Damaged men

[OneHandFlapping]

I've just come from the thread on red flags in relationships, and there are endless, endless posts from women who have suffered EA in their relationships. Including me.

Does anyone here have any insight into why so many men behave like this?

I have nothing to offer to the discussion, but I would like to hear what other poeple have to say, if only so I can help my sons NOT become men like this.

Here's one of my theories. Completely unscientific, of course.

Children have a really, really hard time accepting that they are separate from their mothers; that she is not an extension of themselves who will always provide warmth and comfort and nurture.

Abusive people treat their partners like the partners are extensions of themselves, to move about as will, and who must provide comfort (however the abusive person defines that comfort) OR ELSE.

Men are abusive more often than women, because since they themselves are not women, their resentment of their mothers seethes on, subconsciously encompassing resentment of all women, including their partners.

Women are abusive less often than men, because since they themselves are women, they can project themselves in the role of mother who must one day separate from her child, and accept their own separation from their own mother more easily.

Posted too soon: forgot to say that my theory concerns instances when the separation goes badly: why it may breed lifelong resentment of women in men, more than it does in women. Not every child's separation from his or her mother.

Then there are all the social influences - promoting male aggression, and the view of women as domestic appliances - which of course contribute to the abuser's self-justification.

HotDamn, that makes it sound like abusiveness is innate in (some? most?) men, and that there is little we, as mothers, can do.

If so, it's a depressing thought.

Saint Lundy of Bancroft is good on this. His parable about the boy who was brought up to believe he owned a field, whilst not the same as your theory, HotDAMN, complements it quite well I think.

Lots of good insights in Hot Damn's post.

I think children of both sexes can have challenging, often traumatic experiences in early life and later on that will affect how the relate to other human beings. There experiences may be different because they are boys or girls both to do with social conditioning and differing risks of certain phenomenon for boys and girls (e.g. sexual abuse 6 times more likely for girls, physical abuse more likely for boys.)

How they internalise the experience, try to make sense of it (or not) and how it influences their later relationships can also vary between the genders. In simplest terms, girls and women tend to internalise the bad experiences, feeling they were somehow to blame, often punishing themselves in some way like self-harming, alcohol or drug use, eating disorders. Boys tend to externalise the experience, someone else is to blame for the pain they've suffered so they have to get one back by hurting someone else (e.g. getting into fights, aggressive and anti-social behaviour, offending, etc.)

So if two people bring this conditioning to a male-female relationships, you can kind of see where it's likely to go.

On one hand, it can be beneficial to try and understand why another person has done something that has hurt you. It can be harder to just accept that sometimes "shit happens," particularly when the shit came from someone you loved, respected and trusted and felt loved, trusted and respected you.

But, and it's a big BUT, there's also the risk that women will seek to understand unacceptable, abusive and controlling behaviour from men as a way of effectively excusing it. There are shelves heaving in bookshops across the land, selling solutions to women in abusive, controlling relationships based on the idea that if they just understood their men, just adjusted their thinking and behaviour to take account of what their men are feeling, all would be sunny in the garden. That really sucks because frankly, it don't work like that and when it doesn't work, women are likely to blame themselves (again) because they didn't "do it right."

Sometimes, it's really best to just accept that something is rather than try to unpick it to the nth degree, seeing an answer, an understanding that may just not be there at all. It can take up alot of valuable time, energy and creativity in that pursuit - resources that women can better use getting on their feet and moving forward.

Just wanted to add that I don't think male tendency to control or abuse is in any way innate! I do believe boys (perhaps even more now than say 20 or 30 years ago, depressingly) are conditioned through societal messages that to be a "proper man" you have to be aggressive, competitive, a bit slippery and conniving and whatever you do, be nothing at all like a girl. These messages also discourage boys from taking responsibility for their own actions. Bundle it all together, especially for a lad who's experienced abuse or neglect and it's not looking good.

However, parents and other adults in a child's life can make that crucial difference, can provide the counter balance to all those messages trying to pull boys and men to be something that I don't believe for a minute comes naturally to them. I don't think it's impossible to unlearn what is effectively learned behaviour at any stage in life. The tricky thing can be whether there is enough of an incentive for many men to do so. If anything, they may feel they are having to "give up" something to be a different kind of man (e.g. power, control, sex, entitlement, most male friends who'll think you've gone soft and stupid, etc.) But, it's not impossible.

HotDamn, that makes it sound like abusiveness is innate in (some? most?) men, and that there is little we, as mothers, can do.

I don't think it's innate, no. Just that a poorly experienced separation will breed this resentment more in men than in women. But I don't think all separations are traumatic: at the time that child becomes conscious of separateness, if s/he experiences that mother - although separate - continues to care for and support him/her, this will foster the child's sense of self-worth and healthy independence.

The people I know who have become abusive to their partners in adulthood all experienced separation trauma of some kind: neglectful mother, death of mother, or birth of hated sibling, during the key years.

How the child experiences the trauma is down to the individual child, and his individual circumstances, too. (For example, not all children will count the birth of a sibling as a trauma they never recover from. But I have no clue whether that is down to the child's nature, or how his carers handle the event.)

Anniegetyourgun, I haven't read St Lundy. Are you able to do a quick precis of the boy and the field parable?

IIRC, the boy grows up thinking the field will be his. Then when he takes possession of it, there are people on the land! Doing their own thing! Those people should get the fuck off my land, thinks they boy. How dare they have lives and houses and livestock that I haven't said could be there?

The "people" in the parable being the abused partner's own thoughts and needs and desires. Abusers are incensed by their partner's needs: the partner is supposed to be there for the abuser's benefit, in the abuser's mind. None of this separate-entity-in-her-own-right nonsense. Hence why I theorise it stems from poorly experienced maternal separation.

Why do girls not grow up thinking the field is theirs?

Where is the boys' sense of entitlement coming from?

it stems from poorly experienced maternal separation but not just that: often such abuse is modelled for them by fathers or other men in their lives, and is minimised or condoned if not endorsed by men and women in the family.

And I think very often, because mothers are frequently expected to supress any sense of self and identify completely with their children, especially their male children, and to forgive them everything, a pattern develops where the extent of passivity and forgiveness a woman shows is representative of how much she loves the man in question. So getting your woman to forgive whatever you do to her is an important indicator or test of how much she loves you. it can be a boundary that keeps getting pushed so the man can keep getting reassurance (and power trips).

Men and fathers aren't expected to operate like that, which is why I suspect many men who are routinely incredibly abusive to women can have quite ordinary and functional relationships with other men.

Why do girls not grow up thinking the field is theirs?

Because they don't have the same social messages boys do that when they get married they will acquire a nice tame domestic appliance to service their needs.

And, as I said in my first post, as women themselves they may have more easily gotten over the fact that they don't have a right to an always-available source of comfort and nurture.

I don't think that this kind of behaviour can be blamed on damage or trauma, particularly damage through abusers' relationship with their mothers. That's actually a reversal of what happens, which is that men like this damage women.

Rather it comes from a sense of entitlement and from misogyny, as per the allegory of a man who grows up believing a field will belong to him. Men actually did reward themselves the right of ownership of women in the past, and in some countries they still have it e.g. Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. Society has been set up by men to justify this kind of behaviour towards women and these attitudes.

Also agree that these attitudes and beliefs are passed down father to son, and through male culture.

men like this damage women.

Indeed they do. And yet, they feel so hard done by. Abusers really think they are the victims of their partner's refusal to be/do what the abuser wants her to be/do.

I think there is a lot going on in the abuser's feelings of victimhood. Quite possibly childhood trauma, in my view.

Totally agree about male culture. It is a noxious message that reinforces abusers' views (when the abusers are male).

Or, you know, some people are just arseholes. We, as adults, choose how we behave. I think there can be a danger of explaining someone out of responsibility.

That's it in a nutshell, HotDAMN. And even when he had it proved to him the land was not and never had been his, his relatives kept encouraging him to believe it was. The boy in the story gradually accepted the truth and acknowledged the wrongness of his behaviour, but IRL too few men do, because it hurts.

The abuse victim, IME, also experienced similar childhood trauma. Except that s/he internalised it as being his/her just desserts somehow.

Claiming to feel like a victim, and actually feeling like a victim are two different things though. Abusers use these tactics to throw people off the scent, not because they are true. What they want to do is disguise the fact that there is a real victim - the woman they are abusing - but if they can get people to focus on something else e.g. supposed childhood abuse, then it stops people from challenging their behaviour.

Male abusers of women do it because they can and because they want to. It's a choice.

I think so many men have an upbringing in which (in both big and small ways) they are not expected to have empathy or even a great deal of morality, both of which are things women are always expected to have. Men like that are free to follow their own desires without thought for the consequences for others, and are likely to believe (i) that's the natural order of things; and (ii) anyone, especially any woman, not meekly going along with that is wrong and unfair.

The above is not excusing anything, by the way-any adult with enough brain to walk and talk will know the wrongness of that position. It is just so easy for men to keep abusing regardless.

... my response was to your 12:01:36 post, of course.

I do agree with Nyac though, it would in most cases be wrong and unfair to blame the mother for the child growing into an abuser - and I don't suppose you did mean to blame them as such - though of course there are a few dreadful ones (see Stately Homes thread in Relationships!). Quite often, in the examples we've seen on MN, when the mother is horrible the son grows up as an appeaser rather than an abuser. It is other kinds of separation, such as the psychological separation caused by seeing your father treat your mother as a lesser being unworthy of a close bond with you, that would be likely to cause the kind of damage we're talking about.

I see what you're saying, Nyac. But I truly believe that abusers feel very real pain, because in the "reality" that they choose to inhabit, they are being victimised.

The fact that that "reality" is a big fat lie is where the problem lies. But so long as they hang on to it, they are, in their view, truly being "wronged" by their victim.

Or maybe it's a glimpse of the fact that their reality is a big fat lie that is the thing that causes them so much pain. Probably more likely, in fact.

But I see them as definitely very, very hurt. Damaged, as OP put in her thread title.

This is no excuse for poor behaviour. But it is a cause.

Partly of course it's just because they can. In my parents' young days drink-driving was absolutely par for the course - their passengers might moan a bit, or feel secretly frightened, but that didn't stop people (mostly men, from all accounts...) doing it. Now drink-driving is seen as totally unacceptable and as a result is significantly rarer.

Similarly, if male abusive behaviour was consistently seen as unacceptable by people of both sexes, and women talking about their horrible experiences were really listened to, and abusive men were quietly shunned by non-abusive men, I'm sure it would become less common.

I do agree with Nyac though, it would in most cases be wrong and unfair to blame the mother for the child growing into an abuser - and I don't suppose you did mean to blame them as such - though of course there are a few dreadful ones (see Stately Homes thread in Relationships!). Quite often, in the examples we've seen on MN, when the mother is horrible the son grows up as an appeaser rather than an abuser.

YY

"Blame" is entirely the wrong word. Causal link is not blame.

Is it ever possible to expose the lie of the abuser's reality to them then, Hotdamn?

Come to that, how do we know that it isn't our reality that's warped (as id often claimed by abusers)?