October 30, 1999
Taking responsibility for abusive behavior
By
By
In almost 16 years of counseling men who abuse their partners, I’ve been asked lots of questions about my clients. The thing people most frequently want to know is: Can these guys change?
My answer is always an emphatic but qualified yes, because while I’ve witnessed many dramatic and inspiring conversions, the countervailing truth is that relatively very few abusive men actually come for help or stick with the grueling process.
Men engaged in repetitively demeaning and hurtful behavior rarely look for help on their own. Those who do usually are forced by the law or by their fear of losing their partner, family or earthly possessions.
Among this population, about a quarter are sociopathic, meaning they lack the capacity for conscience or empathy necessary for change.
Even given these daunting facts, we still have dozens of guys from all walks of life and from all backgrounds each year who take the challenge, take responsibility for their own behavior, stop being physically abusive, and greatly reduce their emotional abuse.
How does it happen? In our office, it starts with the man being asked to look at himself through his partner’s eyes. Through a role-play designed to cut through the rationalizations, excuses and blaming, we ask our first-time client to play his wife or girlfriend and answer a series of pointed questions about what it’s like to live with him.
He knows we’re going to ask her the same questions, so the burden of truth often produces grudging acknowledgement that he has done much to cause hurt and hardship. Then the work begins.
Operating from the principles that we are responsible for our own behavior and that retaliation is wrong, we make some basic contracts around stopping all violence, do an evaluation regarding danger and safety, and take a detailed history to begin to explore where and how the abuse was learned.
Then the man is placed in a group. The focus is on being accountable each week, reporting any emotional, verbal, financial, sexual and physical abuse, and being addressed by his peers and the leaders about how he may have gone wrong and how he might have handled himself differently.
He sits in a small group of men from an incredibly diverse cross-section of this region. There are professionals, tradesmen, laborers and sometimes clergy. They are white, black and Latino; born-again Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Protestant. All acknowledge abusing their partners. They will help him face himself.
It’s tough work. A man must be willing to give up sometimes deeply embedded habits and strategies. He has to let himself feel quite uncomfortable. It’s pretty humbling. And it’s hard to stay with such countercultural notions as “if we can stay humble, we’re not likely to be humiliated” or “when in doubt, do nothing” or “nothing is worth being abusive for.”
Many of those who stick with the process find, with profound sadness and hurt, that they are part of an intergenerational cycle of abusive dominance, which ironically they hated as children but now pass on themselves. So now they must persist in unhooking themselves from the train that pulls so relentlessly from the past.
Most men who are seriously emotionally or physically abusive (25 percent of our clients have never hit their partners) need to stay in the program at least seven months. Most need to be part of a small subculture of accountability and support. Most need to practice while being supervised. Thirty-five percent drop out, usually in the early stages, mostly because they won’t take responsibility, it feels too hard or because we don’t spend a lot of time on guys venting about their partners.
And some—the majority of that small minority who arrive in the first place—really do change.
© 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.