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lottiegasp's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
4.75
This book gives insight into the behaviours and thinking of angry, controlling and abusive men. Namely that they have a sense of entitlement and disrespect for their partner and children, and that domestic abuse is not about losing control, or a consequence of mental health issues, substance abuse or trauma. It provides guidance for victims of domestic abuse in understanding their partner, keeping themselves and their children safe, leaving their partner if they want to, and noticing true signs of change. I highly recommend it to anybody to help them become better at understanding abuse, supporting victims and survivors, and working towards a society that does not codify abuse.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Murder, and Domestic abuse
Moderate: Sexual assault, Child abuse, Drug use, and Alcoholism
Minor: Ableism
This book details domestic abuse, including emotional and physical violence. There are certain sections that discuss child abuse, substance abuse. The author occasionally uses ableist language (e.g. calling abusers' behaviour crazy or insane, despite asserting that abuse is not a mental health problem)fiveredhens's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.25
favorite quotes (i highlighted like a third of all text in this book lol):
The abuser would like us to accept the following simple but erroneous formula: "FEELINGS CAUSE BEHAVIOR."
"When people feel hurt, they lash out at someone else in retaliation. When they feel jealous, they become possessive and accusatory. When they feel controlled, they yell and threaten."
Right? Wrong. Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world.
Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than
some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. [...] When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort.
While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: "Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could get hurt myself? Am doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?" [...] An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. [...] He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser's core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.
One very violent man said in his group session, "She stabs me through the heart with her words," to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.
The abusive man's problem with anger is almost the opposite of what is commonly believed. The reality is:
YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN'T
HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS
ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH
YOUR ANGER.
Middle class white abusers, for example, tend to have strict rules about how a woman is allowed to argue. If she talks back to him, shows anger, or doesn't shut up when she is told to, he is likely to make her pay.
Mr. Right considers himself the ultimate authority on every subject under the sun; you might call him "Mr. Always Right." [...] He seems to see the world as a huge classroom, in which he is the teacher and you are his student. [...] He finds little of value in your thoughts or insights, so he seeks to empty out your head and fill it up with his jewels of brilliance. When Mr. Right sits in one of my groups for abusive men, he often speaks of his partner as if she were in danger from her own idiocy and he needs to save her from herself. Mr. Right has difficulty speaking to his partner—or about her—without a ring of condescension in his voice. And in a conflict his arrogance gets even worse. Mr. Right's superiority is a convenient way for him to get what wants. When he and his partner are arguing about their conflicting desires, he turns it into a clash between Intelligence and Stupidity. He ridicules and discredits her perspective so that he can escape dealing with it. [...] Mr. Right tries to sanitize his bullying by telling me, "I have strong opinions" or "I like debating ideas." This is like a bank robber saying, "I'm interested in financial issues." Mr. Right isn't interested in debating ideas; he wants to impose his own.
[...]
The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are:
• You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually.
• I know better than you do, even about what's good for you.
• Your opinions aren't worth listening to carefully or taking seriously. The fact that you sometimes disagree with me shows how sloppy your thinking is.
• If you would just accept that I know what's right, our relationship would go much better. Your own life would go better, too.
• When you disagree with me about something, no matter how respectfuly or meekly, that's mistreatment of me.
Saying the word abuse to an abusive person can be like lighting a tinderbox: When you name the unmentionable secret, he goes wild.
Brad got loud, rolled his eyes at what a hysterical exaggerator he considered me to be, and adopted a victim stance, saying, "I beg you to stop this." Then came the most important part: He said in a screeching whine, "I have only put a hand on a partner once in my life, many years ago, and just barely pushed her away from me like this"—and he shoved me hard by the shoulder—"after she called my mother a sick woman." Well, why was Brad denying a history of assault (while actually admitting to one) when I hadn't said anything about violence?
I have had quite a number of clients over the years who are attracted to women who are vulnerable because of recent traumatic experiences in their lives, including many who have started relationships by helping a woman break away from an abusive partner and then start to control or abuse her themselves. Some
abusive men seek out a woman who comes from a troubled or abusive childhood, who has health problems, or who has suffered a recent severe loss, and present themselves as rescuers. Be alert for the man who seems to be attracted to power imbalances.
Another way he can retaliate against you for resisting his control is to switch into the role of victim. Suppose that you complain about being silenced by his constant interruptions during arguments. He then gets a huffy, hostile tone in his voice as if your objection were unfair to him and says sarcastically, "AIl right, I'll just listen and you talk" and acts as if you are oppressing him by calling him on his behavior. This is an effort to make you feel guilty for resisting his control and is the beginning of abuse.
In any relationship, it makes sense to use some sensitivity in deciding when and how to tackle a difficult relationship issue. There are ways to word a grievance that avoid making it sound like a personal attack, and if you mix in some appreciation you increase the chance that your partner will hear you. But with an abuser, no way to bring up a complaint is the right way. You can wait until the calmest, most relaxed evening, prepare your partner with plenty of verbal stroking, expre your grievance in mild language, but he still won't be willing to take it in. Initial defensiveness or hostility toward a grievance is common even in nonabusive people. Sometimes you have to leave an argument and come back to it in a couple of hours, or the next day, and then you find your partner more prepared to take in what is bothering you. With an abuser, however, the passage of time doesn't help. He doesn't spend the intervening period digesting your comments and struggling to face what he did, the way a nonabusive person might. In fact he does the opposite, appearing to mentally build up his case against your complaint as if he were preparing to go before a judge.
Sometimes a partner can frighten you inadvertently because he is unaware of how his actions affect you. For example, he might come from a family or culture where people yell loudly and wave their arms around during arguments, while those from your background are quiet and polite. The nonabusive man in these circumstances will be very concerned when you inform him that he is frightening you and will want to take steps to keep that from happening again—unconditionally.
Alcohol does not change a person's fundamental value system. People's personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People's conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.
Max sheepishly recounted this event to me, going on to admit that he had torn off some of Lynn's clothes and had "partly" tied her to a chair. (l'm not sure how you "partly" tie someone to a chair; they are either tied or they're not.)
Oppressive systems stay in
existence because the people in power enjoy the luxury of their position and become unwilling to give up the privileges they win through taking advantage of other people and keeping them down. In short, the abusive mentality is the mentality of oppression.
In fact, the greater surprise is that so many boys do not grow up to abuse women. There must not be anything inherently abusive or power-hungry about men, or it would be impossible for so many to refuse to follow the path where their cultural training is propelling them.
Resistance never disappears; it waits in the shadows, sometimes for many years, and then eventually sprouts again. You may have gone through dark times when you felt, "l just can't fight this anymore, I give up," yet you rebound after a while to try again to recover your rights. And one day you will succeed.
Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: "From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn't really her I was hitting. It was my mother!" He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation.
"No," he said, "you were hitting your wife."
To consider a world without relationship abuse is to open up to even more profound possibilities, to the potential for human beings to live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment.
would have liked better sources and also he definitely got up in the anti-ADHD sentiment of the time but otherwise. everyone should read it, every demographic
The abuser would like us to accept the following simple but erroneous formula: "FEELINGS CAUSE BEHAVIOR."
"When people feel hurt, they lash out at someone else in retaliation. When they feel jealous, they become possessive and accusatory. When they feel controlled, they yell and threaten."
Right? Wrong. Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world.
Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than
some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. [...] When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort.
While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: "Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could get hurt myself? Am doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?" [...] An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. [...] He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser's core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.
One very violent man said in his group session, "She stabs me through the heart with her words," to justify the fact that he had stabbed his partner in the chest with a knife.
The abusive man's problem with anger is almost the opposite of what is commonly believed. The reality is:
YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN'T
HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS
ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH
YOUR ANGER.
Middle class white abusers, for example, tend to have strict rules about how a woman is allowed to argue. If she talks back to him, shows anger, or doesn't shut up when she is told to, he is likely to make her pay.
Mr. Right considers himself the ultimate authority on every subject under the sun; you might call him "Mr. Always Right." [...] He seems to see the world as a huge classroom, in which he is the teacher and you are his student. [...] He finds little of value in your thoughts or insights, so he seeks to empty out your head and fill it up with his jewels of brilliance. When Mr. Right sits in one of my groups for abusive men, he often speaks of his partner as if she were in danger from her own idiocy and he needs to save her from herself. Mr. Right has difficulty speaking to his partner—or about her—without a ring of condescension in his voice. And in a conflict his arrogance gets even worse. Mr. Right's superiority is a convenient way for him to get what wants. When he and his partner are arguing about their conflicting desires, he turns it into a clash between Intelligence and Stupidity. He ridicules and discredits her perspective so that he can escape dealing with it. [...] Mr. Right tries to sanitize his bullying by telling me, "I have strong opinions" or "I like debating ideas." This is like a bank robber saying, "I'm interested in financial issues." Mr. Right isn't interested in debating ideas; he wants to impose his own.
[...]
The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are:
• You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually.
• I know better than you do, even about what's good for you.
• Your opinions aren't worth listening to carefully or taking seriously. The fact that you sometimes disagree with me shows how sloppy your thinking is.
• If you would just accept that I know what's right, our relationship would go much better. Your own life would go better, too.
• When you disagree with me about something, no matter how respectfuly or meekly, that's mistreatment of me.
Saying the word abuse to an abusive person can be like lighting a tinderbox: When you name the unmentionable secret, he goes wild.
Brad got loud, rolled his eyes at what a hysterical exaggerator he considered me to be, and adopted a victim stance, saying, "I beg you to stop this." Then came the most important part: He said in a screeching whine, "I have only put a hand on a partner once in my life, many years ago, and just barely pushed her away from me like this"—and he shoved me hard by the shoulder—"after she called my mother a sick woman." Well, why was Brad denying a history of assault (while actually admitting to one) when I hadn't said anything about violence?
I have had quite a number of clients over the years who are attracted to women who are vulnerable because of recent traumatic experiences in their lives, including many who have started relationships by helping a woman break away from an abusive partner and then start to control or abuse her themselves. Some
abusive men seek out a woman who comes from a troubled or abusive childhood, who has health problems, or who has suffered a recent severe loss, and present themselves as rescuers. Be alert for the man who seems to be attracted to power imbalances.
Another way he can retaliate against you for resisting his control is to switch into the role of victim. Suppose that you complain about being silenced by his constant interruptions during arguments. He then gets a huffy, hostile tone in his voice as if your objection were unfair to him and says sarcastically, "AIl right, I'll just listen and you talk" and acts as if you are oppressing him by calling him on his behavior. This is an effort to make you feel guilty for resisting his control and is the beginning of abuse.
In any relationship, it makes sense to use some sensitivity in deciding when and how to tackle a difficult relationship issue. There are ways to word a grievance that avoid making it sound like a personal attack, and if you mix in some appreciation you increase the chance that your partner will hear you. But with an abuser, no way to bring up a complaint is the right way. You can wait until the calmest, most relaxed evening, prepare your partner with plenty of verbal stroking, expre your grievance in mild language, but he still won't be willing to take it in. Initial defensiveness or hostility toward a grievance is common even in nonabusive people. Sometimes you have to leave an argument and come back to it in a couple of hours, or the next day, and then you find your partner more prepared to take in what is bothering you. With an abuser, however, the passage of time doesn't help. He doesn't spend the intervening period digesting your comments and struggling to face what he did, the way a nonabusive person might. In fact he does the opposite, appearing to mentally build up his case against your complaint as if he were preparing to go before a judge.
Sometimes a partner can frighten you inadvertently because he is unaware of how his actions affect you. For example, he might come from a family or culture where people yell loudly and wave their arms around during arguments, while those from your background are quiet and polite. The nonabusive man in these circumstances will be very concerned when you inform him that he is frightening you and will want to take steps to keep that from happening again—unconditionally.
Alcohol does not change a person's fundamental value system. People's personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People's conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.
Max sheepishly recounted this event to me, going on to admit that he had torn off some of Lynn's clothes and had "partly" tied her to a chair. (l'm not sure how you "partly" tie someone to a chair; they are either tied or they're not.)
Oppressive systems stay in
existence because the people in power enjoy the luxury of their position and become unwilling to give up the privileges they win through taking advantage of other people and keeping them down. In short, the abusive mentality is the mentality of oppression.
In fact, the greater surprise is that so many boys do not grow up to abuse women. There must not be anything inherently abusive or power-hungry about men, or it would be impossible for so many to refuse to follow the path where their cultural training is propelling them.
Resistance never disappears; it waits in the shadows, sometimes for many years, and then eventually sprouts again. You may have gone through dark times when you felt, "l just can't fight this anymore, I give up," yet you rebound after a while to try again to recover your rights. And one day you will succeed.
Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: "From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn't really her I was hitting. It was my mother!" He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation.
"No," he said, "you were hitting your wife."
To consider a world without relationship abuse is to open up to even more profound possibilities, to the potential for human beings to live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment.
would have liked better sources and also he definitely got up in the anti-ADHD sentiment of the time but otherwise. everyone should read it, every demographic
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Gun violence, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, and Violence
Moderate: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Incest, Murder, and Stalking
Minor: Abandonment, Blood, Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Cursing, Drug abuse, Fatphobia, Homophobia, Lesbophobia, Mental illness, Racism, Religious bigotry, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, and Toxic relationship
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