Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?
THE ABUSIVE MAN’S CYCLES
Life with an abuser can be a dizzying wave of exciting good times and painful periods of verbal, physical, or sexual assault. The longer the relationship lasts, the shorter and farther apart the positive periods tend to become. If you have been involved with an abusive partner for many years, the good periods may have stopped happening altogether, so that he is an unvarying source of misery. Periods of relative calm are followed by a few days or weeks in which the abuser becomes increasingly irritable. As his tension builds, it takes less and less to set him off on a tirade of insults. His excuses for not carrying his weight mount up, and his criticism and displeasure seem constant. Many women tell me that they learn to read their partner’s moods during this buildup and can sense when he is nearing an eruption. One day he finally hits his limit, often over the most trivial issue, and he bursts out with screaming, disgusting and hurtful put-downs, or frightening aggression. If he is a violent abuser, he turns himself loose to knock over chairs, hurl objects, punch holes in walls, or assault his partner directly, leaving her scared to death. After he has purged himself, he typically acts ashamed or regretful about his cruelty or violence, at least in the early years of a relationship. Then he may enter a period when he reminds you of the man you fell in love with—charming, attentive, funny, kind. His actions have the effect of drawing you into a repetitive traumatic cycle in which you hope each time that he is finally going to change for good. You then begin to see the signs of his next slow slide back into abuse, and your anxiety and confusion rise again. Women commonly ask me: “What is going on inside his mind during this cycle? Why can’t he just stay in the good period, what can I do to keep him there?” To answer these questions, let’s look through his eyes during each phase: The tension-building phase During this period, your partner is collecting negative points about you and squirreling them away for safekeeping. Every little thing that you have done wrong, each disappointment he has experienced, any way in which you have failed to live up to his image of the perfect selfless woman—all goes down as a black mark against your name. Abusers nurse their grievances. One of my former colleagues referred to this habit as The Garden of Resentments, a process through which an abuser plants a minor complaint and then cultivates it carefully while it grows to tremendous dimensions, worthy of outrage and abuse. Jesse, for example, planted the dinner-table conversation in his Garden of Resentments and then harvested it two weeks later to throw in Bea’s face, lumping it together with several other issues into one big ugly ball. To defend against any complaints you attempt to express, the abuser stockpiles his collected grievances like weapons to protect his precious terrain of selfishness and irresponsibility. And some of his negativity about you is just plain habit. An abuser falls into a routine of walking around dwelling on his partner’s purported faults. Since he considers you responsible for fixing everything for him, he logically chooses you as his dumping ground for all of life’s normal frustrations and disappointments. • The eruption The abusive man tends to mentally collect resentments toward you until he feels that you deserve a punishment. Once he’s ready to blow, the tiniest spark will ignite him. Occasionally an abused woman may decide to touch her partner off herself at this point, as scary as that is, because the fear of waiting to see what he will do and when he will do it is worse. The explosion of verbal or physical assault that results is horrible, but at least it’s over. After he blows, the abuser absolves himself of guilt by thinking of himself as having lost control, the victim of his partner’s provocations or his own intolerable pain. Whereas at other times he may say that men are stronger and less emotional than women, he now switches, saying, “There is only so much a man can take,” or “She really hurt my feelings, and I couldn’t help going off.” He may consider women’s emotional reactions—such as breaking into tears—contemptible, even when they hurt no one, but when a man has powerful emotions, even violence may be excusable. Some of my most tough-guy clients unabashedly use their painful feelings to excuse their cruel behavior. • The “hearts and flowers” stage After the apologies are over, the abuser may enter a period of relative calm. He appears to have achieved a catharsis from opening up the bomb bays and raining abuse down on his partner. He feels rejuvenated and may speak the language of a fresh start, of steering the relationship in a new direction. Of course, there is nothing cathartic for his partner about being the target of his abuse (she feels worse with each cycle), but in the abuser’s self-centered way he thinks she should feel better now because he feels better. During this period, an abuser works to rebuild the bridge that his abusiveness just burned down. He wants to be back in his partner’s good graces; he may want sex; and he seeks reassurance that she isn’t going to leave him—or expose him. Cards and gifts are common in this phase; hence the name “hearts and flowers.” The abusive man does not, however, want to look seriously at himself; he is merely looking to paste up some wallpaper to cover the holes he has made—figuratively or literally—and return to business as usual. The good period can’t last because nothing has changed. His coercive habits, his double standards, his contempt, are all still there. The cycle is repeated because there is no reason why it wouldn’t be. Some abusive men don’t follow a discernable cycle like the one I have just described. Your partner’s abusive incidents may follow no pattern, so you can never guess what will happen next. I have had clients who seemed almost to get a thrill out of their own unpredictability, which further increased their power. Random abuse can be particularly deleterious psychologically to you and to your children.