Free The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

men of all classes and races in our society—the violence of emotional abuse. In her groundbreaking work Emotional Abuse Marti Tamm Loring explains that emotional abuse is “an ongoing process in which one individual systematically diminishes and destroys the inner self of another. The essential ideas, feelings, perception, and personality characteristics of the victim are constantly belittled…. The most salient identifying characteristic of emotional abuse is its patterned aspect…. It is…the ongoing effort to demean and control, that constitutes emotional abuse.” Significantly, emotional abuse in families is not just a component of the couple bond; it can determine the way everyone in a family relates. If a woman is patriarchal, it can be present in a single-parent home with no adult males present. In many homes patriarchal power resides with teenage boys who are abusive to single-parent moms; this is male violence against women.
    When Real breaks the silence, the stories he shares are from family therapy sessions where clients openly reveal the way fathers have enacted rituals of power, using shaming, withdrawal, threats, and if all else fails, physical violence to maintain their position of dominance. In my family of origin our dad in a booming, angry voice would often scream repeatedly at Mom, “I will kill you.” For years my nightmares were filled with an angry father sometimes killing Mom, sometimes killing me for trying to protect Mom. In our family, Dad was not consistently enraged, but the intense emotional and physical abuse that he unleashed on those rare occasions when he did act out violently kept everyone in check, living on the edge, living in fear. Usually a cold, silent, reserved man, Dad found his voice when speaking in anger.
    The two men I have had as my primary relational bonds in my adult life are both quiet and reserved like my dad and my beloved grandfather. Unlike my grandfather, whom I never witnessed expressing anger, much less rage, these two men I chose as partners both needed to exercise dominance now and then through rituals of power. One of them was physically violent on a few occasions, a fact he always felt did not matter, and emotionally unkind quite consistently. My second longtime partner I chose in part because he was a major advocate for stopping violence against women, but as our bond progressed he began to be emotionally abusive now and then. It was as though he felt that I was too powerful, and that perception empowered him to challenge that power, to wound and hurt. I was stunned that the past was being reenacted in the present.
    In self-help books galore the notion that women choose men who will treat them badly again and again is presented as truth. These books rarely talk about patriarchy or male domination. They rarely acknowledge that relationships are not static, that people change through time, that they adjust to circumstances. Men who may have seeds of negativity and domination within them along with positive traits may find the negative burgeoning at times of crisis in their lives.
    The two men I chose as partners, like all the men I have loved, were victims of various degrees of emotional neglect and abandonment in their childhoods. They did not love their fathers or truly know them intimately. Growing from young adulthood into manhood they simply passively accepted the lack of communication with their fathers. They both felt that all attempts at reconciliation should have come from the father to the son. And yet as they matured into manhood, both these men began to behave not unlike the fathers whose actions they had condemned and hated. Observing them through time, I found that both of them had been rebellious and antipatriarchal in their twenties and early thirties, but as they moved more into the work world, they began to assume more of the patriarchal manners that identify one as a powerful and successful man. Though they had not been living with their