Domestic violence. Not acceptable, not ever.
“TW DOMESTIC ABUSE ——When [an abusive man] tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”
“I realized one of the children was watching.”
“I was afraid someone would call the police.”
“I could kill her if I did that.”
“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid the neighbors would hear.”And the most frequent response of all:“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”
The response that I almost never heard — I remember hearing it twice in the fifteen years — was: “I don’t know.”
These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss of control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”
A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: 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.
I sometimes ask my clients the following question: “How many of you have ever felt angry enough at youer 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….”
8 comments
May 6, 2014 at 6:35 am
Ruth
I haven’t read that book but those are the exact conclusions I came to about my ex. By the time I was out of denial and ready to confront him, which took nearly 20 years, I already knew the answer.
When I asked him why he treated me the way he did he said I just get so angry I lose control, but I never hit you. And that sealed the deal for me. Pulling my hair out and choking me were okay, hitting wasn’t. I called bullshit on the whole thing and told him that either he loses control and at some point wouldn’t know where to stop or he didn’t lose control at all and used it to intimidate me. Either way wasn’t comforting to me so we needed to part ways.
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May 6, 2014 at 10:15 am
syrbal-labrys
My eldest son and I have had screaming fights; both of us are passionate and opinion-oriented. He has never called me a bitch, nor abused a girlfriend or wife. He has beat a couple abusers up and taken their wives out of the home to shelter.
My daughter, on the other hand, frequently called me a bitch and twice physically attacked me, since she had a foot in height and about 50 lbs on me, she felt secure of victory. So tho’ from the same rearing, she obviously felt no such constraints. Something got lost in translation there…
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May 6, 2014 at 10:43 am
VR Kaine
Puts a knot in my stomach when I read that sort of thing. Glad the excerpt calls it out so perfectly for what it is.
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May 6, 2014 at 10:47 am
The Arbourist
@Ruth
I’m sorry you had to live through that. :(
Further apologies if the post brought any unwanted badness back.
Domestic violence is still so under the radar and thus still so prevalent, it is such a daunting problem.
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May 6, 2014 at 10:53 am
The Arbourist
@Syrbal
Being a parent is fraught with so many difficulties and one never knows where the issue is going to crop up and how explosive its going to be.
I cannot imagine being attacked by my child. As a behaviour teacher, I have been attacked by other people’s children but the context is sooo much different.
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May 6, 2014 at 12:03 pm
Ruth
@ The Arbourist,
No worries, it’s all good now. I’m out and in a good place. It’s not a think I’ll ever, ever forget, but it doesn’t rule my life.
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May 6, 2014 at 1:12 pm
House Mouse Queen
This was a great post. I never thought of it so eloquently as you did.
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May 6, 2014 at 3:29 pm
The Arbourist
@HMQ
‘Tis not my words. :) Thanks need to passed on to Lundy Bancroft for her words about DV.
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