Behind the Veil: Inside the Mind of Men "That Abuse"
Domestic violence and unmasking the terror of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
We aren't doomed to repeat our mistake
Jon, a 45-year-old lawyer, reported for his first session in our treatment program for abusive partners desperate for help salvaging his relationships with his partner, Ann, from whom he was now separated and their two kids, one a teenager and the other in preschool.
Last week, when Jon and Ann were arguing, she’d said something cutting and tried to leave the room. He blocked her way and assaulted her. Their teenaged son tried to intervene, yelling that he was calling the police. Jon threatened to beat the terrified boy. In the end the police weren’t called.
After the assault Jon sagged with shame. His sobbing wife begged him to leave as his children hid in their rooms. He packed his bag and returned to his childhood home.
Jon was self-referred but his participation was anything but voluntary. Jon wanted to return home but until he gets help his wife won’t consider reconciling.
Jon’s history
Jon’s biological father abandoned him when he was an infant. His parents split up shortly after his birth. Jon’s mother was young when he was born and seemed to resent the burden of being a single parent. She eventually married a man who would go on to father Jon’s younger siblings. Jon looked up to his stepfather, a firefighter. When he was a child he’d follow him to work, where his stepfather would introduce Jon as “my wife’s kid” …
never, as Jon fantasized, “my son.” His stepfather was decent if perfunctory, but Jon
longed for his love.
Out of the home, things weren’t easy. Jon was smart and high achieving but also introverted, shy and soft - interested in graphic novels, a heavyset boy who wore glasses and was poor at sports. He lived in a rough neighborhood and was bullied daily. He tried to avoid notice and when that didn’t work, to his lasting shame, he would give away his possessions in a bid for other boys to leave him alone.
As an adult Jon resented the easy comfort that this wife shares with their kids. When he tried to spend time with his son, he inevitably became critical as he bumped up against his son’s vulnerabilities. He was aware only of his desire to protect and instruct but ended up punishing his son, shaming him particularly when he became aware that the boy had given away any of his possessions to friends. His family was a source of injury and anxiety. As Jon isolated himself playing video games, he could hear his family laughing and was hurt to feel excluded.
The irony was that Jon is quite well liked in the world. His colleagues find him affable and pleasant and his staff often joke about how lucky Jon’s wife is to be married to him.
If Jon wants to be a part of his family, his work must be both immediate and long-term and the first piece is non-negotiable: he has to stop hurting his family now. If he’s serious about wanting the trust of the people he’s hurt, he has to earn it.
1. He’ll need to sit with his guilt and stop focusing his blame on others
While Jon came to us full of guilt, this feeling quickly became blame. He finds himself thinking about how Ann shuts him out or doesn’t listen to him. Blaming her helps him avoid his intolerable feelings. Guilt includes the knowledge that we’ve behaved badly - while it is uncomfortable, it is also powerful. We can change behavior and we can try to make amends.
2. He’ll have to expand his understanding of what is abusive
Jon knew that physical violence is wrong but struggled to think of yelling, name calling,jealous behavior, or criticizing as abuse. The work here requires us to care about and be accountable for the ways our words and actions hurt others. Jon initially had a difficult time seeing how raising his voice was abusive, but his history of unpredictable behavior meant that Ann was always scared when they fought. When she took the risk of trying to engage him she needed him to be safe, to look like he cared about her even if he was feeling hurt.
3. He’ll have to learn to tolerate emotional injury
Learning how stay in relationship with others while feeling hurt is an important skill. Most people who abuse their partners don’t do this well. We think that if someone hurts us, we have to strike back. For many people, this is about early training at home or on the streets which teaches us not to allow someone else to make us look small. But in a partnership it is inevitable that our significant other is going to sometimes hurt our feelings. When that happens we have to find a way to hold on to ourselves and not retaliate.
4. He’ll need to to identify and share his feelings
In his first session, Jon sat in our offices with tears streaming down his face as we talked through what had happened in his family. When we asked him what he was feeling, he told us he was angry. Generally when men come to see us there is one emotion they can comfortably express: anger. Anger is almost always a secondary emotion, meaning that there is also a more primary feeling beneath it like fear, hurt, sadness or shame. This is a critical distinction because what we tell ourselves about how we feel informs behavior. If I tell myself that I’m pissed, than I’m going to act pissed. Anger feels better than hurt or embarrassment but it also sets us up to punish the other person.
5. He’ll need to practice humility
Jon felt so often humiliated as a kid that he has developed a puffed-up false self that protects against others seeing how small he is on the inside. Injuries to the inflated self, or “narcissistic injuries” make us brittle and easily offended. The truth about Jon is that he isn’t, as he fantasizes in his most grandiose moments, the nicest guy in the world. He’s also not, as he imagines in his most shame-filled moments, unloveable. He’s just a regular person with strengths and flaws. If he can hold on to that when his wife calls him out, his need to reject her won’t be so great. He can nod sadly and say, “You’re right, that wasn’t nice of me. I’m sorry.”
6. He’ll have to develop deeper empathy
Jon was so flooded with self-pity about feeling excluded by his wife and kids that he never considered their experience. The story that Jon tells himself about what Ann and the kids are feeling isn’t generous. He tells himself that his wife snaps at him because she’s a cold person. And because this is the story, he responds accordingly - he’s terse and punitive. Jon needs to learn to make an empathic leap. What Jon experiences as his wife looking cold is likely an unconscious armor she has developed in response to his regular explosions. Underneath she is likely hurt and anxious. If he wants any chance of repair he has to understand and react to what is behind her defenses. He must respond with warmth to her hurt.
7. He’ll need to be accountable for real change
At our treatment program we see evidence every day that our kind of work is made more effective when family systems, faith communities, courts and workplaces take seriously the job of holding people accountable for change. We also know that the reverse is true. Abusive partners should also have access to a program with the expertise and structure needed to help guide them to lasting change.
8. He’ll need to be patient and accept uncertainty
This problem didn’t get created overnight and it won’t be solved overnight. Initially Jon’s partner rejected his attempts at making amends. If Jon wants to earn back the trust of his partner he will have to tolerate that right now she doesn’t ... and probably shouldn’t ... trust him. He hasn’t been trustworthy or safe. If he wants her trust and the trust of their kids, he will have to demonstrate consistently over time that he won’t punish them when he’s hurt and that he will respect their boundaries and their process.
It is also possible that Ann may decide that she doesn’t want to reconcile, that the damage is too great. Jon must be willing to accept this and still do the work to be a decent and respectful co-parent to their kids.
Five Reasons People Abuse their Partners
And a problem with anger management isn't one of them!
“Why does he do it?” This is the question we are frequently asked here at our treatment program for men and women who have been abusive to their partners. While some abusive partners are motivated by a need for power and control, that it isn’t true for many of the people we work with. Joe arrived for his first session at Menergy desperate to save his marriage. He could acknowledge that the yelling, name-calling and throwing things during fights were problems. He’d slapped her twice and pushed her and blocked her from leaving the room and those things he knew were obviously wrong and he’d stopped the physical abusive a while ago. Now, instead of putting his hands on her, he would purse his lips and glare. When his wife tried to resolve the conflicts between them she encountered a silent unyielding wall.
But even when they weren’t fighting she felt utterly alone. Somehow he’d decided that the kids were her job. It wasn’t what they’d agreed to but it had settled into this pattern which didn’t seem that unusual. What was different in her case was that she had to accept it or to risk pushing him and who knew what that might mean? Would he scream in her face or would she find herself with the new silently rageful Joe who could go days without speaking to her?
Over many years of treating abusive behavior, we have learned that the problem isn’t that people like Joe can’t ‘manage their anger.’ When Joe’s boss chews him out at work, he doesn’t blow up. So if the problem isn’t anger management, then why do people abuse their partners?
Five reasons many people behave abusively:
1. Difficulty tolerating injury. Knowing how to have your feelings hurt without retaliating is an important relationship skill.
Joe was the only son of older parents and they wanted everything for him. For his part, Joe was mostly an easy child, well-liked and a good student. He could, however, throw epic tantrums, becoming stormy and implacable and, as he got older, disappointments leveled him. A test score that was lower than expected, not getting picked for a team, slights on the playground, these things could leave him devastated. His parents wanted to protect him- they intervened with teachers, soothed and placated him, all the while encouraging, cajoling and praising him, because he was mostly a good kid and things were mostly going well. When Joe made the high school basketball team but found himself with a tough coach, Joe quit. Joe never learned what to do with feelings like disappointment, hurt, and shame. He learned to expect that he should be protected from discomfort because he was such a nice guy.
Joe is not in this alone. Many men never develop this skill. Most boys learn early that if someone hurts or embarrasses them, you have to hurt them back. If you get hurt, don’t show it. Don’t cry. Don’t look scared or sad or anxious. Being able to tolerate injuries without punishing the other person is one of the most important skills for partnership because inevitably, your partner will hurt your feelings or disappoint you. Most of our clients don’t have a problem with anger management. Most of the people we work with have a problem tolerating being hurt.
2. Entitlement. If I think that I have a right to not be hurt or embarrassed, than I’m likely to punish you when my entitlement has been violated.
Joe walks around thinking that he’s a nice guy — everyone says so — but then he goes home to his wife and she says that he’s hurtful and Joe knows that she’s right, but it hurts when she says so and he’s been taught that he’s entitled to have his feelings protected.
3. Lack of empathy. We talk about "putting ourselves in other people’s shoes" all the ime. Abusive people do put themselves in their partner’s shoes, but they don’t necessarily do it with generosity. They imagine that the other person wants to cause harm. The kind of empathy that helps us to be decent, requires generosity and a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt.
Susan is scared of Joe’s rage and he interprets her fearfulness as coldness and because of that, he continues to punish her. If Joe wants to change things with Susan, he’s going to have to more generously interpret Susan's actions.
4. Lack of accountability
Abuse happens in the context of a world that says that it’s okay to hurt others when we are hurt. Abusive partners behave abusively, to some extent, because they can.
5. Unaddressed trauma
Many abusive partners have histories of complex childhood trauma, living in homes where they witnessed or were themselves abused and a history of unresolved trauma can result in high reactivity to injury. For people who grow up in high conflict families, abusive behavior can seem normative. While this isn’t the case for Joe, it’s important to know that many of the people we work with struggle with the aftermath of traumatic histories.
Now that we know some of what is behind Joe’s abusive behavior, stay tuned to learn how he and other abusive partners can change.
Violence Wheel
The chart below is a way of looking at the behaviors abusers use to get and keep control in their relationships. Battering is a choice. It is used to gain power and control over another person. Physical abuse is only one part of a system of abusive behaviors.
Abuse is never a one time event.
This chart uses the wheel to show the relationship of physical abuse to other forms of abuse. Each part shows a way to control or gain power.
Power and Control Wheel in Abusive Relationships
This information and the Power and Control Wheel of Abuse (pictured below) is provided courtesy of Kim Eyer.
POWER and CONTROL
Abusers believe they have a right to control their partners in the abusive relationships by utilizing the tactics found in the power and control wheel, by:
Telling them what to do and expecting obedience
Using force to maintain power and control over partners
Feeling their partners have no right to challenge their desire for power and control
Feeling justified making the victim comply
Blaming the abuse on the partner and not accepting responsibility for wrongful acts.
The characteristics shown in thepower and control wheel are examples of how this power and control are demonstrated and enacted against the victim.
Isolation
limiting outside involvement
making another avoid people/friends/family by deliberately embarrassing or humiliating them in front of others
expecting another to report every move and activity
restricting use of the car
moving residences
Emotional and Mental Abuse
putting another down/name-calling
ignoring or discounting activities and accomplishments
withholding approval or affection
making another feel as if they are crazy in public or through private humiliation
unreasonable jealousy and suspicion
playing mind games
Economic and Financial Abuse
preventing another from getting or keeping a job
withholding funds
spending family income without consent and/or making the partner struggle to pay bills
not letting someone know of or have access to family/personal income
forcing someone to ask for basic necessities
Intimidation
driving recklessly to make another feel threatened or endangered
reference:
www,psychologytoday.com
We aren't doomed to repeat our mistake
Jon, a 45-year-old lawyer, reported for his first session in our treatment program for abusive partners desperate for help salvaging his relationships with his partner, Ann, from whom he was now separated and their two kids, one a teenager and the other in preschool.
Last week, when Jon and Ann were arguing, she’d said something cutting and tried to leave the room. He blocked her way and assaulted her. Their teenaged son tried to intervene, yelling that he was calling the police. Jon threatened to beat the terrified boy. In the end the police weren’t called.
After the assault Jon sagged with shame. His sobbing wife begged him to leave as his children hid in their rooms. He packed his bag and returned to his childhood home.
Jon was self-referred but his participation was anything but voluntary. Jon wanted to return home but until he gets help his wife won’t consider reconciling.
Jon’s history
Jon’s biological father abandoned him when he was an infant. His parents split up shortly after his birth. Jon’s mother was young when he was born and seemed to resent the burden of being a single parent. She eventually married a man who would go on to father Jon’s younger siblings. Jon looked up to his stepfather, a firefighter. When he was a child he’d follow him to work, where his stepfather would introduce Jon as “my wife’s kid” …
never, as Jon fantasized, “my son.” His stepfather was decent if perfunctory, but Jon
longed for his love.
Out of the home, things weren’t easy. Jon was smart and high achieving but also introverted, shy and soft - interested in graphic novels, a heavyset boy who wore glasses and was poor at sports. He lived in a rough neighborhood and was bullied daily. He tried to avoid notice and when that didn’t work, to his lasting shame, he would give away his possessions in a bid for other boys to leave him alone.
As an adult Jon resented the easy comfort that this wife shares with their kids. When he tried to spend time with his son, he inevitably became critical as he bumped up against his son’s vulnerabilities. He was aware only of his desire to protect and instruct but ended up punishing his son, shaming him particularly when he became aware that the boy had given away any of his possessions to friends. His family was a source of injury and anxiety. As Jon isolated himself playing video games, he could hear his family laughing and was hurt to feel excluded.
The irony was that Jon is quite well liked in the world. His colleagues find him affable and pleasant and his staff often joke about how lucky Jon’s wife is to be married to him.
If Jon wants to be a part of his family, his work must be both immediate and long-term and the first piece is non-negotiable: he has to stop hurting his family now. If he’s serious about wanting the trust of the people he’s hurt, he has to earn it.
1. He’ll need to sit with his guilt and stop focusing his blame on others
While Jon came to us full of guilt, this feeling quickly became blame. He finds himself thinking about how Ann shuts him out or doesn’t listen to him. Blaming her helps him avoid his intolerable feelings. Guilt includes the knowledge that we’ve behaved badly - while it is uncomfortable, it is also powerful. We can change behavior and we can try to make amends.
2. He’ll have to expand his understanding of what is abusive
Jon knew that physical violence is wrong but struggled to think of yelling, name calling,jealous behavior, or criticizing as abuse. The work here requires us to care about and be accountable for the ways our words and actions hurt others. Jon initially had a difficult time seeing how raising his voice was abusive, but his history of unpredictable behavior meant that Ann was always scared when they fought. When she took the risk of trying to engage him she needed him to be safe, to look like he cared about her even if he was feeling hurt.
3. He’ll have to learn to tolerate emotional injury
Learning how stay in relationship with others while feeling hurt is an important skill. Most people who abuse their partners don’t do this well. We think that if someone hurts us, we have to strike back. For many people, this is about early training at home or on the streets which teaches us not to allow someone else to make us look small. But in a partnership it is inevitable that our significant other is going to sometimes hurt our feelings. When that happens we have to find a way to hold on to ourselves and not retaliate.
3. He’ll have to learn to tolerate emotional injury
Learning how stay in relationship with others while feeling hurt is an important skill. Most people who abuse their partners don’t do this well. We think that if someone hurts us, we have to strike back. For many people, this is about early training at home or on the streets which teaches us not to allow someone else to make us look small. But in a partnership it is inevitable that our significant other is going to sometimes hurt our feelings. When that happens we have to find a way to hold on to ourselves and not retaliate.
4. He’ll need to to identify and share his feelings
In his first session, Jon sat in our offices with tears streaming down his face as we talked through what had happened in his family. When we asked him what he was feeling, he told us he was angry. Generally when men come to see us there is one emotion they can comfortably express: anger. Anger is almost always a secondary emotion, meaning that there is also a more primary feeling beneath it like fear, hurt, sadness or shame. This is a critical distinction because what we tell ourselves about how we feel informs behavior. If I tell myself that I’m pissed, than I’m going to act pissed. Anger feels better than hurt or embarrassment but it also sets us up to punish the other person.
5. He’ll need to practice humility
Jon felt so often humiliated as a kid that he has developed a puffed-up false self that protects against others seeing how small he is on the inside. Injuries to the inflated self, or “narcissistic injuries” make us brittle and easily offended. The truth about Jon is that he isn’t, as he fantasizes in his most grandiose moments, the nicest guy in the world. He’s also not, as he imagines in his most shame-filled moments, unloveable. He’s just a regular person with strengths and flaws. If he can hold on to that when his wife calls him out, his need to reject her won’t be so great. He can nod sadly and say, “You’re right, that wasn’t nice of me. I’m sorry.”
6. He’ll have to develop deeper empathy
Jon was so flooded with self-pity about feeling excluded by his wife and kids that he never considered their experience. The story that Jon tells himself about what Ann and the kids are feeling isn’t generous. He tells himself that his wife snaps at him because she’s a cold person. And because this is the story, he responds accordingly - he’s terse and punitive. Jon needs to learn to make an empathic leap. What Jon experiences as his wife looking cold is likely an unconscious armor she has developed in response to his regular explosions. Underneath she is likely hurt and anxious. If he wants any chance of repair he has to understand and react to what is behind her defenses. He must respond with warmth to her hurt.
7. He’ll need to be accountable for real change
At our treatment program we see evidence every day that our kind of work is made more effective when family systems, faith communities, courts and workplaces take seriously the job of holding people accountable for change. We also know that the reverse is true. Abusive partners should also have access to a program with the expertise and structure needed to help guide them to lasting change.
8. He’ll need to be patient and accept uncertainty
This problem didn’t get created overnight and it won’t be solved overnight. Initially Jon’s partner rejected his attempts at making amends. If Jon wants to earn back the trust of his partner he will have to tolerate that right now she doesn’t ... and probably shouldn’t ... trust him. He hasn’t been trustworthy or safe. If he wants her trust and the trust of their kids, he will have to demonstrate consistently over time that he won’t punish them when he’s hurt and that he will respect their boundaries and their process.
It is also possible that Ann may decide that she doesn’t want to reconcile, that the damage is too great. Jon must be willing to accept this and still do the work to be a decent and respectful co-parent to their kids.
Five Reasons People Abuse their Partners
And a problem with anger management isn't one of them!
“Why does he do it?” This is the question we are frequently asked here at our treatment program for men and women who have been abusive to their partners. While some abusive partners are motivated by a need for power and control, that it isn’t true for many of the people we work with. Joe arrived for his first session at Menergy desperate to save his marriage. He could acknowledge that the yelling, name-calling and throwing things during fights were problems. He’d slapped her twice and pushed her and blocked her from leaving the room and those things he knew were obviously wrong and he’d stopped the physical abusive a while ago. Now, instead of putting his hands on her, he would purse his lips and glare. When his wife tried to resolve the conflicts between them she encountered a silent unyielding wall.
But even when they weren’t fighting she felt utterly alone. Somehow he’d decided that the kids were her job. It wasn’t what they’d agreed to but it had settled into this pattern which didn’t seem that unusual. What was different in her case was that she had to accept it or to risk pushing him and who knew what that might mean? Would he scream in her face or would she find herself with the new silently rageful Joe who could go days without speaking to her?
Over many years of treating abusive behavior, we have learned that the problem isn’t that people like Joe can’t ‘manage their anger.’ When Joe’s boss chews him out at work, he doesn’t blow up. So if the problem isn’t anger management, then why do people abuse their partners?
Five reasons many people behave abusively:
1. Difficulty tolerating injury. Knowing how to have your feelings hurt without retaliating is an important relationship skill.
Joe was the only son of older parents and they wanted everything for him. For his part, Joe was mostly an easy child, well-liked and a good student. He could, however, throw epic tantrums, becoming stormy and implacable and, as he got older, disappointments leveled him. A test score that was lower than expected, not getting picked for a team, slights on the playground, these things could leave him devastated. His parents wanted to protect him- they intervened with teachers, soothed and placated him, all the while encouraging, cajoling and praising him, because he was mostly a good kid and things were mostly going well. When Joe made the high school basketball team but found himself with a tough coach, Joe quit. Joe never learned what to do with feelings like disappointment, hurt, and shame. He learned to expect that he should be protected from discomfort because he was such a nice guy.
Joe is not in this alone. Many men never develop this skill. Most boys learn early that if someone hurts or embarrasses them, you have to hurt them back. If you get hurt, don’t show it. Don’t cry. Don’t look scared or sad or anxious. Being able to tolerate injuries without punishing the other person is one of the most important skills for partnership because inevitably, your partner will hurt your feelings or disappoint you. Most of our clients don’t have a problem with anger management. Most of the people we work with have a problem tolerating being hurt.
2. Entitlement. If I think that I have a right to not be hurt or embarrassed, than I’m likely to punish you when my entitlement has been violated.
Joe walks around thinking that he’s a nice guy — everyone says so — but then he goes home to his wife and she says that he’s hurtful and Joe knows that she’s right, but it hurts when she says so and he’s been taught that he’s entitled to have his feelings protected.
3. Lack of empathy. We talk about "putting ourselves in other people’s shoes" all the ime. Abusive people do put themselves in their partner’s shoes, but they don’t necessarily do it with generosity. They imagine that the other person wants to cause harm. The kind of empathy that helps us to be decent, requires generosity and a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt.
Susan is scared of Joe’s rage and he interprets her fearfulness as coldness and because of that, he continues to punish her. If Joe wants to change things with Susan, he’s going to have to more generously interpret Susan's actions.
4. Lack of accountability
Abuse happens in the context of a world that says that it’s okay to hurt others when we are hurt. Abusive partners behave abusively, to some extent, because they can.
5. Unaddressed trauma
Many abusive partners have histories of complex childhood trauma, living in homes where they witnessed or were themselves abused and a history of unresolved trauma can result in high reactivity to injury. For people who grow up in high conflict families, abusive behavior can seem normative. While this isn’t the case for Joe, it’s important to know that many of the people we work with struggle with the aftermath of traumatic histories.
Now that we know some of what is behind Joe’s abusive behavior, stay tuned to learn how he and other abusive partners can change.
Violence Wheel
The chart below is a way of looking at the behaviors abusers use to get and keep control in their relationships. Battering is a choice. It is used to gain power and control over another person. Physical abuse is only one part of a system of abusive behaviors.
Abuse is never a one time event.
This chart uses the wheel to show the relationship of physical abuse to other forms of abuse. Each part shows a way to control or gain power.
Power and Control Wheel in Abusive Relationships
This information and the Power and Control Wheel of Abuse (pictured below) is provided courtesy of Kim Eyer.
POWER and CONTROL
Abusers believe they have a right to control their partners in the abusive relationships by utilizing the tactics found in the power and control wheel, by:
Telling them what to do and expecting obedience
Using force to maintain power and control over partners
Feeling their partners have no right to challenge their desire for power and control
Feeling justified making the victim comply
Blaming the abuse on the partner and not accepting responsibility for wrongful acts.
The characteristics shown in thepower and control wheel are examples of how this power and control are demonstrated and enacted against the victim.
Isolation
limiting outside involvement
making another avoid people/friends/family by deliberately embarrassing or humiliating them in front of others
expecting another to report every move and activity
restricting use of the car
moving residences
Emotional and Mental Abuse
putting another down/name-calling
ignoring or discounting activities and accomplishments
withholding approval or affection
making another feel as if they are crazy in public or through private humiliation
unreasonable jealousy and suspicion
playing mind games
Economic and Financial Abuse
preventing another from getting or keeping a job
withholding funds
spending family income without consent and/or making the partner struggle to pay bills
not letting someone know of or have access to family/personal income
forcing someone to ask for basic necessities
Intimidation
driving recklessly to make another feel threatened or endangered
reference:
There are five types of abuse and they usually start with the less noticeable first and become more obvious as the abusive relationship continues.