Research on Emotional Abuse (type and whether it can stop)

Today I am thankful for quotes: They are helping me get a clearer vision of what was going on.

All of these quotes come from the same book:

• Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“Abuse counselors say of the abusive client: “When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.”

—  Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

WHICH ABUSERS ARE MOST LIKELY TO CHANGE?

"His close friends and relatives recognize that he is abusive and tell him that he needs to deal with it. They support the abused woman instead of supporting him. I have a much more difficult time with the abuser whose friends and family back up his excuses and encourage his disrespect for the woman."

….

"His partner gets the most unreserved, unequivocal support from her friends and relatives, her religious community, and from the legal system if she needs it. The more consistently she receives the message that the abuse is in no way her fault and that her community intends to stand behind her 100 percent, the stronger and safer she feels to settle for nothing less than fully respectful treatment from her partner or ex-partner."

WHY DO ABUSIVE MEN TELL WOMEN TO SHUT UP?
“Your abusive partner doesn’t have a problem with his anger; He has a problem with your anger. One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him. No matter how badly he treats you, he believes that your voice shouldn’t rise and your blood shouldn’t boil. The privilege of rage is reserved for him alone. 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. Abuse can make you feel straitjacketed. You may develop physical or emotional reactions to swallowing your anger, such as depression, nightmares, emotional numbing, or eating and sleeping problems, which your partner may use as an excuse to belittle you further or make you feel crazy.”

SHOULD A WOMAN APOLOGIZIE FOR A MAN'S MISBEHAVIOR JUST TO KEEP THE PEACE?

“…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.”

CAN THE PROBLEM BE THAT HE THINKS I AM A NARCISSIST?
“I have almost never worked with an abused woman who overlooked her partner’s humanity. The problem is reverse: He forgets her humanity. Acknowledging his abusiveness and speaking forcefully and honestly about how he has hurt her is indispensable to her recovery. It is the abuser’s perspective that she is being mean to him by speaking bluntly about the damage he has done. To suggest to her that his need for compassion should come before her right to live free from abuse is consistent with the abuser’s outlook. I have repeatedly seen the tendency among friends and acquaintances of an abused woman to feel that it is their responsibility to make sure that she realizes what a good person he really is inside - in other words, stay focused on his needs rather than her own, which is a mistake.”

WHY DOESN'T HE USE NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION RATHER THAN EMOTIONALLY ABUSE ME?

“An abusive man is not unable to resolve conflicts nonabusively; he isunwilling 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 assertivenesswhen they choose to use them. They typically get through tense situations at work without threatening anyone; they manage their stress without exploding when they spend Thanksgiving with their parents; they share openly with their siblings regarding their sadness over a grandparent’s death. But they don’twant to handle these kinds of issues nonabusively when it involves their partners. You can equip an abuser with the most innovative, New Age skills for expressing his deep emotions, listening actively, and using win-win bargaining, and then he will go home and continue abusing.”

IS ABUSE DUE TO LOW SELF-ESTEEM?

The self-esteem myth [that an abuser inflicts abuse due to low self esteem] is rewarding for an abuser, because it gets his partner, his therapist, and others to cater to him emotionally. Imagine the privileges an abusive man may acquire: getting his own way most of the time, having his partner bend over backward to keep him happy so he won’t explode, getting to behave as he pleases, and then on top of it all, he gets praise for what a good person he is, and everyone is trying to help him feel better about himself! 

Certainly an abuser can be remorseful or ashamed after being cruel or scary to his partner, especially if any outsider has seen what he did. But those feelings are a result of his abusive behavior, not a cause. And as a relationship progresses, the abusive man tends to get more comfortable with his own behavior and the remorse dies out, suffocated under the weight of his justifications. He may get nasty if he doesn’t receive the frequent compliments, reassurance and deference he feels he deserves, but this reaction is not rooted in feelings of inferiority; in fact, the reality is almost the opposite…."











HE DOESN'T SEEM LIKE AN BATTERER?  CAN I BE WRONG? 

An abusive man can be scary. Even if he never raises a hand or makes a threat, his partner may find herself wondering what he is capable of. She sees how ugly he can turn, sometimes out of the blue. His desire to crush her emotionally is palpable at times. He sometimes tears into her verbally with a cruelty that she could never have imagined earlier in their relationship. When a man shows himself capable of viciousness, it is natural, and in fact wise, to wonder if he will go further. Abused women ask me over and over again: “Do you think my partner could get violent? Am I overreacting? I mean, he’s not a batterer or something.”

Before I take you through a list of points to consider in examing this issue, make a mental note of the following:

RESEARCH INDICATES THAT A WOMAN’S INTUITIVE SENSE OF WHETHER OR NOT HER PARTNER WILL BE VIOLENT TOWARD HER IS A SUBSTANTIALLY MORE ACCURATE PREDICTOR OF FUTURE VIOLENCE THAN ANY OTHER WARNING SIGN.

So listen closely to your inner voices above all.

When a woman tells me of her concerns about her partner’s potential for violence, I first encourage her to pay close attention to her feelings. If he is scaring her, she should take her intuitive sense seriously, even if she doesn’t believe his frightening behavior is intentional. Next, I want to learn more about what has already happened:

Has he ever trapped you in a room and not let you out?

Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit you?

Has he ever thrown an object that hit you or nearly did?

Has he ever held you down or grabbed you to restrain you?

Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed you?

Has he ever threatened to hurt you?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he’ll ever be violent; he already has been. In more than half of cases in which a woman tells me that her partner is verbally abusive, I discover that he is physically assaultive as well.

It is critical to use common-sense — and legal — definition of what constitute violence not the abuser’s definition. An abuser minimizes his behavior by comparing himself to men who are worse than he is, whom he thinks of as “real” abusers. If he never threatens his partner, then to him threats define real abuse. If he only threatens but never actually hits, then real abusers are those who hit. Any abuser hides behind this mental process: If he hits her but never punches her with a closed fist…If he punches her but she has never had broken bones or been hospitalized…If he beats her up badly but afterward he apologizes and drives her to the hospital himself (as several clients of mine have done)…In the abuser’s mind his behavior is never truly violent.

A related mental process reveals itself when a client says to me, as many do: “I’m not like one of those guys who comes home and beats his wife for no reason.” In other words, if he had adequate justification, then it isn’t violence. The abuser’s thinking tends to wend it’s way inside of the woman, too, like a tapeworm. The partners of my clients say things to me, such as “I really pushed him to far,” or “He’s never hit me; he just shoves me sometimes,” that almost certainly come from the abuser’s indoctrination.

To steer clear of these distortions, we need to wrestle the definition of violence out of the hands of the abusers and implement a proper one of our own."

This excerpt talks about the type of emotional abuser Steve seems to be.  I fear that if the relationship continued, it could have become physical. 

MR. SENSITIVE

Mr. Sensitive appears to be the diametric opposite of the Drill Sergeant. He is soft-spoken, gentle, and supportive—when he isn’t being abusive. He loves the language of feelings, openly sharing his insecurities, his fears, and his emotional injuries. He hugs other men. He may speak out about the absurdity of war or the need for men to “get in touch with their feminine side.” Often he has participated extensively in therapy or twelve-step programs, or reads all the big self-help books, so he speaks the language of popular psychology and introspection. His vocabulary is sprinkled with jargon like developing closeness, working out our issues, and facing up to hard things about myself. He presents himself to women as an ally in the struggle against sex-role limitations. To some women, he seems like a dream come true.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Nothing obvious yet. But this is exactly the problem: Mr. Sensitive wraps himself in one of the most persuasive covers a man can have. If you start to feel chronically mistreated by him, you are likely to assume that something is wrong with you, and if you complain about him to other people, they may think you must be spoiled: “You have the New Age man, what more do you want?”

The following dynamics are typical of a relationship with Mr. Sensitive and may help explain your feeling that something has gone awry:

1. You seem to be hurting his feelings constantly, though you aren’t sure why, and he expects your attention to be focused endlessly on his emotional injuries. If you are in a bad mood one day and say something unfair or insensitive, it won’t be enough for you to give him a sincere apology and accept responsibility. He’ll go on and on about it, expecting you to grovel as if you had treated him with profound cruelty. (Notice the twist here: This is just what an abuser accuses his partner of doing to him, when all she is really looking for is a heartfelt “I’m sorry.”)
2. When your feelings are hurt, on the other hand, he will insist on brushing over it quickly. He may give you a stream of pop-psychology language (“Just let the feelings go through you, don’t hold on to them so much,” or “It’s all in the attitude you take toward life,” or  “No one can hurt you unless you let them”) to substitute for genuine support for your feelings, especially if you are upset about something he did. None of these philosophies applies when you upset him, however.
3. With the passing of time, he increasingly casts the blame on to you for anything he is dissatisfied with in his own life; your burden of guilt keeps growing.
4. He starts to exhibit a mean side that no one else ever sees and may even become threatening or intimidating. Mr. Sensitive has the potential to turn physically frightening, as any style of abuser can, no matter how much he may preach nonviolence. After an aggressive incident, he will speak of his actions as “anger” rather than as “abuse, ” as though there were no difference between the two.
5. He blames his assaultive behavior on you or on his emotional “issues,” saying that his feelings were so deeply wounded that he had no other choice. Many people reject the possibility that Mr. Sensitive could be an abuser.

Saying the word abuse to an abusive person can be like lighting a tinderbox: When you name the unmentionable secret, he goes wild.One of my clients got loud, rolled his eyes at what a hysterical exaggerator he considered me to be, and adopted a victim stance, saying, “I beg you to stop this.” Then came the most important part: He said in a screeching whine, “I have only put a hand on a partner once in my life, many years ago, and I just barely pushed her away from me like this”—and he shoved me hard by the shoulder—“after she called my mother a sick woman.” [..]The strength of the shove he gave me would have shaken up most women. I now doubted that the assaultive incident he had described was his only occasion of physically intimidating a woman.

At this point I asked him to leave my workshop. I then had to deal with a mini-insurrection from some of the other workshop participants who couldn’t believe I was ejecting this gentle man who was so in touch with his feelings. He cries after all, how could he be abusive?

This “gentle man” style of abuser tends to be highly self-centered and demanding of emotional catering. He may not be the man who has a fit because dinner is late but rather erupts because of some way his partner failed to sacrifice her own needs or interests to keep him content. He plays up how fragile he is to divert attention from the swath of destruction he leaves behind him.

The central attitudes driving Mr. Sensitive are:

1. I’m against the macho men, so I couldn’t be abusive.
2. As long as I use a lot of “psychobabble,” no one is going to believe that I am mistreating you.
3. I can control you by analyzing how your mind and emotions work. I can get inside your head whether you want me there or not.
4. Nothing in the world is more important than my feelings.
5. Women should be grateful to me for not being like those other men."

*****

I don't think it is possible for Steve to change.  The reason I say this is that it seems like his mother and therapist support and enable the abuse.  I can give specific examples.  His mother deals with the communication from his ex-wives, she raises his daughter, and several of the incidents between Steve and I were precipitated by three hour long conversations with his mother where she coaches him into deciding what he needs from me.  Apparently what he needs is domination.   Seriously....one should talk to his girlfriend about things prior to talking to his mother.  It could be that he doesn't do this, too.   He could just say "my mother says" or "my therapist says" to try to get me to behave in a certain fashion.  I'm just reporting back what it was that I've been told. 
Every time he does something abusive and creepy (usually in the form of abusive voice messages, text messages or emails), we break up.  At this point, he starts posting to Facebook about the things his therapist allegedly says.  He claims she says that I lack self-esteem and feel unworthy of love (because I left), that I am trying to keep him hooked (by leaving), that I abuse him because I fear losing the relationship (I left), and that it is unhealthy for a man to talk to girlfriends who keep "throwing [him] away."   I have asked numerous times for the therapist's name.  No, by law, she's not allowed to talk to me about Steve but I can interview her to see if she needs to be reported to DORA for acting outside her scope of training.   

It could also be that Steve is lying about his mother and therapist, too.  I do not know. 

If Steve were to change, he'd need people in his life that hold him accountable rather than enable him.  I do not know that he has that. 

Before reading this book, I never pegged him as a physical abuser.  There was a time when he grabbed and shook my jaw when I was trying to explain a political concept.  The net result of that was that I shut up.   I don't like to try to talk about politics around him anymore.   He has been physically abusive.  I didn't notice.

I never even pegged him an emotional abuser until he started saying that about me.

It makes me wonder if he had been arrested for domestic violence before.
***** 

If you're being disrespected, it is the first step towards abuse. 
All I can say is leave. 

If the man loves you, he will ensure that he never purposely disrespects you again.

If he doesn't, he does NOT love you.  

Leave...for your sanity.

EVENTUALLY THE PAIN OF STAYING WILL OUTWEIGH THE PAIN OF LEAVING. 

This is where I am. 


I'm going to be crying about this for a long time.



Love ya,

S.