See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Of the hundreds of accounts from survivors I’ve heard or read, this one, from a woman in Queensland, has seared itself into my memory. ‘My head was pounding,’ she begins. ‘He was ripping out my hair. I had big chunks of hair missing … I was screaming the whole time. The neighbours didn’t call anyone. When I tried to scream, he would smother me. Then I blacked out. When I woke up, he was on top of me and he started having sex with me. I was like, stop it, everything is hurting, I can’t move, stop it, you’re hurting me. I was crying. He was like, shut up, shut up, I’m just using you, shut up, you slut. I was like, please stop, please stop. He was like, I’m doing this because I love you. Then he obviously didn’t stop. I just blacked out … Then when I woke up again, he was yelling at me to get up because he had to go to work.’1

  I’m doing this because I love you. That’s the line I couldn’t stop thinking about. How had this man’s ‘love’ become so dangerously perverted?

  For most readers, the violence and insanity of this assault will be as foreign as it is shocking. And yet the evidence tells us that such scenes play out every day and night across Australia: in suburban homes and town camps, apartment blocks and waterfront homes. The abusers are men who are prominent and successful, men who work regular jobs, men who are mentally ill, men with drinking problems, men who work their guts out for minimum wage, and men who expect their partners to earn all the money and do all the housework. Men who say they love their partners. Men who say they want equal rights for women. Men who think most chicks are dumb sluts begging to be raped. Men who often show no signs they are capable of such sadism. Just as an infinite variety of women end up as victims, there is no such thing as a typical male perpetrator.

  So, how does it happen? Why do so many different kinds of men abuse the women they claim to love?

  The answer to that question depends on who you ask.

  Let me be clear at the outset: explaining abusive behaviour is not an exact science. It’s a battle of ideas being fought on territory we’ve only just begun to map. It’s been about fifty years since scholars started taking domestic abuse seriously, and ever since, competing factions have clashed over how to explain it. We’ll hear more from them later.

  But first, as we’ve seen, we make a terrible mistake when we treat ‘domestic abuse’ as one homogenous phenomenon. Those two words cover behaviour that ranges from cold and systematic to reactive and haphazard. Perpetrators may use predictable behaviours and tactics – as though they’ve studied some ‘perpetrator’s handbook’ – but the intensity of their abuse, and their reasons for abusing, vary wildly. A sociopathic coercive controller who exploits his wife for money and domestic labour is very different from the morbidly jealous man who controls his wife because he’s terrified she will leave. Add other variables, like mental illness and substance abuse, and you have another set of circumstances again.

  That’s why researchers have attempted to arrange the behaviour of abusive men into a few distinct categories. These categories, in academic terms, are known as typologies – an attempt to distil the chaos of abusive behaviour into clear, observable patterns. They’ve had some success: in study after study, researchers have repeatedly landed on very similar ways to describe different ‘types’ of abusive men. It’s tempting to treat these types as diagnoses – oh, he’s definitely this type, not that. But a caution before we begin: even the researchers who’ve defined these types say it’s often impossible to slot individual abusers definitively into one type. As we saw in Chapter 1, some men may start out looking like one type and shape-shift into another; others may seem like a combination. While these categories may not entirely map the condition of men’s violence, right now they are the best guide we have.

  *

  In 1995, two psychology professors at the University of Washington made a surprising discovery. Doctors John Gottman and Neil Jacobson were trying to solve a riddle that had long bewildered researchers: why are some men violent towards women? To do this, they invited 200 couples into a laboratory – nicknamed ‘The Love Lab’ – to examine their arguing styles. They connected them to polygraph machines to record physiological responses such as heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. Then they asked them to fight.

  Late one Saturday night, they were crunching the data on sixty-three couples where the men had a history of controlling behaviour and physical and emotional violence. These sixty-three men were coercive controllers: they sought to dominate their victims by isolating them, micromanaging their behaviour, humiliating and degrading them, monitoring their movements and creating an environment of confusion, contradiction and extreme threat.

  The data showed something Gottman and Jacobson weren’t expecting. Usually, when people argue, they experience a range of internal responses – their heart rate goes up, their blood pressure skyrockets and so on. And that’s exactly what the data showed for the large majority of those men – around 80 per cent. But, for the other 20 per cent, the physiological results showed precisely the opposite. As these men became increasingly aggressive towards their partners, their heart rates dropped. On the outside, they looked just as angry and worked up as the other men, but internally they were perfectly calm. In fact, as they verbally abused their partners, their measurements indicated that they felt calmer than earlier in the study, when the doctors had asked them to close their eyes and relax.

  Gottman and Jacobson replayed the tapes again and again, casting a forensic eye over the differences between how these two distinct groups of men fought. Each behaviour and physiological response, from flickers of disgust to clammy hands to audible sighs, was meticulously coded and recorded. From this elaborate dataset, the doctors devised two profiles: ‘Cobras’ and ‘Pit Bulls’.2

  COBRAS

  The smaller group of men – who were internally calm when arguing – were observed to be more aggressive and even sadistic towards their partners. Their behaviour was akin to that of the cobra, which sizes up its victim, then becomes perfectly focused, before striking hard and fast. By calming themselves internally, the Cobras remained in complete control even when they looked like they were losing it, enabling them to be swift and ruthless with their partners. They also displayed fewer signs of emotional dependence; some would even goad their wives into cheating on them. They were very frightening to their wives, the researchers noted, ‘and yet at the same time captivating’.

  ‘George’ was a Cobra. He liked unsettling people with his dry, dark humour and was a cold and systematic abuser who dominated his wife, ‘Vicky’, in terrifying ways. Gottman and Jacobson describe a typical scene from their life:

  George came home late after drinking with his buddies and found Vicky and Christi (their young daughter) sharing a pizza. Vicky was angry at him for missing dinner and ignored him when he arrived. Her silence angered him and he shouted, ‘You got a problem?’ When she remained silent, he slammed his fist into the pizza, knocked her off the chair, dragged her across the room by her hair, held her down and spit pizza in her face. He then beat her up, yelling, ‘You’re a bitch! You’ve ruined my life!’ Vicky described the argument as typical: ‘powerful, mean and fast.’3

  George thought nothing of the assault: he minimised it, and said he didn’t remember the details ‘because it’s not important’. Besides: ‘She was a bitch and she deserved it.’ Gottman and Jacobson wrote that ‘George was not emotionally dependent on Vicky … [but] in a peculiar way, he did need her. It seemed to us … that his need for her was so infantile, a need to know that he had the power to control her. Having this power was important to him, perhaps because as a child he was so powerless.’ George was attached to the experience of having power over someone, but was not emotionally attached to Vicky herself. She could be anyone – so long as she was someone he could dominate.4

  PIT BULLS

  The majority of coercive controllers in the study behaved quite differently. Their heart rates increased when they fought. Their anger built gradually, and they became more domine
ering and threatening over time, until they were in such a state of rage that they couldn’t calm themselves. Searching for another animal analogy, Gottman and Jacobson decided they were akin to that notoriously aggressive breed of dog, the pit bull, because their hostility slowly increased until, finally, they attacked. Unlike the cold and avoidant Cobras, Pit Bulls were codependent and profoundly insecure, twisted by morbid jealousy and paranoia.

  A soft-spoken, artistic man called ‘Don’ was a typical Pit Bull. He was obsessively jealous with his wife, ‘Martha’, and terrified she would abandon him. This made him resent how dependent he’d become on her – and how vulnerable she made him feel. Things weren’t all bad with Don: he loved to buy Martha presents and take her to expensive restaurants. But once they were married, Don’s violence became an almost daily event, and the honeymoon periods of remorse shrank until he stopped bothering to apologise at all. Don was a typical coercive controller: he monitored Martha’s movements obsessively, calling regularly to check on her.

  Don wasn’t charismatic and charming like George; in fact, when he met Martha, she was struck by how candid and raw he was about his terrible childhood, during which he’d been routinely humiliated and beaten by his preacher father. He was tender and attentive with Martha, at the beginning. When Don’s violence began to emerge, it was short-lived: he would be mortified by his behaviour, apologise sincerely and return to doting on her – until it happened again. At first, Martha fought back and tried to hold Don accountable for his violence. But as the abuse became more frequent and severe, she grew increasingly afraid of him and withdrew into a state of hypervigilance, exhausted by her constant efforts to try to keep the peace. There was no respite for Martha – managing Don’s volatility was a full-time job. His emotional needs, as the researchers noted, ‘were constant … [he] needed Martha to fill a void that could never be filled’. Don had a ‘compelling need to feel connected to others’. But after growing up in a family where emotional intimacy was cauterised by abuse, the relationship soon reached the point where ‘the only way that Don could connect with Martha was through violence’.5 By the time they showed up at the laboratory, Don was beating, humiliating and abusing Martha every day. There was no latitude for her to resist: even when she tried to calm him down by asking, ‘Can we just drop it for now?’ Don would blow up and accuse her of being abusive. His public face was very different: to the doctors, he appeared ‘meek and mild-mannered’. In their interviews with him, he insisted it was he who was the victim, not Martha: she loved to make him angry and got off on it when he reacted.6

  This was, the doctors found, one of the key distinctions between the two groups of coercive controllers: like many Pit Bulls, Don ‘didn’t know he was dangerous’. Cobras like George, on the other hand, knew they were dangerous – they just didn’t care.7

  TELLING THE DIFFERENCE

  From the fights they observed and their interviews with each couple, Gottman and Jacobson listed the differences between the two basic types of coercive controller. Cobras were generally hedonistic and impulsive, and blighted by a pathological sense of entitlement. They abused and dominated their wives to get what they wanted, whenever they wanted it. They had little interest in intimacy and did not fear abandonment. Instead, they appeared interested only in the benefits their wives could provide: sex, money, social profile, and so on. They were in the relationship for instant gratification and the thrill of being dominant. Cobras were the abusers most likely to answer the door calmly to police and fool them into believing it was really their agitated and hysterical wife who was the problem, not them. Statistically, Cobras were also the ones most likely to have antisocial personality disorders – the sociopathic/psychopathic types relatively untroubled by messy feelings of guilt and remorse, or empathy. They were also most likely to have had severely problematic childhoods, in which at least one parent had abused or neglected them. These experiences in childhood, the researchers surmised, had perhaps ‘led the Cobras to vow … that no-one would ever control them again’. Seventy-eight per cent of Cobras in the study had grown up with violence, compared to 51 per cent of the Pit Bulls.8

  George came from a divorced family, and grew up being beaten and neglected by both parents. His mother was a sex worker, and George was sexually abused by her male clients. As a vulnerable, dependent child living in this frightening environment, George worked out how to go cold when he was in a state of stress: when his mother hit him, for example, he would ‘leave the scene’ in his mind (a process called ‘dissociation’).9 Vicky could see how wounded George was, and like so many other women devoted to their abusers was determined she would be the woman to help him heal. But her devotion was simply another source of amusement for George. As he yelled at her while they argued in the lab, ‘Don’t you see? It’s all a game! Life is a game.’10

  The violence of George and other Cobras was typically more severe than that of the Pit Bulls: 38 per cent of the Cobras had threatened their wives with a weapon, compared to only 4 per cent of Pit Bulls. In the twelve months before their time in the lab, George had threatened to kill Vicky repeatedly, and had kicked, pushed, shoved and choked her more than a dozen times. Nine per cent of the Cobras had actually stabbed or shot their wives; not one Pit Bull had done this. The majority of both groups had, however, used severe physical violence against their wives, including beating and choking them.11

  Whereas Cobras were generally difficult or intimidating, Pit Bulls were the kind of men neighbours and friends would describe as ‘nice guys’. Few would ever see their dark side, because their abuse only surfaced in intimate relationships. But they were no less controlling than the Cobras: they were often jealous to the point of obsession, and prone to converting the most unlikely clues into evidence of betrayal. These were the men who, once wounded, were more likely to stalk and potentially kill their partners after they’d left. ‘Although one is safer trying to leave a Pit Bull in the short run,’ the researchers wrote, ‘Pit Bulls may actually be more dangerous to leave in the long run.’12 Cobras were less interested in chasing; they were at their most dangerous when they were about to be exposed and left – for instance, if their partner threatened to call the police or take them to court. For Cobras, the emphasis is on the control, not on the insecure need that drives Pit Bulls; if she leaves and doesn’t seek to reveal his abuse, a Cobra can simply move on to the next woman.

  Two years after the initial study, Gottman and Jacobson interviewed their subjects again. The marriages of the Pit Bulls were highly volatile – almost half of them had ended. But not a single Cobra had separated or divorced. That’s because the women married to Cobras were, the researchers deduced, too terrified to leave.13

  When I spoke to John Gottman about this experiment, he was on the other end of a phone line in Seattle. There, he and his wife, Dr Julie Gottman, head up the world-renowned Gottman Institute, which specialises in couples therapy and takes a ‘research-based approach to relationships’. Gottman’s been in the love business for more than forty years. He started out as a mathematician, studying at America’s leading school for technology, MIT, and became famous for – among other things – being able to predict whether a couple would be together in fifteen years, simply by watching them talk for one hour (his success rate is up to 94 per cent).14 Today, his research findings form a key part of what many psychotherapists understand about marriage and divorce.

  Gottman talked about this particular study – one of hundreds he’s carried out over the past twenty-five years – with such enthusiasm and detailed recall it was as if the results came in yesterday. ‘Here’s another thing that surprised us,’ he said. ‘The violence decreased over time, so we thought, oh, maybe this problem just takes care of itself. But it turned out we were wrong. Once a perpetrator has frightened the victim, they don’t have to use as much violence to get control. So, for example, a guy can just swiftly move his head – this is what the Cobras do, swiftly move their head and have an intake of breath, and just glare �
� and it reminds the partner that they’re capable of sudden changes … that’s enough to keep them in line.’ Is that partly why some victims talk about being so traumatised in court, I asked: because the perpetrator is sending those subtle signals to intimidate them, but nobody else can see what they’re doing? ‘That’s right,’ Gottman replied.

  They also noticed something else about these coercive controllers: ‘They all think they’re undiscovered geniuses,’ said Gottman. ‘Like, one guy that we studied, who is a Pit Bull; he was sure that he was going to become really famous internationally for his coin collection. That was his claim to fame. All of them had this ethos – “I’m an undiscovered talent, and the world has abused me by not recognising my great talent.” They get the woman to go along with this. They’re on their side, that this person should be a celebrity. In reality, a lot of these guys don’t do very well.’

  However, the guys who did do well, Gottman added, were ‘really terrifying’. ‘They’re not criminals, and they’re not losers,’ he said. ‘They’re CEOs, detectives, judges, entrepreneurs. Like this guy [Rob] Porter [former Trump White House staff secretary] who just resigned from the White House. He was violent towards three women. Those guys are really terrifying, because when the women leave, they try to get even, and they make sure they ruin these women’s lives. So you can’t think of Pit Bulls and Cobras as criminal losers; many of them are very successful. I think our president is one of them.’

  *

  The two basic types Gottman and Jacobson identified are seen time and again – by other researchers, and by people who work with perpetrators. Andre Van Altena has spent more than two decades working with violent men in NSW prisons. He’s a bloke’s bloke – a hulk of a man who has spent most of his adult life trying to get some of the state’s most dangerous men to own up to their violence and change their behaviour. Over the years, he says, he too has observed these two distinct types. The codependent men – the Pit Bulls – ‘are often the ones who are very erratic, hostile, needing lots of support, and demanding support’. These men are very different to the ‘more calculating, controlled offender’. These offenders – Gottman and Jacobson’s Cobras – are what Van Altena refers to as ‘the extreme end’: the guys with antisocial disorders like psychopathy or sociopathy, who would typically avoid a program like his. ‘Some will tell you that they’re selective on who they get involved with in their relationships – they’re looking for someone that they can violate, that they can groom, and [they’re looking] for the opportunity to control them.’