Activity

I hear this (mostly unconscious) attitude in the voice of the client who says to me: “I thought you were going to be giving me tools to help me manage my partner’s crazy behavior. But you aren’t helping me with that at all.” His expression crazy behavior is a code phrase for any way in which she st…

But even a genuine and sincere apology is only a starting point. Many of my clients make it through the first three steps: They admit to a substantial portion of their abuse; they agree that their actions resulted from choice rather than loss of control; and they apologize. Then they dig in their h…

When this boy gets involved in actual—as opposed to imagined—dating, especially as he reaches an age where his relationships become more serious, his childhood fantasy life collides with the real-life young woman he is seeing. She defies him on occasion. She has other people in her life who are imp…

Until well into the 1800s, it was expressly legal for a man in the English-speaking world to physically abuse his wife. She had no recourse to the police or the courts, and, if she chose to divorce him because of his abusiveness, he was legally entitled to custody of their children. In the late nin…

The abuser’s distortions regarding the abuser program follow the same lines of his thinking about his partner. If I tell a loquacious client that he can’t dominate the entire group discussion and needs to be quiet for a while, he tells his probation officer, “The counselors say we can only listen a…