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

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

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

I have almost never worked with an abused woman who overlooked her partner’s humanity. The problem is the reverse: He forgets her humanity. Acknowledging his abusiveness and speaking forcefully and honestly about how he has hurt her is indispensable to her recovery. It is the abuser’s perspective that she is being mean to him by speaking bluntly about the damage he has done. To suggest to her that his need for compassion should come before her right to live free from abuse is consistent with the abuser’s outlook. I have repeatedly seen the tendency among friends and acquaintances of an abused woman to feel that it is their responsibility to make sure that she realizes what a good person he really is inside—in other words, to stay focused on his needs rather than on her own, which is a mistake. People who wish to help an abused woman should instead be telling her what a good person she is.

My clients support laws that prohibit domestic abuse—as long as they are applied only to other men. Each one has a mental image of what a “real abuser” is like, and it isn’t him. In his mind, the “real abuser” is more violent and scary than he is and has a partner who is “a nice lady” who doesn’t deserve abuse. Dozens of my clients have said to me: “I’m not like those guys who come home and abuse their partners for no reason, you know.” A man who minimizes and excuses his abuse in these ways is shocked when the police arrest him or when a court orders him to vacate his home. He feels outraged at the unfairness of the system. He thinks, With all those horrible batterers out there, why are they coming after me? This is ridiculous!

Anyone who believes that abusers lose control of themselves should peer through the window when the police enter a home. Hundreds of women have told me: “It’s as if he could flick a switch. The police arrive, and he’s suddenly cool as a cucumber. Meanwhile, I’m freaking out, so of course they think something is wrong with me. They don’t believe he could settle down that fast.” If abusers truly had tremendous problems managing their anger, if they were as emotionally vulnerable or deeply injured from childhood as they often maintain, they wouldn’t be able to shut themselves off like a faucet as soon as a cop knocks on the door.

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 and we’re not allowed to talk at all.” If I set limits on a man’s disruptiveness in the group, he turns in his seat, drops his head like a victim, and says sarcastically, “Right, I get it: We’re always wrong, and the women are always right.” If I terminate a man from the program after three warnings for inappropriate behavior, he says, “If we don’t tell you exactly what you want to hear, you kick us out, and you don’t give anyone a second chance.” His twisted reports on our statements provide important glimpses into how he discredits his partner at home—and why she may feel so angry, frustrated, and ready to scream.

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 nineteenth century some legal consequences were finally legislated for some of the most extreme beatings of women, but they were rarely enforced until the 1970s and were not enforced consistently at all until the 1990s! For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years the domestic assault of women has been considered a necessary tool for a man to maintain order and discipline in his home, to make sure that his superior intelligence rules, and to avoid the mushrooming of the hysterical, short-sighted, and naive qualities that men widely attribute to women. It was only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially with the work of those activists focusing specifically on battering and sexual assault, that the intimate oppression of women began to be taken seriously as a crime.

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 important to her rather than making him her exclusive focus. She demands from time to time that he take an interest in her as a person. She doesn’t always accept his opinions as accurate and superior to hers. She may even attempt at some point to break up with him, as if she were not his personal possession. The boy doesn’t believe that he is demanding anything unreasonable; he seeks only what he considers his due. In fact, our young man feels like he gives his girlfriend more freedom than a lot of other guys do, just as the boy in our opening story felt generous for providing a public picnic area on “his” land. And, like that boy’s reaction to the “trespassers,” he becomes increasingly frustrated, erratic, and coercive as he tries to regain control over his partner. His first sexual experiences are likely to be a result of his pressuring a girl steadily until she gives in, so that sexual coercion becomes one of his earliest relationship habits. He may even start to appear mentally ill, as did the young man who began firing at hikers, but in fact his behavior is largely logical and rational, given what his key social influences have led him to believe. Above all, he feels that his rights are the ones being denied—which is precisely the attitude of almost all of my clients when they begin my program. The abusive man feels cheated, ripped off, and wronged, because his sense of entitlement is so badly distorting his perceptions of right and wrong.

In sum, an abuser can be thought of not as a man who is a “deviant,” but rather as one who learned his society’s lessons too well, swallowing them whole. He followed too carefully the signposts his culture put out for him marking the path to manhood—at least with respect to relationships with women.

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 heels at that point. An abuser’s sense of entitlement is like a rude, arrogant voice screaming inside his head. It yells at him: “You’ve given up too much already; don’t budge another inch. They already talked you into saying your abuse is all your own fault when you know she’s at least half to blame because of the shit that she does. She should be grateful to you for apologizing; that wasn’t easy to do. She’s lucky you’ve gone this far; a lot of guys would tell her to go screw, you know.” And the voice drags him back into the mud that he had finally taken a couple of baby steps out of.

Step number four, for example, demands that the abusive man accept his partner’s right to be angry. He actually has to take seriously the furious things that she says and think about them rather than using her emotional pitch as an excuse to stuff her opinions back down her throat as he has normally done. When I explain this step, my clients at first look at me as though I had an eye in the middle of my forehead. “I should do what?? When she is yelling at me, I’m supposed to just sit there and take it??” To which I reply, “More than that, actually. You should reflect on the points she is making and respond to them in a thoughtful way.” And then we begin practicing exactly that in the group; I ask them for examples of their partners’ angry statements and then guide them through understanding why their partners are furious and accepting their right to feel that way.