I sometimes ask my clients the following question: “How many of you have ever felt angry enough at your mother to get the urge to call her a bitch?” Typically, half or more of the group members raise their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have ever acted on that urge?” All the hands fly down, and the men cast appalled gazes on me, as if I had just asked whether they sell drugs outside elementary schools. So then I ask, “Well, why haven’t you?” The same answer shoots out from the men each time I do this exercise: “But you can’t treat your mother like that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!”

The unspoken remainder of this statement, which we can fill in for my clients, is: “But you can treat your wife or girlfriend like that, as long as you have a good enough reason. That’s different.” In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable. This insight has tremendous implications for how counseling work with abusers has to be done, as we will see.

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury. A nonabusive man would not expect his wife to be taking emotional care of him during a crisis of this gravity. In fact, he would be focused on what he could do for her and on trying to find the child. It would be futile to teach Ray to take a time-out to punch pillows, take a brisk walk, or concentrate on deep breathing, because his thinking process will soon get him enraged again. In Chapter 3, you will see how and why an abuser’s attitudes keep him furious.

Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

Much of what appears to be crazy behavior in an abuser actually works well for him. We already met Michael, who never broke his own stuff, and Marshall, who did not believe his own jealous accusations. In the pages ahead, you will encounter many more examples of the method behind the abuser’s madness. You will also learn how distorted his view of his partner is—which can make him appear emotionally disturbed—and where those distortions spring from.

An abusive man is not unable to resolve conflicts nonabusively; he is unwilling to do so. The skill deficits of abusers have been the subject of a number of research studies, and the results lead to the following conclusion: Abusers have normal abilities in conflict resolution, communication, and assertiveness when they choose to use them. They typically get through tense situations at work without threatening anyone; they manage their stress without exploding when they spend Thanksgiving with their parents; they share openly with their siblings regarding their sadness over a grandparent’s death. But they don’t want to handle these kinds of issues nonabusively when it involves their partners. You can equip an abuser with the most innovative, New Age skills for expressing his deep emotions, listening actively, and using win-win bargaining, and then he will go home and continue abusing. In the coming chapter, we’ll see why.

In their efforts to adopt victim status, my clients try to exaggerate their partners’ verbal power: “Sure, I can win a physical fight, but she is much better with her mouth than I am, so I’d say it balances out.” (One very violent man said in his group session, “She stabs me through the heart with her words,” to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.) But abuse is not a battle that you win by being better at expressing yourself. You win it by being better at sarcasm, put-downs, twisting everything around backward, and using other tactics of control—an arena in which my clients win hands down over their partners, just as they do in a violent altercation. Who can beat an abuser at his own game?

His attitude always seems to be: “You owe me.”
He manages to twist everything around so that it’s my fault.
I feel suffocated by him. He’s trying to run my life.
Everyone seems to think he’s the greatest guy in the world. I wish they could see the side of him that I have to live with.
He says he loves me so much. So why does he treat me like this?

Harriet started yelling at me on Friday afternoon and told me she is going to move out soon. Then she left for the whole weekend and took my two-year-old son with her. She really hurt me. So I decided to hurt her too, and I wanted to go after something that was really important to her, to show her what it’s like. She had been working for a week on this college paper that she had put a lot of hours into and was going to hand in on Monday. She left it sitting right on top of her dresser, just asking for it. So I tore it up into little pieces. Then I ripped up a bunch of pictures of the three of us, and I left it all in a nice pile on the bed for her to come home to. I think she learned something from that.

The mind-set that an abuser brings to these choices and tensions can make him impossible to get along with. Consider how challenging it is to negotiate or compromise with a man who operates on the following tenets (whether or not he ever says them aloud):

• “An argument should only last as long as my patience does. Once I’ve had enough, the discussion is over and it’s time for you to shut up.”
• “If the issue we’re struggling over is important to me, I should get what I want. If you don’t back off, you’re wronging me.”
• “I know what is best for you and for our relationship. If you continue disagreeing with me after I’ve made it clear which path is the right one, you’re acting stupid.”
• “If my control and authority seem to be slipping, I have the right to take steps to reestablish the rule of my will, including abuse if necessary.”

The last item on this list is the one that most distinguishes the abuser from other people: Perhaps any of us can slip into having feelings like the ones in numbers one through three, but the abuser gives himself permission to take action on the basis of his beliefs. With him, the foregoing statements aren’t feelings; they are closely held convictions that he uses to guide his actions. That is why they lead to so much bullying behavior.

An abusive man often considers it his right to control where his partner goes, with whom she associates, what she wears, and when she needs to be back home. He therefore feels that she should be grateful for any freedoms that he does choose to grant her, and will say something in a counseling session like, “She’s all bent out of shape because there’s one sleazy girl I don’t let her hang out with, when all the rest of the time I allow her to be friends with anyone she wants.” He expects his partner to give him a medal for his generosity, not to criticize him for his oppressiveness. He sees himself as a reasonably permissive parent—toward his adult partner—and he does not want to meet with a lot of resistance on the occasions when he believes that he needs to put his foot down.

When a man starts my program, he often says, “I am here because I lose control of myself sometimes. I need to get a better grip.” I always correct him: “Your problem is not that you lose control of yourself, it’s that you take control of your partner. In order to change, you don’t need to gain control over yourself, you need to let go of control of her.” A large part of his abusiveness comes in the form of punishments used to retaliate against you for resisting his control. This is one of the single most important concepts to grasp about an abusive man.