Inside the Minds of Domestic Abusers & How to Support Women | Lundy Bancroft

First of all, thank you for, thank you for letting us do this in your home. I, I, I'm really glad to get to have these conversations. I always enjoy these kind of conversations a lot. So, I'll give you a little background on why I found you, okay? Which was, um, the main thing I started to become curious about is like, what constitutes abuse? And when someone is in a confusing situation, how do you begin to sort through the confusion of what the hell is going on? But you offered a side of the equation that I think a lot of people don't understand, which is insight into the abuser's perspective. And the book that you wrote, which was the first book I read, which is "Why Does He Do That?", which is literally the question that is in many people's heads, why, um, spoke directly to the struggle I was having to understand what was going on. So, anyway, I would love you to introduce yourself and just say a little bit about your background and what you do. Yeah, what you did.

So, I'm Lundie BFTT, and I came into the domestic violence field about 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago now. And I came in on the offender end. And so that's so much of what shapes my perspective is the fact that my, the lion's share of my direct service experience was with the offender rather than with the abused woman. And there's a way, I guess, that when people think about domestic violence, their first image tends to be of an abused woman. Whereas my first image tends to be of an abuser. And that tends to be part of the soapbox I'm on is, try to get people to keep the offender front and center. Like he's the source of the problem. Like she's not the problem, he's the problem.

So, I started to first volunteer and then become a staff member at what was actually the first counseling program specifically for men who abuse women in the country, called Emerge. It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so we did, had a really deep dive into the abuser mentality because we were working with the abusers in groups. And a lot of what was so essential to our experience and my experience was that we maintained telephone contact with the abused woman throughout the time that the man was in our program. Because the abuser is very deceptive. You cannot come to fully understand abusers by spending your time with abusers. They will so dramatically mislead you. But if you're spending your time with abusers while simultaneously checking in every few weeks with the abused woman, yeah, who keeps waking you up to reality, then you start to understand the abuser mentality because you start to understand what he's saying, how what he's saying and thinking in his interactions with you versus what he's actually doing at home and what he's saying to her. And so that was really the, the most important aspect of my background was working intensively with the abusers while constantly hearing the story of what was actually going on at home. And we'll be talking more, I'm sure, about some of the contrasts there.

What led you, like, what even led you there to begin? Well, I went through kind, I came out of college with various kinds of training and counseling. I didn't have a psychology degree, but I had various kinds of training and counseling. That was my only marketable skill. But my interests were always more in social change than in social work. So I was trying to think, well, how do you use counseling in a way that's more about social change than about social work? And I first, it didn't look like I was going to find anything like that. Like, well, no one's going to pay you to counsel draft resisters or something, you know? And so when I learned about abuser programs, I thought, no, wait a minute. That's intriguing because that's, that's really about trying to address a, a, a justice issue with your counseling skills. And it ended up being a perfect fit.

It's very cool to hear you say that. I mean, I feel like I'm sitting here with you today, uh, because I hate patriarchy. I hate it. I hate it with a deep passion. And, um, I am, like, an angry woman for that. And, um, but I, I wouldn't say I've kept it under wraps, but I'm not going to keep quiet about that anymore. And I feel like the intersection in romantic relationships and patriarchy is so unavoidable. Um, it's almost impossible to engage with the idea of having one without considering the reality of, of the world we live in. So, it's interesting that you say what you're saying. And I'm curious, how many guys are doing what you're doing? Like, where, where are the, where are the men? I, I don't know how to, I don't know how to find that out, really.

What, but I was surprised when I first came into the field, how many men there already were then who had decided they want to be on the right side of this thing. But I think there are more now. Like, I think now I hear a lot of young guys, like 20 guys in their 20s who are all sort of hyped up on on gender justice and and who have a very feminist orientation. So I feel like it's growing. One thing that I really like to point out to people is that when a white person devotes themselves in all kinds of ways to fighting racism, and we know many, many white people who do that, we think, oh, they should be doing that. That's being on the cause of justice. Like, why wouldn't they be doing that? When a man is someone who's really devotes his life to to fighting for women's rights, people immediately start to look at you like, well, what's up? And and with me, they're always like saying, oh, so is your father an abuser? Or, you know, what, what's this really about? And I say, now, wait a minute. Why shouldn't we take the same attitude with a man who's fighting for women's rights as we do with white people who are fighting racism? Say, yeah, that's what you ought to be doing. Like, yeah, that you're you're fighting for something because it's right. Yeah. I, I want us to to try our best to get the surprise out of that and feel like, yeah, good, you're doing what you should be doing. Keep you know.

Um, the couple other thoughts of the night. One is that I noticed all kinds of times people trying to address male violence while trying to avoid any discussion of male domination. And I think they end up doing harm for exactly the reason that you've pointed out, that you're actually missing so much the key dynamic. And then one other sort of snippet that I like to give, which is that when people hear about domestic abuse, they're, they right away start focusing on the man's anger and say, oh, he's got anger issues. You know, he's got problems with his anger. And one of my catchphrases about that is, no, he doesn't have a problem with his anger. He has a problem with her anger. He believes she doesn't have the right to be angry. And he believes she does not have the right to stand up for herself. And that's why he hurts her.

I read something yesterday about when, let's say, in a heterosexual relationship, the man gets angry at the woman or aggresses on her for her emotions, he is trying to regulate her emotions to control himself as opposed to understanding that he has to learn how to manage his own emotions. In other words, he accuses her of being his trigger. And so she, or is that just another excuse? I think that the heavier dynamic is much more really deep beliefs he's absorbed over his lifetime from from from a young age about what kind of service females owe him and what sort of enforcement he has the right to use when that service is not being provided to him adequately. So, I don't, his his sort of emotional world, his insecurities, I find playing actually a very small role. And and sometimes really no role at all. And it turns out to have much more to do with his entitlements, his sense of what, what you must do for me. How, like, how bury?

Because you say that and I start to think about class. And I and I start to think about, you know, a really well, well-educated man, uh, at least would be able to cover for that attitude based on the cloak that education and polite society has provided him. Um, but what did you, what did you find? I mean, I know that they come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and whatnot. But, but, but this is a lot of why the, the better educated, more upper-class abuser gets away with even more because he covers it better. He very often uses lower levels of physical violence. He uses violence that's really what defines him as a batterer, but he's using lower levels of physical violence because he's got so many other tactics and weapons at his disposal from his financial power and from his social connections. He has a lot of ways to really frighten her that don't have to involve putting his hands on her. But then that means he's much less likely to be defined as a batterer, even though I would look at that history and say, well, that's clearly a batterer. He's putting her in physical fear all the time. He may not be doing it with his own body, but he's always threatening her with physical harm. So the ability to cover things up is, is increases as you go up the socioeconomic ladder, right?

And, and one of the things I was interested in when I was reading your book, um, was like, and I was going to ask you to do this, which is like, to define abuse and to define batterer. And let me just put one thing in here that I was struck by that I read. Physical intimidation can take subtle forms that can be an, that can carry an implication of threat. And if there is an implication of physical threat, that person who's doing the physical threatening becomes essentially a batterer. Is that correct? That, that's my definition. And I think that view is fairly widespread in the field. I can't say that's how everybody looks at it, but I say that that view is fairly widespread. So my definition of a batterer, and I just deal with men, men who abuse women. We can talk some about same-sex battering, but to, to be in my area of expertise, I have to talk primarily about men who abuse women. To me, he has become a batterer at the moment at which he is deliberately taking steps to put her in physical fear. He doesn't have to ever touch her. If he raises a fist, well, he's trying to put her in physical fear. If he says, you know, I'm digging a grave for you in the backyard, that's putting her in physical fear. If he says, well, I'm going to call him a grave on you and they're going to drag you back to Guatemala where you're from because she doesn't have documents, he's putting her in physical fear. Those are battering acts. As soon as you're trying to let her know something's going to happen to her body.

And can you differentiate between psychological, verbal, I mean, physical is evident, right? Um, but can you give, can you, you know, differentiate between those? And one thing I have to clarify is that I put certain things in the physical abuse category that other people would put in the verbal or psychological abuse category because they involve deliberately making her think that she's going to physically get harmed. M-hm. So if I say, I'm going to kill you, that to me is physical violence. That's not verbal. It is also verbally abusive, but I wouldn't put it in the verbal abuse category because I'm deliberately using it to put you in physical fear. So if something like blocking a door, refusing to leave, pH, physical abuse, pinning, M-hm, which is a very common thing that abusers use. They'll, what do they call it? Restraining, which I don't like that word because it's pinning. You're talking about pinning the person. Um, those are, those are violent acts. Yeah. And we, we live in, in the United States, we live in an extremely violent society. So people don't even think of something as violence until it becomes so violent. And I'm not talking about what people call verbal violence. I don't even like that term, honestly. That would be a whole other discussion. I'm talking about clear physical, using, harming the person through their physical body. M-hm. Pinning them is is an assault and battery. It's very oppressive. Locking someone in a room, blocking a doorway, that's those are impr, which is effectively imprisoning. Like, we these things get called a lot of things that they're not. You're imprisoning the person, or you're pinning them, that's assault and battery. You're take, you're taking power, you're taking their body, their rights away from them. And so that any verbal behavior that's designed to cause physical fear, and that means also all kinds of physical behavior that doesn't get defined as violence, punching a wall. It's like, well, the whole point of punching a wall is to get the message across. It could be you the next time. When I think about verbal abuse, I'm thinking about behaviors that are made to, that are where you're saying things that are deliberately simply to hurt the other person's feelings. That's the goal. You're stupid, you're fat, you don't know what you're talking about, you, every, you know, nobody, nobody, nobody likes you, you're a loser. So, so put insults and put-downs. And are those intent, what is the intention of those? The intention is to hurt you. The intention is to hurt you, which will then make, because then you'll be reluctant to stand up for yourself, they think. And it works. I mean, over time, time, if people will be reluctant, and people will become reluctant to stand up for themselves if they keep getting hurt every time they do. If you have a boss, and many people, but it doesn't necessarily mean you believe what they're saying, but just that you are not going to go, you're not going to go head-to-head with them because you're, it's just a losing battle because, h, it's painful. Even if you in no way believe that you're stupid, it hurts when someone calls you stupid, you know? Uh, the same way when someone's a jerk to you in traffic, where it was totally their own fault, and you know it was totally their own fault, you're still upset that they flipped you off or whatever. And actually, you, it will also creep into you over time, but even to the extent that it doesn't, right, you just start to avoid it. And people who have a boss who's that style start to not want to confront the boss about things. It's just, it's, it's, to you get, it hurts, it's painful, you start to not want to go there. Um, and so that's the object is to, is to make it harder for you to have a voice. And what, what an abuser wants, consciously or unconsciously, but on some level, what they want is a relationship that gets increasingly tipped over time, way sideways. They do not want to be in an equal relationship.

One thing that we see a lot in an abuser program is abusers whose behavior improves for weeks or even months, and then they go back to how they were being before. And so we start exploring, okay, why the backsliding? Why'd you go back? And once we get into the details of what was going on in the relationship, it's always that the relationship was starting to move towards being more equal, and he couldn't, he wasn't willing to. He's not going to put up with that. He's not going to live in an equal relationship. He does not want to be in an equal relationship. In fact, he really wants the opposite. If he's using less abusive behavior, he believes that he should be rewarded for that. And so he'll be like, angry in the group, like, I've been, you know, letting her have more space, and I, you know, I haven't been criticizing her as much, I haven't, you know, been controlling her as much, and she's just getting mouthier with me. It's like, well, well, yeah, that's what's going to happen when she's not afraid anymore. And he's like, well, why would I want to be giving up being abusive if it's going to make my life more difficult? It's like, well, yeah, being non-abusive will lead you to a more difficult life.

So, is there any benefit for people to be less abusive other than the legal implications? Now, this is a really important question, and it has big implications. Is it better for the abuser to give up being abusive? Yes, he will have a better life, but he won't see any of the benefits for two or three years or longer. In the short term, it's going to make his life harder, not easier. So he's, and the abuser, his attitude towards relationships is, this should work for me. So why would I do something when it's making things harder for me? Because the whole point of a relationship is it's supposed to do everything for me. That's the abuser's fundamental outlook on an intimate partner relationship.

And in terms of the person on the receiving end of that, my sense is that many people are not always clear. The women have this challenge of trusting their perception of what is happening. We have a lot of people who watch our channel who are, um, who have personality disorders. Their perceptions are either off, or they understand that in the past they have been off, and they cannot thus trust them. So how do you know when to trust that what you're experiencing, if you're not actually getting a fist to your face or your body, um, is, is, is abuse versus just a messed-up relationship? So I don't think it's always easy, actually, to draw a real sharp line. Now, this has become abuse. The, the pattern that I'm most encouraged people look for is, is one person systematically tearing the other person down. Now, that can be primarily verbal in nature, it can be primarily physical in nature, it often has heavy elements of sexual mistreatment, huge range of different kinds of sexual mistreatment, including verbal sexual mistreatment, sexual insults, you know, said, said verbally. And, and but that's a real judgment call at what point do I feel like this person is really over and over again tearing me down? And the abuser will also work quite strategically. And this is one of the things again, that people who don't know that much about domestic abuse have trouble accepting, is how much method there is to the madness. You can focus so much on the madness and not notice how much method there is. So if he notices, for example, that she has some mental health problems that she's battling with, he's going to keep throwing that up in her face all the time. Oh, you're just imagining this, you think I'm abusing you because you just see abuse everywhere, or you think I'm abusing you because your parents abused you. That's become a popular one that abusers like to use against the victim. And I tend to really encourage her to trust her perceptions. That if she's going to like sue him, then yeah, she needs more than her perceptions. But for her decision whether to be in the relationship or not, or to go into distance, she doesn't need any proof. That she has the right at any point to back away from a relationship. Hey, so what if you were wrong? Like, well, maybe better safe than sorry.

A couple of other things I really watch people to look for is, does he make her responsible for his actions? Because that's something that even if she, if has some mental health issues and so she's wondering like, am I distorting this? It's like, well, that's something very concrete she can look at. Does she complain about things that he did and he says, well, you caused me to do those things? Well, that's got to be a, a big flashing light right there. Well, you made me so angry, or you made me this way, or you made me that way. It's like, well, that doesn't justify his actions. Someone can make you feel things, but they can't make you do things unless they, you know, put you in danger. Yeah. So that's a big one to watch for. Is he's saying that you cause what he does? Another big one to watch for is double standards. And again, that's something sometimes you can find fairly objectively. That he has really different rules for himself than he has for you. Like he's allowed to be quite flirtatious with with women, you're not even allowed to talk to a guy or have a man friend. Or he can spend money any way he wants, but you spend a little money and he's like, you're wasting money. That's, I find sometimes super clarifying and helpful to people who are trying to make sense out of what's happening, is where there's double standards. But the main thing I tend to want to emphasize to someone is, if you're afraid, assume that there's a problem. Don't assume that, look, oh, I'm just getting afraid for no reason. It's maybe you're just getting afraid for no reason. I doubt it. But even if you are, it's like, it's too risky in case it's not for no reason. You got to take it seriously.

Oh, actually, let me add one more thing, which is that a guy who's not abusive, if you say, you really scared me, is concerned about that. He's going to say, oh, oh, geez, all right. What do we need to change? And even if he didn't feel he didn't do anything wrong, he's still going to want to know, okay, what was it? I want, I'm going to learn this about you. Okay, maybe I wasn't misbehaving, but now I've learned that there is a thing that I do sometimes that scares you. He'd want to know about that. He doesn't want her to be afraid. And if her, if he says, you scared me, and his response is, well, that's an abuser for sure.

If you're having intuition, instinct that you're afraid of him, uh, you know, all things being equal, is it worth the risk to stay or is it not worth the risk? Because statistically, it's a, it's a risk. Is it worth putting me, me and my kids in danger to stay or not? Well, we know what the answer is. Whether you choose that or not is a different story. There also are sort of a series of levels to to take distance in a relationship. Because people will think like, well, I'm not ready to leave this relationship, so I'm going to leave it the way it is. It's like, well, there's other things you can leave for a week. You can leave for a month. You can say, okay, we're not having sex anymore. There are different ways to distance yourself in a relationship. It doesn't, it's not, you don't have to be ready to decide that you're ending this relationship forever to decide it's not, this is not a safe situation to be at this level of intimacy. And you will also learn a lot from that. Because when you try to back away from a relationship, is another way that you discover whether you're involved with an abuser or not. Because when you try to back away from a non-abusive man, he may be upset by that, but he's going to respect the limits you set. He's going to be concerned, he's going to be interested in working on what needs to be different. You back away from an abuser, he usually will not respect it. Like you say, okay, I don't want to have sex anymore for now. He's going to be push, push, pushing, pushing you for sex or outright sexually assaulting you. Well, then you know you're with an abuser. Or you say, you know what, I need to not talk to you for a week. And he's texting you 20 times. You know you're involved with an abuser. So backing off some distance is often very, very clarifying and will help you to take steps that you need to take. M-hm. Whereas you try to wake up tomorrow morning and leave. Like, who's ready to do that? No, that's, that's a very big, hard move to make.

With regard to blaming, non-accountability, part of the original YouTube channel was geared toward people who are interested in personality disorders. And certainly for borderline, one of the things that good therapy does is it sort of positions you, the borderline person, in a place where you have to be sort of radically accountable for yourself and your actions. It maybe almost to an extreme, but it means that, you know, look what you, look how your actions are impacting other people. And one of the things that seems pretty much common, right, with abusers is they absolutely do not take accountability for their actions. I mean, I think that's a general red flag in a romantic relationship, period, for someone you may not want to stick around with. But not everybody who isn't accountable is an abuser, right? Like, that's my question.

So, so there's a couple pieces in here. One is that in dealing with the domestic abuser, we're dealing with someone who has this really odd split between how he is in relationships with women and how he is in other contexts. And the, the, to most people are quite surprised to hear, for example, that most domestic abusers are not personality disordered. They can look really personality disordered because they do stuff that's so much like a person disorder and how they are in relationships, but you'll notice it's not playing out on any other front, generally. It's not playing out on any front, other front in their lives, including they can even be answerable for their actions in other contexts. And just to insert, they may say in a fight, no one else does this happen with. But you, very popular com, it never happens with anyone else. Why only you? This is one of the ways from the abuser's perspective, this is one of the ways we know that you're the problem. Is you're the only person I get this way with. Exactly. And so that proves that you, that you must be the problem. Yes. Rather than that proves that I see a domestic partner as my servant, which is the real issue. And it might be an emotional servant. I don't mean necessarily someone who's has to pick up your socks and cook your dinner, although a lot of domestic abusers demand service in those senses also. But the modern domestic abuser often is much more focused on emotional service. That she has to cater to him, build up his ego, want to have sex whenever he wants to have sex, not have any needs of her own, etc.

So, can I, that's why it's such an oddly specific problem that comes out only in intimate partner relationships or women that he wishes he were with in an intimate partner relationship with. But also with the emotional aspect, isn't it also just that his emotional life, um, the responsibility for his emotional wellness is hers? Isn't that, isn't it more that even on a general level? So from the, the abuser mentality is that the woman's responsibility is, and she was really on this Earth to make him happy. And when they're first dating, he's like, oh, we're going to make beautiful music together, and I'm going to do this stuff for you, and you're going to do this stuff for me. And once the relationship gets really solid and serious, all the stuff about what he was going to do for you disappears, and it's all about what you should do for him. And all kinds of catering, meet all his sexual needs, meet all his emotional needs. And it gets to a level where what it really means is it's your job to make him a happy person. It's not, not his responsibility to make himself a happy person. You, in other words, by definition, if he's unhappy, you must be doing something wrong. He might be unhappy while he's 30 miles away from you doing something, has nothing to do with you. Doesn't matter. It's your job to make him happy. So if he's unhappy, you must be doing something wrong.

So, what is someone to do with these men who seem so unchanging? What's been your experience? Are they fixable? So, what we're up against is someone who started learning from a really young age, you, you boyhood, like young boyhood, about what kind of service he has a right to require and expect, you know, from females. And it may have been his father or stepfather that he watched doing this. His other male relatives. I mean, a lot of people grow up in a family where the whole family tree is set up in a way where the, all the males just expect the females to do everything for them. Like that's just normal. And by the way, that doesn't divide by race or class. You can grow up in a family of wealth or poverty, of any color, and your family tree may just be full of men who just expect everything done for them and who feel superior to the females. Like that's just the way they're, that's the way they've been. Some people grow up in a town where that's just like rife through their town. And again, not necessarily divided by race or class or anything, you know, obvious. So we're trying to change a mentality in him that goes, goes back really early. And then research shows us that during teen years, the guys who are the future abusers start to hang out with peers who have very exploitative outlook on females. Again, it's what you can get from Fe, you know, what can you get from her kind of mentality, using her for sex, using her for window dressing. And so if I've got the guy in an abuser program when he's 25 or 35 or 45 years old, he's been functioning with a set of assumptions since he was very young about what, what women were put on this Earth to do for him. So imagine if you were like, suddenly the counselor for a slave owner who grew up from generations of slave owners and was suddenly informed at 45 years old that not only did he not, was did not have the right to have slaves anymore, but that it had been a terrible thing that he'd been involved in. He's not going to come and say, oh, wow, oh, I see what you mean, wow, that's been really awful. He's going to be like, what on earth are you talking about? This is our lifestyle for generations. This is, of this is real, this is, this is right, this is just, this is how the world is and should be. So our only hope with an abuser is to get him to be challenged about his societal beliefs from like six different directions. I need him arrested because then he's had to send the message, your legal system doesn't agree with what you're doing. And then I need him in an abuser program so he's been being confronted by males and females because he should have both male and female counselors ideally, week after week, like this isn't okay what you're doing. And then his own relatives need to go after him. That's not common, unfortunately. But he needs his own relatives to say, this isn't cool. His friends are usually behind him. So we need to, he needs to get with a different group of friends. If he keeps staying with the same group of friends, they're going to keep backing him up, just like an alcoholic, right, has to stop hanging out with the person he or she has been drinking with, or nothing's going to change. And so this is why we don't see a huge range of change in abusers is because they have to get the message from so many different places. Otherwise, they just hang on tightly. You misunderstand me, you don't realize that this is what I had to do to defend my rights. It's a very distorted view, but that's his view. You don't realize how awful this woman was, you, you, you know, you're being unfair to me by taking my slaves. These are my slaves, you can't take my slaves away from me. That's not fair to me. Who's going to grow the crops? It's a very, very twisted mentality, but it's deep. It's really deep.

I mean, this sort of leads me to wonder, the question that people who are in abusive relationships wonder, if the person, the abuser, actually knows what they're doing, or if they are just, you know, they don't know. And especially if they deny what they did. Can you talk about that experience and what's, what the hell is really going on? So, I think the level of consciousness varies quite a bit among abusers. And the, for example, a lot of abusers, something like 40%, still not half, certainly not 80%, but it's still a substantial number of abusers grew up with an abusive dad or stepdad, you know, an abusive male in the home. And that means that a lot of what they do, they're just doing on automatic. That just, they absorb that as what a man has a right to do. And, and we should really see most of his abusive behaviors as forms of enforcement. He's trying to require her to do certain things that he's trying to make her do. Well, those kinds of enforcing behaviors, he just absorbed. And so they became automatic. So when he doesn't like what his partners are doing, he moves to enforce. And so he just learned how to use the verbal abuse and the threats and the scary looks and all this different kind of stuff became automatic. One thing I'd like to say to people about that, though, is don't confuse something that's, uh, automatic with something that's accidental. Doesn't mean that it's accidental. I'll give you an example. If there's a glass of water sitting on a table and I go like this and knock the glass off, we can argue about how much thought or premeditation went into that, but we can't argue that it was an accident. That is not an accident. So whatever the abuser's level of consciousness may be, and it, it varies, it's not an accident. He may not be aware of his own reasons. He's often not aware of his own reasons. That doesn't mean those reasons are not functioning. The fact that that the fact that your motivation for doing something is below the level of consciousness doesn't mean that that's not your motivation for doing it. I'll give a somewhat strong example. You, whereas most of the cases are going to be much subtler than this, but I had a client who was insisting that the reason he started slapping, the reason he started hitting his partner in the car was because they were driving through a dangerous neighborhood at night, and she started trying to get out of the car, and he didn't want her to get out in a dangerous neighborhood. So, and I think he believed it. I think he had actually convinced himself that he was hitting her to protect her safety. And so I was kind of making fun of him in the group, right? I was saying, oh, yeah, so you're, you're beating your wife to keep her safe, right? Like that's real logical, buddy. And then I said to him, no, you weren't. You were doing that because if she got away from you, then you didn't get to win the argument. If she could get out, out of the car, then she's escaped you, and you no longer get to rule. You feel like she wins if she gets away from you. And that was the real issue. You weren't beating her to keep her safe. How can you tell yourself that? That's absurd. And in that case, I've got a whole group, even the other abusers, like prepared to say, well, obviously he's not hitting her to protect her. So my job as the abuse counselor is to bring the true motivation to consciousness. So I'm forcing him that evening to look at the fact that, yeah, I was doing that because I didn't want her to win, which was obviously why. And it also did just, and because he defines that as winning, like that getting successfully, I mean, that's twisted to even define that as winning, to get away from him being a jerk. So the real reasons why he's doing things are, you know, invariably tied back to patterns of selfishness and disrespect and enforcement.

You know, one of the things when I started reading your book and just in general, I hear it all the time, and I'm one, someone who asked it, like, why don't they leave? I thought about cults and Stockholm syndrome. You know, there's the danger issue, but there's some psychological entwinement that happens. There's so many different ways to talk about this. But I have one frame that I think sometimes is useful because it's a different, I think a lot of the frames are important, honestly, but there's just one that's that you will not often hear. So I think it's nice to add one that you don't often hear, which is, what do you need to leave a relationship that's not abusive? What do you need? Good question. You need to believe that you deserve better. You're usually going to need money because living separately is usually going to cost more, almost always going to cost more than living together. You're going to need to have some sense of your own attractiveness because no one wants to end a relationship believing that that means they're going to be single forever more. Like, I'm leaving this relationship in order to never be with somebody again. Uh, you really need social contact because the decision to leave a relationship is complicated. People do that by talking with their friends and relatives and therapists and whatever, whoever they have in their life to talk to about the decision because it's a tough decision. Um, you need the belief that you are someone who can manage life on your own. So you need some level of self-confidence to believe, oh, I'll be able to get my own place and, and, uh, if I haven't been working that much, that I'll be able to work more hours, or, you know, that a sense of that you can. So these are the things anybody needs to leave any relationship. Are exactly the things abuse takes away from you. So I always say the main obstacle to leaving an abuser is the abuse. And people commonly in the public look at this backwards. They think it would be easier to leave a relationship because of abuse than to leave a relationship for the other reasons why we leave relationships. But that's 180 degrees wrong. It's much harder to leave because of abuse than because of the other reasons why we leave relationships because the abuse takes away the key elements that I just went over that you need to leave a relationship.

I mean, one of the things I thought interesting in your book was also, you don't tell the partners, slash women, to leave. Um, and I've been on the receiving end of being told to leave relationships, and it has a strange effect on me where, like, initially I want to hear it because I can't trust myself, but then I become avoidant of that person, right? Because I get ashamed or embarrassed that I'm not able to do the thing that they're telling me to do. And then I get kind of angry at them for feeling, feeling misunderstood about what's actually going on inside the relationship. I mean, it's not really their fault, they're doing what they mean to do. So that's just my personal experience of it. And so I appreciated when I actually didn't see that in your book. But I'm curious if you can talk about your choice not to put that. Certainly. And, and I'll say something first, just that I think is useful for people in, in the world in general to know, which is that, uh, when a woman is being really badly mistreated in a relationship, she's going to have so many different moods and feelings about it on different days. And she may talk to you on a day when she's furious at the man and sick of him, which is what you, as her helper, her friend or relative, are hoping to hear. So you're going to tend to join with her very enthusiastically that day. Oh, yeah, you're right, he's awful, he's terrible, you need to not do that. Because then when she's in one of the other phases, she's not going to want to talk to you. Yes, and she's going to feel, uh, that you're too much against him, and she's feel embarrassed about how angry she was towards him that day. So support her, support her anger, but in a way where you don't get too into it yourself, so that you're making sure that you leave the door open for her to be able to talk to you a different day when she's in a different place. So, okay, so why don't I tell women to leave? So many different reasons. One is, she can get killed. And leaving is, is really dangerous. You, you, depending on the abuser, it can be really dangerous. And you have to, if you're leaving a scary abuser, you have to do it really carefully and strategically. And sometimes that means waiting a while. Sometimes that means, well, actually, six months from now is going to be a safer time to leave for this reason or that reason or the other reason. Second, for a lot of women, leaving is literally not an option. And so if I tell her she should leave, all I'm doing is adding to her burden. A lot of women have no financial way to survive. They couldn't possibly leave. A lot of women have mental health histories such that if she leaves, he will get custody to the children. The threat of losing custody to the abuser is a very, very real threat. And I've written about this extensively. The, the, the court is will take much more seriously concerns about one of the parents' mental health than concerns about one of the parents' history of perpetrating domestic violence, believe it or not. So if, if he goes in there saying, well, she has a borderline personality, and she goes in saying, he's been, you know, beating me up for years, or whatever, threatening to beat me up for years, they're going to say, well, we don't really see the evidence of domestic violence. Let's talk about this personality disorder. And very commonly, they're going to send you both out for psychological evaluation. And he's going to do fine. Psychological evaluation doesn't catch a domestic violence perpetrator unless it may catch mental health problems he has, if he has mental health problems. But most domestic batters, even horrible domestic batters, typically don't have any diagnosable mental health problems. So he's, his eval, usually comes back fine. This is a very widespread misconception that people think, oh, if I get him evaluated, they're going to find out in the custody courts what his issues are. Unfortunately, they will not. If he's a domestic violence perpetrator, if, if that's his primary issue, whereas she is very likely to turn up with all kinds of problems, mostly just because she's been traumatized by him. She wouldn't even have to have any pre-existing mental health problems. So, so lot, a woman, for example, who has a history of say, two or three or even sometimes one previous psychiatric hospitalization, she can't leave the abuser unless she wants to give up her kids. They're women, immigration status makes leaving absolutely out of the question. Um, there, there are all kinds of factors that, to, to women who have children with certain kinds of special needs. I mean, so we can't start from the assumption that leaving is even an option for her. And so I try to encourage people to think, what are strategies to increase her agency? What are strategies to increase her voice? What are strategies to increase her self-confidence? Strategies to improve her economic position, rather than how can I get her to leave this relationship? If you do everything else right, that's also going to increase the likelihood that she can find a way out. So focus on doing all this other stuff, which you need to do anyhow, right? And that'll also help her get out if she can.

Do you think, I mean, one of the things I also found very interesting was what you did, these abuser programs were not therapy. And then in fact, therapy is and can be detrimental. Certainly couples therapy can be very detrimental because you're operating on a premise that both are equally causing the problem. Um, and individual therapy for the abuser can be detrimental. I, I think many people probably who are in a situation where they're in an abusive relationship, they initially go the therapy route. That was really interesting to hear. I have my own ideas about why it isn't useful, um, but I'm curious to hear, you know, from the field, what, what you've seen. So I'll say first, looking at it from sort of the godest perspective, that we have a tendency in American culture to, American society, to psychologize all problems. To think of all problems are somehow rooted to our family of origin experiences. So what disappears from the discussion is the influence of culture and the influence of systems of oppression, whole societal structures that oppress specific groups that keep them down. And how that trickles down is when you've got a man who's oppressing his partner, it, it's viewed as, well, it must be that he's got emotional problems. It must be that he's got psychological problems. I don't find that same assumption about a white person who's been a rampant racist their whole life. People don't think right away, oh, well, this person must.

be really insecure or this person must uh have mental health problems. They think this person probably grew up racist and has been attached to racism ever since. You think you know, you're going to focus much more on the person's mentality, yeah, than on their emotional world.

But as soon as a man is oppressing women, it starts to look like this sort of private issue. And you, the jump right away is to assume that it's something about his emotional world. So then there have been various kinds of studies that have been done that don't find really very large psychological differences between abusive and non-abusive men. For, for example, this assumption that there'd be just so much more personality disorder among abusive than non-abusive men. And there's actually only a little bump in how much personality disorder there is. Somewhat a little more personality disorder among abusive men, but it's only a little bump. It's not like, whoa, they got way more personality.

So what tends to disappear from discussions in in modern society is, well, to what extent are people's behavior problems sometimes being driven much more by unhealthy societal training than by their wounds? Well, when we look at racism, we do assume that's coming largely from unhealthy societal training, not from their personal emotional wounds. Yeah. But when a man, when there's when there's sexism in one of its worst forms, which is male violence against women, or just male domination of women in a home, taking her rights away, squelching her, the more obvious cause gets overlooked, which is, well, what, what, what was his societal training?

So the, when I wrote "Why Does He Do That?", yeah, why, I said, "Why?" I called the subtitle "Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" is because those of us in the field had decided years earlier, the problem is, turns out to be much more in his mind than in his heart. So you made reference to how these programs are different from therapy, and that's because their primary focus needs to be on changing values and attitudes, not on changing his emotional makeup. His emotional makeup is not necessarily any different from a non-abusive guy. So, so our standard joke in the field is, if you, if you send an abuser to therapy and you find a particularly good therapist, and the therapy goes particularly well, he'll be a happy abuser when he's done. And that's what you will have accomplished. He'll be a happy, well-adjusted, he'll be enjoying his own life more.

I mean, I mean, it's funny you say that because if you're on the internet at all, in this world that you're in, you'll see like narcissistic abuse is everywhere. And the channel that I've run that deals with narcissism and borderline, we actually are not into demonizing narcissists because I think it's just, narcissist has just become a code word for bad person. That's all it sort of means. And it's used, it's like weaponized against people and used as an insult thrown. You know, if someone really has a narcissistic personality disorder, I mean, every quadrant, every area of their life is impacted, right? They're having theoretically probably some level of trouble with employment, some level of interpersonal trouble in general, like with relationships across the board.

And it sounds like, is this true that a lot of the men that you worked with in your program seem to very specifically have just trouble in the home? Is that, was that generally what you found? Or the overwhelming majority of abusers, the problem is limited to to current or former intimate partners or to some extent women that they wish they were involved with. But in other words, it's all connected to intimate partnership. Certainly, people with personality disorders can move through certain contexts and hide the problem if they don't have too extensive a relationship with the person. And often are particularly lovable and charming. And this is one of the reasons why they get confused with the domestic abuser who often is particularly lovable and charming if you don't know him too much. But yes, with someone with a personality disorder, if you have an intense relationship, if you're their child, for example, there's no way you could not after a while know that there's a problem. If you're working with them in a context where they have to periodically be called out on stuff, where you have, where you have to call each other out on certain, where people's mistakes have to be pointed out, well, you're going to start to run into problems with someone whose personality is flawed because they're not going to do well when they're being called out, particularly on their more serious mistakes.

You often can call them out on their smaller mistakes and they'll say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that." But it's when they make bigger mistakes that's when they can't look, right? And, and, you know, we all have the hardest time looking at our biggest mistakes. And that's what sort of separates people with personalities from people who don't. Is once you get into people, the realm with really having to face up to really not good things we've done, it's hard for any of us. The person with the personality disorder can't go there. And they, that's when everything starts to get flipped around back on you.

And the abuser can move through the world with nobody else knowing there's a problem. He can have a, a work life that goes on for 20 or 30 years, nobody there knows. His own children, often, it depends, this is going to vary, but, but his own children, it's fairly commonly that they can't see the the extent of the problem because not all men who abuse women are are abusive to children. It's about 50/50. About half of abusers are not particularly abusive to children. And they're still, they still do huge damage to children for other reasons, but not by directly abusing them. Much more through manipulation and through how much damage they're doing to those kids' relationship with their mother. Yeah.

And this, by the way, is also connected not just to the issue of personality disorder, but the, the issue of addiction. Because abuse, sometimes people want to see it as an addiction, and it doesn't fit there either. Because addicts certainly will do a lot of harm to other people, but they're also doing a lot of harm to themselves. And over time, their work life will tend to decline, and their social life will tend to decline, except for their friendships with other addicts. And their physical health will start to decline. None of those things happen for the domestic abuser. His physical health, her physical health is going to be deteriorating over a couple, over 20 years, but his physical health isn't going to deteriorate over 20 years. His work life, he doesn't usually go through any deterioration at all. His social life, everybody thinks he's fine. Again, there are exceptions, but I'm talking about the, you know, the typical, the mass, no, the by far the more common abusers, he doesn't hit, hit bottom the way an addict does because he's not actually doing himself much harm at all. I mean, I don't think it's a great way to live, but he's not doing, he's not really doing himself much harm at all. He's doing huge damage to other people.

The reason why I'm so concerned about the way that the term narcissism has come to replace domestic abuser or batterer or domestic abuse perpetrator is that it's completely depoliticizing the problem. And so the, the, the responsibility comes off the society for the way that it's raising boys and men. I mean, when you're talking about personality disorder, you again tend to start to think about family of origin type wounds. And that means who's most likely going to be blamed for this guy? His mother. So, whoa, we're back around to finding a way to make women to blame again. And there's also the simple fact that research shows, but that we also always saw in abuser programs, that something like seven out of eight domestic abusers are not personality disorder. We, the guy who was personality disorder, you would totally see in your group. He was an even more, he was an even more of a pain in the butt than your other clients. Wow. Because he would be an abuser with a personality disorder. It's not either or. But the great majority of our clients were not. And you, we could tell. We just knew. We would be talking about it when we were processing, you know, when we were processing our groups or in supervision, we'd be saying, "Yeah, and so-and-so is pretty clearly personality disorder." You would know. He would stick out.

Did you ever, did you like the batters you worked with? Our clients were much more likable than not likable people. And one of our catchphrases around the abuser program was, "I never met a batterer I didn't like." And we really like to emphasize that point because we want people to understand that you can't judge, you know, how abusive a guy is or whether it's, whether he is an abuser or not, like whether it's true or not, based on anything about your personal experience of him, unless you've been involved in a serious relationship with him. You, and that doesn't include like, you dated him for six months or something. And because there will be women who were in a brief relationship with the guy who say, "Oh, she's totally lying. I was went out with him for four months. He's nothing like that." You wouldn't know unless your relationship got really serious, or you moved in together, or started talking long-term, or that kind of thing. You wouldn't even discover what he was like. These guys work extra hard, actually, to be likable in public. That, that's part of how they increase their power at home. And these are really power-oriented individuals on the home front. And so building a really good public image is a lot of what strengthens their hand at home. That's part of what gets her to not be believed. That's what I was just going to say. How hard, and gets the kids not to be believed, is how hard he's worked to make everybody think he's the greatest. And maybe even makes it harder for her to leave on some level because he looks so good on the outside. You know, he looks, she's often got people saying to her, "I've heard the story so many times from women," that she's got people saying to her, "You're so lucky to be with him." And she, and she's just crushed. She doesn't say anything, but inside she just feels crushed. Like, God, if they only knew.

So, if regarding therapy, I started to read "The Assault on Truth," right, which was about the ideology of hysteria. Yeah. So I'll frame it, but I think it's interesting to talk about. And it's something, I mean, it may not be the conversation to have with you with regard to the implications for what was potentially uncovered or, I don't know, can we say allegedly uncovered? Which is basically that Freud was treating many girls, women who had hysteria, right? A sort of general term at the time for disturbance, mental disturbance, unspecified, let's say. And found that many of these women were in fact abused by the father, probably who was also probably paying the bills for the therapy. And he wrote this paper called "The Ideology of Hysteria" and was met with just utter horror, right? Or just avoidance, no thank you, humiliation. He can't be taken seriously. He, he was made into a total joke, basically. Yes. So then he, right, essentially redacted, rescinded, rewrote that story in the form of the Oedipal complex, which postulates, right, that the, the young child is in fact possibly attracted to the parent. And maybe the sexual relations occurred, maybe they didn't, but it was in, it was a figment of her attraction to the parent, slash generally father. So I read that and I like fell off my chair because I thought, holy, the entire, um, kind of psychiatric field, psychology field, is, is psychoanalytic field, is founded on his writings, which is founded on this idea, or this potentially idea of an Oedipal complex, which is just, you know, that a theory which may have existed simply to hide the reality of sexual abuse. And what does that mean, visa-vis implications for the field as a whole? And so, can you just talk a little bit about that? That's remarkable to me.

So it's disturbing for people, and they're reluctant to really take in the possibility that the field of modern psychology, and to a great extent the field of psychiatry, are founded on a really unhealthy set of principles, almost from the beginning. That that gets people very much on the defensive. But this is the reality. That even though people now have largely moved beyond Freud, the underlying thinking from Freud is still dominant. People say, "Oh, yeah, because they've rejected a lot of other stuff from Freud." But the core beliefs that he has about human personality are still very much the underpinnings of modern psychology. And that means that our mental health system is rooted in the belief that when children report being sexually abused, that's probably false. And that is a tragic, tragic underpinning to your psychological system that is makes it so that the system is there to keep oppression in place rather than to overcome it. Yeah.

So can you talk about the problem of therapy as it relates to abuse, and where if people are seeking out therapy for themselves or their partner as a means to get help, um, what are some of the things they're going to come up against in that experience so they know it's the wrong path to embark down? Okay. So, so first, I'll, I'll talk about a piece that is actually growing right from what we were just talking about, which is that we have this, this underpinning in psychology that women and children are exaggerating, or, or, or they're not, or it's not even true at all, or they're, or they're saying things that are actually based on their own desires. So that's a very unfortunate, potential, tragic distortion to start from the beginning. But then what you're adding to that when you're talking about couples' work or some kind of family work for domestic abuse is the assumption that the abuse is the product of dynamics. In other words, that everyone is contributing to it in certain ways. And if, if you're doing couples counseling, well, then obviously it's going to be that both partners are contributing to what happens. And what that means is that the woman is being given the message that if she changes what she does, if she makes improvements in what she does, that's likely to improve his behavior. That can make him less abusive. Well, that's exactly what he's been telling her all along. That if she would just do better, he would treat her better. So couples counseling, by its very nature, supports the abuser. And I don't mean that the couples counselor, in any way, would think of it that way. The couples counselor would usually insist that they did not want to be, that they were against the abuse, that they wanted the abuse to stop. But the fundamental frame is backing him up.

If there was a couples counselor watching this right now, what would be some of the signs you would want that counselor to look for in the therapy to recognize that what they are doing is backing up an abuser? Well, the first thing I would say is, before a therapist works with any couple, they should, as far as the routine procedure, and they should tell all couples that come, "It's part of my routine procedure. I do a session with each person individually." MH. Should never meet with a couple without having met them each separately. So you try to find out whatever you can then about whether one partner is afraid of the other. The whole notion of couples counseling, for it to be successful, suggests some level of safety and some rough level of equality. And no relationship between a man and woman is going to be perfectly equal. There's always going to be issues there from sexism. But, but that it's not some huge, you know, insane power imbalance like what abuse creates. So that's the first thing is that you should do your best to find out ahead of time and not work with a couple if you find out the woman's ever been afraid of him. And there's a whole set of things to look for after that may come up at other times, like her making reference to certain subjects that she doesn't want to bring up because he just has such ballistic reactions to those. Well, that's a, that doesn't prove right away abuse, but it's one of those things that's a flag where you should think, "Whoa, she just pointed out that there's certain subjects she doesn't dare touch." We better, maybe I better meet with her alone again and try to find out a little bit more about what. And a couples counselor can make excuses at any point. You don't have to broadcast that you're concerned about abuse. And please don't, because that's going to get her hurt. If you broadcast that you're concerned about abuse, but just say, "Oh, you know, the, there are times in a couples' counseling work where it works better if I do a couple sessions for a while with you." And that's often true, actually, with not with situations that don't involve abuse. So whatever you can easily come up with an excuse to meet with them separately and say, "I've noticed that you're really afraid to touch certain subjects with him. Let's talk more about that. Like, what's going on there?" Um, couples counselors talk sometimes about noticing that she's always looking at him before answering questions or after answering questions, like she's very concerned to check, "Did I say anything wrong? Or is he, you know, getting too upset by things that I said?"

But then one of the sort of underlying kind of tenets that I find a lot in therapy and that comes up in couples counseling is the notion that all feelings are valid. And I don't think that's entirely true. This is some place where I break from much of modern society. I think, well, no, not all feelings are valid. So, for example, if I have a client, and I have had such a client, whose feelings are very hurt because while he was strangling his wife, she tried to kick him in the balls. Like, how could she try to do that to me? Like, that's so mean. She's going to, you know, hurt me in my private parts. Uh, no. His hurt feelings are not valid. He does not need someone saying, "Okay, well, now he has his hurt feelings, and she has hers. Let's each, let's all talk about our her feelings." He needs somebody to say to him, "That's really messed up. That's an incredible distortion to have your feelings hurt because of her attempt to defend herself while you were strangling her." No, those are not valid feelings. Those are extreme distortions that are a product of a really severe sense of entitlement and a really severe denial about the fact that you were putting her, you were doing a very serious, like felonious, like you belong in jail type of assault. We have to talk very bluntly. MH. There's a real reluctance with abusers to talk really bluntly about what they were actually doing and how severe it actually was. And no, so this is the kind, in a less severe form, is what comes up all the time in couples counseling where a very well-meaning couples counselor is, when, when, when, when she is talking about her hurt feelings and he's talking about his hurt feelings. And a lot of abusers, by the way, love to talk about their hurt feelings. People have this assumption about abusers as not being very psychologized. Some of them aren't. And a lot of them are. In our times, a lot of them are very psychologized and and very literate, you know, emotionally literate. And the couples counseling might say, "Well, okay, now, now you've really heard what you had to say about how he feels hurt. Now you really need to hear what he's saying about how he feels hurt." That's a terrible message to her. The last thing she needs is to be now hearing more, once again, about how he feels hurt, usually by stuff he has no right even to feel hurt by, anyhow. MH. So that's just an example of the kind of thing that a couples' counseling process, very well-meaning couples' counseling process, will get her dragged into that's just going to dig her deeper into that hole.

But then a lot of other things that couples counselors who are more alert on these issues pick up are the fundamental kinds of dynamics of domestic abuse that we've already talked about, like, is he always making his behavior her fault? M. And did the, this remind me, you asked earlier about, you know, people who are thinking about getting married. Yeah. And one thing I wanted to say about that is that I feel like as people are moving into marriage, they're thinking way too much about love and not nearly enough about respect. And, "Oh, I love him and he loves me." It's like, "Okay, great. Does he respect you?" And I wish people would put way more emphasis on that question before they dive into getting married because getting married really gets you in a really deep hole.

What is like, how would you constitute evidence of respect? So it's questions like, for example, what happens when either he really doesn't like something that you did, or you really didn't like something that he did? And that's one of the ways you find out whether there's respect or not. Because if there's respect, then when he's really mad at you, or you're really mad at him, you're, that's being processed in some kind of humane and decent way, rather than you're dirt because he's mad, or because you're mad. Either way, he's making it that you're dirt. And that is the way the abuser works. You're terrible if I'm mad, and you're terrible if you're mad. Right. Got it. Yeah. And he flies off the handle, but then he apologizes. It doesn't, the apology doesn't count for much. He needs to not fly off the handle. But respect is also like, how does he talk about your friends? How does he talk about your relatives? Is he actually interested in your opinions, or is he just interested in proving your opinions to make them more like his? Is he actually interested in your taste in music, or is he just trying to fix your taste in music to be more like his? Does he actually make you feel bad for your relationships with your friendships with your friends or your relatives, like you should just always be available to him? Does he know anything about your ambitions and, and, and actually seem to take an interest in them? I mean, all these questions matter. But I also think what matters most is just to keep asking yourself, is, is this, is this what respect looks like? Because I think when people really reflect on that question, to a great extent, they actually do know it intuitively. The questions are helpful, but I think people largely have a sense intuitively. It's that they're not focusing on that enough because in our society, it's all about, "Oh, is there love? Is there love? Is there?" Of course, you want love, that matters too. But I don't feel like people ask themselves, and women in particular, conditioned not to think too much about whether the man respects them and just focus on whether he loves them and he'll be a good provider. And well, keep asking yourself, keep asking yourself, "Does this feel like respect? Does this look like respect? Am I being seen? Am I really being seen? Or is he seeing an imaginary person, seeing me as way better than I am, and seeing me as way worse than I am? Either way, he's not really seeing me."

Well, and that, and this maybe to this maybe gets back a little bit to the therapy thing, but also to this other piece that you talk about, um, something I thought was really interesting, which was defining reality. I have known people who, um, present a view of reality that is just seems off in a big way, and it is, um, almost intractable. And I had this thought when that has been presented to me in these ways, which is, if I disrupt that reality, they might get pretty angry at me. And in some ways, thinking that way, right, where they're defining reality, I could see how that could get confused with a narcissistic type of personality dynamic. Because if narcissism avoids contact with reality because reality is too painful, and you see too much who you truly are, right? Then by the same token, someone who's defining their own reality, you could see how that might, one might wonder, is that a sort of an extreme narcissism where if you burst that bubble, they might go in for the attack because it's too painful to tolerate the reality you are presenting them with? But I just, this defining reality, I thought that was an interesting.

So one of the, the powerful tactics that an abuser uses is what, what in the field we refer to as defining reality. And it means that he really controls her sense of what is real. And some of the ways that he does are, first of all, by just speaking with a remarkable level of certainty. Where he is just so sure. So he can say things that are completely not true, but he says them in such an authoritative voice that it makes it very hard for her to question. She starts to think, "Well, maybe, well, he must be telling the truth because, because he just sounds so, so." He'll say, for example, "The police, this is how they handle certain situations," when it's not might not be true at all, but he talks about it with such certainty and authority that it sounds very persuasive. And then if she tries to suggest that maybe that's not it, what she's going to get slammed with is ridicule. Very intense level of ridicule. And I think people often underestimate the power of ridicule. They underestimate the power of various forms of psychological assault. And one of the mistakes, for example, that gets made a lot in domestic abuse is people saying, "Well, this, this guy only uses psychological abuse," as if somehow these were ranked, like psychological abuses here, then physical abuses here, and then sexual abuses here for how damaging they are. You can't line them up that way. You can't line them up that way. There are abusers who use almost no physical or sexual violence who do unbelievable harm because their level of psychological abuse is so high. And ridicule is one of those things that if you use it in really extreme and severe ways will do very, very serious damage. And so that's just an example of a key tactic in defining reality is to ridicule the person for trying to suggest that that may, maybe their version is the real one. When you're saying, "No, no, this is, this is what's real."

It then unfortunately dovetails with the way that an abuser cuts the woman off from other people. Because if you're very isolated, and an abused woman does tend to become, not always, but does tend to become increasingly isolated over time, that's going to increase the impact of the one voice that you're hearing. If the one voice that you're hearing is the only voice that you're hearing, it gets more and more power, more and more opportunity to define what is real.

What if though, the person getting abused, the woman with whom he's trying this tactic on, what if she knows this claim is false? I mean, even if she can't say it, does it mean he has less hold on her? Yes, it's actually, in some ways, better. I mean, it's going to be specific to her particular abuser that she's dealing with. But often it's better for her to stop challenging him too much aloud because he's so good at hammering that down. Whereas, and she'll, in some ways, lose it more for herself. But there are women who have told me that they managed to just go inside themselves and say, "But I know this is true." And yes, that has, when she can do that, that really helps her. He's always going to be looking for signs. I, I know this makes them sound almost more like mad scientists than abusers are, but I'm not exaggerating here. The abuser tends to look for signs of resistance, the way any oppressor does. Keep an eye out. So to stomp him down. And so if he notices ways that she's holding on to her sense of what's real, he's going to take steps to stomp it out. So it does become important for her to be secretive. And people may criticize her for being secretive when actually it's a really good thing for her to become secretive. If she can find a place to keep a journal where he doesn't know where it is, it's actually one of the single best things she can do for her mental health in the face of abuse. Is to be writing it down and then hiding it somewhere. And the writing itself is a really crucial and powerful process. But also because then she can reread it later. And the one of the ways that abuse works and abusers work is by constantly, the abuser keeps denying that he ever did the things that he did, or to the extent that he admits them, he makes them sound like less than they were. And he's always saying that her reactions were out of proportion. Even if he admits to what he did, it's still that her reactions, that she should have been okay with it, or it shouldn't have had, you know, that her reactions were out of proportion to what he did. And so that stuff creeps into you. It's not, you can't help it. Any human being, I mean, this is how interrogators work, this is how torturers work, because any human being will start to absorb, none of us is immune. What you will start to absorb stuff over time. The only people who can tolerate that kind of thing without being absorbing it are people who basically been trained to be secret agents. So they've been actually systematically trained over a long period of time how to defend themselves. But any ordinary human being who hasn't had super specialized, high-level agent type training, this stuff is going to affect you. You cannot grow up with a parent who tells you you're stupid every day and not have that creep into you. You cannot have a partner who tells you you're stupid every day and not have that creep into you. It's just, unfortunately, it's not possible. So you will have times when you start to believe all this stuff. It's just natural. "Oh God, I guess I am blowing it out of proportion." Every, practically every abused woman I've ever dealt with has said, "I think there were times when I was blowing it out of proportion." That's not because there's something wrong with women. That's because that's what abuse does to you. So when you have a journal and you can go back and see what you were writing six months ago, or back when you were writing a year ago, you realize, "Wait a minute, I didn't, I'm not blowing any of this stuff up. It's like, it's right here. What happened?" And it's one of the most helpful things.

Um, the problem is, if you have a young kid in the house, they haven't had the benefit of years of living to have developed a core understanding of what is and isn't real, opinions, points of view, all of that. I mean, what happens to kids who are fed false reality? You know, what, what happens? Do they, is there some intuitive intelligence that when they get older, they're like, "Whoa"? Is there something a mother or other parent can do to undermine it, which she probably can't do in front of him because that will only create, you know, an explosion? What can you do?

So there, unfortunately, isn't anything inevitable. Like the child is going to eventually see through it. I tend to compare it to situations where children grow up in a family that's got any extremely rigid thing that they're taught, whether it's an extremely rigid religion, or an extremely rigid, uh, political view, or an extremely rigid fear of all other human beings, you know, that everyone's out there. Whatever it is, their kids will grow up with really severe rigidities. You're always going to have a percentage of kids who see through it, a larger percentage of kids who don't see through it, and a percentage of kids who, like, fully take it on as bad as, you know, who were as bad as the parents were. You know, they get, they're as extreme as them. So there's going to be this range of reactions. So it's not automatic. So yeah, you, you do want to do what you can to try to plant seeds.

So one of the things that I tend to say to moms, and nothing's foolproof, unfortunately, but one of the things I tend to say to moms is, the abuser is going to be saying, "Think like me. Think like me. Think like me." And your temptation is going to be to say to him, "No, no, think like me. Think like me. Think like me." And he's going to win because that, you're playing right to his strengths. So you really have to teach kids to think for themselves. So when he's saying, "Think like me, think like me, think like me," rather than saying, "No, no, he's wrong. It's more like this," you have to keep saying to the kid, "What do you think? And let's look at this." And any games that you can play with them that encourage them to figure things out for themselves. Great conversation with kids is to talk about advertising. Because advertising is manipulation. With all due respect to people whose relatives work in advertising, the goal of advertising is to mislead you into believing that something is going to have an effect on your life that it's not going to have. Even a fairly good product that may have a good effect on your life, it's not going to have the effect that they're saying it's going to have. And they're out to convince you that the reason they want you to do this is because it would be good for you. When obviously the reason they want you to do this is because it would be good for them. MH. So advertising is manip, it is manipulation. It's working just the way manipulators work for exactly the same reason. So teaching kids to read advertising is a great way to prepare them to think for themselves in the face of manipulation.

And as you're pointing out, you can't say anything very critical about the abuser because he may catch on that you're saying that. And also, he's so often is the children's father. They don't want to hear anything bad about him. If he's their stepdad, they're much less sensitive about it. M. You can usually get away with being more obviously analytical about him. If, if he's their father, you, you can't usually be obviously analytical about him. So what you have to do is equip them with the ability to analyze and leave it to them to apply it to him. And kids see so many ads. Kids see so many ads constantly. So that's a real opportunity to say, "Well, you know, why are they saying why do you think they're saying it this way? And what do you think they really want? And why are they making it look like this kid suddenly won a prize because they got the new sneakers or whatever?" Yeah. And then for younger kids, I really up to like about age five or six, I really recommend the Russell Hoban book, "A Bargain for Frances." And it's just, it's a children's story, very entertaining. Kids aren't going to feel like they're being preached to by the story, but it actually teaches them to recognize manipulation. And not only that, but it covers so many of the key tactics that manipulators use. Wow. And it's just, boy, if you got a kid who, you know, has a key manipulator in their life, like a dad or stepdad who's a manipulator, and you want to teach them to read, teach them some skills for reading that without saying anything bad about him.

Okay, "A Bargain for Frances." And you recommend not saying bad things about the other parent to the kid if the other parent's an abuser? It, it won't work for a number of reasons. One is, if he finds out you're saying that, you're going to pay, and the kid's going to pay. But the other thing is, the kids, kids don't want to hear bad things about their parents. Kids often want to say bad things about their parents themselves, but they don't want other people saying bad things about their parents. Yeah. But you can often name behaviors as wrong without them getting so defensive. Like, you can say, "That's not okay that he did such and such," or "He shouldn't have put you in that position," or "He shouldn't have said that to you," or "He shouldn't have scared you." That stuff is okay, fine to say. But don't ever say things that evaluate him as a person. Don't say he's mean. Or as kids start to understand abuse, don't say he's abusive or he's an abuser. Avoid characterizations, uh, of him as a person. I would even avoid characterizations of his behavior. I wouldn't even say his behavior is abusive. I would just say that's, that's hurtful, or that's not okay, or that was scary. Just keep, stick to, stick to what the behavior was.

But the other thing that kids do need to hear is that adults are responsible for their own actions. And part of the goal of childhood is to gradually become, by the time you reach adulthood, able to be fully responsible for your own actions. But we don't consider kids responsible for their actions. That's why we have juvenile courts, right, instead of adult courts. And so we're trying to move them in that direction. But they need to understand that adults are responsible for their own actions because they're going to hear all kinds of things from him that he isn't, that. And so kids need to hear, "You're not causing what he does. And Mom isn't causing what he does. And your siblings don't cause what he does."

One of the big sources of harm in a family where you have the domestic abuser is that everybody starts to blame each other. He's, he's conditioning them to all blame each other for what's going on. And then that's then, then they start to do a lot of damage to each other. What you might call secondary damage, where they're starting to hurt each other a lot because of dynamics that he's put into motion. And so we want to try to break that up by saying to kids, "Hey, don't blame each other. Don't blame yourself for what he did. Don't blame each other for what he did. Don't blame Mom for what he did. He's responsible for his own behavior. You're angry at Mom by what she did, that's fine. But don't get mad at her by what he did. That's like not her fault."

Is the intention to turn the child against the mother? Like, what is, what is it dynamic when an abuser is sewing divisions between moms and kids? A lot of the intention is to turn children against the mom. But also the intention is to make the mom's parenting life more difficult, to make her be under more stress, to undermine her authority. So he doesn't want the family to be able to unify against him. Any oppressor is trying to avoid solidarity. And so he does not want the family to be able to support each other because then he's not going to have the same kind of, he's not going to be able to be the same kind of tyrant that he's able to be if he's got them divided. And I've had clients, a few different clients over the years, who said, "And the, and the whole family ganged up against me." And I know, because I know the filter to hear that through, it's like, "Oh, what means is he didn't succeed in driving them apart." MH. So they'll tell kids bad things about their moms. They'll tell moms bad things about the kids. But a lot of what they'll do to sow those divisions is how they, how they react. Right. While a mom and a kid are having a struggle, like, like if Mom and kid are in the middle of a struggle, and he starts to ridicule the mom, well, that kid's going to become a major behavioral problem rapidly if he does that over and over again. Um, if he conditions the child to believe that the mom doesn't care about them, or that the mom is out sleeping with other men, they'll start telling a four-year-old who doesn't even really know what it means, "Your mom is out sleeping with other guys." And will really pollute that relationship. And it's, to me, it's largely a divide and conquer mentality. It's, "I get more power in this situation if I have these people turned against each other." It also means he gets to be the center of attention more because then everybody's focused on him. He can even make himself the family good guy who's helping these other people work out their conflicts that he's creating. Right. Right. And then it also means that the mother can't parent the child in the way that is best and organic to her, because she's mediating that parenting through managing his potential reaction to her relationship with her child. So she doesn't get to be the mother, basically. And so we have a study, for example, that finding women who were involved with abusive partners, seven times the rate of other women of saying, "I have to change how I'm parenting my children when my partners are." So yeah, has a huge effect on her, on her parenting life.

Fun, fun. We could easily never stop. I mean, thank you. Oh, you're welcome. Any last word? Or all good? No, I better stop because there'll always be three more things I can think of to say. But we covered a lot of ground. Yeah, we did. Thank you. Thank you so much for.