Abusers know exactly what they're doing

[Notjustme]

I have thought hard about whether to abuse others is an innate, uncontrollable drive within (hopefully) a small minority or whether the drive to abuse others is a learnt behaviour, either copied from direct experience or a reaction to the subliminal messages given to men by our culture and society that they should feel superior to women.

I certainly think that abusers have a superiority complex. What I don’t believe is that the portrayal of outdated male and female gender roles in our society can be used as a reason or excuse for their behaviour. Otherwise, every man in the world would behave in the same way, and whilst my faith in the less fairer sex has been severely distorted I’m reasonable enough to realise this simply isn’t the case.

It is a fact that familial environments are the single biggest influence on anyone’s behaviour. But does witnessing or experiencing abuse Really justify doing it to another. I, for one, grew up in a volatile household. I grew up in women’s refuges. I was abused emotionally and physically by both my parents and I saw them do it to each other. If anything it made me realise that I definitely do not want to be that person, who causes another’s pain and trauma.

I am certain that significant ex number one had a tough time growing up and I can hazard a guess that significant ex number two grew up to believe that it’s a man’s job to keep their women in check; to ensure that the man remains the dominant species in the household; to grind the woman down to the point where she doesn’t even try to resist; ensure she feels lesser than the man until she is dependent on him for everything and then the man is able to do whatever he likes and there is nothing she can do about it. I saw this in his parents relationship. It was perfectly blantent. But was this reason enough to do it to me?

My theory is a resounding no. Absolutely not. He saw the tears on my face. He heard me telling him that he needed to stop treating me this way. He was perfectly able to treat others with respect. He knew when he was treating someone wrongfully or rightfully. He wouldn’t hurt me in the street. It suited his n********c personality to ensure that the rest of the world believed his girlfriend to be this perfect creature which matched his perfect self; at least in the early days anyway. Before he realised I was actually just an ordinary human being with plenty of flaws and he started bad mouthing me to anyone who would pretend to listen.

He made up so many lies; I cheated on him; I was a prostitute; I took drugs; I hit him. The list goes on. In hindsight I can see that he was making up these stories about me just in case his own behaviour got exposed. He knew exactly what he was doing. He needed to make out to the world that I was mentally unbalanced just in case his behaviour ever came to light then maybe people would think that whatever I said shouldn’t be believed. This foresight and planning are not the actions of someone who has no control over their behaviour. He knew exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t the fault of culture or society or his parents or even of bad wiring in his brain. He was a grown man and grown ups are responsible for how they treat others.

Has anyone still reading this ever asked an abuser why they do it? I have. I asked my very own n********c. His response? “Because you let me get away with it”. He knew. He knew his behaviour was wrong. He enjoyed it. To him it was fun, a way to break the monotony of his otherwise boring life. It was a way for him to project his insecurities onto another person so that he didn’t need to feel so bad about what he had amounted to in his own life.

As women we need to stop making excuses for the way these men operate. We need to stop blaming everything outside of them for the way they think. By continuing to look outside of them we are justifying the way they treat women. We are giving them what they want. Men who treat women in this way may very well be in love with the idea of love but they’ve got very little understanding of how to love in reality. That is not our fault, it is not society’s fault or the fault of their childhoods. They know when they are hurting you, whether that is physically, emotionally or otherwise and they want to hurt you. That is their aim. To keep you in check. To grind you down. To make you theirs. Please stop making excuses and please stop blaming yourselves. Some people just think about the world a little differently from others, that is why we have a range of different abusers in society. Domestic abuse is just one of many different forms of criminality. It may be complex but it comes down to the fact that they are grown men who terrorise behind closed doors knowing they are causing immense distress to others and this makes them one of the worst kinds of perpetrators that we have in our supposedly modern society.

[KIP.]

What a wonderfully insightful post. I would add they the are predatory and look for Women they perceive as vulnerable. I did ask my ex why he sexually assaulted me before we married. I asked him after we married. His answer was, well you married me didn’t you. They take zero blame or accountability. I agree they are the worst kind maybe only beaten by child abusers but they use the same tactics x

[Notjustme]

Hi KIP!

Thank you. I totally understand that these men hunt out victims for their perceived vulnerabilities and I feel that this is another tactic they use to control and dominant their victims without having to take any responsibility for their actions. They also convince themselves that their behaviour is justified due to the vulnerabilities they perceive in their victims. However, I remember being told that perpetrators sense vulnerability and this is when I started to blame myself. I wondered what was wrong with me and I wondered what messages I was sending out to the world. I started to question myself and felt like I must have been weak and incapable to allow these things to happen to me.
I worry that the label of ‘vulnerable’ some how takes the emphasis off the actions of the perpertrators? I might be wrong but i worry that some how it victim blames? I wouldn’t have classed myself as vulnerable before i met my ex but i have been worried that maybe i was, ever since I realised this could have been a contributing factor in getting together with him. I understand that you’re not victim blaming in anyway at all but I worry that this societal acceptance of ‘victim vulnerability’ amounts to the same thing as blaming a rape victim for wearing a short skirt.
I read a meme once that said, “If you can’t control your woman then you’ve found a good one” which made me feel so sad. I was controlled, does that mean the world perceives me as ‘not good’ so therefore I deserved it. That maybe my vulnerabilities led my perpetrator into believing that I needed controlling: again, victim blaming.
Maybe I’m thinking too much about this but I really feel women are too quick to take the weight of the world on their shoulders, even if it means blaming themselves for everything that happens to them. X*x

[KIP.]

I meant vulnerable to them, to their charms and manipulation. In no was was I accepting any blame. I was/am a good person with a good caring heart. Responsible, took my marriage vows very seriously. Was faithful. Had a good job. Was honest, loving loyal. A strong moral compass. All these things an abuser sees as a vulnerability. Another person asked her abuser why, and he said because you were gullible. She was all the tings I listed above the her abuser just saw that in his mind she was gullible. I truly blieve the rest of the world sees them as positive attributes. As did we. We were vulnerable in the sense that we did not know such evil could exist. People are conned every day out of their savings, duped in business deals etc. They were vulnerable to the con artist for whatever reason. I hope I make sense. There is a definite culture of victim blaming. When my ex was arrested for assaulting me, my step daughter wrote and told me I had ruined her family and she never wanted to hear from me. So I know victim blaming very much exists and it is very painful. We survivors have a loud voice and I would urge every one of us to use it. Nice to meet you x

[ballet]

“Does he mean it? Does he know he’s hurting me?” were questions that played on a loop in my mind during the relationship. At the time I believed he honestly didn’t understand how hurtful his behaviour was. He is diagnosed with a severe mental illness, and I put everything he did down to that – “It’s the illness talking, it’s not really him.” There was massive cognitive dissonance at work here, because if someone had asked me, “Does that mean you think people with this illness are automatically abusive?” I would have said no without hesitation. Yet somehow I kept on making excuses for my ex based on his diagnosis. He would often do and say terrible things and then deny they’d ever happened, tell me I was fabricating stories in order to manipulate him when I brought them up. I learnt not to bring them up. I thought I was going mad, and to save my own sanity I clung to the belief that his illness meant he couldn’t remember any of it. (And if he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t really have MEANT it…)

The thing that made me realise that he did know exactly what he was doing was the way he lied to other people in order to cover up his behaviour and make it seem better than it was. I eventually accepted that if he honestly didn’t understand it was wrong, he wouldn’t see any need to hide it. The fact that he covered it up meant he knew it didn’t reflect well on him.

[Iwon]

When I started reading your great insightful post I thought what a lovely person…. but why is she looking for excuses for the abuser. I understood you were clearly making the accountability the abusers by the end.

I have read loads and been in courses with womens aid and my final conclusion is I wasn’t vulnerable or a victim when I met my ex husband. I had a good job lots of friends loved life and I really didn’t have any experience of evil. That someone I loved and trusted would want to destroy me control me and make my life a living hell.

I think abusers are not out of control. They want a relationship that fullfill there needs. So they are entitled to abuse if you are not fulfilling there needs.

There needs are unrealistic because they want full control over others and see us as slaves there to serve them. They consider we are lucky to be with them.

Abusers are just 3 year olds having a tantrum and trying any tactic possible to get there way.

They are incapable of and uninterested and frankly incapable of a mutually satisfying relationship.

He didn’t pick me because I was weak. He picked me because had so much to offer.

[ballet]

He didn’t pick me because I was weak. He picked me because had so much to offer.

Iwon, thank you for this insight.

When I started to put myself together after the tornado had ripped through my life, I joined a support group for partners of people with my ex’s mental illness. Elements of it were helpful, but the organisers were constantly telling us that only emotionally immature people would get into such a relationship, and urging us to see what we needed to change in ourselves. “We’re drawn to our emotional equals,” was the mantra in there. This didn’t sit right with me, and neither did the way the medically unqualified founders were dishing out pop psychological advice about our maturity levels as though it were actually grounded in clinical evidence.

I wasn’t my ex’s emotional equal. I was (am) a kind, compassionate, generous person who liked (likes) to believe the best of others, and like you, I didn’t realise that such behaviour was likely to come my way. Nothing in my life had prepared me for it. My ex took advantage of that. At first I thought that my good character traits had disappeared forever, but a close friend said to me, “You’ll learn to trust again, but you will never be naïve like you were.” He was right.

[iwillbeok]

Iwon,

I totally agree with this statement of yours:

I think abusers are not out of control. They want a relationship that fullfill there needs. So they are entitled to abuse if you are not fulfilling there needs.
There needs are unrealistic because they want full control over others and see us as slaves there to serve them. They consider we are lucky to be with them.

Before things escalated at the end, I was (unknowingly to myself) going grey rock – I had begun to shut down and shut off. I was walking through life in a fog.

When the abuse finally escalated to sexual coercion and rape, I minimised it by thinking he had flipped, had some kind of mental collapse, that it would all blow over. Through my journey in counselling I also asked the question over and over again. “Was this on purpose? Did he know what he was doing?” In the end I came to the conclusion that yes, he did know precisely what he was doing. From the beginning. If I had continued to be the compliant, awed, boundary-less girl that I was at the beginning then he would not have needed to put me back in my place.

His treatment of me at the end was all about control and punishment. The only way he could have controlled me in the way he did was for there to be a long-standing pattern of such control that I didn’t even question what was happening at first.

He must have felt so in control, so powerful. It must have been quite a shock to him when, in the end I proved myself to be so much stronger than he anticipated and said “Enough.”

[KIP.]

My ex kept pushing the boundaries of abuse. It wouldn’t have mattered that I did everything he wanted and was the perfect wife. It was in his nature to simply change the goal posts and continue the abuse. It got to the stage where after decades of marriage he had an affair and blatantly changed his profile picture to him and his mistress. I found out from a friend as unbeknown to me he had blocked me on Facebook. He had treated me with such contempt over the years that he simply thought I would take this final insult. I probably would have if he had moved out but he actually thought it was ok for him to rub my nose in it in public. Carry on living with me and all that comes with our marriage. Because he had got away with such horrors over the years. What a shock he must have got when I went straight to a solicitor to divorce him. When nothing he did would change my mind he became even more violent and was arrested. They are entitled p*********s. No doubt he was feeding his gf all sorts of c**p while tellin me he would dump her and go and get help.

[Iwon]

I so related to your post kip. Do these abuser have a text book they all follow. My ex was openly and public having an affair on Facebook and he blocked me. How funny.

My sister showed me the message. I was so b****y delighted even then he had met his next victim. I had been saving to go for months. She dumped him before it started…. I felt only relief that while his attention was focused on someone else he would not notice I was going behind his back. Finding out financial stuff so he wouldn’t destroy me financially.

Just wanted to say kip I can’t believe your ex did the same x

[KIP.]

Wow. They are so pathetic. I think this was the triangulation that women’s aid talk about. They go get another woman and try to make us jealous. I honestly think he thought I’d come begging him to stay. It just shows that they underestimated us all along. We all have a breaking point. They have zero moral compass. I remember decades ago he told me a story about an ex of his who was ignoring him at a party so he started to outrageously flirt with all her friends and she came running. I bet he thought it would work with me. (Detail removed by Moderator) x

[iwillbeok]

Triangulation is right! A number of incidents come to mind.

– Within x months of getting together my ex tried to get a threesome going. With one of the girls (supposedly) interested in him when he was love bombing me (the idea being “better get me while I’m free, I’m a hot commodity” I was suitably flattered being as young as I was and fell for it hook line and sinker).

– He flirted unashamedly with my friends, if they didn’t respond, he alienated them from me by dripping poison in my ear about them.

– Within x years of being married, he orchestrated a threesome with a friend of mine. We were in a relationship for nearly x years. He broke it off when I started to wonder how long this was going to go on for and how would wanting children fit into the picture. Of course he chose me, too much loss of face if he was to run off with our mistress!

– After many business trips he would point out how all the husbands were unfaithful (loved to drop that some had even used prostitutes) on these trips. I should be so lucky that he wasn’t one of them. If it wasn’t for the utter disgust he had for sex, and especially women who had had multiple partners, I would have wondered later if this was him admitting. I still had an STI check after we split, just in case.

– Years after house-sharing with another couple, he “admitted” that the woman had propositioned him and also invited him to join her and her partner. This incident had just “slipped his mind”. W*f?!

It amazes me how so many patterns become clear after the facts; and that those patterns are experienced by so many! When talking with my therapist I would mention something off-hand and they would confirm “oh, that’s typical abuser tactics”. So for all that we feel alone, that no-one could possibly being going/went through the same thing as what we experience/d is just so ludicrous; we are not alone, we are not the only ones.

Iwillbeok x

Iwillbeok x

[KIP.]

I must admit I pushed him in her direction thinking that if he had someone else then he would stop hurting me and simply move out. She thought she had won first prize when in fact it was the booby prize. A single mother of (Detail removed by Moderator) with (Detail removed by Moderator) who’s husband was recently removed for domestic violence. Talk about vulnerable.

[itwillbeokay]

I’m struggling 24/7 in my head at the moment with did he know, does he even get why I’ve left with our children, could he change, did he just not realise, should I have been clearer how intimidated and anxious I felt and, a lot, is it somehow less because a lot of the time it appeared to be drink related. He still has a lot of (removed by moderator) traits and I would say some issues with empathy etc but he was okay in between the drinking. Lacking in any huge affection but alright really, I mean, I married him, after a very perfect and romantic proposal and beautiful ring etc. Asked my Dad, did it all right. Now hates my Dad and my family and slates them all.

He can’t understand why I’ve left and doesn’t see his behaviour as that bad whereas from my side I had started to feel like I needed to leave regularly and felt nervous and anxious and actually now recognise hyper vigilance as the episodes were becoming much more frequent. He was unemployed so under strain and he says I abandoned him when I should’ve supported him. I absolutely did and tried everything to keep the peace and keep us all together but left suddenly after yet another (only slightly) drunk abusive episode.

Should I have stayed and just focussed on making him look at the way he was drinking?! I have left him all alone (he has no friends and his family are not as supportive as mine are being – he blames me for this too, that I have friends etc) so surely the drinking, and therefore the behaviour, will just get worse. Was the way he was drinking the problem really and I should’ve focussed on that? I did tell him he was abusing me and he needed to stop but he didn’t so I just left and that was the end. I now do limited contact.

But I’m struggling to process the whole dobthey get it thing too.

[Iwon]

Read Lundy Bancroft book why does he do that. I am sure you tried e everything before you left. Women don’t leave with kids unless they are desperate.

I did what you did and went back because he minimized it. He actually went to the police to report me for being mean! To him because he threatened to kill me and I was so terrified I called police! The fact he is minimizes it and says he don’t understand the big deal shows he will do it again.

You say he don’t do it unless he is drunk…. or slightly drunk. He is to bad in between. Well you are walking on eggshells unconsciouly waiting for the next blowup.

It would be tiring to abuse you all the time. He has control over you by doing it only sometimes because you believe the nice fella is the real him. Every time you go back he will get accustomed to abusing you and getting his way.

He isn’t even promising to change. He said solo whats the big deal. He is under stress so you should support him by allowing him to act abusively! You have support now but if you keep hoping and going back you will lose that support. He has you brainwashed into believing him.

My advice would be cut off all contact to get clear of his manipulation. Do you want your kids yo think his behaviour is unacceptable x

[KIP.]

Never ever blame alcohol or unemployment for abuse. Many men drink and are unemployed and do not abuse their partners. He chose to behave that way and always will. There is never an excuse for domestic abuse x

[itwillbeokay]

Thank you. All of you. I’m so grateful. Really grateful. I read a bit of Lundy’s book earlier again, I have it. It was helpful.

Thank you for making me stronger. How do you do it?? Xxxx

[Iwon]

A step at a time. You slowly come out of the fog a little at a time. I isolated myself through this because I felt ashamed I had got stuck in this mess. I thought I could fix it somehow. If I had my time again I would go to anyone and everywhere to get help because you are dealing with a horrible abnormal soul destroying situation. Rambo would need help and guidance!

[Author]

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