Breaking Things Down (Part 1)

This is something I've wanted to do for a while, but finding the energy and brain space is tough. I'm going to try and talk about the communications I received from my abuser while we were still friends in the context of abusive mentality and abuser dynamics, because I think it's important to understand that subtle or otherwise, these things come up all the time in our interactions with others... but being blinded by reasons and justifications doesn't make any of it okay. I've posted a lot of what he and I both said in this previous blog post (linked for all necessary context), so I'm not going to reproduce everything here.

Email 1:

There really isn't much to say from my part that I haven't already communicated to you. The only problem I had that personally affected /me/ was the stress (in the context of already being stressed) that I was feeling because I felt like all my options regarding you, you're health, and our friendship, were in some way massively deficient.

This seems reasonable on the surface, but it's a twisty way to get the focus OFF him and back onto me, by denying and ignoring things not related to his agenda. Though he had established himself as a carer/support person, it's still disturbing he is alluding to the idea that he needs to 'fix' me and/or us in some way. Relationships of all sorts need to be a two way street.

You do have a problem with self-regulation, because you (self-admittedly) react in ways when anxiety/emotional brained that when you calm down you understand were not helpful/in your best interest, etc.

By "self-admittedly" he's referring to the fact that I was already gaslighted at this point to take on the burden of guilt for everything going wrong. To be fair, it wasn't a huge push.. my anxiety and depression do already make me think that I'm a "burden" and "difficult to deal with", etc. Plus, it plays on the societal acceptance of the idea that rational=good and emotional=bad, something abusers use to their advantage all the time. My abuser particularly was covert aggressive (good description of this type of abuse lives here) or (as described in this blog post) a Water Torturer type abuser. Basically, this means he stays calm and in control at all times while provoking emotional responses from the target, thus being able to claim they are "overreacting" and "irrational", etc. to invalidate their emotions.

And you do have a problem with dependence, which, other than being observable, you've said as much yourself when you've calmed down.

 Look, this doesn't even explain a damn thing, which goes to show just how much of a gaslighting lie it was. "Being observable" is not actual evidence of anything, neither is the fact I admitted to it at any point (because... gaslighted). What he really disagreed with was now that I trusted him and accepted him as my main source of support, it was unacceptable to expect ANYthing from him that he did not want to give... and since I did expect him to actually give a shit about me and got angry when his behaviour showed otherwise, it was obviously asking too much. 

Now, whilst I accept my part in not being vigilant enough in trying to help you, to not let it become a dependence thing, the communication was /impossible/ until after you spoke to [REDACTED] on Wednesday. Because you were both in denial about the problem and quite defensive/hostile about it. 

Basically, I disagreed with him and therefore I was in denial and hostile. This is an attack designed to put me on the defensive. By putting the burden on me once again as the one with the problem, I'm pushed to either accept his views or at least have to continue defending myself (probably with some anger at the accusation), which would allow him to again call me "unreasonable". He also would often consult with friends about things between us to subtly prime them to agree with his view that I was overreacting or wrong in some way, so that when I spoke to others for outside viewpoints, it was assured I would be led back to his thinking and more likely to succumb to his control. I don't think he outright would say, 'I am right, she is being emotional and is wrong', but I do think he often played off, again, unwritten social rules. In this case, it's partially that being overly emotional is a 'bad' thing and also that he had to keep distancing himself from me because I was 'too much' (Mmm, mental illness stigma).

So whilst I accept that non-communication might be triggering for you, I do not feel responsible for being the trigger. Nor, given the context, do I think it's fair of you to try to tell me I'm responsible for.

Huge red flag. People who actually care about how they are affecting you do not tell you they are not responsible for the harm caused. Even hurting someone inadvertently, most of us would apologise for what happened, because it sucks to hurt a friend and you try not to do it ever again. Abusers, however, never ever take responsibility for their actions and their effects. It is a major thing that MAKES someone an abuser.  (see #9 in this post). And not only does he not care that his behaviour was causing me some massive and stressful anxiety (after I had set it as a hard boundary between us), but he then again turns the guilt and blame BACK onto me to make me feel bad I brought it up in the first place.

Now, if after calming down and maybe talking to [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] you realise that much of what you've just said was in no small way disturbing, I'm happy to ignore it. Either way I haven't taken it personally, or let it impact how I feel about you.

He's Very Kindly (sarcasm ahoy) forgiving me for being angry at him about him causing me a lot of undue stress and anxiety. How very nice and big of him. How very manipulative.

However, until you get perspective on the situation from a third party I'm not going to discuss this further with you.

And he ends with a good dose of stonewalling, or shutting down any further communication on the topic so that a resolution or compromise (other than accepting his views) cannot be reached. It's used to retain control of the situation and frustrate the person on the other side, and is another huge red flag when it comes to attempting to have a healthy relationship with someone.

Email 2:

Look. You are going to calm down at some point, maybe vent your shit at someone or whatever. Then you are going to freak out because you will think you've just destroyed our friendship. It's a pattern. And I like to think I have a pretty damn high tolerance for that kind of thing. But you are walking on very thin ice, tracing the circumference of my no drama policy.

 Let us begin with a threat. The cycle did keep repeating itself, because abuse is a cycle, and there would always be some way he'd try to control me that pushed just a little too far, so I'd get angry at him. Then the gaslighting and self-blame would kick in and I'd go crawling back, asking for forgiveness since it was the only way to keep things status quo between us. This is how abuse works (the only thing he didn't do was get violent with me, obviously, but everything else is true).

So, in the event that you do at some point realise that you are being completely unreasonable

Because I was always unreasonable if I was angry at him. Blame was always put squarely onto my shoulders.

You are very dear to me and I value our friendship. However, I'm /not/ willing to deal with this amount of drama, from anyone. So if you do in fact want to maintain our friendship, this has to stop.

He said I was dear to him and he valued our friendship in that exact phrase many times as reassurance. A weirdly particular way of putting it and I don't believe any of them were ever sincere, it was always just to placate me. And then there is another threat.

No more expectations of how I should or shouldn't act, no more trying (intentionally or otherwise) to guilt trip me over how /you/ are feeling or into me spending time with you (I say trying because I /don't/ feel guilty in any way). No more emotional venty outbursts at me for what you perceive I've done wrong but inevitably, and usually after talking to someone like [REDACTED], realise that you were, in fact, being unreasonable. No more drama, period.

Basically, stop trying to fight against my control in various ways. You can see how he twisted my valid complaints about his behaviour into things I've done wrong to him. He often accused me of being emotionally manipulative and guilt tripping, when in fact, he was doing these things constantly to me by trying to force me to accept the blame and responsibility of all our problems. By framing my actions in such a drastic framework, it, again, attempts to make me go on the defensive and also feel shame for trying to hold him responsible for the way he was affecting me. This is a list of demands that I had to adhere to for the friendship to stay intact, and yet he couldn't be held 'responsible' for the one thing I asked him to do to make me stop feeling terrible all the time. This is one of the main abuse dynamics, where the abuser must be free to do whatever they please without consequence, but you cannot do anything that the abuser dislikes within the relationship. And of course, again, I am unreasonable for being angry that he did not care about my feelings one bit.

If any of this continues after this particular incident, I intend on cutting communication with you for as long as it takes for you to fix your shit so we can go back to being friends without the drama. Hint: this will be measured in months, maybe even years, not days/weeks, to give you some perspective.

The threat in full, with added consequences of not submitting to his demands. Also, for someone so invested in fighting mental health stigma and mental health advocacy (it's his job at a non-profit, even), the phrase "fix your shit" is very demeaning and out of character for his usual "I'm such a nice, understanding guy" facade.

I don't want to talk about this with you, it is not open for discussion. I want our friendship to work, but if time apart is needed then so be it. This is the last time I will deal with it. At a minimum, I don't want to talk to you at all until you've calmed down and got some perspective.

And again, more stonewalling so that the only possible resolution is his resolution.

The second email was one of the last before the friendship dissolved, so it might make ultimatums seem more reasonable (though everything he took issue with was not an actual issue except that I kept getting mad at him for treating me poorly instead of shutting up and taking his crap). Still, he sent this after I had already expressed that I no longer wanted to continue being friends because of how he was acting. He attempted one more go at regaining control over me, but I'd had enough at that point, as you can see in my reply in the blog post linked at the beginning of this one. The issues I state in my reply were all the true issues as I saw them, instead of the ones he kept pushing on me to make me at fault and more compliant to his control. Never once would he address anything I wanted him to address, and instead derailed every argument into what he felt the problem was (aka Me).

These are not the communications of someone who ever truly cared about me, but they are pretty good examples of how subtle psychological and emotional abuse manifests.

It still baffles me that the people defending him believe that any of the above is acceptable, but then again, they probably believe him that I'm 'crazy' cause I'm mentally ill or that he just couldn't cope with dealing with me anymore (protip: relationships work on communication and compromise... not abusive actions like control and stonewalling and manipulation).

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 6): Abusers and Allies

Excerpts taken from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft.

Besides, he feels that he deserves allies, because he considers himself the victim. 

You may wonder why, if abusive men feel so justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn’t want to have to explain his worst behaviors—his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence—to people who might find those acts distasteful, and he may not feel confident that his justifications will be accepted. Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging selfdoubt. He considers his guilt feelings a weakness to be overcome. And, last, he may lie because he has convinced himself of his own distortions.

But whether or not he is telling the truth is almost beside the point; he is playing to the societal value, still widely held, that a man’s abuse toward a woman is significantly less serious if she has behaved rudely herself. 

What her family and friends may not know is that when an abused woman refuses to “look at her part” in the abuse, she has actually taken a powerful step out of self-blame and toward emotional recovery. She doesn’t have any responsibility for his actions. Anyone who tries to get her to share responsibility is adopting the abuser’s perspective.

Despite the challenges, many, many friends and relatives of abused women stay by them. Their presence is critical, for it is the level of loyalty, respect, patience, and support that an abused woman receives from her own friends and family that largely determines her ability to recover from abuse and stay free.

I’ve had couples counselors say to me, for example: “He just isn’t the type to be abusive; he’s so pleasant and insightful, and she’s so angry.” Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her.

THE MYTH OF NEUTRALITY

It is not possible to be truly balanced in one’s views of an abuser and an abused woman. As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her masterwork Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral. Although an abuser prefers to have you wholeheartedly on his side, he will settle contentedly for your decision to take a middle stance. To him, that means you see the couple’s problems as partly her fault and partly his fault,
which means it isn’t abuse.

I was speaking with a person one day who was describing the abusive relationship of a man and woman, both of whom were friends of hers. “They each want me to side with them,” she explained to me, “but I refuse to take sides. They have to work out their own dynamics. I have let both of them know that I’m there for them. If I openly supported her, he would just dig his heels in harder.” She added, “People need to avoid the temptation to choose up teams” in a tone that indicated that she considered herself to be of superior maturity because of her neutrality.

In reality, to remain neutral is to collude with the abusive man, whether or not that is your goal. If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused women, meanwhile, the silence means that no one will help—just what her partner wants her to believe. Anyone who chooses to quietly look the other way therefore unwittingly becomes the abuser’s ally.

Breaking the silence does not necessarily mean criticizing or confronting the abuser regarding his behavior. It certainly doesn’t mean going to him with anything you have learned from her, because the abuser will retaliate against her for talking about his behavior to other people. It does mean telling the abused woman privately that you don’t like the way he is treating her and that she doesn’t deserve it, no matter what she has done.

Summary 

Colluding with abuse abandons the abused woman and her children, and ultimately abandons the abuser as well, since it keeps him from ever dealing with his problem. If we can erode the ability of abusers to gain allies, they will stand alone, and alone they are easier to stop.

It often falls to the abused woman herself, unfortunately, to try to educate the people around her whose help and support she needs, so that they will understand the dynamics of abuse and stop supporting the abusive man. Much of why an abuser is so able to recruit allies, besides his own manipulativeness and charm, is his skill in playing on people’s ignorance and misconceptions and often on their negative attitudes toward women. As difficult as it is to take on, you will often find yourself having to be your own best advocate, arguing forcefully against the range of ways in which your society’s values may buy into the abusive man’s outlook, in order to gain the kind of strong backing that you deserve from all those around you.

Abusers and the Legal System

Abusers have also learned to rush to the court for restraining orders before their partners get a chance to do so and sometimes scoop up custody of their children in the process. It would be difficult to find anyone more self-satisfied than the man who repeatedly assaults his partner verbally or physically and then has the pleasure of handing her a court order that bars her from the residence. And of course the shock to the woman of discovering that the court has kicked her when she was already down can propel her several more yards in the direction of resignation and bitterness. 

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 5): Types of Abusers

Excerpts taken from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. Only the most relevant types: Mr. Right and The Water Torturer.

Types of Abusers

Besides knowing all about the world, Mr. Right is also an expert on your life and how you should live it. He has the answers to your conflicts at work, how you should spend your time, and how you should raise your children. 

The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are: 

• You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually. I know better than you do, even about what's good for you.
• Your opinions aren't worth listening to carefully or taking seriously.
• The fact that you sometimes disagree with me shows how sloppy your thinking is.
• If you would just accept that I know what's right, our relationship would go much better. Your own life would go better, too.

The Water Torturer's style proves that anger doesn't cause abuse. He can assault his partner psychologically without even raising his voice. He tends to stay calm in arguments, using his own evenness as a weapon to push her over the edge. 

In an argument, she may end up yelling in frustration, leaving the room crying, or sinking into silence. The Water Torturer then says, See, you're the abusive one, not me. You're the one who's yelling and refusing to talk things out rationally. I wasn't even raising my voice. It's impossible to reason with you. 

The psychological effects of living with the Water Torturer can be severe. His tactics can be difficult to identify, so they sink in deeply. Women can find it difficult not to blame themselves for their reactions to what their partner does if they don't even know what to call it. When someone slaps you in the face, you know you've been slapped. But when a woman feels psychologically assaulted, with little idea why, after an argument with The Water Torturer, she may turn her frustration inward. How do you seek support from a friend, for example, when you don't know how to describe what is going wrong? 

The Water Torturer tends to genuinely believe that there is nothing unusual about his behavior. When his partner starts to confront him with his abusiveness—which she usually does sooner or later—he looks at her as if she were crazy and says, What the hell are you talking about? I've never done anything to you. Friends and relatives who have witnessed the couple's interactions may back him up. They shake their heads and say to each other, I don't know what goes on with her. She just explodes at him sometimes, and he's so low-key.

The Water Torturer is payback-oriented like most abusive men, but he may hide it better. His moves appear carefully thought out, and he rarely makes obvious mistakes—such as letting his abusiveness show in public—that could turn other people against him or get him in legal trouble. 

If you are involved with a Water Torturer, you may struggle for years trying to figure out what is happening. You may feel that you overreact to his behavior and that he isn't really so bad. But the effects of his control and contempt have crept up on you over the years. If you finally leave him, you may experience intense periods of delayed rage, as you become conscious of how quietly but deathly oppressive he was. 

The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are: 

• You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing.
• I can easily convince other people that you're the one who is messed up.
• As long as I'm calm, you can't call anything I do abusive, no matter how cruel.
• I know exactly how to get under your skin.

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 4): Realities of Abuse #6-10

Excerpts taken from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft.

REALITY #6: He is manipulative.

There are some signs of manipulation by abusers that you can watch for:

• Changing his moods abruptly and frequently, so that you find it difficult to tell who he is or how he feels, keeping you constantly off balance. His feelings toward you are especially changeable.

• Denying the obvious about what he is doing or feeling. He’ll speak to you with his voice trembling with anger, or he’ll blame a difficulty on you, or he’ll sulk for two hours, and then deny it to your face. You know what he did—and so does he —but he refuses to admit it, which can drive you crazy with frustration. Then he may call you irrational for getting so upset by his denial.

• Convincing you that what he wants you to do is what is best for you. This way the abuser can make his selfishness look like generosity, which is a neat trick. A long time may pass before you realize what his real motives were.

• Getting you to feel sorry for him, so that you will be reluctant to push forward with your complaints about what he does.

• Getting you to blame yourself, or blame other people, for what he does. Using confusion tactics in arguments, subtly or overtly changing the subject, insisting that you are thinking or feeling things that you aren’t, twisting your words, and many other tactics that serve as glue to pour into your brain. You may leave arguments with him feeling like you are losing your mind.

• Lying or misleading you about his actions, his desires, or his reasons for doing certain things, in order to guide you into doing what he wants you to do. One of the most frequent complaints I get from abused women is that their partners lie repeatedly, a form of psychological abuse that in itself can be highly destructive over time.

• Getting you and the people you care about turned against each other by betraying confidences, being rude to your friends, telling people lies about what you supposedly said about them, charming your friends and then telling them bad things about you, and many other divisive tactics.

When a woman gets called “bitch,” or gets shoved or slapped, she at least knows what her partner did to her. But after a manipulative interaction she may have little idea what went wrong; she just knows that she feels terrible, or crazy, and that somehow it seems to be her own fault. 

REALITY #7: He strives to have a good public image. 

If you are involved with an abusive man, you may spend a lot of your time trying to figure out what is wrong with you, rather than what is wrong with him. If he gets along well with other people and impresses them with his generosity, sense of humor, and friendliness, you may wind up wondering, “What is it about me that sets him off? Other people seem to think he’s great.”

They are drawn to power and control, and part of how they get it is by looking good in public. The abusive man’s charm makes his partner reluctant to reach out for support or assistance because she feels that people will find her revelations hard to believe or will blame her. If friends overhear him say something abusive, or police arrest him for an assault, his previous people-pleasing lays the groundwork to get him off the hook. The observers think, He’s such a nice guy, he’s just not the type to be abusive. She must have really hurt him.

The abuser’s nice-guy front helps him feel good about himself. My clients say to me, “I get along fine with everyone but her. You should ask around about what I’m like; you’ll see. I’m a calm, reasonable person. People can see that she’s the one who goes off.” Meanwhile, he uses the difficulties that she is having in her relationships with people—many of which may be caused by him—as further proof that she is the one with the problem.

Although these men usually keep their abusive side well hidden outside of the home, there is one situation in which it slips out: when someone confronts them about their abusiveness and sticks up for the abused woman, which happens to be my job. Suddenly, the attitudes and tactics they normally reserve for home come pouring out. The vast majority of women who say that they are being abused are telling the truth. I know this to be true because the abusers let their guard down with me, belying their denial. 

REALITY #8: He feels justified. 

They don’t mind glibly saying, “I know what I did was wrong,” but when I ask them to describe their verbal or physical assaults in detail, they leap back to justifying. 

Abusive men are masters of excuse making. In this respect they are like substance abusers, who believe that everyone and everything except them is responsible for their actions. When they aren’t blaming their partners, they blame stress, alcohol, their childhood, their children, their bosses, or their insecurities. More important, they feel entitled to make these excuses; when I point out that other men under the same pressures choose not to be abusive, they tend to become irate or contemptuous.

REALITY #9: Abusers deny and minimize their abuse.

If the man is abusive, of course he is going to deny it, partly to protect himself and partly because his perceptions are distorted. If he were ready to accept responsibility for his actions in relationships, he wouldn’t be abusive.

REALITY #10: Abusers are possessive.

Possessiveness is at the core of the abuser’s mindset, the spring from which all the other streams spout; on some level he feels that he owns you and therefore has the right to treat you as he sees fit.

Summary

In other words, abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology. When someone challenges an abuser’s attitudes and beliefs, he tends to reveal the contemptuous and insulting personality that normally stays hidden, reserved for private attacks on his partner. An abuser tries to keep everybody—his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives—focused on how he feels, so that they won’t focus on how he thinks, perhaps because on some level he is aware that if you grasp the true nature of his problem, you will begin to escape his domination. 

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 3): Realities of Abuse #1-5

Excerpts taken from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft.

REALITY #1: He is controlling.

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):

1. “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.”
2. “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.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”

With him, the foregoing statements aren’t feelings; they are closely held convictions that he uses to guide his actions. 

THE ABUSIVE MAN CLAIMS that his control is in his partner’s best interest. Unfortunately, an abuser can sometimes succeed at convincing people that his partner is so irrational and out of control, that her judgment is so poor, that she has to be saved from herself. A large part of his abusiveness comes in the form of punishments used to retaliate against you for resisting his control.

REALITY #2: He feels entitled. 

Freedom from accountability means that the abusive man considers himself above criticism. If his partner attempts to raise her grievances, she is “nagging” or “provoking” him. He believes he should be permitted to ignore the damage his behavior is causing, and he may become retaliatory if anyone tries to get him to look at it. 

And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities. 

When your anger does jump out of you—as will happen to any abused woman from time to time—he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are. If you have space to feel and express your rage, you will be better able to hold on to your identity and to resist his suffocation of you. He tries to take your anger away in order to snuff out your capacity to resist his will.

REALITY #3: He twists things into their opposites.

The abuser’s highly entitled perceptual system causes him to mentally reverse aggression and self-defense. The lens of entitlement the abuser holds over his eye stands everything on its head, like the reflection in a spoon. 

REALITY #4: He disrespects his partner and considers himself superior to her. 

He often has difficulty conceiving of her as a human being. This tendency in abusers is known as objectification or depersonalization. By depersonalizing his partner, the abuser protects himself from the natural human emotions of guilt and empathy, so that he can sleep at night with a clear conscience. He distances himself so far from her humanity that her feelings no longer count, or simply cease to exist.

Objectification is a critical reason why an abuser tends to get worse over time. Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.

REALITY #5: He confuses love and abuse.

Genuine love means respecting the humanity of the other person, wanting what is best for him or her, and supporting the other person’s self-esteem and independence. This kind of love is incompatible with abuse and coercion.

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 2): Dispelling Myths

Excerpts taken from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft.

One of the obstacles to recognizing chronic mistreatment in relationships is that most abusive men simply don’t seem like abusers. They have many good qualities, including times of kindness, warmth, and humor, especially in the early period of a relationship. An abuser’s friends may think the world of him. He may have a successful work life and have no problems with drugs or alcohol. He may simply not fit anyone’s image of a cruel or intimidating person. So when a woman feels her relationship spinning out of control, it is unlikely to occur to her that her partner is an abuser.

The symptoms of abuse are there, and the woman usually sees them: the escalating frequency of put-downs. Early generosity turning more and more to selfishness. Verbal explosions when he is irritated or when he doesn’t get his way. Her grievances constantly turned around on her, so that everything is her own fault. His growing attitude that he knows what is good for her better than she does. 

The abuser creates confusion because he has to. He can’t control and intimidate you, he can’t recruit people around him to take his side, he can’t keep escaping the consequences of his actions, unless he can throw everyone off the track. When the world catches on to the abuser, his power begins to melt away. Unmasking the abuser also does him a favor, because he will not confront—and overcome—his highly destructive problem as long as he can remain hidden. 

But it is virtually unheard of for an abusive man to make substantial and lasting changes in his pattern of abusiveness as a result of therapy. He may work through other emotional difficulties, he may gain insight into himself, but his behavior continues. In fact it typically gets worse, as he uses therapy to develop new excuses for his behavior, more sophisticated arguments to prove that his partner is mentally unstable, and more creative ways to make her feel responsible for his emotional distress.

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. 

An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong. 

In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable.

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.

Behind Abusive Mentality (Part 1): When is it Abuse?

A friend linked me to this book called, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. It's got some really great and helpful info, even if it's kind of hard to get through at times (triggers ahoy). I just wanted to post up some excerpts that I found both quite interesting and useful for my circumstances. There's quite a bit of info, so I'll make it a mini-series of posts. (Bold and Italics are mostly mine.)

In fact, his language tends to be of mutuality during the dating period- I want to be with there for you, etc. He may truly believe his own promises, because he wants to see himself as a generous and thoughtful partner, one who does not use or disrespect women. Later, when he begins to control the woman and take advantage of her, he will find ways to convince himself that it's not happening or that it's her fault. Abuse is not his goal, but control is, and he finds himself using abuse to gain the control he feels he has a right to. 

An Abuser is a human being, not an evil monster, but he has a profoundly complex and destructive problem that should not be underestimated. The common view of abusive men as evil, calculating brutes can make it difficult for a woman to recognize her partner's problems. She tends to think: My partner really cares about me and has a good side to him. He has feelings, he's not a sadist. He couldn't be an abuser. She doesn't realize he can have all these positive qualities and still be an abuser. 

An abuser's behavior is primarily conscious- he acts deliberately rather than by accident or by losing control of himself- but the underlying thinking that drives his behavior is largely not conscious. 

When Is It Abuse?

There is a difference between having a bad day and being a jerk and a pattern that adds up to something more serious. Behaviors such as name calling, interrupting and acting selfish and insensitive are hurtful and worthy of criticism but they aren't all abuse, except when they are part of a pattern of abuse. Abuse is about power, it means that a person is taking advantage of a power imbalance to exploit or control someone else.

The lines where subtler kinds of mistreatment end and abuse begins include the following actions [My Note: not a comprehensive list from the book]: 

He retaliates against you for complaining about his behavior- repeating behaviors he knows you dislike, switching into the role of the victim, ridiculing you for complaining of mistreatment. He doesn't believe that you have the right to defy him. 

He tells you that your objections to his mistreatment are your own problem- says you are too sensitive, you think everyone is abusing you, you're angry because you are not getting your own way. He is trying to persuade you that you have unreasonable expectations of his behavior, that you are actually reacting to something else and that you are using your complaints against him. These tactics are to discredit your complaints of mistreatment, which is abusive. His core attitude is "you have no right to object to how I treat you". 

It's never the right time, or the right way, to bring things up- Initial defensiveness is comon even in nonabusive people. With an abuser however, even time after an argument to cool off doesn't help. In fact, the time between arguments may be used to build a case against you.

Justifies hurtful or frightening acts or says you "made him do it"- He may tell you he can yell because you're not listening to him or says he will stop one form of abuse if you stop doing something that bothers him, which often will be something you have every right to do.

Control Tactics in Arguments

Sarcasm
Ridicule
Distorting what happened in an earlier interaction
Sulking
Accusing you of doing what he does, or thinking the way he thinks
Using a tone of absolute authority
Interrupting
Not listening, refusing to respond
Laughing out loud at your opinion or perspective
Turning your grievances around to use against you
Changing the subject to his grievances
Criticism that is harsh, undeserved or frequent
Provoking guilt
Playing the victim
Smirking, rolling his eyes, contemptuous facial expressions
Yelling, out-shouting
Swearing
Name calling, insults, put downs
Walking out
Towering over you
Walking towards you in an intimidating way
Blocking a doorway
Physical intimidation, such as getting too close when angry
Threatening to leave or harm you