View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
The difference, one that would take years for Mitty to realize, was that Patricia had lived long enough to know that there is always somewhere else to go. That life, despite its brutal corners, is actually quite forgiving as long as you continue to move through it. But how could she expect her daughter, who had existed for less than two decades, who had only ever lived in the same small suburb, to know this? Mitty’s perspective was, like her, small and bordered.
Her theory is that people always fall out of love for the same reasons they fall into it. Everything exciting eventually becomes a nuisance. Recently, on a camping trip, Sebastian forgot to pack pillows and arranged their clothes into lumpy rectangles to cushion their heads. She stayed up all night, glaring at him, his heavy breath always inching toward a snore. But she used to gush over these small acts of innovation after first meeting him. Like when he secured a handle to the middle of her surfboard so she could carry it beneath her arm. Or built a step stool when he noticed she could barely reach the upper cabinets in his house. Now she feels annoyed by how much useless knowledge he seems to carry. That they can’t go anywhere without him regurgitating trivia. At the coffee shop, he boasts to the barista about his expertise in siphon pots. At the dentist, he talks with a full mouth of metal tools about ancient methods of molar removal.
She has watched him begin to resent her, too. He used to be so taken by her curiosity when they went on walks and she kneeled down to inspect a beetle or peeked in through the windows of an abandoned house, enchanted and grinning. But now what he clearly used to see as a charming eagerness to know the world has evolved into words like nosy, invasive, disrespectful. She has watched his fondness distort into resentment and his responses to her stories tighten into sour nods. She has tried to change the things about herself he’s started to hate, to breezily look the other direction when something catches her interest. But while she thought she could harness her questions until they learned to heel, all they do is yank at their chains, bloody and barking in her brain.
“I’m telling you; it doesn’t hurt.” Lena pauses between each word with a forced, patronizing clarity. “I just want to find the wires.”
“Lena.” Mitty collects herself, the fury in her chest only growing louder. “What are you talking about?”
“I know there are wires in there.” She presses her finger into the hole and Mitty winces.
“There are no wires, Lena,” Mitty says. “There’s blood.”
Lena’s attention snaps away from her body to Mitty. Her face is twisted with an adolescent impatience, angry about something she’d already deemed obvious. “Yes, I know,” she hisses. “Of course he would give me blood.”
Her odometer has just tipped above two hundred and fifty thousand miles. How much of that has been spent running, she thinks, hurrying from one place to the next, trying to remain unnoticed? She buys a canned coffee from the mini-mart and fills her tank. At the neighboring pump, a girl is perched in the passenger seat of a raised pickup, sucking on the tip of an e-cigarette. Her feet are bare, resting on the dashboard, toes pressed into the windshield. She can’t be older than twenty, pretty in the way her peers must clamor over, dishwater-blond hair wrestled into a bun with a pretend thoughtlessness, eyebrows drawn dark, cutoff shorts slinking up past her ass. Sometimes, Mitty feels like she never really got to be that age. Lawless and projecting love onto a gaunt boy who fancies himself an adult. Was she lucky, having avoided the pregnancy scares and constant yearning for some invented romance? Or had she missed out on some crucial phase that would have made her more discerning and less afraid of the people who might hurt her? What was lost, she wonders, from being so protected?
Martin, a man in his late twenties, joined my abuser group while also seeing an individual therapist. He told me the first day that he was confused about whether he had a problem or not, but that his long-time girlfriend Ginny was preparing to break up with him because she considered him abusive. He went on to describe incidents of insulting or ignoring Ginny and of deliberately causing her emotional pain “to show her how it feels when she hurts me.” He also admitted to times of humiliating her in front of other people, being flirtatious with women when he was mad at her, and ruining a couple of recent important events in her life by causing big scenes. He justified all of these behaviors because of ways he felt hurt by her.
THESE ARE JUST a very few of the many confounding questions that face anyone—the partner of an abusive man, a friend, or a professional—who is looking for effective ways to respond to abusive behavior. I came to realize, through my experience with over two thousand abusers, that the abusive man wants to be a mystery. To get away with his behavior and to avoid having to face his problem, he needs to convince everyone around him—and himself—that his behavior makes no sense. He needs his partner to focus on everything except the real causes of his behavior. To see the abuser as he really is, it is necessary to strip away layer after layer of confusion, mixed messages, and deception. Like anyone with a serious problem, abusers work hard to keep their true selves hidden.
Part of how the abuser escapes confronting himself is by convincing you that you are the cause of his behavior, or that you at least share the blame. But abuse is not a product of bad relationship dynamics, and you cannot make things better by changing your own behavior or by attempting to manage your partner better. Abuse is a problem that lies entirely within the abuser.
He’s crazy.
He feels so bad about himself. I just need to build up his self-image a little.
He just loses it.
He’s so insecure.
His mother abused him, and now he has a grudge against women and he takes it out on me.
I’m so confused. I don’t understand what’s going on with him.
aaahhh this is triggering lol
My clients who have participated extensively in therapy or substance-abuse recovery programs sometimes sound like therapists themselves—and a few actually have been—as they adopt the terms of popular psychology or textbook theory. One client used to try to lure me into intellectual debates with comments such as, “Well, your group follows a cognitive-behavioral model, which has been shown to have limitations for addressing a problem as deep as this one.” An abusive man who is adept in the language of feelings can make his partner feel crazy by turning each argument into a therapy session in which he puts her reactions under a microscope and assigns himself the role of “helping” her. He may, for example, “explain” to her the emotional issues she needs to work through, or analyze her reasons for “mistakenly” believing that he is mistreating her.
I have sometimes said to a client: “If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.
I recommend applying the following principle to assertions that an angry or controlling man makes about past women in his life:
IF IT IS AN EXCUSE FOR MISTREATING YOU, IT’S A DISTORTION.
A man who was genuinely mistreated in a relationship with a woman would not be using that experience to get away with hurting someone else.
Consider the reverse situation for a moment: Have you ever heard a woman claim that the reason why she is chronically mistreating her male partner is because a previous man abused her? I have never run into this excuse in the fifteen years I have worked in the field of abuse. Certainly I have encountered cases where women had trouble trusting another man after leaving an abuser, but there is a critical distinction to be made: Her past experiences may explain how she feels, but they are not an excuse for how she behaves. And the same is true for a man.