect his precious terrain of selfishness and irresponsibility. And some of his negativity about you is just plain habit. An abuser falls into a routine of walking around dwelling on his partner's purported faults. Since he considers you responsible for fixing everything for him, he logically chooses you as his dumping ground for all of life's normal frustrations and disappointments.

• The eruption

The abusive man tends to mentally collect resentments toward you until he feels that you deserve a punishment. Once he's ready to blow, the tiniest spark will ignite him. Occasionally an abused woman may decide to touch her partner off herself at this point, as scary as that is, because the fear of waiting to see what he will do and when he will do it is worse. The explosion of verbal or physical assault that results is horrible, but at least it's over.

After he blows, the abuser absolves himself of guilt by thinking of himself as having lost control, the victim of his partner's provocations or his own intolerable pain. Whereas at other times he may say that men are stronger and less emotional than women, he now switches, saying, “There is only so much a man can take,” or “She really hurt my feelings, and I couldn't help going off.” He may consider women's emotional reactions—such as breaking into tears—contemptible, even when they hurt no one, but when a man has powerful emotions, even violence may be excusable. Some of my most tough-guy clients unabashedly use their painful feelings to excuse their cruel behavior.

• The “hearts and flowers” stage

After the apologies are over, the abuser may enter a period of relative calm. He appears to have achieved a catharsis from opening up the bomb bays and raining abuse down on his partner. He feels rejuvenated and may speak the language of a fresh start, of steering the relationship in a new direction. Of course, there is nothing cathartic for his partner about being the target of his abuse (she feels worse with each cycle), but in the abuser's self-centered way he thinks she should feel better now because he feels better.

During this period, an abuser works to rebuild the bridge that his abusiveness just burned down. He wants to be back in his partner's good graces; he may want sex; and he seeks reassurance that she isn't going to leave him—or expose him. Cards and gifts are common in this phase; hence the name "hearts and flowers."

The abusive man does not, however, want to look seriously at himself; he is merely looking to paste up some wallpaper to cover the holes he has made—figuratively or literally—and return to business as usual. The good period can't last because nothing has changed. His coercive habits, his double standards, his contempt, are all still there. The cycle is repeated because there is no reason why it wouldn't be.

Some abusive men don't follow a discernible cycle like the one I have just described. Your partner's abusive incidents may follow no pattern, so you can never guess what will happen next. I have had clients who seemed almost to get a thrill out of their own unpredictability, which further increased their power. Random abuse can be particularly deleterious psychologically to you and to your children.

A Closer Look at the Good Periods

When an alcohol abuser goes a month or two without a drink, we say the person is “on the wagon.” The dry period is a break from the pattern and inspires some hope of a positive trend. But, with partner abuse, the periods when the man is being good—or at least not at his worst—are not really outside of his pattern. They are generally an integral aspect of his abusiveness, woven into the fabric of his thinking and behavior.

What functions do the good periods play? They perform several, including the following:

- His spurts of kindness and generosity help him to feel good about himself. He can persuade himself that you are the one who is messed up, “because look at me, I'm a great guy.”

- You gradually feel warmer and more trusting toward him. The good periods are critical to hooking you back into the relationship, especially if he doesn't have another way to keep you from leaving, such as financial control or the threat of taking the children.

- While you are feeling more trusting, you expose more of your true feelings about different issues in your life and you show him more caring, which creates vulnerability that he can use later to control you (though he probably doesn't consciously plan to do this). During one of Jesse's bad periods, for example, Bea would probably protect herself by telling him that she was taking a journalism class “just to get the English credits toward my college degree.” But during a more intimate period, she might open up about her dream of pursuing a career in journalism, and he would say it was a great idea. And still later, when he was back in abuse mode, he would be armed with knowledge about her inner life with which to hurt her, as we saw in their argument.

- He uses the good periods to shape his public image, making it harder for you to get people to believe that he's abusive.

I have not encountered any case, out of the roughly two thousand men I have worked with, in which one of an abuser's good periods has lasted into the long term, unless the man has also done deep work on his abusive attitudes. Being kind and loving usually just becomes a different approach to control and manipulation and gradually blends back into more overt abuse. I recognize how painful or frightening it can be for an abused woman to accept this reality, because those times of kindness, and the hope that comes with them, can feel like all you have left to hold on to, given how much he has taken away from you.

But illusions of change also keep you trapped and can increase your feelings of helplessness or disappointment when he returns to his old ways. Real change looks very different from a typical good period—so different that you could scarcely mistake the two, as we will see in Chapter 14.

Ten Reasons to Stay the Same

To answer the question “Why Does He Do That?”

we have to examine the foundation on which abusive behaviors are based. On the first level are the abuser's attitudes, beliefs, and habits—the thinking that drives his behavior day in and day out, which we have been looking at. On the second level is the learning process by which some boys develop into abusive men or, in other words, where abusive values come from, which is the topic of Chapter 13.

There is also a third level, which is rarely mentioned in discussions of abuse but which is actually one of the most important dynamics: the benefits that an abuser gets that make his behavior desirable to him. In what ways is abusiveness rewarding? How does this destructive pattern get reinforced?

Consider the following scenario: Mom, Dad, and their children are having dinner on a Wednesday night. Dad is snappy and irritable, criticizing everybody during the meal, spreading his tension around like electricity. When he finishes eating, he leaves the table abruptly and heads out of the room. His ten-year-old daughter says, “Dad, where are you going? Wednesday is your night to wash the dishes.” Upon hearing these words, Dad bursts into flames, screaming, “You upstart little shit, don't you dare try to tell me what to do! You'll be wearing a dish on your face!” He grabs a plate off the table, makes like he is going to throw it at her, and then turns away and smashes it on the floor. He knocks a chair over with his hand and storms out of the room.

Mom and the children are left trembling; the daughter bursts into tears. Dad reappears in the doorway and yells that she'd better shut up, so she chokes off her tears, which causes her to shake even more violently. Without touching a soul, Dad has sent painful shock waves through the entire family.

We move ahead now to the following Wednesday. Dinner passes fairly normally, without the previous week's tension, but Dad still strolls out of the kitchen when he finishes eating. Does a family member remind him that it's his turn to wash the dishes? Of course not. It will be many, many months before anyone makes that mistake again.

They quietly attend to the cleanup, or they squabble among themselves about who should do it, taking out their frustrations over Dad's unfairness and volatility on each other. Dad's scary behavior has created a context in which he won't have to do the dishes anytime he doesn't feel like it, and no one will dare take him to task for it.

Any incident of abusive behavior brings the abuser benefits just as this one did. Over time, the man grows attached to his ballooning collection of comforts and privileges. Here are some of the reasons why he may appear so determined not to stop bullying:

1. The intrinsic satisfaction of power and control

The abusive man gains power through his coercive and intimidating behaviors—a sensation that can create a potent, thrilling rush. The wielder of power feels important and effective and finds a momentary relief from life's normal distresses. It isn't the woman's pain that appeals to him; most abusers are not sadists. In fact, he has to go to some lengths to shield himself from his own natural tendency to empathize with her. The feeling that he rules is where the pleasure lies.

Yet the heady rush of power is the bare beginning of what the abuser gains through his mistreatment of his partner. If the rewards stopped here, I would find it much easier than I do to prevail upon my clients to change.

2. Getting his way, especially when it matters to him the most

A romantic partnership involves a never-ending series of negotiations between two people's differing needs, desires, and preferences. Many of the differences that have to be worked out are matters of tremendous importance to the emotional life of each partner, such as:

• Are we spending Christmas (or whatever

- holidays are most important to a particular couple) with my relatives, whom I enjoy, or with your relatives, who get on my nerves and don't seem to like me?

- Are we eating dinner tonight at my favorite restaurant, or at a place that I'm tired of and where the children seem to get wound up and irritating?

- Am I going to have to go alone to my office party, which makes me feel terrible, or are you going to come with me even though you would rather spend your evening doing almost anything else on earth?

It is important not to underestimate the impact of these kinds of day-to-day decisions. Your happiness in a relationship depends greatly on your ability to get your needs heard and taken seriously. If these decisions are taken over by an abusive or controlling partner, you experience disappointment after disappointment, the constant sacrificing of your needs. He, on the other hand, enjoys the luxury of a relationship where he rarely has to compromise, gets to do the things he enjoys, and skips the rest. He shows off his generosity when the stakes are low, so that friends will see what a swell guy he is.

The abuser ends up with the benefits of being in an intimate relationship without the sacrifices that normally come with the territory. That's a pretty privileged lifestyle.

3. Someone to take his problems out on

Have you ever suffered a sharp disappointment or a painful loss and found yourself looking for someone to blame? Have you, for example, ever been nasty to a store clerk when you were really upset about your job? Most people have an impulse to dump bad feelings on some undeserving person, as a way to relieve—temporarily—sadness or frustration. Certain days you may know that you just have to keep an eye on yourself so as not to bite someone's head off.

The abusive man doesn't bother to keep an eye on himself, however. In fact, he considers himself entitled to use his partner as a kind of human garbage dump where he can litter the ordinary pains and frustrations that life brings us. She is always an available target, she is easy to blame—since no partner is perfect—and she can't prevent him from dumping because he will get even worse if she tries. His excuse when he jettisons his distresses on to her is that his life is unusually painful—an unacceptable rationalization even if it were true, which it generally isn't.

4. Free labor from her; leisure and freedom for him

No abusive man does his share of the work in a relationship. He may take advantage of his partner's hard work keeping the house, preparing the meals, caring for the children, and managing the myriad details of life. Or, if he is one of the few abusers who carries his weight in these areas, then he exploits her emotionally instead, sucking her dry of attention, nurturing, and support, and returning only a trickle.

All this uncompensated labor from her means leisure for him. During the hours he spends talking about himself he is relieved of the work of listening. The long weekend days when she cares for the children are his opportunity to watch sports, go rock climbing, or write his novel. My clients don't make the connection that someone takes care of the work; they think of it as just mysteriously getting done and refer to women as "lazy." Yet on a deeper level the abuser seems to realize how hard his partner works, because he fights like hell not to have to share that burden. He is accustomed to his luxury and often talks exaggeratedly about his exhaustion to excuse staying on his rear end.

Studies have shown that a majority of women feel that their male partners don't contribute fairly to household responsibilities. However, a woman whose partner is not abusive at least has the option to put her foot down about her workload and insist that the man pick up the slack. With an abusive man, however, if you put your foot down he either ignores you or makes you pay.

The abuser comes and goes as he pleases, meets or ignores his responsibilities at his whim, and skips anything he finds too unpleasant. In fact, some abusers are rarely home at all, using the house only as a base for periodic refueling.

5. Being the center of attention, with priority given to his needs

When a woman's partner chronically mistreats her, what fills up her thoughts? Him, of course. She ponders how to soothe him so that he won't explode, how to improve herself in his eyes, how she might delicately raise a touchy issue with him. Little space remains for her to think about her own life, which suits the abuser; he wants her to be thinking about him. The abuser reaps cooperation and catering to his physical, emotional, and sexual needs. And if the couple has children, the entire family strives to enhance his good moods and fix his bad ones, in the hope that he won't start tearing pieces out of anyone. Consistently at the center of attention and getting his own way, the abuser can ensure that his emotional needs get met on his terms—a luxury he is loath to part with.

6. Financial control

Money is a leading cause of tension in modern relationships, at least in families with children. Financial choices have huge quality-of-life implications, including: Who gets to make the purchases that matter most to him or her; what kinds of preparations are made for the future, including retirement; what types of leisure activities and travel are engaged in; who gets to work; who gets to not work if he or she doesn't want to; and how the children's needs are met. To have your voice in these decisions taken away is a monumental denial of your rights and has long- term implications. On the flip side, the abuser who dominates these kinds of decisions extorts important benefits for himself, whether the family is low income or wealthy. One of the most common tactics I hear about, for example, is that the abuser manages to finagle dealings so that his name is on his partner's belongings—such as her house or her car—along with, or instead of, her name. In fact, I have had clients whose abuse was almost entirely economically based and who managed to take many thousands of dollars away from their partners, either openly or through playing financial tricks.

An abuser's history of economic exploitation tends to put him in a much better financial position than his partner if the relationship splits up. This imbalance makes it harder for her to leave him, especially if she has to find a way to support her children. He may also threaten to use his economic advantage to hire a lawyer and pursue custody, one of the single most terrifying prospects that can face an abused woman.

7. Ensuring that his career, education, or other goals are prioritized

Closely interwoven with financial control is the question of whose personal goals receive priority. If the abuser needs to be out several evenings studying for a certificate that will improve his job advancement potential, he's going to do it. If a career opportunity for him involves moving to a new state, he is likely to ignore the impact of his decision on his partner. Her own goals may also advance at times, but only as long as they don't interfere with his.

8. Public status of partner and/or father without the sacrifices

With his strong people-pleasing skills and his lively energy when under the public gaze, the abusive man is often thought of as an unusually fun and loving partner and a sweet, committed dad. He soaks up the smiles and appreciation he receives from relatives, neighbors, and people in the street who are unaware of his behavior in private.

9. The approval of his friends and relatives

An abuser often chooses friends who are supportive of abusive attitudes. On top of that, he may come from an abusive family; in fact, his father or stepfather may have been his key role model for how to treat female partners. If these are his social surroundings, he gets strokes for knowing how to control his partner, for “putting her in her place” from time to time, and for ridiculing her complaints about him. His friends and relatives may even bond with him on the basis of his view of women in general as being irrational, vindictive, or avaricious. For this man to renounce abuse, he would have to give up his cheerleading squad as well.

10. Double standards

An abusive man subtly or overtly imposes a system in which he is exempt from the rules and standards that he applies to you. He may allow himself to have occasional affairs, “because men have their needs,” but if you so much as gaze at another man, you're a “whore.” He may scream in arguments, but if you raise your voice, you're “hysterical.” He may pick up one of your children by the ear, but if you grab your son and put him in time-out for punching you in the leg, you're a “child abuser.” He can leave his schedule open and flexible while you have to account for your time. He can point out your faults, while setting himself above criticism, so that he doesn't have to deal with your complaints or be confronted with the effects of his selfish and destructive actions. The abusive man has the privilege of living by a special set of criteria that were designed just for him.

Glance Back Quickly over this impressive collection of privileges. Is it any wonder that abusive men are reluctant to change? The benefits of abuse are a major social secret, rarely mentioned anywhere. Why? Largely because abusers are specialists in distracting our attention. They don't want anyone to notice how well this system is working for them (and usually don't even want to admit it to themselves). If we caught on, we would stop feeling sorry for them and instead start holding them accountable for their actions.

As long as we see abusers as victims, or as out-of-control monsters, they will continue getting away with ruining lives. If we want abusers to change, we will have to require them to give up the luxury of exploitation.

When you are left feeling hurt or confused after a confrontation with your controlling partner, ask yourself: What was he trying to get out of what he just did? What is the ultimate benefit to him? Thinking through these questions can help you clear your head and identify his tactics.

Certainly the abusive man also loses a great deal through his abusiveness. He loses the potential for genuine intimacy in his relationship, for example, and his capacity for compassion and empathy. But these are often not things that he values, so he may not feel their absence. And even if he would like greater intimacy, that wish is outweighed by his attachment to the benefits of abuse.

Is He Going to Get Violent?

An abusive man can be scary. Even if he never raises a hand or makes a threat, his partner may find herself wondering what he is capable of. She sees how ugly he can turn, sometimes out of the blue. His desire to crush her emotionally is palpable at times. He sometimes tears into her verbally with a cruelty that she could never have imagined earlier in their relationship. When a man shows himself capable of viciousness, it is natural, and in fact wise, to wonder if he will go even further. Abused women ask me over and over again: “Do you think my partner could get violent? Am I overreacting? I mean, he's not a batterer or something.”

Before I take you through a list of points to consider in examining this issue, make a mental note of the following:

Research Indicates that A Womans Intuitive Sense of Whether or not Her Partner Will be Violent Toward Her is A Substantially More Accurate Predictor of Future Violence than any Other Warning Sign.

So listen closely to your inner voices above all.

When a woman tells me of her concerns about her partner's potential for violence, I first encourage her to pay close attention to her feelings. If he is scaring her, she should take her intuitive sense seriously, even if she doesn't believe his frightening behavior is intentional. Next, I want to learn more about what has already happened:

- Has he ever trapped you in a room and not let you out?

- Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit you?

- Has he ever thrown an object that hit you or nearly did?

- Has he ever held you down or grabbed you to restrain you?

- Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed you?

- Has he ever threatened to hurt you?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he'll ever be violent; he already has been. In more than half of cases in which a woman tells me that her partner is verbally abusive, I discover that he is physically assaultive as well.

It is critical to use common-sense—and legal—definitions of what constitute violence, not the abuser's definition. An abuser minimizes his behavior by comparing himself to men who are worse than he is, whom he thinks of as "real" abusers. If he never threatens his partner, then to him threats define real abuse.

If he only threatens but never actually hits, then real abusers are those who hit. Any abuser hides behind this mental process: If he hits her but never punches her with a closed fist...If he punches her but she has never had broken bones or been hospitalized...If he beats her up badly but afterward he apologizes and drives her to the hospital himself (as several clients of mine have done)...In the abuser's mind, his behavior is never truly violent.

A related mental process reveals itself when a client says to me, as many do: “I'm not like one of those guys who comes home and beats his wife for no reason.” In other words, if he had adequate justification, then it isn't violence. The abuser's thinking tends to wend its way inside of the woman, too, like a tapeworm. The partners of my clients say things to me, such as “I really pushed him too far,” or “He's never hit me; he just shoves me sometimes,” that almost certainly come from the abuser's indoctrination.

To steer clear of these distortions, we need to wrestle the definition of violence out of the hands of the abusers and implement a proper one of our own. Violence is behavior that does any of the following:

- Physically hurts or frightens you, or uses contact with your body to control or intimidate you

• Takes away your freedom of movement,

- such as by locking you in a room or refusing to let you out of a car

- Causes you to believe that you will be physically harmed

- Forces you to have sexual contact or other unwanted physical intimacy

Drawing on the above definition, we can answer important questions that arise:

Is it violence if he tells me he will “kick the crap” out of me but he never does it?

Yes. Threats of bodily harm are physical abuse. The woman ducks or cowers, she runs out of the room, she goes into hiding with her children. There are emotional effects as well, of course, as physical abuse is by nature psychologically abusive.

Is it violence if he pokes me?

Probably. Noncoercive men don't poke their partners in my experience. If it frightens you, causes you pain, controls you, or makes you start wondering what he will do next time, it's violence. Whether it will have these effects partly depends on what his history of past intimidation has been and on what his motives appeared to be in the specific incident. If he is repeatedly emotionally abusive, then a poke is definitely violent. In other words, context matters.

The abuser will of course deny that he meant to intimidate his partner; he just “lost his cool” or “couldn't take it anymore.” He may ridicule her for being so upset: “You call a poke violent?? That's abuse?? You're the most hysterical, melodramatic person in the world!” To me, this bullying response makes clear that he did indeed have power motives.

I slapped him in the face, and he punched me and gave me a black eye. He says what he did was self-defense. Is he right?

No, it was revenge. My clients often report having hit their partners back “so that she'll see what it's like” or “to show her that she can't do that to me.” That isn't self-defense, which means using the minimal amount of force needed to protect oneself. He uses her hitting him as an opening to let his violence show, thereby putting her on notice about what might happen in the future if she isn't careful. His payback is usually many times more injurious and intimidating than what she did to him, making his claims of self-defense even weaker; he believes that when he feels hurt by you, emotionally or physically, that gives him the right to do something far worse to you.

He says that I'm violent, because I've slapped him or shoved him a couple of times. Is he right?

If your actions did not harm, frighten, or control him, they wouldn't fit my definition of violence.

He labels you as violent in order to shift the focus to what you do wrong, which will just lock you more tightly in his grip. However, I do recommend that you not assault him again, as he might seize on it as an excuse to injure you seriously. Some women persuade themselves that they are holding their own by using violence too, saying, “I can take it, but I can also dish it out.” But over time you will find that you are the one being controlled, hurt, and frightened. Besides, hitting a partner is just plain wrong, except in self-defense. Use your own behavior as a warning sign that you can't manage your abusive partner, and call an abuse hot line now.

Question 11:

Will His Verbal Abuse Turn to Violence?

If your partner has not used any physical violence yet, how can you tell if he is likely to head in that direction? These are some of the rumblings that can tip you off that a violent storm may come some day:

- When he is mad at you, does he react by throwing things, punching doors, or kicking the car? Does he use violent gestures such as gnashing teeth, ripping at his clothes, or swinging his arms around in the air to show his rage? Have you been frightened when he does those things?

- Is he willing to take responsibility for those behaviors and agree to stop them, or does he justify them angrily?

- Can he hear you when you say that those behaviors frighten you, or does he throw the subject back on you, saying that you cause his behaviors, so it's your own

- problem if you're scared?

- Does he attempt to use his scary behaviors as bargaining chips, such as by saying that he won't punch walls if you will stop going out with your friends?

- Does he deny that he even engaged in the scary behaviors, such as claiming that a broken door was caused by somebody else or that you are making up or exaggerating what happened?

- Does he ever make veiled threats, such as "You don't want to see me mad," or "You don't know who you're messing with"?

- Is he severely verbally abusive? (Research studies indicate that the best behavioral predictor of which men will become violent to their partners is their level of verbal abuse.)

Although these questions can help you determine the degree of your partner's tendency to violence, it is important to contact a program for abused women regardless of your answers; the fact that you are even considering his potential for violence means that something is seriously wrong.

If your partner is hurting or scaring you, consider seeking legal protection. In many states, for example, you can seek a restraining order even if your partner has never hit or sexually assaulted you, as long as he has put you in fear. Some states offer a woman the option of obtaining an order that allows the man to continue residing in the home but that forbids him from behaving in frightening ways.

Some approaches to assessing how dangerous your partner may be are covered in “Leaving an Abuser Safely” in Chapter 9. The advantages and disadvantages of taking legal steps are discussed in “Should I Get a Restraining Order?” in Chapter 12.

Racial and Cultural Differences in Abuse

I find that the fundamental thinking and behavior of abusive men cut across racial and ethnic lines. The underlying goal of these abusers, whether conscious or not, is to control their female partners. They consider themselves entitled to demand service and to impose punishments when they feel that their needs are not being met. They look down on their partners as inferior to them, a view that often extends to their outlook on women in general.

At the same time, the particular shape that abusiveness takes can vary considerably among races and cultures. Abusers rely heavily on the forms of abuse that are most acceptable among men of their background. My white American clients, for example, tend to be extremely rigid about how their partners are allowed to argue or express anger. If the partner of one of these clients raises her voice, or swears, or refuses to shut up when told to do so, abuse is likely to follow. Clients from certain other cultures are more focused on precisely how their partners care for the house and prepare meals. Their social lives revolve around food, so they expect to be waited on like royalty with a warm, creative, and tasty dinner every night. If the man shows up two hours late without calling, the meal is still expected to be warm somehow, or else. I find that clients from certain countries stand out for their fanatical jealousy, which can lead verbally to ripping into their partners for speaking to a stranger on the street for ten minutes or for dancing one number with another man at a party. Abusive men from one region of the world commonly hit their children with belts, a behavior that meets with stern disapproval from abusers from other parts of the world, who in turn may horrify the first group by taking custody of their children away from the mothers.

Not only abusive behaviors but also the excuses and justifications that accompany them are formed partly by an abusive man's background. Men of one group may rely more on the excuse of having lost control of themselves, for example, whereas others admit that their behavior is a choice but justify it by saying that they have to resort to abuse to keep the family from spinning out of control.

As we will see in Chapter 13, abusiveness in relationships is a problem that is transmitted from generation to generation by cultural training and therefore takes a unique shape within each society. But for the women (and often children) who are the targets of this cruelty, the cultural variations don't necessarily change the quality of life very much. Abusiveness can be thought of as a recipe that involves a consistent set of ingredients: control, entitlement, disrespect, excuses, and justifications (including victim blaming)—elements that are always present, often accompanied by physical intimidation or violence.

Abusive men tend to use a little more of one ingredient and a little less of another, substituting different tactics and excuses depending on their culture, allowing their partners certain rights and taking away others. But, despite the variations, the flavor of abuse remains pretty much the same. Abusers—and therefore their abused partners—have a tremendous amount in common across national and racial lines.

Is Abuse of Women Acceptable in Some Cultures?

I commonly run into the misconception that men from some national or ethnic groups behave much more abusively toward women than those in the mainstream of the United States and Canada.

Social workers sometimes say to me, for example, "The family I am working with right now comes from one of those cultures where domestic violence is considered normal and acceptable."

The reality, however, is that cultural approval for partner abuse is disturbingly high in our society, even among the privileged and educated (see Chapter 13), and our domestic-violence statistics, while not the worst in the world, are on the high end. The United States is the only industrialized nation that has failed to ratify the U.N convention on eliminating discrimination against women, which specifically refers to violence against women as a form of discrimination. Pointing fingers at other countries can be a way to ignore the serious problems in our own.

In reality, abuse of women—and societal approval of it—is a widespread problem in the great majority of modern cultures. The only places where it has been found not to exist are among some tribal peoples who are highly disapproving of all forms of aggression and who give women and men equal or nearly equal power.

Abusive men from some national backgrounds are very explicit and direct about their cultural or religious rules, which can make their attitudes appear to be unusually bad. A man might say, for example, “God ordained that the man chastise the woman,” or he might say threateningly to this partner, “Part of a wife's job is to give the man sex when he wants it.” Do white American abusers think in these ways less than abusers of other cultures do? No. They do often hide their beliefs better and, by doing so, can create the impression of being more “enlightened.” But the directness of a cultural message is not the same thing as its strength. I have worked with hundreds of nonwhite abusers from a spectrum of cultures and religions, with more than twenty different countries of origin among them, and I can assure you that my white, middle-class clients feel every bit as justified as the others and have attitudes toward women that are just as superior and disrespectful. As a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging. Unwrapped, it doesn't look very different.

Some Specific Cultural Excuses and Justifications

Certain culturally specific rationalizations used by abusive men can be particularly confusing to women. For example, I find it fairly common for an abusive man of color to believe that the racial discrimination he has faced in his life excuses his mistreatment of his partner. If you complain to him that he is abusing you, he may accuse you of betraying him as a man of color, saying that you are siding with the white culture that has already torn him down so much. Because racism does remain a harsh reality, he may succeed in making you feel guilty for criticizing him or for trying to leave him. If your background is the same as his, he applies a double standard of racial solidarity; in his mind he isn't betraying his racial group even though he is abusing a woman of color, yet he considers you disloyal when you complain of his treatment or denounce him. He's got reality turned around backward: The one who is betraying solidarity is him.

I have also had a few dozen clients over the years who belong to fundamentalist religious groups, usually Christian or Islamic fundamentalist or Orthodox Judaic. Abusive men from these groups tend to openly espouse a system in which women have next to no rights and a man is entitled to be the unquestioned ruler of the home. To make matters worse, these religious sects have greatly increased their political power around the globe over the past two decades. As a case in point, consider the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism in the United States. Women who live within these religious groups may feel especially trapped by abuse, since their resistance to domination is likely to be viewed as evil and the surrounding community may support or even revere the abuser. (Christian women living with abuse can find excellent guidance in keeping the Faith by Marie Fortune. See “Resources.”)

Some of my African-American clients claim that black women are too tough to abuse, and they may even claim to be victims of the women's violence. This claim is sometimes accompanied by descriptions of the black family as “matriarchal” or “female dominated.” These exaggerations of cultural differences serve to cover up the fact that, according to the latest U.S. statistics, African-American woman are abused at roughly the same rate as white women. It is true, in my experience, that black women sometimes fight back more than white women against a physically violent abuser (though many white women fight back also), but they don't come out any less injured, frightened, or controlled.

Finally, men of some tribal cultures develop abusive behaviors toward women after they have had extensive contact with modern societies for the first time. Tribal women have sometimes reported, for example, that when television came to their geographic areas, domestic violence came with it, as their men began to learn the violent and male-dominant attitudes that characterize so much of modern culture. The tribal man thus may justify his abusiveness in terms of progress and moving into the mainstream, linking his ridicule of his partner to disparaging the overall tribal way of life, though some do the opposite, falsely claiming that tradition supports their oppressive behaviors.

While I have Focused here on cultural differences and similarities among abusive men, there is another situation in which race and culture are very important to abuse: when the abuser is white American (or Canadian) but his partner is a woman of color or an immigrant. The abuser in such a relationship tends to use racism as an additional tactic to insult and control his partner. Women of color who have white abusers can face considerable bias from police, courts, or child protective services. Some specific resources for abused women of color—regardless of the race of the abusive man—are listed in the back of this book.

The Same-Sex Abuser

Although most abusers are male and most abused partners are female, the reasons for this lopsided picture are social, not biological. Women sometimes abuse their lesbian partners, and men may be abused by their gay partners. The thinking that drives the behavior of lesbian and gay male abusers largely follows the patterns we have been examining. While it is true that some justifications used by heterosexual male abusers are not available to the gay or lesbian abuser—such as “I have the right to rule over you because I'm the man and you're the woman”—the same-sex abuser replaces these with others that can be as powerful. The abused lesbian or gay man therefore can get as badly ensnarled as the straight woman.

First, let's look at some of the things the same-sex abuser can't do as easily (I am going to call the abuser "she"):

- She won't be able to use sex-role expectations that are based on cultural or religious rules as easily as the straight male abuser can.

- She doesn't have as many social power advantages as a man who is involved with a woman does. (The straight male abuser can take advantage in multiple ways of the fact that we still live in "a man's world," despite recent societal changes.)

- She may not be able to use size and strength to intimidate as easily as most straight male abusers do. In fact, she may be smaller or appear to be less “tough” than her partner.

The same-sex abuser compensates for these gaps in several ways. I will offer just a few examples:

1. She may have an even deeper conviction than the straight male abuser that she couldn't possibly be abusive, no matter how cruel or even violent she gets, because abuse "doesn't happen" in same-sex relationships. She may sound so sure of herself on this point that she is able to convince her abused partner that what is happening is just normal relationship conflict.

2. She uses her partner's homosexuality against her. When she is angry, she may threaten to tell her partner's parents about their relationship or to call up her place of employment and "out" her, which could cause her to lose her job. If she is a violent abuser, she may tell her partner: "You think the police or the courts are going to help you when they know you're lesbian?" The gay male abuser may tell his partner: "The police are just going to laugh at you when you tell them you are afraid. They'll tell you to act like a man."

The lesbian or gay male who is involved with a violent or threatening abuser does genuinely face discrimination from the police and courts, and the abuser knows this. In many states, for example, an abused person cannot obtain a restraining order to keep the abuser away if that person is of the same sex.

3. The same-sex abuser may get even more mileage out of playing the victim than the straight male abuser does. When a straight male goes around claiming that a woman is abusing him, he often meets with considerable skepticism—as well he should. But when we look at two people of the same sex, how are we to tell which one is abusing power? A quick glance won't give us the answer. The result is that a same-sex abuser can often convince people around her, and sometimes even her own partner, that she is the one being abused.

When lesbians or gay men go to agencies for help with relationship abuse, it is not unheard of for the abuser to say that she is the victim and for the victim to say that she is the abuser! Sometimes the abuser succeeds in getting support and sympathy for quite a while before service providers catch on to the fact that they are assisting the wrong person.

4. The abuser can sometimes get her wider community to be silent about the abuse, because everyone is already struggling with the negative social image of homosexuality. Many lesbians and gay men feel, quite understandably, that awareness of abuse in same-sex relationships will be used by bigoted people as an excuse for further stereotyping and discrimination. And there's really no question that bigots will do exactly that. But silence is not the answer either, since it isolates and abandons abused lesbians and gay men and allows the abusers to go steamrolling forward over the lives of their partners.

The same-sex abuser may have had an extremely difficult life, and she may feel that anyone who labels her “abusive” is being unfair to her, given what she has gone through. She may have been banished from her family because of her homosexuality, barred from progressing in her career, or filled with secret shame during her adolescence. People in her social circle may have gone through similar trials and thus feel an instant sympathy for her excuses. But nonabusive lesbians and gay men have also endured oppressive experiences because of their sexuality. Same-sex abusers, like straight male abusers, seize any excuse they can to absolve themselves of responsibility for their actions and to elicit sympathy.

Ultimately, the thinking and actions of lesbian and gay male abusers are more similar to than different from those of other abusers. Later on, when we explore the social roots of abusiveness, it will become clear why all abusers follow more or less the same template.

Key Points to Remember

- For the most part, an abusive man uses verbally aggressive tactics in an argument to discredit your statements and silence you. In short, he wants to avoid having to deal seriously with your perspective in the conflict.

• Arguments that seem to spin out of control “for no reason” actually are usually being used by the abusive man to achieve certain goals, although he may not always be conscious of his own motives. His actions and statements make far more sense than they appear to.

- An abusive man's good periods are an important and integrated aspect of his abuse, not something separate from it.

• Abusive men find abusiveness rewarding. The privileged position they gain is a central reason for their reluctance to change.

- Abusive men tend to be happy only when everything in the relationship is proceeding on their terms. This is a major reason for the severe mood swings that they so often exhibit from day to day.

- Violence is not just punches and slaps; it is anything that puts you in physical fear or that uses your body to control you.

- The styles of abusers vary by race, nationality, and sexual orientation. However, their commonalities far outweigh their differences.

- The turbulence, insecurity, and fear that your partner causes in daily life can make it hard to recognize his pattern of attitudes and behaviors. By taking a mental step back, you may begin to see recurring themes.

• Be cautious, and seek out assistance. You don't deserve to live like this, and you don't have to. Try to block his words out of your mind and believe in yourself. You can do it.

Abusive Men and Sex

He's not attracted to me anymore, which really hurts me.

It's easier sometimes to just give in.

He never hits me, but he did force me to have sex once.

We both have an infection now, and he says it must have come from me, but I haven't had any affairs, so I know it's him.

It seems like the only time we feel close is when we're making love.

Libby Scowled, the muscles in her face and neck tightening, as she described an abusive boyfriend she had left three years earlier. “Arnaldo never hit me, but he seemed to get a thrill out of being mysterious and terrifying. One day he described in graphic detail how he was going to torture and kill my cat, because he knew how precious my pets are to me. Another time he was giving me a massage, talking in this hypnotic, faraway tone, and he said, 'When I was in Green Beret training, I learned about a certain spot in a person's neck where, if you poke them hard and fast, you can paralyze them permanently.'” Libby found out later that Arnaldo had never been in the military. He had told other lies, too, like the one about his terminally ill grandmother who was going to leave him thirty thousand dollars.

But his stories had all sounded so convincing. “He got me to support him for a year and to lend him a lot of money besides. I'm out five or six thousand dollars because of him.” Resentment rang through her voice as she gained momentum. “I would be in such a different financial position right now if it hadn't been for him. And I bought it when he promised to pay me back any day, always saying that the money was just about to arrive. What a con artist!” And she told me how Arnaldo would harangue her about being too skinny, so that she became shameful of her body. I couldn't tell which was more potent inside of her, rage or grief.

Then, abruptly, Libby's face softened. A hint of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes shined lightly as she focused on an image inside her mind. "But there was one thing that wasn't like the rest with Arnaldo. Sex. Lovemaking with him was great.

He was so completely into it. He would light candles and build the mood for a while. It would last a long time. He was so intense, and passionate. There was this drama around it that was so transporting. I have never experienced anything like it before. Or since, really. I wish I could capture just that one part of the relationship. The rest was awful."

Libby's story is not as unusual as you might think. When I interview partners of my clients, I always ask whether there has been any sexual mistreatment. It is not uncommon for me to hear the woman's voice lose its tension, as Libby's facial expression had, and hear her say with a certain lilt, "Oh, well, we've never had any problem in that area," followed by a contented and slightly embarrassed chuckle. In fact, memories of the better aspects of their sexual relationship can be part of why a woman who has left an abusive partner feels so tempted to give him another chance.

But there is also the other extreme. I have had clients whose only interest in sex was for domination and degradation. For the woman, being in bed with this style of abuser can be a nightmare. He wants sex when he wants it, the way he likes it, and with little attention to how she may feel or what her needs might be. Sexual episodes with him may feel like sexual assaults to her. As the partner of one of my clients said to me, "I don't even want to go into it. It's just ugly."

The sexually abusive man won't necessarily rape his partner in the literal sense of using physical force or threats of harm—though some do. Instead he may insult her when she declines his advances, call her names like "frigid" or "lesbian," or snarl accusingly, "You must be getting it somewhere else, since you never want to make it with me anymore." He may make her feel guilty about his sexual frustration, tell her that he feels like she doesn't love him anymore, or say that a man must have his needs met. He may threaten infidelity: "Well, if you won't have sex with me, I can find plenty of women who will." And he may carry that threat out; many clients of mine have used affairs to punish their partners.

A woman named Cynthia recounted how her partner coerced her by using relentlessness: “If I don't want to have sex with Ernie, he just goes on

and on, and he won't stop until I change my mind. He'll beg me, then he'll get crude and say I'm fucking someone else. Then it's nonstop insults. If I go to sleep, he wakes me up. Some nights I'm just exhausted after a while. So what do I do? Usually I finally give in. I can't stand to go through it. It ends up being better to just get it over with, even though it's awful, because then at least he lets me sleep."

When people think about forced sex, they picture physical assault. So when an abuser forces sex through pressure or manipulation or sleep deprivation, a woman doesn't know what to call it and may blame herself. Dozens of partners of my clients, including Cynthia, have said: "It's my own fault. I shouldn't give in to him." A woman can need some time and distance before she can come to realize that she was not responsible for her partner's sexual mistreatment of her, before she can even name what he did. An ex-partner of one of my clients said to me, about two years after she and the abuser divorced, “Looking back on it now, I can see that I was raped over and over again for more than ten years.” And she was realizing how destructive his actions had been to her soul. Studies show that women whose partners abuse them sexually can have some of the greatest emotional difficulties, including depression, of any abused women.

How Many Abusive Men Look at Sex

Arnaldo, the sexually amazing abuser, and Ernie, the sexually degrading abuser, are not as different as they may seem. Their underlying orientation toward sex is similar. One style of abusive man may behave in a sexually appropriate manner for the early period of a relationship, and then one night from hell he may broadside his partner with aggressive, degrading sex or even force her outright. The woman is left in shock, heartbroken and betrayed, feeling that her life has been turned upside down. A few of the women I've worked with have even told me of the anguish of being sexually assaulted on the night of their wedding or within a few days thereafter. With other abusive men the change may be gradual rather than abrupt, the early months of exciting and loving sexuality blending slowly into arm-twisting and ugliness. When we look inside the abuser's mind, we often find that dazzling lovemaking and spirit-murdering sexual aggression can actually be two aspects of the same mind-set.

Before I take you through the details and subtleties of how abusive men typically approach a range of sexual issues, I want to emphasize the underpinnings of the sexual mentality of many abusers, the foundation that often supports the rest of the structure.

It's for Him

The abuser's orientation toward sex is likely to be self-involved. Sex to him is primarily about meeting his needs. He may put some effort into creating pleasure for his partner, but probably not because her satisfaction, or sharing a mutual experience, is important to him. He is invested in having her reach orgasm so that he can see himself as a great lover. He wants to be erotic because he believes that his sexual prowess will enable him to dominate women. Of course, any lover gets some pride out of bringing pleasure to a partner. But to many abusive men, that's the only reason why the woman's satisfaction matters. Everything refers back to him.

An abusive man commonly rolls all of his emotional needs into one tremendous bundle, which he expects sex to be able to carry. He tends to have little real heart-to-heart connection with his partner, since a man cannot be truly close to a woman he is abusing. (Although his partner may feel very attached to him through traumatic bonding, and he may feel very attached to having her meet his various needs, attachment and closeness are two different things.) So he compensates for the lack of genuine intimacy by elevating sex to the highest plane, burdening it with the responsibility of providing for him all the emotional satisfaction that he is not receiving elsewhere in his relationship.

2. She Owes Him Sex.

My clients commonly believe that a woman gives up her right to decline sex once she becomes seriously involved with a man. It's her responsibility to have sex with him to make him feel loved, to meet his sexual needs, or simply because that's her job. The specific point at which she loses her right to say no varies from abuser to abuser. For some, the gateway to sexual domination is the first time they have sex. In other words, she has the right to say no as long as she always says no, but the first time they actually make love, she forfeits her option to turn him down from that day forward. I find this particularly true of my younger clients. To other abusers, marriage is the moment when her body is transferred to his ownership. To still others, moving in together is the demarcation line.

A majority of my clients seem to believe that the woman loses her right to refuse him if the man determines that it has been “too long” since they have had sex. The definition of how many days without sex is too many differs for each abuser, but he watches his internal clock and expects access when the alarm goes off. Her decision not to have sex may be respected up to that moment, but then his entitlement tends to take over.

In a typical abusive inversion, my clients often attempt to convince me that they are the sexual victims in their relationships. As one man said: "My partner uses sex to control me, that's how women jerk men around. Women are the ones that really have the power over men because they know they have what we want the most, and they have the power to shut us out. My wife wants me to be her little puppy dog, begging and drooling and wagging my tail, that's the only way I'll get sex.” The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn't want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land—and he owns them.

3. Sex Is a Way to Establish Power and Dominance.

We have been looking at the abusive attitude that says: “We have sex because I have power over you.” On the flip side of that outlook is an equally prevalent aspect of abusive thinking: “I have power over you because we have sex.” In this respect his sexual actions are like those of a tomcat marking territory. Once he has “gone all the way” with a woman, he feels that he owns her, or at least owns a piece of her. Both the kinder and more cruel aspects of the sexuality of abusive men can spring from the use of sex to establish dominance.

One quarter or more of my clients cheat on their partners repeatedly. These men seem to get excitement from establishing their power over women in general, by demonstrating their ability to get sexual access. An abuser may get all this sex by creating an image of himself as a stupendous lover; by telling woman after woman that he is in love with her and that he is planning to leave his partner for her “as soon as I can break the news to her, but I just need a little time to let her down easy”; by using drugs or alcohol to impair a woman's ability to resist, or by force and intimidation. This man is heavily focused on “scoring,” and the actual effect he has on the lives of these women, from broken promises to sexually transmitted infections, never seems to hit home for him.

Sexual access to lots of different women may not only make him feel powerful vis-à-vis women but also in relation to other men. If he feels competitive with men, he can demonstrate his superiority by having more notches in his belt, “bagging” women like deer. He may surround himself with men who share his view that high status in the pecking order accrues to those who can control or exploit the most women. (See “The Player” in Chapter 4.)

For those abusers who are not chronically unfaithful to their partners, this competition with men may still exist, perhaps taking the form of desiring to have the most beautiful or sexy partner and wanting other men to see how he owns and controls her. His partner may be flattered by his pride in her at first, but gradually she comes to feel that she is being used as a showpiece, with her humanity ignored.

4. He Sees Her as a Sex Object.

An abuser who exhibits any one of the sexual attitudes described above—or all three—has to distance himself from his partner's thoughts and feelings in order to avoid guilty feelings about how he is using and wounding her sexually. One way he may do this is by seeing his partner as a sex object, as if she were a pornographic photo rather than a person, devoid of emotions or ambitions, free of any need for personal integrity or safety. This style of abusive man looks at his partner as a machine to be used for his sexual use. This depersonalizing of his partner can, in the long term, be as psychologically injurious to her as any of his other abusive behaviors. Partners of my clients sometimes tell me:

“He just makes me feel gross.”

“I feel dirty and slimed on.”

"He makes me feel cheap."

“The sexual stuff he does is what has really ruined my self-esteem.”

“It's been years since I've had sex that really felt loving or voluntary. With him it seems more like he thinks he's winning a war or something. It's like an invasion. I hate it.”

Dehumanization can be a sickening, horrible experience for the person at whom it is directed. If you are involved with a sexually exploitative partner, you may find that sex is sometimes, or perhaps always, a nightmare. Exploitative, rough, coercive, uncaring sex is similar to physical violence in its effects, and can be worse in many ways. And part of why it feels so degrading is that a woman can sense the fact that in her partner's mind she has ceased to exist as a human being.

Abusive men who have these kinds of attitudes of sexual ownership sometimes refuse to use birth control or to practice safe sex. I have had numerous clients, for example, who have conceived children through sexual assaults on their partners. The implications of these kinds of sexual abuse for a woman—and for her children—are very serious.

Back to Mister Amazing

Having laid out the worst aspects of the sexual mind-set of many abusive men, we now can go back to reexamine Arnaldo, the sexually exciting and engaging abuser. Ironically, part of why he is so sexually dynamic is that he is profoundly self-involved. He can create a vibrantly sensual lovemaking experience because of how engrossed he is in seeing himself as an awe-inspiring person. (This is connected to why severely self-centered people in general, not just abusive men, can often be charismatic and seductive.) When Mr.

Amazing is lighting the candles, choosing the music, and using his soft, smooth voice to conjure the sexual mood, you may be thinking, “Wow, this is so amazingly deep, and here we are going through this together.” But in reality the abuser is secretly off in a world by himself, engaged more with his fantasy than with you.

Mr. Amazing is enraptured for another reason: He finds possession enthralling. He feels like he is entering a magical realm where you belong to him totally, where he can be the ultimate master and you his unquestioning and contented slave. He craves, in short, a sexual partner with no mind or will of her own.

Finally, on some level he hopes that his ability to transport you sexually will tie you to him, so that he can have power over you in other, nonsexual ways. And, in some relationships, the abuser's belief in the power of his sexuality is self- fulfilling: if much of the rest of the time he acts cold or mean, the episodes of lovemaking can become the only experience you have of loving attention from him, and their addictive pull thus becomes greater. In this way he can draw you into being as dependent on sex as he is, although for a very different reason.

The Abuser Who Isn't Interested in Sex (At Least Not Anymore)

Not every abusive man is pressuring or demanding with respect to sex. In fact, a substantial number of the partners of my clients complain of the opposite problem: The man has lost sexual interest almost completely, and the woman is feeling rejected and hungry for sex and affection. His drop in sexual energy can be propelled by several forces, including:

- A substantial proportion of abusive men are sexually shallow and so are only attracted to women with whom they have not had sex or to those they have been with only a few times. Your partner may not be interested in the kind of deep connection needed to sustain a lively sexual relationship over time and instead is off pursuing his latest fantasy of a great sexual relationship. His body may not be cheating yet, but his mind is.

- Similarly, he may be incapable of sustained sexual attraction to any woman who doesn't meet his exaggerated ideal. He may want a woman with perfect features and a flawless body, like the airbrushed models in magazines. He may lose interest rapidly in a real-life woman whose body changes over time (from childbearing, for example, or simply from age) or one who, on close examination, is revealed to have blemishes or imperfections, as any real human being does. He'll never find his dream girl because she doesn't exist, but he may pour a lot of his time and mental energy into the search—and into punishing you for not being her.

- He may be attracted primarily to sex involving domination, referred to by some researchers as the sexualization of subordination. As your relationship progresses, he may feel disappointed to discover that you don't fit his fantasy of a concubine—submissive and servile. There may be ways in which you stand up to him, refusing to relinquish certain aspects of your life or thoughts to his control. Some abusive men unfortunately have difficulty in achieving sexual arousal once they discover that a woman is determined to be her own person.

- He may be punishing you for some way you have challenged him, or for times when you have not felt like having sex with him. It is common for abusive men to withhold sex as a control tactic.

- If he is indeed having an affair, his energy for sex at home is bound to be siphoned off some. The chances that he is carrying a dangerous infection are also rising. If you have any concerns that your partner may be cheating on you, be sure to insist on safer sex practices. If requiring him to use safe sex feels dangerous to you because of how he may react, call a hotline for help right away.

- He may be addicted to drugs or alcohol. Some substance abusers lose their sex drive.

- He may be gay. A small number of my clients have eventually admitted to their partners, or to me, that they are primarily attracted to men. In a slightly larger but still small number of cases, the man never admits that he is gay, but the woman either catches him with a man or realizes that he spends most of his time at gay hangouts or with gay friends. Just because a man is gay doesn't mean that he can't be abusive to women. He may, for example, use a female partner as a window dressing to give him social respectability, diverting attention from his homosexuality. This is simply another example of how abusive men, straight or gay, tend to use women for selfish purposes.

- He may ration out sex as a way to gain power, sensing that you will try extra hard to keep him happy in hopes of getting him interested in lovemaking.

As I have discussed, abusive men tend to move between extremes, from loving and attentive to hateful and intimidating, from being overly involved in the minute details of your life to expressing no interest, from showing exclusive concern with what is good for you to being unboundedly selfish. The swing from electric sexual charge to loss of all sexual desire can increase his power just as the other highs and lows do.

Sex as a Cure-All

A baffling question arises over and over again among the female partners of my clients: “Why does he want to have sex right after an incident in which he has been horrible to me? Sex is the last thing on my mind at that moment.”

Question 12:

Why Does He Want Sex After Abusing Me?

Contrary to what some abusive men seem to believe, women do not find abuse sexy. When a woman's partner calls her “bitch” or “whore,” mocks her, or physically intimidates her, the image of entwining herself intimately with him recedes far from her mind. How can you “make love” after someone has just treated you in a way that feels more like hatred? Abusive men do not grasp how ugly they appear when acting cruel.

So why are his feelings so different? Does abuse turn him on? Perhaps. Some men do appear to find abuse arousing, probably because they associate sexuality with domination. But other reasons why he might want sex after mistreating you are more common, including:

- He is seeking a quick-fix for his abusive behavior. He feels that if you have sex together, it proves that his verbal degradation or his violence is not that serious, that you aren't hurt by what he did, and that everything is forgiven and forgotten.

- He wants to reassure himself that his abuse isn't going to cause you to pull away from him emotionally or sexually. In fact, pursuing sex after abuse can be an expression of the man's entitlement, as if to say, "Even if I'm mean to you, I should still get to have sexual access."

An incident of abuse leaves the abusive man with a bad taste in his mouth, which he wants to chase away quickly, and sex helps him do that. But the woman can't drive her anguish off so easily, as it runs much too deep. Unfortunately, the abuser's self-focus makes him unwilling to understand that difference.

Sex as a Way to Keep Women Divided

Some of my clients are the focal points of swirling wars among females who hate each other passionately. The man creates and feeds these battles by being sexually unfaithful, making promises to various women that he's going to pursue a long-term relationship with each one of them, bad-mouthing women to each other, getting women pregnant, and making them feel sorry for him. (See “The Player” in Chapter 4.) By getting women to channel their energy into fighting with each other, he escapes confrontation or accountability for his own actions and gets women to focus on meeting his needs and keeping him happy. Here are a couple of the approaches that clients of mine have used:

Chris and Donna

Chris makes his partner, Donna, insecure by frequently looking hard at other women or speaking flirtatiously with them and by spending a lot of time on phone calls for which he has odd explanations. He likes Donna to be aware that a lot of women are interested in him, so he drops suggestive comments from time to time. He pretends that he feels hostile toward these women, whom he accuses of “trying to tear us apart because they want to be with me." When Donna starts to hear rumors that he is sleeping around, and when one woman finally tells her outright that she has been having an affair with Chris, he tells Donna that these are lies designed to drive wedges between them. Donna spends a lot of time wondering whether Chris is really telling the truth and hating the women who are trying to take her man away from her.

Sam and Nancy

A few years into his relationship with Nancy, Sam has a secret affair for a couple of months with a woman named Zoe. He finally cuts off the affair and confesses to Nancy. He claims that Zoe seduced him and that he knew all along they shouldn't have been seeing each other, but he was afraid of hurting her because she seemed deeply depressed, so he kept postponing the decision to end it. “Zoe kept saying that she and I are right for each other, but I always knew it was just a fling and that I belong with you. She just wouldn't listen, though." He says that what finally prompted him to break things off with Zoe was her unkind comments about Nancy, which he quotes to her. Nancy becomes furious at Zoe upon hearing about her insults.

A year or so later, Nancy senses that Sam is drifting from her, including losing interest in sex. She snoops around a little and discovers that he is involved with Zoe again. She demands that Sam stop seeing her and he reluctantly agrees, but two months later he is involved with her again. "I don't know how to explain it," Sam says, "because I don't have feelings for her like I have for you. She just has some hold over me. It's a sexual thing I guess. I just can't seem to say no." Nancy comes increasingly to hate Zoe for ruining her relationship.

Meanwhile, Sam uses his tortured feelings about being “caught between two women” as an excuse for mounting abuse. For example, Nancy confronts him one day about lying to her and stealing her money. Sam responds by apologizing and explaining that he feels guilty and torn about his relationship with Zoe. He says that he stole the money to buy something for Zoe because she was so depressed that he was afraid she might try to hurt herself. Years go by, and he is still putting off making a clear choice between the two women, so their mutual bitterness is deep.

Over this period Sam's treatment of Nancy gets progressively worse, including one incident in which he knocks a table over onto her leg. He doesn't show any signs of using his abusive behaviors with Zoe, which makes Nancy hate her all the more. Zoe, meanwhile, goes around telling people: "Nancy treats Sam so badly; he is so hurt by her. He's told me all about how mean she is to him, and that's why he wants to be with me. The reason he has trouble divorcing her is that they go back a lot of years together and their families are friends of each other, but he's almost ready."

Both of the above scenarios involve an abusive man who keeps getting women to focus on each other's behavior rather than his. He relies partly on popular negative stereotypes of women, from which women themselves are not immune.

Women are conditioned, for example, to see one another as catty, conniving, and eager to steal men from other women. Meanwhile he gets to remain a player, which is what he wants. On a couple of occasions, my colleagues and I have overheard clients in the waiting area joking and laughing about ways in which women fall for these machinations, as if their ability to get away with it reinforced their masculinity.

How to Stop This Routine

Women can interfere with these manipulations if they keep the following principles in mind:

1. An abusive man lies a lot. Don't believe what he tells you about what is happening in his relationships with other women, including what those women have supposedly said about you.

2. Communicate directly with other women as much as possible to compare stories about what he is saying and doing, so that he can't play you off against each other.

3. If a man cheats, that is 100 percent his own responsibility. Don't let him channel your anger toward the other woman as if he were the helpless victim of a seduction. Abusive men love to portray themselves as unable to control their hormonal urges, which is nonsense.

4. Apply the principle of “no third chances.” When a man, especially an abusive one, cheats for the second time, that means that more affairs will follow, no matter what promises he may make.

5. Many women want to have a sexually intense partner, which is fine; men don't have to cheat to be sexy. Abusive men love to create the impression that their sexual wandering is a product of how passionate they are. But the reality is that sexual passion and faithfulness are entirely compatible. The reason he cheats is because he is a manipulator, not because he's sexy.

The Role of Pornography

In pornography that is geared toward heterosexual men, women are portrayed as very simple. They are always in the mood for sex, and they never say no. They have no sexual needs—or needs of any kind—of their own; all they seem to care about is the man's pleasure. They require no commitment, no sacrifice, and little money.

When a man is finished with them, he turns off the video or closes the magazine, and they're gone. What could be easier?

Most pornographic images regrettably fit well with the abusive mind-set. The woman is available and submissive. Reduced to a body, and usually further reduced to just her sexual organs, she is depersonalized. The man owns her, literally, because he owns the video or magazine or computer image.

The woman is sometimes even depicted as being sexually excited by verbal abuse, roughness, violence, or even torture. Cartoons and jokes in pornography often insult or degrade women and their anatomy, or even make rape appear funny, feeding anti-female ways of thinking.

For many abusive men, pornography has shaped their sexuality since they were teenagers or even younger. It has helped to form their view of what women are like and what they ought to be. When a graduate of what I call “The Pornography School of Sexuality” discovers, for example, that his partner does not find a slap in the face arousing, he thinks that's evidence of something wrong with her sexually, not him. His mind-set is: The women in the magazines and videos all like it, so why don't you? A large percentage of abused women report that they have been pressured one or more times to behave like the women in pornography, often to the point of acting out a specific scenario that the man finds enticing but that she experiences as repulsive, frightening, or violent. Abusers thus sometimes directly model their sexual interests on stories or images from pornography.

Partners of my clients report to me on their efforts to set limits regarding the presence of pornography in the house, especially where children might get access to it. These women have good instincts. Abusive men absolutely need to be kept away from pornography, as it feeds the precise thinking that drives their abusiveness. Women who like to use pornography themselves should try to avoid doing so with an abusive partner.

I have received numerous reports over the years from women who have told me that they were being pressured or required by their abusive partners to watch pornography. This seems largely to be a strategy to break down the woman's resistance to performing certain sexual acts the man wants, although the actual effect is often to increase her repulsion rather than to create desire. Pornography tends to be filled with abuse of women, so his drive to make her watch it can also come from wanting to prove to her that his degrading treatment is normal.

What About Sex That Involves Games of Force or Violence?

Is all sex play that involves adopting roles of domination or force abusive, even if it's consensual? This is a highly controversial question among heterosexuals as well as lesbians and gay men. My opinion is that the answer is no. The key words, however, are consensual and play. For example, couples who play sex games involving force need to have a mutually established signal that means "I want you to stop for real," and that signal must be respected. If one partner gives the "stop" signal and the force doesn't immediately cease, what is occurring is sexual assault, not lovemaking.

Here is another critical point: The meaning of what happens during sexual play is determined by the context of the relationship. If partners are consistently kind to and respectful of each other in daily life, they can probably share kinky lovemaking without making either person feel unsafe or degraded. But in an abusive relationship these lines are too blurry. It's a stretch to call any sexual contact fully consensual when it takes place in an atmosphere of abuse; the woman is always having to gauge whether her partner will react abusively if she says no to a particular sex act, so her choices rarely feel truly free. Many abusers get a thrill out of taking sex play too far, to where it isn't play any more and causes genuine pain or fear. When the woman tells him later that she felt assaulted or raped, he may respond disparagingly, “We always play games like that. Come off it.” When she tries to explain why the sex felt so bad, he isn't willing to listen, mostly because he knows it was not consensual this time, and he got a charge out of that.

When you are being mistreated in a relationship, stay away from force scenarios during lovemaking, even if the times when your partner does stay within appropriate limits are fun. Other times it isn't going to be fun at all. If you can say no to those games without running the risk of being attacked, do so. These kinds of games can only be played safely in a nonabusive relationship.

Sex and Double Standards

The double standards that are endemic to abusers can stand out sharply in the sexual arena. The most obvious one involves outside relationships. The abuser who has frequent affairs is often the same one who interrogates his partner about her movements and social contacts and goes ballistic when he has the slightest suspicion that she is developing any kind of connection—sexual or otherwise—to another man. He may enjoy looking over other women from head to toe as he and his partner walk down the street, but if she gives so much as a sidelong glance at a male, he screams at her and calls her a “slut.”

A popular justification for this double standard is that men have an inherent need to be with many different women, whereas women want to be monogamous. Over the years I have had many clients use such sociobiological arguments with me, saying that from a genetics standpoint males have reason to desire sex with as many different females as possible, while females succeed best— in evolutionary terms—if they choose their partners carefully. You might call this the “human beings are basically baboons” argument. In reality, there are plenty of examples of stable monogamy in nature. But these arguments are ultimately beside the point; there is simply no excuse for double standards or for any other aspect of abuse. (I sometimes ask my clients, when they attempt to lead me into this theoretical quagmire, “Do you cook your meat before you eat it?” When they answer that of course they do, I say, “Isn't that awfully unnatural? I've never seen any other animal doing such a peculiar thing.” Human behavior can only be measured by human standards.)

My clients sometimes pressure their partners with the myth that men can suffer physical pain or damage if they become sexually aroused and are not satisfied. Of course, I have never heard them claim that this risk applies to unsatisfied women.

A fair number of my clients have imposed an additional double standard, according to which the woman is expected to consent to sex any time the man is in the mood, but she is never supposed to initiate sex herself. As one partner of a client said to me: “If I'm in the mood, I have to make sure not to let it show too much, because he shuts it off real fast if it's coming from me.” Nothing could better illustrate the way in which an abuser's approach to sex reflects his overall orientation toward power and control. He wants to run the couple's sex life, and he doesn't want her needs interfering with his fantasy in any way. He prefers the two-dimensional women in the magazines, who never come to him asking for anything.

Sex and Vulnerability

For most women (and perhaps for most nonabusive men as well) sex is an area of emotional vulnerability. An abuser's charm during the better periods of a relationship can lead his partner to open up to him about deeply personal and potentially painful issues. Sexual relations then add an additional layer of vulnerability, as the abuser learns about the woman's sexual likes and dislikes and about her previous sexual experiences. She may confide in him about some sexual victimization she suffered earlier in life, or about a period of promiscuity she went through, or about "hang-ups" or sexual difficulties that she has.

The abusive man tends to make mental note of the highly personal knowledge he gains. At another phase in the relationship, when things turn ugly, his partner may find that her vulnerabilities are being thrown back on her. If she revealed to him earlier that she sometimes has difficulty reaching orgasm, he now may be throwing words like frigid and cold fish in her face. If she shared any discomfort regarding sex, he now will call her uptight and repressed, especially when she doesn't happen to like what he likes. (To the abuser, sexual liberation means the freedom to do whatever he wants.) If she told him about suffering child sexual abuse or previous experiences of rape, he now will characterize her as being permanently damaged by those violations or use her past to discredit her current grievances: "That's why you think I don't treat you well, because you were abused before. It's not me." In some of my cases the abuser has even spread private sexual information about his partner in public, including her sources of shame, thereby humiliating her and making it difficult for her to continue being around other people. Other clients of mine have been careless or insensitive regarding the risk of pregnancy or of communicating sexually transmitted diseases, increasing the woman's sense of violation.

The shock to a woman of having her deepest vulnerabilities thrown back in her face by someone she has loved and trusted can cause a burning pain unlike any other. This is intimate psychological cruelty in one of its worst forms.

Sexual Assault Is Violence

Over the years I occasionally have had clients who do not punch, slap, or physically hurt their partners but have repeatedly forced them to have sex through threats, intimidation, or physical force, including holding the woman down. The partner of this style of abuser sometimes says, “He was never violent to me,” despite describing a degrading and debilitating history of coerced sex. But sexual assault is violence. An abuser who forces his partner to have any form of sexual relations against her will is physically battering her.

There is a societal tendency not to recognize the violence present in sexual assault, which can make it more difficult for a woman to understand her own reactions and reach out for help. If you feel like you have been sexually violated by your abusive partner, trust your own perceptions and call an abuse or rape hotline (see “Resources”).

Repeated studies have demonstrated that men who embrace certain key myths about rape are more likely to carry out a sexual assault. The misconceptions include the belief that women find rape arousing, that they provoke sexual assault with their style of dress or behavior, and that rapists lose control of themselves. These myths are easy for many abusive men to accept, because they are consistent with the other characteristics of an abusive outlook on female partners. It is not surprising, then, that the risk to an abused woman of being sexually assaulted by her partner is high. I also have had clients who use sexual assault to punish their partners, sometimes because of anger directly related to sex and sometimes not, including some who have raped their ex-partners for leaving them. The impact of such assaults can be devastating.

Sexuality is a central arena in which the abuser's relationship to power is played out, including power over his partner's reproductive process. Although he may appear to keep his abusiveness separate from your sex life, closer examination of the dynamics of his conduct may persuade you that he carries his core attitude problems right into the bedroom with him. The subtle undercurrent of “sexualization of subordination” can take some time to identify. It is rare, unfortunately, for any aspect of an abuser's relationship with his partner to remain untouched by his entitlement and disrespect.

Key Points to Remember

- The abuser often believes that the ultimate decision-making authority regarding sex rests with him. He may see his partner as his sexual possession.

- Sex with an abuser can be especially good, but it can also be a horror show. The two extremes actually result from

- similar attitudes in the abuser's mind-set regarding sex.

- The majority of abusers' sexualize power, including some who find violence sexually exciting.

- Since sexuality is an area of particular vulnerability for most women, an abuser may use any of your sensitivities against you.

- If you feel uncomfortable about sexual interactions with your partner, listen carefully to your inner voice regarding what is good for you. An abusive man will try to tell you that your discomfort is your own problem rather than a product of his coercive, disrespectful, or humiliating sexual behavior.

- Women (and men) can heal from injurious sexual experiences, but healing is not likely to happen while abuse continues in the present. Attaining an abuse-free life is thus the first step to sexual wellness.

Abusive Men and Addiction

If I could just get him to stop drinking and smoking pot, the abuse would stop.

He's completely different when he's drinking—he turns mean.

He has stopped drinking, and now he says that I have a problem with alcohol.

I try really hard not to upset him, because when he gets mad he drinks.

He can be a terror when he doesn't have pot. He's a lot easier to deal with when he's stoned.

the Role that Alcohol, drugs, and other addictions play in abusiveness has been greatly misunderstood. A majority of abusers are not addicts, and even those who do abuse substances mistreat their partners even when they are not under the influence. Abusive men who succeed in recovering from an addiction continue to abuse their partners, although sometimes there is a short break in their worst behaviors.

Physically violent abusers sometimes refrain from violence for a substantial period of time when they get sober, but their psychologically abusive treatment continues or even worsens. Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

At the same time, a man's addictions can contribute in important ways to his cruelty or volatility. A drunk or drugged abuser tends to make his partner's life even more miserable than a sober one does. The trick is to separate fact from fiction, including the myths perpetrated by abusers themselves, regarding how addiction affects the abusive man and his partner.

Not All Substance Abusers Are Abusive Partners

Part of how we know that partner abuse is not caused by substances is that many alcoholics and drug addicts are neither mean to nor controlling of their partners. Some alcoholics drink only late at night, or they drink away from home and return only to pass out. Some become passive and pathetic, not belligerent or domineering. A certain number even provide fairly responsibly for their families and take good care of their children, at least during the early years of their addiction.

In such cases the man's substance abuse certainly causes serious problems for his partner and children, but the atmosphere differs sharply from that of a home where a partner abuser lives. And while substance abusers can be male or female, abusive partners are overwhelmingly male.

Not All Abusive Partners Are Substance Abusers

We can further uncouple addiction from partner abuse by observing that a clear majority of partner abusers do not abuse alcohol or drugs or show other signs of addiction. Even if we restrict our discussion to physically violent abusers, I still find addiction present less than half of the time, and most researchers report similar observations.

In short, partner abuse and substance abuse are two separate problems. Both are rampant in the world today, so it is no surprise that they often turn up in the same person, along with dandruff, acne, college degrees, and various other noncausal factors.

Isn't Partner Abuse Itself a Type of Addiction?

No. Partner abuse has its own causes and dynamics that are unrelated to addiction, although it also shares some features. In recent years some counseling programs have sprung up that claim to address substance addiction and partner abuse at the same time, but they are selling false hopes. A doctor theoretically may be able to develop specialties in both brain surgery and pelvic reconstruction—although it would be very difficult, given the complexities involved—but if he or she claims to perform one procedure that can solve a problem in both areas, you shouldn't buy it. The differences between abusing women and abusing substances are great enough that they have to be addressed in separate ways.

How Partner Abuse and Addiction Are Similar

The ways in which partner abuse resembles addiction include the following:

• Escalation

Alcoholics tend to find that they are drinking increasing amounts, or with increasing frequency, or both. This escalation is caused partly by tolerance, which means that the body adapts to the substance, so that more is required to have the same effect. “I can handle my alcohol” is essentially a short form for saying, “I have been drinking too much for a long time now, so it takes a lot to get me drunk.” (Some addicts experience the opposite effect, so that smaller and smaller amounts can intoxicate them over time.) Substance abuse also escalates for other reasons, including the addict's increasing fear of facing reality the more time he or she has spent escaping it, and the mounting life problems that the addiction itself is creating, which gives the addict more things to need to escape from.

Partner abuse also tends to escalate, at least for the first few years of a relationship. One of the causes of mounting abuse is that the abuser gets frustrated by the effects of his own abusiveness, which he then uses as an excuse for more abuse. For example, you as the partner of an abuser may have become increasingly depressed over time (because chronic mistreatment is depressing), and now he gets angry about the ways in which your decreased energy make you cater to him less enthusiastically. Similarly, abuse may diminish your drive for sex, and then he is hurt and enraged about your lack of desire for him.

The concept of tolerance can also be applied to partner abuse, but with different implications. As an abusive man adapts to a certain degree of mistreatment of his partner, his feelings of guilt nag at him less and less, so he is then able to graduate to more serious acts. He becomes accustomed to a level of cruelty or aggression that would have been out of the question for him a few years earlier. In some cases the concept of tolerance also applies to the abused woman, when she becomes injured to his abusiveness and starts to stand up to him more. He then increases his abusiveness because he sees that it takes more to frighten or control her than it used to. This escalation is similar to the style of crowd control used by a military dictatorship, which shoots rubber bullets as long as they are adequate to disperse protestors but switches to live ammunition when the crowds stop running away from the rubber bullets.

However, many women (and their children) respond to the trauma of abuse by becoming easier to frighten rather than harder. A recent study of physical batterers found, for example, that about one-third of the men decreased their violence over time, because the women had become so frightened that the men could control them with scary words and glances, making actual assaults unnecessary.

• Denial, minimization, and blaming

Addicts and partner abusers share a capacity for convincing themselves that they don't have any problem and for hotly denying the problem to other people. An alcoholic may say that he drank "a couple of frosties" on a night when he had three forty-ounce beers and two shots, or insist that alcohol is not a problem for him because he never drinks liquor, although he throws back two cases of beer each weekend. The addict also follows the partner abuser's pattern in externalizing responsibility. In the world of substance abuse treatment, the expression people, places, and things is used to describe the addict's way of always finding someone or something to blame for drinking or drugging.

• Choosing approving peers

Substance abusers prefer to spend their time with other people who abuse substances or with those who at least accept the addiction without making an issue of it, and who will listen sympathetically to the addict's excuses for his behavior. Partner abusers make similar choices regarding their social circle. Their male friends tend to either abuse their own wives or girlfriends or else make comments about abuse that buy into excuse making and victim blaming. (In research terminology this is called providing informational support for abuse.) Their female friends may be mostly people who will accept their poor-me stories about being the victims of hysterical or mentally ill women.

• Lying and manipulating

Both partner abusers and addicts can have chronic problems with lying to cover up their problem, escape accountability, and get other people to clean up the messes they make. Partner abusers, however, use dishonesty and manipulation for the additional purpose of gaining power and control over their partners, which is a separate dynamic.

• Lack of predictability

Both partner abusers and substance abusers tend to keep their partners and children walking on eggshells, never knowing what is going to happen next. This dynamic helps to hook family members into hoping that he will change.

• Defining roles for family members

Both abusive men and addicts can set up family members to be cast in roles that serve the abuse scenario. One person may become the confronter, another the protector, and another the family scapegoat, whom the abuser uses as a place to lay all the blame for the problems that he himself is actually causing in the family.

• High rates of returning to abuse after periods of apparent change

Both groups have rampant problems with dropping out of treatment programs or with continuing to abuse even after “successful” completion of a program. Deep and lasting change comes only through an extended and painstaking series of steps, although the process of change for substance abusers is quite different from that for partner abusers.

How Partner Abuse and Addiction

Are Different

The ways in which partner abuse differs from addiction include the following:

• Partner abusers don't “hit bottom.”

Substance abuse is self-destructive. Over time, the addict's life becomes increasingly unmanageable. He tends to have difficulty keeping jobs; his finances slide into disarray (partly due to the expense of his habit); his friendships decline. He may alienate himself from his relatives unless they are substance abusers themselves.

This downward spiral can lead the addict to reach a nadir where his life is finally such a mess that he can no longer deny his problem. Alcoholics commonly attribute their entrance into recovery to such an experience of “hitting bottom.”

Partner abuse, on the other hand, is not especially self-destructive, although it is profoundly destructive to others. A man can abuse women for twenty or thirty years and still have a stable job or professional career, keep his finances in good order, and remain popular with his friends and relatives. His self-esteem, his ability to sleep at night, his self-confidence, his physical health, all tend to hold just as steady as they would for a nonabusive man. One of the great sources of pain in the life of an abused woman is her sense of isolation and frustration because no one else seems to notice that anything is awry in her partner. Her life and her freedom may slide down the tubes because of what he is doing to her mind, but his life usually doesn't.

It is true that partner abusers lose intimacy because of their abuse, since true closeness and abuse are mutually exclusive. However, they rarely experience this as much of a loss. Either they find their intimacy through close emotional connections with friends or relatives, as many of my clients do, or they are people for whom intimacy is neither a goal nor a value (as is also true of many nonabusers). You can't miss something that you aren't interested in having.

In recent years, physically assaultive abusers are for the first time hitting bottom in one sense: They are occasionally experiencing unpleasant legal consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, most court systems still treat domestic abusers with special leniency (see Chapter 12), so the bottom seems to be a long way down.

• Short-term versus long-term rewards

Substance abuse can be highly rewarding. It brings quick, easy pleasure and relief from emotional distresses. It often provides camaraderie through entrance to a circle of friends whose social life revolves around seeking and enjoying intoxication.

However, these rewards are usually short-lived. Over time, substance abuse causes the addict emotional distresses that are as great as the ones he or she was attempting to escape in the first place. Friendships based on substance abuse are shallow and are prone to tensions and ruptures due to financial resentments, paranoia, mutual irresponsibility, and many other factors. An alcoholic tends to drink more and more, not because of how well it is working but because of how poorly.

Partner abuse, on the other hand, can be rewarding to the abuser for many years, and potentially for a lifetime. In Chapter 6, we examined the multiple benefits that abusers gain through their behavior, none of which necessarily decreases over time. It is impossible to get partner abusers to change by trying to persuade them to look at the damage they are doing to their own lives (as I tried to do in my early years as an abuse counselor) because they perceive the gains as vastly outweighing the losses. Change in an abuser is primarily brought about when society succeeds in pressuring him into caring about the damage he is doing to others.

• Societal approval for partner abuse is greater. Social supports for both substance abuse and partner abuse are regrettably high, but they are even stronger for the latter, as discussed in Chapter 13. Substance abuse receives the active promotion of alcohol advertising, which domestic abuse does not. But there is an array of writers and organizations that actively opposes improvements in legal and institutional responses to domestic abuse, whereas there are no parallel organized efforts to defend substance abuse. Television, movies, music videos, and other cultural outlets are replete with messages condoning partner abuse.

Because of these critical distinctions between partner abuse and addiction, programs and books that have attempted to address abusiveness based on an addiction model have failed badly. Batterers Anonymous groups, for example, are notorious for acting as support circles for abusers' excuses and justifications rather than as launching pads for change. Recovery programs generally address few or none of the central attitudes and habits that cause partner abuse.

Partner Abuse Doesn't Go Away When an Addict Recovers

Question 13:

If He Stops Drinking, Will He Stop Abusing Me?

Over the years, dozens of my clients have gone into recovery from addiction while they were participating in my program, sometimes because of pressure from me. No significant improvement has occurred as a result, except in those men who also worked seriously on their partner abuse issues. During the first several months of recovery, a man's harsh daily criticism and control sometimes soften, and any physical violence he was using may lessen or cease for a period, raising the hopes of the abused woman. She interprets this respite as confirmation that the addiction did indeed cause his abusiveness, but his behavior toward her gradually, or abruptly, reverts to being as destructive as it was while he was drinking, or nearly so.

Ironically, the man's backsliding tends to begin precisely as his recovery from addiction starts to take solid hold. The early period of recovery is all-consuming: The compulsion to drink is intense, so the alcoholic fights a daily internal battle, often holding on by a thread. He may be attending one or more substance abuse meetings per day, which occupy his time and maintain his focus. One result of this Herculean effort is that the man has little time, energy, or mental space to devote to controlling or manipulating his partner.

He is entirely self-focused and absorbed. But when he starts to come out the other end of this white-knuckle process of early recovery, his energy and attention are redirected toward his partner, and his desire to bully her reemerges.

It is not uncommon for abusers to actually get worse when they are in recovery, partly because they may become irritable from not drinking and take it out on family members. Other abusers become more controlling when sober than they were while drunk, standing guard with eyes that are no longer clouded by alcohol.

Perhaps even more important is that an abuser's recovery program tends itself to become a weapon to use against his partner. Once he stops drinking, for example, he may turn around and insist that she is alcoholic too, even if she actually drinks moderately. He starts to criticize her for being “in denial” about her own drinking, a concept he has learned at his meetings and about which he now considers himself an expert. Insulting comments about her drinking habits and pressure on her to give up alcohol and join A.A are likely to follow.

The abuser also can use specific concepts from A.A against his partner. For example, A.A encourages participants to review their own faults and misdeeds and make an inventory of them and discourages criticizing or focusing on the shortcomings of others, which is known as “taking someone else's inventory.” The abuser turns this concept against his partner, so that any time she attempts to complain about his abusive behavior and how it affects her, he says to her, “You should work on your own issues instead of taking my inventory.” Similarly, he uses the danger that he might drink as an excuse to control her. For example, when he is bothered by something she does, such as confront him about his bullying, he says, “You're getting me stressed, and you know I might drink if I get under too much stress.” The accusation “You're threatening my sobriety!” becomes a new tool that the abuser uses to hammer and silence his partner. Abusers thus develop new excuses for abuse to make up for the fact that they no longer can blame it on being drunk.

The philosophy of twelve-step programs includes elements that could be valuable to abusers, but I find that my clients tend to ignore the principles that could help. For example, according to A.A the alcoholic has a responsibility to make amends for all the damage he has done to other people while he was drinking. Abusers choose instead to take an almost opposite view, arguing that their partners should not raise grievances about past abuse, “because that was when I was drinking and I'm not like that anymore, so she should let go of the past.” They think of recovery from addiction as a gigantic, self-awarded amnesty program that should cause their partners' resentments and mistrust to simply vanish.

Abusers in recovery can be just as committed to blaming their behavior on alcohol as they were while drinking. They choose to misinterpret the A.A philosophy to mean that they were not responsible for their actions while they were drinking—which is not what A.A proposes—and that therefore alcohol is a full and adequate explanation for all the cruelty and selfishness to which they have subjected women. Some of my clients use their recovery to try to escape their responsibilities, saying that they can't help with the children, get a job, or contribute in other ways, “because the program says I need to keep my focus on myself.” In this way recovery can feed an abusive man's self-centeredness and excuse making. A woman who hears the abuser express these attitudes may find herself doubting that he is really changing, and her skepticism is well advised. Her partner may tell her, “You just have no faith in people” or “You don't believe anyone can change” (as if putting her down were the way to persuade her that he is no longer abusive!), but her instincts are correctly telling her that he is very much the same.

I have had clients who made significant changes from a combination of recovery from alcoholism and working seriously on taking responsibility for their abusiveness. Only then does an abuser's recovery from addiction become a significant step.

Alcohol Has No Biological Connection to Abuse or Violence

Alcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior—anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine—but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Alcohol and other substances thus contribute to partner abuse in two ways:

1. A man's beliefs about the effects of the substance will largely be borne out. If he believes that alcohol can make him aggressive, it will, as research has shown. On the other hand, if he doesn't attribute violence-causing powers to substances, he is unlikely to become aggressive even when severely intoxicated.

2. Alcohol provides an abuser with an excuse to freely act on his desires. After a few drinks, he turns himself loose to be as insulting or intimidating as he feels inclined to be, knowing that the next day he can say, “Hey, sorry about last night, I was really trashed,” or even claim to have completely forgotten the incident, and his partner, his family, or even a judge will let him off the hook. (Courts tend to be especially lenient with abusers who blame their violence on a drinking problem.) And the alcohol is an excuse that he accepts, so he isn't kept awake at night with gnawing guilt about having hurt his partner.

I have had several physically violent clients admit that they made the decision to assault their partners before they had any alcohol in their systems. They went out, as a few of the men have put it, “to grease the wheels,” drinking for a couple of hours before coming home to start a vicious, scary fight. The alcohol arms the abuser with an excuse and helps him to overcome any shame or embarrassment that might hold him back.

Beware of the man who believes that drugging or drinking makes him violent. If he thinks it will, he'll be right.

What About the Man Who Is Abusive Only When He Drinks?

I could count on one hand the number of clients I have had whose abusiveness is entirely restricted to times of intoxication. However, I have worked with dozens of men whose worst incidents are accompanied by alcohol use but whose controlling and disrespectful behaviors are a pattern even when they are sober. These abusers tend to fit into one of the following categories:

1. The verbally abusive man who escalates to physical violence or threats only when intoxicated: When I ask the partner of such a man to describe his day-to-day behavior, she usually reports that he gets meaner and scarier when he's drinking but that his name-calling, disrespect, and selfishness are the same, whether he is drunk or sober. She tends to feel that his physically scary behaviors would stop if she could get him into recovery and that she could manage the rest of his abusive behaviors. This soothing hope is a false one for two reasons: (a) When this style of abuser gets sober, he gradually accustoms himself to using violence without the assistance of alcohol, usually over a period of one or two years; and (b) even if he is among the small number of exceptions to this rule, the woman usually discovers that his psychological abuse can be as destructive to her as his violence was, which tosses her back into having to figure out what to do.

2. The verbal abuser who becomes even more cruel and degrading when drinking but doesn't escalate to violence: He is doing the same thing that the physically assaultive abuser does: using alcohol as an excuse. If he gets sober, he gradually comes up with new excuses, including learning to use his recovery as an excuse, and life goes on more or less as before.

3. The assaultive abuser who becomes even more violent when intoxicated: I find this style the most common among substance-addicted partner abusers.

When this abuser is not intoxicated, he mostly refrains from his scariest forms of violence, like punching, kicking, choking, or threatening to kill her. His partner may say, “He is only violent when he drinks,” but she then goes on to tell me that he shoves or grabs her, walks toward her in menacing ways, is sexually rough, or uses other forms of physical intimidation or assault even when sober—behaviors that the abuser has succeeded in convincing her not to define as violence.

If your partner's behavior becomes much worse when he's intoxicated, you may tend to focus your attention on trying to manage his drinking, so that you never fully realize how abusive he is when he's sober. His substance-abuse problem can thereby create a huge diversion from critical issues.

Alcohol does not a change a person's fundamental value system. People's personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store?

Unlikely. People's conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.

Abusers Make Conscious Choices

Even While Intoxicated

One of my first abusive clients, almost fifteen years ago now, was a physically assaultive husband named Max who worked for a utility company. He had gone out drinking after work one evening, and by the time he arrived at his front door he was “trashed.” He told me that as soon as he came in the house, his wife, Lynn, began “nagging” him. He “saw red” and started to scream at her and soon was tearing into her with his fists.

Max sheepishly recounted this event to me, going on to admit that he had torn off some of Lynn's clothes and had “partly” tied her to a chair. (I'm not sure how you “partly” tie someone to a chair; they are either tied or they're not.) As Max sat in my office, he seemed to be a likable, mild-mannered line worker. It was not easy to imagine what he must have looked like through Lynn's eyes that night.

I asked him to describe Lynn's injuries, and he told me that she had black-and-blue marks and welts up and down both of her legs. I inquired about any other injuries, and he said there were none. I was surprised, given the brutality of the attack. “Lynn had no bruises on her arms, or on her face? Why not?” Max's face changed shape, suddenly peering at me as if I must not be very bright, and he sputtered, “Oh, well, of course I wasn't going to do anything that would show.”

Lynn confirmed to me later that Max had indeed been stumbling drunk that night. But had his inebriation caused him to lose control? Clearly not. He had remained focused on his desire to protect his own reputation and to avoid putting himself at risk of arrest, and so he had restricted Lynn's injuries to places where they would be covered by clothing the next day. He could scarcely be termed "out of control."

I could provide countless similar examples of the consciousness and decision making that my clients exhibit while drunk or on drugs. They may not choose their words quite as carefully, and they may not have perfect coordination of their movements, but they protect their self-interest: They avoid damaging their own prized belongings and usually don't let their friends and relatives see their most overt and cruel forms of verbal or physical abuse or anything that they feel wouldn't be adequately covered by the "I was drunk" excuse.

When I criticize my clients about their drunken abusiveness, they sometimes respond: "But I was in a blackout." However, a blackout is a memory disconnection that happens after a drunk person passes out, causing the person to no longer know what occurred upon awakening. The person was still conscious during the event. If you ask an extremely drunk but still-awake person what happened earlier that evening, he or she can tell you. Thus there is no such thing as being "in" a blackout; the loss of memory happens later.

Finally, even if substances could cause people to “lose control,” the abusive man would still be responsible for his actions while intoxicated because he made the choice to impair himself with alcohol or drugs. A man's claim that he is not fully responsible for his mistreatment of his partner because he was drunk is simply another manifestation of the abusive mentality.

Substances as Weapons of Abuse

Oscar and Ellen

Oscar and Ellen were dining in a restaurant. Tension was mounting during the meal because of several relationship issues, mostly related to Ellen's complaints of mistreatment by Oscar. Oscar, on the other hand, insisted that Ellen's complaints were all caused by her own hypersensitivity and desire to control him. Ellen was pinning her hopes for their relationship on persuading Oscar to deal with his alcohol problem. He had agreed at one point earlier in their relationship that he was indeed drinking too much, and he had maintained sobriety for nine months. His abusiveness toward her actually hadn't improved during that time, but she didn't see any other strategy to get him to change.

The argument at dinner that night focused on his economic abuse of her. Specifically, he had withdrawn $4,000—virtually the entirety of their savings—from their joint bank account and had bought an old B.M.W “for her.” Ellen was angry that she hadn't been consulted, all the more so because she was pregnant with their first child and wanted the security of having some savings. Oscar responded by outgoing her anger, snapping through clenched teeth, “You never appreciate anything I do for you! Nothing is ever good enough for you!

You just bitch, bitch, bitch!” He immediately proceeded to order a cocktail, which he knew would bother her. As soon as the waitress brought his drink, he looked Ellen in the eye, downed it in three gulps, and quickly ordered another. He set out to make himself rapidly drunk, and did. Ellen was then afraid to leave the restaurant with him, because she had been through numerous occasions on which he had combined alcohol and rage in a volatile mix that led to raised fists, pounded walls, thrown objects, and threats, leaving her cowering and trembling.

Among my clients, I have encountered numerous other ways that they have used substances as weapons, including:

• Stomping out to go driving while drunk, because he knows it will cause her to be upset and worried. This type of maneuver is particularly powerful if the couple has children and the family is dependent on the man's income for survival.

- Forcing her to assist him in running or dealing drugs, thereby putting her at risk of serious legal consequences, which he can use to control her further. (A large percentage of women who are in prison for drug-or alcohol-related charges, or for minor economic crimes such as forging checks, are serving time for crimes that either directly or indirectly were instigated by their abusive partners.)

- During periods when he is sober or clean, threatening to return to alcohol or drug use if she does not meet his demands or obey his orders, or claiming that her challenges of him are “threatening his sobriety.”

- Blaming her for problems in his life that are really caused by his addiction.

- Pressuring and manipulating his partner into becoming substance-involved herself. He then uses her addiction to increase his power over her and to get other people to disbelieve her reports that he is abusive. This tactic is particularly common when the abuser has a substance-abuse problem himself, since he doesn't want his partner to be able to hold anything over him. But I have also had clients who kept their partners substance-involved while staying sober or using substances only moderately themselves.

Shane and Amanda

In one of my cases, an alcoholic woman named Amanda had entered sobriety several times, but her husband, Shane, would sabotage her progress each time by ridiculing her for being “dependent” on A.A, telling her she was weak for not being able to stay away from alcohol on her own, “without a crutch.” He would also go out and buy beer, telling her, “I just want to have a few on hand in case friends come over,” but he never seemed to drink them. They would just sit in the refrigerator and in cabinets tempting her, and finally she would succumb.

Amanda eventually went into a detox center and didn't tell Shane where she was going, knowing that if she spoke with him she was likely to give in to the temptation to get back together with him. Shane left no stone unturned in his efforts to find out where she was and get a message to her. As of my last contact with the case, she had succeeded in staying away from him and as a result had regained custody of her children, which his abuse and her drinking had caused her to lose.

Mutual Reinforcement of Addiction and Partner Abuse

Notice that when a man uses substances as a weapon, he ends up contributing to his own problem with substances. Thus partner abuse can feed the problem of addiction, and not just vice versa. They are two separate issues, neither of which causes the other but which do help to keep each other stuck. A man's abusiveness strengthens his denial of his substance-abuse problem, as he can blame all of his life difficulties on his partner. His negative attitudes toward her allow him to easily dismiss concerns that she raises about his addiction. At the same time, the addiction fortifies his denial of his abusiveness, as he uses the substance as an excuse and as a weapon.

Other Addictions

I have worked with clients who have been addicted to gambling, cocaine, heroin, and prescription medications. Several have also claimed to be “sex addicts,” but I don't buy this self-diagnosis from abusive men (for reasons that I covered in Chapter 4, under “The Player”). Any addiction can be a financial drain on a couple, contribute to the man's secretiveness, and encourage him to use his partner as a scapegoat. An abuser's addiction doesn't cause his abuse, but it does make his partner's life even more painful and complicated.

Entitlement and Addiction

An abusive man typically believes that his use or abuse of substances is none of his partner's business. No matter how his addiction may lead him to abuse his partner economically (because he pours money into the substance and/or has trouble holding down a job) no matter how burdened she is with household responsibilities because he is out partying, no matter how much worse he may treat her while intoxicated, he nonetheless feels entitled to use substances as he chooses. If she criticizes him for his selfishness or confronts him with the effects that his partying has on her life, he feels justified in calling her a "nag" or a "bitch" or labeling her "controlling." In short, irresponsible use of alcohol or drugs is another one of the privileges that the abusive man may award himself, and he may use psychological or physical assaults to punish his partner for challenging it.

Substance Abuse Blocks Self-Examination

While substance addiction does not cause a man to become abusive, it does ensure that the abusiveness remains. I have yet to see a substance-abusing client make significant and lasting improvements in his treatment of his partner unless he simultaneously deals with his addiction. In fact, I only give an alcoholic or drug addict about two months to get himself into recovery, and if he doesn't, I dismiss him from the abuser program; I don't want to give his partner false hopes, nor do I want to waste my program's time. Facing up to a problem with partner abuse, and changing it, is a profoundly complex and uncomfortable process that requires consistent commitment over a long period of time. It takes tremendous courage for a man to be honest with himself, to reevaluate his ways of thinking about his partner, and to accept how much emotional injury he has caused her. No active substance abuser is willing or able to take on this task.

Thus, although recovery from addiction is not sufficient to bring about change in a man's abusiveness, it is a necessary prerequisite. Only if he is willing to address both problems—and I have had a number of clients who have gotten serious about becoming both sober and respectful—can he stop being a source of pain and distress to his partner.

Key Points to Remember

- Alcohol or drugs cannot make an abuser out of a man who is not abusive.

- Even while intoxicated, abusers continue to make choices about their actions based on their habits, attitudes, and self-interest.

- The primary role that addiction plays in partner abuse is as an excuse.

• Abusiveness and addiction are two distinct problems requiring separate solutions.

You have reached the end of the document.