Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft
Authors: Lundy Bancroft
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rights down to where it belongs. The abusive man awards himself all kinds of “rights,” including:
Physical caretaking
Emotional caretaking
Sexual caretaking
Deference
Freedom from accountability
Physical caretaking is the focus of the more traditionally minded abuser. He expects his partner to make dinner for him the way he likes it, look after the children, clean the house, and perform an endlessly continuing list of additional tasks. He sees her essentially as an unpaid servant. He grouches, “I work my butt off all day, and when I come home I expect a little peace and quiet. Is that too much to ask for?” He seems to expect a soft chair, a newspaper, and a footstool. On the weekends he expects everything in the home to be taken care of so that he can watch sports or tinker with his car, go golfing or bird watching, or sleep. If she doesn’t fulfill her myriad household responsibilities to his satisfaction, he feels entitled to dole out harsh criticism.
Although this style of abuser may seem out of date, he is alive and well. He did learn to use some prettier packaging for his regal expectations during the ’80s and ’90s, but the change is superficial. Fewer abusers look me in the eye nowadays and say, “I expect a warm, tasty dinner on the table when I come home,” but they may still explode if it isn’t there.
Interwoven with the abuser’s overvaluation of his own work is the devaluation of his partner’s labor. My clients grumble to me: “I don’t know what the hell she does all day. I come home and the house is a mess, the children haven’t been fed, and she’s talking on the telephone. She spends her time watching soap operas.” If she works outside the home—and few families can get by on one income—then he insists that her job is easy compared to his. Of course, if he attempts to do what she does—for example, if he is the primary parent for a while because he’s unemployed and she’s working—he does an abrupt about-face: Suddenly he declares that parenting and housekeeping are monumental and admirable tasks, requiring hours a day of rest for him to recuperate.
Emotional caretaking can be even more important than homemaking services to the modern abuser. Remember Ray, who swore at Mary Beth for “ignoring” him for two days while she looked for her missing son? His problem was that he believed that nothing—not even a missing child—should interfere with Mary Beth’s duty to meet his emotional needs. Just as common as the abuser who blows up because dinner is late is the one who explodes because his partner gets tired of listening to him talk endlessly about himself, or because she wants to spend a little time doing something alone that she enjoys, or because she didn’t drop everything to soothe him when he was feeling down, or because she failed to anticipate needs or desires he hadn’t even expressed.
Abusive men often hide their high emotional demands by cloaking them as something else. My client Bert, for example, would be furious if his girlfriend Kirsten didn’t get off the phone as soon as he came in the door. His excuse to tear into her would be “all the money she’s wasting on the phone bill when she knows we can’t afford it,” but we noticed that the issue only arose when he wanted her attention. If she called England when he wasn’t around, or if he spent an hour on the phone to his parents every Saturday morning, the expense was no big deal.
When I have new clients, I go to the board and draw a compass with the needle pointing straight up to a big N. “You want your partner to be this compass,” I say to them, “and you want to be North. No matter where the compass goes, it always points in the same direction. And no matter where she goes, or what she’s doing, or what’s on her mind, you expect her to always be focused on you.” My clients sometimes protest to me, “But that’s what being in a relationship is about. We’re supposed to focus on
Physical caretaking
Emotional caretaking
Sexual caretaking
Deference
Freedom from accountability
Physical caretaking is the focus of the more traditionally minded abuser. He expects his partner to make dinner for him the way he likes it, look after the children, clean the house, and perform an endlessly continuing list of additional tasks. He sees her essentially as an unpaid servant. He grouches, “I work my butt off all day, and when I come home I expect a little peace and quiet. Is that too much to ask for?” He seems to expect a soft chair, a newspaper, and a footstool. On the weekends he expects everything in the home to be taken care of so that he can watch sports or tinker with his car, go golfing or bird watching, or sleep. If she doesn’t fulfill her myriad household responsibilities to his satisfaction, he feels entitled to dole out harsh criticism.
Although this style of abuser may seem out of date, he is alive and well. He did learn to use some prettier packaging for his regal expectations during the ’80s and ’90s, but the change is superficial. Fewer abusers look me in the eye nowadays and say, “I expect a warm, tasty dinner on the table when I come home,” but they may still explode if it isn’t there.
Interwoven with the abuser’s overvaluation of his own work is the devaluation of his partner’s labor. My clients grumble to me: “I don’t know what the hell she does all day. I come home and the house is a mess, the children haven’t been fed, and she’s talking on the telephone. She spends her time watching soap operas.” If she works outside the home—and few families can get by on one income—then he insists that her job is easy compared to his. Of course, if he attempts to do what she does—for example, if he is the primary parent for a while because he’s unemployed and she’s working—he does an abrupt about-face: Suddenly he declares that parenting and housekeeping are monumental and admirable tasks, requiring hours a day of rest for him to recuperate.
Emotional caretaking can be even more important than homemaking services to the modern abuser. Remember Ray, who swore at Mary Beth for “ignoring” him for two days while she looked for her missing son? His problem was that he believed that nothing—not even a missing child—should interfere with Mary Beth’s duty to meet his emotional needs. Just as common as the abuser who blows up because dinner is late is the one who explodes because his partner gets tired of listening to him talk endlessly about himself, or because she wants to spend a little time doing something alone that she enjoys, or because she didn’t drop everything to soothe him when he was feeling down, or because she failed to anticipate needs or desires he hadn’t even expressed.
Abusive men often hide their high emotional demands by cloaking them as something else. My client Bert, for example, would be furious if his girlfriend Kirsten didn’t get off the phone as soon as he came in the door. His excuse to tear into her would be “all the money she’s wasting on the phone bill when she knows we can’t afford it,” but we noticed that the issue only arose when he wanted her attention. If she called England when he wasn’t around, or if he spent an hour on the phone to his parents every Saturday morning, the expense was no big deal.
When I have new clients, I go to the board and draw a compass with the needle pointing straight up to a big N. “You want your partner to be this compass,” I say to them, “and you want to be North. No matter where the compass goes, it always points in the same direction. And no matter where she goes, or what she’s doing, or what’s on her mind, you expect her to always be focused on you.” My clients sometimes protest to me, “But that’s what being in a relationship is about. We’re supposed to focus on
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