Lundy Bancroft is an author and a counselor specializing in relationships of abuse, generally when a male partner is abusive of a female partner. I didn’t realize until I finished a book and researched the author that Lundy is a man. Bancroft has decades of experience working with abusive men and their victims, writing books, and giving speeches across the country. He is definitely a major expert in his field, and he dispels tons of myths in this book. I love that he includes and references tons more resources in his book that are written by others. He is clearly out here to help survivors of abuse any way he can. One crucial point that Bancroft makes early on is that abuse is not always or even mostly physical. Abuse can take spoken form in emotional manipulation and the men that use their words to hurt their partners are still abusive even if they never lay a hand on them.
Bancroft spends a lot of time analyzing the mind of the abuser. He tells us that abusers want to be a mystery. An abuser seeks to make others think that his behavior makes no sense and have them focus on his feelings rather than his thoughts. An abuser would prefer that his partner think of him as having “anger issues” or a mental illness rather than having his partner understand how he thinks about his actions. An abuser wants his partner to focus on his feelings when it is his thoughts (in which he justifies his manipulation) that are the problem. Bancroft states it very well when he says that, “Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.”
I think that you could criticize Bancroft a little bit for focusing so much on male-on-female abuse and not covering female-on-male abuse. He does address gay and lesbian relationships. However, I am pretty convinced by his points about female-on-male abuse being extremely uncommon. While it makes sense as a reader to hear so much about one and immediately think about abuse going the other way, the fact is that abuse is not divided evenly on gender and that men commit a disproportionate amount of abuse while women receive a disproportionate amount of abuse. For this reason, Bancroft says that “A genuine male victim tends to feel sympathy for abused women and support their cause. The Victim (referring to a male abuser who likes to play the victim), on the other hand, often says that women exaggerate or fabricate their claims of abuse or insists that men are abused just as much as women are.”
In another interesting passage, the author points out that, “Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors…” and that they use their abilities to manipulate the entire family to get the children on their side. Bancroft puts forward a hypothetical argument in which the children are present but don’t understand the issue at stake. They just see their parents yelling at each other. Bancroft says that in his experience, “An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.” What tends to happen is that the mother spends the rest of the day distant and depressed while the father disappears for two hours and returns in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children. First of all, this reveals that the mother is probably the victim here since she was obviously impacted more by what happened. Second, who do you think the children want to be with afterwards? Probably not their mother, who’s in a bad mood. This is a classic manipulative tactic that abusive husbands use to bring children onto their side and further isolate their partners.
Bancroft closes the book by reflecting on how to know if an abuser is really changing. This is incredibly difficult and he points out that his abused partner is the person in the best position to analyze his behavior, not a psychologist or anyone else. This is because abusers tend to be expert manipulators, especially in couples’ therapy, which tends to focus on how both partners can improve their behavior. As such, couples’ therapy does not work in a situation where one partner is causing the problems. In those cases, it can make things worse as it teaches the abuser new vocabulary to use for manipulation and can make him feel even more justified in his actions. Truly repentant abusers will not focus on their partner’s behavior and will express empathy towards their partner. A truly repentant abuser will not feel the need to control their partner’s emotions and will understand their partner’s justified anger towards them for what they had done. Non-repentant abusers will say things like “I can only change if you change too,” and “you need to help me,” or “you don’t realize how much I’ve changed.”
Bancroft says that the answer is not therapy for the abuser, because therapy “focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support.” The answer is an abuser program like Bancroft’s, which can impose rules and consequences on abusers and which is in contact with his victims to get a better understanding of how he acts outside of the program. Bancroft tells countless stories in the book of men who appeared excellent in the program but whose wives and girlfriends told a very different story over the phone. Ultimately, writes the author, “The first test of the quality of an abuser program is whether the main goal of the staff members appears to be helping you or helping him. In a responsible program the abused woman is considered the primary client. The only “assistance” they should be offering to the man is to educate and challenge him about his abusive attitudes and behaviors.”
I would highly recommend this book because many of us experience abuse or manipulation in our lives even if we don’t want to categorize the person who does it as an “abuser.” Bancroft cautions the reader that the answer is not always cutting contact with that person. He writes that, “One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner. If the woman feels unable or unready to end her relationship, or if she goes back to him, people who have attempted to help tend to feel that their effort failed and often channel this frustration into blaming the abused woman. A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman’s right to run her own life—which an abusive man does not do—and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety. If you stay focused on these goals you will feel less frustrated as a helper and will be a more valuable resource for the woman.” This is an important book and has had a huge impact on the way I view a lot of relationships. I can’t recommend it enough.
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