Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (31 page)

The abuser’s coerciveness thus comes into his treatment
of
the children and his behavior
regarding
the children, including his bullying of decisions in which the mother should have an equal voice.

E
NTITLEMENT

Tom doesn’t accept that a couple’s choice to have children requires major lifestyle changes and sacrifices. He’ll work on Randy’s dirt bike because he enjoys it, but whatever else needs to be done for the children is not his problem. Yet at the party he goes to great lengths to present himself as Mr. Dad, because he likes the
image
and
status
of fatherhood.

The selfishness and self-centeredness that his entitlement produces cause
role reversal
in his relationships with his children, in that he considers it their responsibility to meet
his
needs. Tom behaves flirtatiously with his teenage daughter at the birthday party, introducing her as his “girlfriend,” commenting obliquely on her sexual development and kissing her in the midst of her embarrassment. The discomfort he causes Alex is obvious, but he can’t be bothered to pay attention to that fact. He meets his own needs through the fantasy of having an attractive young partner while simultaneously taking pride as a parent in her attractiveness.

Children of abusers often find their father’s attention and approval hard to come by. This scarcity has the effect of
increasing
his value in their eyes, as any attention from him feels special and exciting. Ironically, their mother can come to seem less important to them because they know they can count on her.

The abuser’s entitled attitude that he should be above criticism makes it hard for his partner to intervene with him on her children’s behalf. When Helen tries to get Tom to hurry up for the children’s sake, he considers her efforts “a ration of shit” and punishes them all by deliberately taking even longer. Alex and Randy don’t realize the price that their mother pays, and that they themselves pay, when she tries to stand up for them against him, so they wind up feeling that she doesn’t care.

E
XTERNALIZATION OF
R
ESPONSIBILITY

Tom makes the children late for their party but then tells Helen it’s her own fault. He also says that her overly sympathetic responses to Alex are the reason why the children’s fights become a big deal. It never enters his mind that Randy’s behavior toward females might be related to what he himself has modeled. Everything that goes wrong in the family is someone else’s fault, usually Helen’s.

Children who are exposed to the abuse of their mother often have trouble paying attention in school, get along poorly with their peers, or act out aggressively. In fact, they have been found to exhibit virtually every symptom that appears in children who are being abused directly. The abuser attributes all of these effects to the mother’s poor parenting or to inherent weaknesses in the children.

When a family affected by partner abuse splits up, some children discover how much more pleasant life is without their father in the home and may choose to distance themselves from him. This can be a sign of emotional health and recovery. The abuser then often claims, predictably, that the mother is turning the children against him; in his mind, what else could it be?

M
ANIPULATIVENESS

As the Turner family drives off toward the party, Tom abruptly shifts into good humor, joking with the children and inducing them to bond with him against their mother. It is hard to stay angry at him when he is being playful. The children are ashamed of laughing at their mother—consciously for Alex, less so for Randy—but they are also drawn into an alliance with their father.

In certain ways children actually have an easier time living with an abusive parent who is mean all the time—at least then they know what they are dealing with and who is at fault. But the typical abuser is constantly changing faces, leaving his children confused and ambivalent and increasing the likelihood that they will identify with him in hopes of staying on his good side.

One critical category of manipulation involves the various tactics an abusive man may use to keep children from revealing to outsiders that their mother is being abused. Your partner may reward the children for maintaining secrecy or may make them feel that they would bring shame on the family, including themselves, if anyone were to find out. In some cases the man uses more overt pressure, including threats to enforce secret-keeping. Children who do disclose the abuse going on at home sometimes suffer emotional or physical retaliation by the abuser. (Some children are also pressured by their mother not to tell, because she is afraid of what her partner will do to her or to them if word leaks out.) It is important to take steps to relieve any burden of secrecy that your children may be carrying, as I discuss at the end of this chapter.

S
UPERIORITY,
D
ISRESPECT

Tom openly ridicules Helen for being concerned with Randy’s assaultiveness toward Alex. Her parenting is thus one of the things about which he abuses her. Children growing up in this atmosphere can gradually come to look down on their mother as a parent, having absorbed the abuser’s messages that she is immature, irrational, illogical, and incompetent. Even those children who take their mother’s side in most conflicts, as many daughters and some sons of abused women do, nonetheless can come to see her as inferior to other people and to themselves. Randy’s behavior reveals this dynamic when he remarks condescendingly to his mother: “I see you’re hysterical as usual.” He has learned to see his mother through Tom’s eyes.

P
OSSESSIVENESS

Tom treats Alex like an object that belongs to him. When he makes her change before the party, we might think, “He doesn’t want his daughter to get sexualized at such a young age, which is good.” But what we discover at the party is that he doesn’t object to her sexualization, he just wants to be in control of it, and he wants it oriented toward
his
gratification. His demand that she not show off her body is not based on the viewpoint of a responsible parent but rather is more like the attitude of a jealous boyfriend.

Not all abusers perceive their children as owned objects, but many do. A man who already considers his partner a possession can find it easy to see his children the same way. But children are not
things,
and parents who see their children in an objectified way are likely to cause psychological harm because they don’t perceive children as having rights.

P
UBLIC
I
MAGE

It is confusing for children to see people responding to their abusive father as if he were a charming and entertaining person. What are Alex and Randy to make of how popular Tom is at the party? They are left to assume that his behavior at home is normal, which in turn means that they, and their mother, must be at fault.

T
HE
A
BUSIVE
M
AN AS
C
HILD
A
BUSER

Multiple studies have demonstrated that men who abuse their partners are far more likely than other men to abuse children. The extent of the risk to children from a particular abuser largely depends on the nature of his pattern of mistreatment toward their mother, although other factors such as his own childhood also can play an important role. The increased risks include the following.

P
HYSICAL
A
BUSE

The abuser who is most likely to hit children is the one who is quite physically assaultive or threatening toward the mother. A battering partner is seven times more likely than a nonbattering man to physically abuse children, and the risk increases with the frequency of his violence toward the mother. However, there are also some abusers who hit the children but not the mother. The man in this category tends to be: (a) a particularly harsh and authoritarian parent, (b) a controlling and dictatorial partner, and, (c) a man who was physically abused by his own parents while he was growing up.

S
EXUAL
A
BUSE

Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and their tactics. They tend to be highly entitled, self-centered, and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs. Like Tom, they are often controlling toward their daughters (or sons) and view them as owned objects and tend to use seduction and sweetness to lure their victims in. In fact, Tom exhibits many of the warning signs of a sexually abusive father, including his apparent jealousy toward Alex and his penchant for giving a romantic and sexual tone to his interactions with her.

As in cases of physical abuse of children, multiple research studies have found that men who abuse their partners perpetrate incest at a much higher rate than do nonabusive men. These studies suggest that the incest perpetrator is not necessarily severely violent to the mother, but some degree of assault on her is common. The mentality and tactics of the incest perpetrator are very similar to those of the partner abuser, including self-centeredness and demands that his needs be catered to, manipulation, cultivation of a charming public persona, requiring the victim to keep the abuse secret, and others. Although the percentage of outright sexual abuse appears to be fairly low, even among abusive men, partners of my clients frequently raise concerns about subtler kinds of boundary violations and other sexually inappropriate behaviors along the lines of those exhibited by Tom at the party. A man who perceives his child as an owned object, as Tom did, is likely to disregard her rights to privacy or to integrity in her own body.

Boys are at some risk of being violated by abusive men as well, although most incest perpetrators choose to offend against a girl if one is available. Boys appear to be at particular risk when they are very young, while the vulnerability of girls remains steady and may even increase during adolescence.

P
SYCHOLOGICAL
A
BUSE

Partners of my clients frequently share their distress with me over the mental cruelty the abuser visits upon the children. Name-calling, belittling, attacking their self-confidence, humiliating them in front of other people, shaming boys with regard to their masculinity, and insulting—or inappropriately complimenting—girls on the basis of their physical development and appearance are all common parenting behaviors among the abusive men in my groups. They tend to hurt their children’s feelings further by failing to show up for important events, not following through on promises to take them on outings, or by showing no interest. Watching their children get rejected by their fathers in these ways is a source of pain for many of the abused women I speak with.

T
HE
A
BUSER AS
R
OLE
M
ODEL

What are Randy and Alex learning from Tom’s treatment of Helen and from the messages he gives them about her? Parents’ statements and behaviors are probably the single greatest influence on the development of children’s values and on how they perceive other people and themselves—at least as powerful as their parents’ words (which sometimes convey opposite messages). Children exposed to partner abuse learn the following lessons from the dynamics they are caught in the middle of:

“T
HE TARGET OF ABUSE IS AT FAULT, NOT THE ABUSER.
”

Tom makes it clear to his children that Helen brings abuse upon herself by being too emotional, by questioning his decisions, or by being overly angry. Randy (and perhaps Alex as well) is likely to exhibit problems in how he treats other people, because he has been taught how to blame others, especially females, for his actions. Alex may believe that other people, especially males, have the right to mistreat her and that it is her own fault if they do.

“S
ATISFACTION IN LIFE COMES THROUGH CONTROLLING AND MANIPULATING OTHERS.
”

Tom’s behavior communicates to his children that having power over other people is a desirable goal. The possibility that sharing, equality, cooperation, and mutual respect can lead to a fulfilling life may be beyond their conceptual reach. When the sons of abusers reach adolescence, for example, they commonly begin manipulating girls into relationships that are sexually or emotionally exploitative. They may lack empathy for their victims, having been conditioned by their fathers to shut themselves off to caring about the feelings of females.

“B
OYS AND MEN SHOULD BE IN CONTROL, AND FEMALES SHOULD SUBMIT TO THAT CONTROL.
”

Unless they can find strong counter-examples among their friends or relatives, Alex and Randy run the risk of internalizing a rigid, abuse-prone view of what men and women inherently
are.
Children’s parents are their first and most important source of sex-role definition and identification.

“W
OMEN ARE WEAK, INCOMPETENT, AND ILLOGICAL.
”

Tom is teaching his children—whether intentionally or not—to perceive women in the same degrading light that he casts on Helen. He reinforces these messages by treating Alex disrespectfully in public. Daughters of abusive men often have profound self-esteem problems. Why wouldn’t they? Look at what the abuser is teaching them about how valuable and worthy of respect females are. Sons of abusive men in turn tend to be disparaging of and superior to girls and women, especially when the boys become old enough to begin dating.

“M
OMMIES DO THE HARD, CONSTANT, RESPONSIBLE DAILY WORK OF PARENTING, WHILE DADDIES STEP IN TO MAKE THE KEY DECISIONS AND SHARE THE FUN TIMES.
”

Alex and Randy are led to regard their mother as the brawn of the family operation and their father as the brains. They associate Helen with routine and structure, whereas they connect Tom with times that are special and exciting. Despite how grumpy he often is, Dad still comes out seeming like the fun parent; they notice how entertaining he is at the party, for example, while their mother is sullen and withdrawn.