Abusive
men have to start somewhere.
By
the time you meet them, all the programming is already in place, all it takes
is something to activate it. In that –
if nothing else – they are akin to puppies (or other baby animals.)
If
you have had the pleasure of observing a puppy, even at 8 weeks, you’ll know
that the puppy already knows how to bark, how to (play-)fight, how to jostle
for position, etc.
Sure,
that kind of programming, which helps secure their survival, has been
hard-wired into healthy puppies. While
abusive men don’t need to be abusive to survive…
At
some point, though, they have more or less come to believe that abusive
behaviours are part of their survival mechanism.
But,
still, you could ask yourself: have abusive behaviours been hard-wired
into the abusive man, or are they part of the software that he runs?
I’m
not sure that it is helpful to spend too long searching for the answer. One thing that we all know – to our
cost – is that abusive men are very attached to their abusive programming. In fact, the thing that makes them so
toxic is that they are more attached to their abusive programming than they are
to their partner.
But,
since it may help to focus on a concrete example, let’s look, briefly, at the
abusive man I know best: my ex-husband.
He
was the son of 2 concentration camp survivors. His father – who I had the misfortune
to know - was a very psychologically damaged and damaging man. Always emotionally destructive, he was
sometimes physically violent, also, to his wife and son.
By
the time I met my in-laws they had been married 30 years. My ex-mother-in-law heartily disliked her
husband, and delighted in playing the Wronged, Long-suffering Saint. She was the Smother Mother to end all
Smother Mothers.
As my
husband told it, he had grown up being the loving, supportive surrogate
partner to… his mother. He
had been engaged before he met me, but broken the engagement off – shortly
before the wedding. Then he decided he
had made a hideous mistake. He
asked his ex-fiancée to take him back and… she refused. (Wise girl!)
What
is the point in my sharing this with you?
I’m
doing it so that you can see that, by
the time I met him, my ex-husband had all the pieces of the abusive puzzle
in place – bar one. He had
the necessary
· Psychopathology
· Role model
· Hard luck story and attendant self-pity
The
one thing he had lacked - until he met me – was the opportunity to
behave in an overtly abusive way.
His
fiancée still lived at home, and her father was the head of the professional
association he had just joined. This
meant that it was in his best
interest to tread carefully
with her. But he had broken
off the engagement because she had not complied with his demands for sex.
As I said, all the pieces of the abusive puzzle,
bar one, were in place, by the time he met me.
That
last piece I provided, by my compliance.
In
that respect, certainly, in me, he made a more inspired choice. My father was not the head of a useful
professional association – but, in truth that would not impact on his career. My future husband had a rare talent
for antagonizing all his colleagues. Not even a powerful father-in-law
could have protected him from himself for long.
What
I had in my favour was that unlike his previous partner, I was a virtual
orphan. There had been total breakdown
in my relationship with my parents.
That
meant he didn’t even have to go to the trouble of isolating me from my
family. The job
had already been done.
All
he had to do was run the “Compliance Test”.
What
is the “Compliance Test”?
That
is the very first Test Temper
Tantrum an abusive
partner throws.
That
is the bizarre, or seemingly out of character, behaviour that takes you
completely by surprise, in a thoroughly unpleasant way. It happens early
on in the relationship. You want to
believe that he is really a good guy, so you tell yourself it is just a
glitch. Possibly you tell
him that kind of behaviour is unacceptable, and he makes the right kind of
noises – or not.
Either
way, you come away from it with the - misguided - belief that it will not
happen again.
Not
only does it happen again, and again, and
again, but each time the behaviour gets progressively worse. Because he was watching the way you
responded very carefully, and he has understood something absolutely
fundamental to the future of the relationship.
He
has learnt that you may not like his unpleasant behaviour, but you will tolerate it.
And
the last piece of the abusive puzzle has fallen into place: opportunity.
An
abusive man 'earns his abusive stripes' when he finds and exploits the opportunity to treat his partner
abusively. Our
responsibility is that we allow him to do so.
And
after we have allowed him to treat us abusively once, we let it happen to us
over and over again – as if we had no power to stop it.
I
depression and sadness in her voice triggered this question:
strategy that works:
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