By Chuck Derry For many years, I facilitated courtmandated groups for men who batter. In the early 1980s we were concentrating on healthy relationship skills building, emotional identification and selfcontrol, and anger management, among other related issues. Then battered women in Duluth, Minnesota, began gathering to discuss the impact of the violence on their lives.… Continue Reading Abusive Men Describe the Benefits of Violence
I have mixed feelings on this because yes, information can be used to cause harm. That same information has also been crucial to me in understanding how abuse and manipulation have affected me. Without identifying the motive behind certain behaviours or actions, how am I supposed to know which boundaries to put up to protect myself? This is obviously very situational to me because in order for me to act on something, I need to understand the under layers of a topic in order to effectively change my views/habits/behaviour.
This article to me reads as an “Ah-Ha!” moment in understanding how to approach the topic of abuse to abusers. Unfortunately, that part wasn’t expanded on enough and since the article is nearly 10 years old, I don’t think I have the patience enough to see if there is any sort of follow-up regarding how to talk about abuse to abusers.
With the information I’ve learned about abusers and manipulators over the past years, I’ve been not only helping myself place proper boundaries, but encouraging the women in my life to protect their boundaries too by informing them of both actions and intent behind those actions from abusers.
My help is one sided though because there are a few men in my life that are on the border of being decent people, they just need light pushes away from toxic masculine influences. Too much can cause things to crumble. Understanding their intent behind their words has helped in avoiding unnecessary, name-calling backlash. It’s an exhausting balancing act. I more often choose to not engage them because it’s such a long, draining process.
I do wish there were more effective ways of educating the dangers and damage from such forms of masculinity. In my area, medical professionals throw Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Mindfulness at people and call it a day. I feel those methods are like placing a bandage over a problem without looking at the cause. Those methods seem to cause more anger, regret and frustration. It’s such an overburdened mess. It seems the author is attempting to reframe his methods from “treating batterers” to “a consistent coordinated community response.” Or at least advocating for a consistent coordinated community response in general. To approach this sensitive topic from another approach. I can agree this point could have been expanded upon.
Humans are too complex and there’s so no one perfect way to teach other people. What works for one person would completely zone out another person. What can be useful by one person can be harmful by another. There’s really no easy way to talk about uncomfortable topics and it sucks we have to resort to war tactics regarding such information.
You raise interesting points! I guess it is crucial to distinguish with what audience in mind the text was written. As you say, it may help abusive people to be empathized with and to get their intentions mirrored back to them in order for them to understand their own intentions better. Just as the men in the text themselves, who apparently had problems identifying their own intentions in the first place.
But I have a few problems with that. First, I don’t think the text does a particularly good job at actually placing these intentions in any meaningful context. As the other commenter said, it is just raw data. Meaning the author just wrote those quotes down but didn’t expand further on it. Stopping at this stage, other men or abusive people in general might stop thinking about their intentions and feel encouraged. Yeah, I want control! Right, I just keep on doing this, because that’s what’s in my best interest. Second, as I said I would be cautious with trying to empathize with abusive people. Too easily you get could up with feeling sorry for them or giving them the opportunity to feel as victims. Because obviously those men are probably not all fine and have their own struggles that they then externalize and make the problem for other people around them. A lot of men-support groups that start out trying to help men get out of toxic masculinity actually just perpetuate its problems because men then will see themselves as victims and feel legitimized in their actions. Patriarchal violence has the idea at its core that men are the only subjects while all others are mere objects. It is really hard to fundamentally challenge this indoctrinated view in men who instinctively see women as inherently inferior from men. If empathizing is your only strategy, this will fail to challenge this underlying imbalance.
Anyways, the article does a bad job in any of this and that’s why I didn’t get why it was posted here in the first place. I have to go now, may expand on this further later.
I have mixed feelings on this because yes, information can be used to cause harm. That same information has also been crucial to me in understanding how abuse and manipulation have affected me. Without identifying the motive behind certain behaviours or actions, how am I supposed to know which boundaries to put up to protect myself? This is obviously very situational to me because in order for me to act on something, I need to understand the under layers of a topic in order to effectively change my views/habits/behaviour.
This article to me reads as an “Ah-Ha!” moment in understanding how to approach the topic of abuse to abusers. Unfortunately, that part wasn’t expanded on enough and since the article is nearly 10 years old, I don’t think I have the patience enough to see if there is any sort of follow-up regarding how to talk about abuse to abusers.
With the information I’ve learned about abusers and manipulators over the past years, I’ve been not only helping myself place proper boundaries, but encouraging the women in my life to protect their boundaries too by informing them of both actions and intent behind those actions from abusers.
My help is one sided though because there are a few men in my life that are on the border of being decent people, they just need light pushes away from toxic masculine influences. Too much can cause things to crumble. Understanding their intent behind their words has helped in avoiding unnecessary, name-calling backlash. It’s an exhausting balancing act. I more often choose to not engage them because it’s such a long, draining process.
I do wish there were more effective ways of educating the dangers and damage from such forms of masculinity. In my area, medical professionals throw Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Mindfulness at people and call it a day. I feel those methods are like placing a bandage over a problem without looking at the cause. Those methods seem to cause more anger, regret and frustration. It’s such an overburdened mess. It seems the author is attempting to reframe his methods from “treating batterers” to “a consistent coordinated community response.” Or at least advocating for a consistent coordinated community response in general. To approach this sensitive topic from another approach. I can agree this point could have been expanded upon.
Humans are too complex and there’s so no one perfect way to teach other people. What works for one person would completely zone out another person. What can be useful by one person can be harmful by another. There’s really no easy way to talk about uncomfortable topics and it sucks we have to resort to war tactics regarding such information.
You raise interesting points! I guess it is crucial to distinguish with what audience in mind the text was written. As you say, it may help abusive people to be empathized with and to get their intentions mirrored back to them in order for them to understand their own intentions better. Just as the men in the text themselves, who apparently had problems identifying their own intentions in the first place.
But I have a few problems with that. First, I don’t think the text does a particularly good job at actually placing these intentions in any meaningful context. As the other commenter said, it is just raw data. Meaning the author just wrote those quotes down but didn’t expand further on it. Stopping at this stage, other men or abusive people in general might stop thinking about their intentions and feel encouraged. Yeah, I want control! Right, I just keep on doing this, because that’s what’s in my best interest. Second, as I said I would be cautious with trying to empathize with abusive people. Too easily you get could up with feeling sorry for them or giving them the opportunity to feel as victims. Because obviously those men are probably not all fine and have their own struggles that they then externalize and make the problem for other people around them. A lot of men-support groups that start out trying to help men get out of toxic masculinity actually just perpetuate its problems because men then will see themselves as victims and feel legitimized in their actions. Patriarchal violence has the idea at its core that men are the only subjects while all others are mere objects. It is really hard to fundamentally challenge this indoctrinated view in men who instinctively see women as inherently inferior from men. If empathizing is your only strategy, this will fail to challenge this underlying imbalance.
Anyways, the article does a bad job in any of this and that’s why I didn’t get why it was posted here in the first place. I have to go now, may expand on this further later.