Free Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft Page B

who have abusive mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons.
    So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle—though often quite pervasive—sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don’t show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship.
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    M YTH #10:
    He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.
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    Abusive men are often jealous and possessive, and their coercive and destructive behaviors can escalate when their partners attempt to break up with them. Some psychologists have glanced quickly at this pattern and concluded that abusers have an extreme fear of abandonment. But many people, both male and female, are afraid of abandonment and may reel from panic, heartbreak, or desperation when being left by a partner. If a person’s panicked reaction to being left could cause threats, stalking, or murder, our entire society would be a war zone. But postseparation homicides of intimate partners are committed almost exclusively by men (and there is almost always a history of abuse before the breakup). If fear of abandonment causes postseparation abuse, why are the statistics so lopsided? Do women have a much easier time with abandonment than men do? No, of course not. (We’ll examine the real causes of the extreme behaviors some abusers use postseparation in Chapter 9.)
    A close cousin of the abandonment myth is the belief that abusive men “are afraid of intimacy,” which attempts to explain why most abusers mistreat only their partners and why most are male. According to this theory, the abuser uses his periodic cruelty to keep his partner from getting too close to him emotionally, a behavior which, in the language of psychologists, is called mediating the intimacy .
    But there are several holes in this theory. First, abusive men usually have their worst incidents after a period of mounting tension and distance, not at the moments of greatest closeness. Some keep their emotional distance all the time so the relationship never gets close enough to trigger any fears of intimacy they might have, yet the abuse continues. Wife abuse occurs just as severely in some cultures where there is no expectation of intimacy between husbands and wives, where marriage has nothing to do with real emotional connection. And, finally, there are plenty of men who have powerful fears of intimacy who don’t abuse or control their partners—because they don’t have an abusive mentality.
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    M YTH #11:
    He suffers from low self-esteem. He needs his self-image shored up.
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    Q UESTION 3:
    I S IT BECAUSE HE FEELS BAD ABOUT HIMSELF?
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    An abused woman tends to pour precious energy into supporting her abusive partner and massaging his ego, hoping against hope that if he is kept well stroked his next explosion might be averted. How well does this strategy work? Unfortunately, not very. You can’t manage an abuser except for brief periods. Praising him and boosting his self-opinion may buy you some time, but sooner or later he’ll jump back into chewing pieces out of you. When you try to improve an abuser’s feelings about himself, his problem actually tends to get worse. An abusive man expects catering, and the more positive attention he receives, the more he demands. He never reaches a point where he is satisfied, where he has been given enough. Rather, he gets used to the luxurious treatment he is receiving and soon escalates his demands.
    My colleagues and I discovered this dynamic through a mistake we made in the early years of abuse work. A few times we asked clients who had made outstanding progress in our program to be interviewed on television or to speak to a group of high school students because we thought the public could benefit from