See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  *

  The feminist movement had a clear goal in the 1970s – to ensure that domestic violence became a political issue that connected modern violence against women with a history of systematic male power and privilege. That approach has taken the movement – and society – a long way. Now, in the shift towards a more complex understanding of why men abuse, the feminist movement can also give us insight into what is happening inside the minds of men. It was feminist academics, after all, who first showed men that patriarchy hurts them too, because it makes them sacrifice rich emotional lives in exchange for a phony promise of control and material success. Indeed, feminist academics were the first to even study masculinity, and developed much of what we know about men’s inner emotional lives. ‘Back in the 1970s,’ says Salter, ‘feminist psychoanalysis was looking at issues around men, vulnerability and dependency, and the high level of sensitivity among men that their basic needs can’t be fulfilled, and that they will be overwhelmed and betrayed in their interpersonal relationships. Those sorts of approaches are now excoriated as “anti-feminist”. Well, they’re not anti-feminist: this was foundational feminist work, and it was very prominent in the 1980s in understandings of male violence.’ It’s to this work that we must now return.

  It’s indisputable that traditional notions of masculinity – particularly male entitlement – are at the core of men’s violence against women. Abusive men obviously take power and control in their relationships. But there are many other questions that I believe we need to answer. What are the different reasons men have for needing to dominate their partners? What is happening in the minds of these men to make them sabotage the lives of their partners and children – to the point where they destroy even their own lives? These are critical parts of the puzzle I believe are missing from our public conversations about domestic abuse.

  We’ll talk more about patriarchy later, and how it governs the forces that create an abusive mind. But since it’s the mind we’re trying to understand, we’ll also take a close look at some dark corners of the human psyche.

  It’s only by integrating both viewpoints – feminism and psychology – that we can start to truly comprehend the phenomenon of men’s violence against women, and find effective ways to stop it.

  *

  There’s an oft-quoted phrase from the novelist Margaret Atwood that made me look at the abusive mind with fresh eyes. ‘Men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them.’ Atwood says this line was based on a straw poll she conducted among her friends and students. ‘I asked some women students in a poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said. “Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine. “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.”’

  We could look at this contrast with derision, scoff at the fragility of men’s egos and rage at how pathetic they are for being preoccupied by petty concerns, while women have real things to fear. Or, given how destructive those fragile male egos can be, we could take it seriously. Why is it that men are so afraid of being laughed at?

  This is what led me to the study of shame – and humiliated fury.

  *To give just one example, there is the Neo-Darwinist view – especially popular with men’s rights activists – which insists that violence against women is a natural feature of evolution, because men instinctively do what’s necessary to retain a female mate and control the means of reproduction. Can’t change that; it’s natural. Apparently perpetrators missed the evolutionary memo, though, because their violence commonly starts or escalates when their partners fall pregnant. As domestic abuse expert Donald Dutton and his co-author, Susan Golant, pointed out: ‘Why would a man bent on passing along his genes endanger his progeny and the source of future descendants?’ Why indeed.

  #To his surprise, there was little evidence for PTSD being a notable factor – only 10 per cent of those he studied showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress, impulsivity or borderline disorders. Even psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia, which have been linked to aggressive behaviour, are seen in only a small percentage of violent offenders.

  †The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the psychiatric bible. It defines and classifies mental disorders with the stated aim of improving diagnosis, treatment and research.

  §Commonly in Australia, men’s behaviour change programs combine CBT techniques from the psychopathology model with the gendered education advanced by the feminist model.

  4

  SHAME

  with David Hollier

  Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE, SHAME

  Professor Neil Websdale is like a domestic violence detective. As head of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative in Flagstaff, Arizona, he spends his time reconstructing what happened in the days and months leading up to a domestic homicide. To find out how and why the homicide occurred, Websdale examines the case through both the eyes of the victim – via the evidence she leaves behind, testimony from friends and relatives – and the eyes of her killer. He applies a historian’s lens to the killer’s life and, sometimes he interviews him in jail. This is not a police investigation: a fatality review looks to better understand homicides, to design interventions that may stop them from happening. Websdale is the first to admit his work is inexact. ‘Women and family members take their secrets to the grave, as do perpetrators. We’re working with the haunting presence of the inexplicable.’

  After decades studying perpetrators, Websdale says none of the standard models get to the heart of what he’s seeing. In the hundreds of killers he’s profiled, he doesn’t see men driven solely by a desire for power and control, nor has he found a unifying thread of disorder or mental illness. But his investigations have time and again brought him back to one recurring element: shame. ‘A lot of these guys struck me as deeply ashamed men,’ he says, and the majority had life histories that were ‘steeped in shame – particularly compromised masculinity’.

  For his book Familicidal Hearts, Websdale conducted a detailed study of seventy-six coercive controllers who killed their families.1 His analysis of their lives and motives is critical to our understanding of abusive men. Because despite exerting enormous power over their families, these men didn’t actually appear to be powerful. They certainly got a ‘fleeting sense of ascendancy created through force, intimidation and instilling a deep fear in loved ones’, as Lundy Bancroft describes, and they clearly benefited from that by ‘receiving various services, labour and privileges’: the luxury of never compromising; control over finances; having their goals prioritised; domestic service and so on.2 But their abuse wasn’t driven by a simple desire for power and privilege. The driver of their abuse was buried deep inside, where an insatiable hunger for intimacy and belonging had mutated into violence through contact with another powerful emotion – shame.

  This deep, long-buried shame was much too painful for the men to acknowledge, let alone address. When their shame was triggered (in ways we will soon explore) the only way they could override its intolerable pain was to overwhelm it, even momentarily, with a feeling of power. This they achieved through lashing out, abusing, controlling or terrorising their loved ones. This is the destructive force of ‘humiliated fury’.

  The concept of humiliated fury dates back to 19713 and was coined by the American psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis. Lewis was a pioneer in the field of psychology when female psychoanalysts were still very much a minority. She was the first to clinically study guilt and shame. She introduced the idea that some men used ‘humiliated fury’ to protect themselves against feeling powerless and defective; by blaming others, they were able to regain a sense of power and avoid unbearable feelings of shame. Picture,
for example, the schoolyard bully who gets up in a smaller boy’s face, daring him to repeat what he just muttered under his breath; this is the schoolyard version of the man who beats his wife for daring to challenge his opinion. Lewis, a staunch feminist born and raised in New York, branded shame the ‘sleeper emotion’ that lurked behind depression, obsession, narcissism and paranoia. Shame was a ‘sleeper’ because it was virtually taboo, even in the therapy room: in her study of hundreds of hours of therapy sessions,4 Lewis found that psychoanalysts rarely, if ever, discussed shame with their clients. Instead, when faced with shame-ridden clients, these psychoanalysts were simply (and wrongly, according to Lewis) diagnosing them with borderline or narcissistic personality disorders. This problem persists.*5 As shame and violence expert James Gilligan points out, it’s as though we’re so ashamed of shame that we can barely bring ourselves to talk about it.

  Let’s clarify a few basics about shame. First, perpetrators who have antisocial personality disorders such as psychopathy or sociopathy – the group identified as ‘Cobras’ – are not driven by humiliated fury. From his case reviews and interviews, Websdale has noticed that perpetrators with antisocial personality disorders ‘appear less vulnerable and dependent, suffer less abandonment anxiety and sensitivity to rejection, and seem to have more narcissism, grandiosity, and emotional isolation’. In fact, Websdale says he has interviewed killers who have coldly described their murderous acts as ‘transcendent’ or ‘spiritual’ experiences. Whether or not shame plays a part in these men’s perpetration, says Websdale, is something that requires more research. Psychopaths can feel empathy and shame, but they don’t feel it spontaneously, and it doesn’t overwhelm them.6 As one diagnosed psychopath explains, ‘If most people feel an emotion between seven and eight on a dial of ten, I feel it between zero and two.’7

  Now to the next point: shame is not guilt. Guilt is the feeling we’ve done something bad or have wronged someone. When we have guilt, we can apologise and, if we are forgiven, we may be absolved of our guilty feeling. But nobody can absolve you of shame. You have to do that work yourself. That’s because shame is not just a feeling that we’ve done something bad, it’s the unspeakable (and often deeply buried) feeling, ‘I am bad’ – the feeling that we are ‘unloved and unlovable’.8 ‘What does shame require?’ Lewis asked. ‘That you be a better person, and not be ugly, and not be stupid, and not have failed? The only thing that suits it at this moment is for you to be nonexistent. That’s what people frequently say. I could crawl through a hole, I could sink through the floor, I could die. It’s so acutely painful.’9 There is no easy way to be rid of shame. It persists like a chemical burn.

  Guilt and shame produce diametrically opposite effects in violent people. Studies of convicted criminals in Germany and the United States show that ‘guilt is more likely to convince prisoners to avoid crime in the future, whereas shame … produces a desire to lash out against unfair emotional pain and social blame. And this can lead to more bad behavior, not less.’10

  Before we interrogate the destructive force of men’s shame and humiliated fury, let’s take a minute to talk about shame itself. Shame is an emotion that everybody has to deal with (even if, in psychopaths, the effect of it is deeply muted). The way we respond to it has a lot to do with how we were raised, the culture we live in, and – first and foremost – whether we are male or female.

  Though our culture excels at finding ever more sophisticated ways for us to feel shame, it’s important to understand that shame itself is not a learned emotion. It is one of the nine primary ‘affects’#11 we are born with, on the same level physiologically as anger, sadness, fear, joy, anticipation, surprise, dissmell (the avoidance of bad smells) and disgust. A baby seeking contact with her mother, for example, may, if the mother doesn’t acknowledge her, display classic shame responses: her body slumps, she turns her face away and looks downward, away from her mother’s face. Having her strong interest in connection rebuffed, she feels a type of shame.12

  Why is this important to understand? Because it tells us there is an evolutionary purpose to shame. It’s not just there to make us miserable: it is fundamental to our survival in social groups. Researchers from the University of California say that just as pain exists to prevent us from damaging our tissue, ‘the function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them’. When we were hunter-gatherers, our survival depended on being included in social life – on having the other members of our small group value us enough to share food, protection and care with us. Shame was one emotion that regulated our behaviour, and made us weigh up the possible consequences of our actions – which, if weighed incorrectly, could lead to being exiled, hurt or killed.13

  Today, it’s less likely that you’ll die if you’re exiled from your community. But the fear of becoming a pariah in the eyes of people we love and trust is still acute. To protect us against shame and exile, we keep our own internal records of acts that will make us liked or disliked. This is why, for example, victims of domestic abuse often keep their abuse a secret, and victims of child sexual abuse can take decades to tell anybody – the fear that they will be devalued in the eyes of their community is so great that they feel a need to bury what was done to them.

  In the modern world, the list of shame-triggering behaviours has grown exponentially. For women, the potential sources of shame are kaleidoscopic and ever-changing. Modern culture has women walking a tightrope – be sexy but not too sexy, be smart but not intimidating, assertive but not pushy, and on it goes. Fall just an inch over the side of what has been decreed acceptable and you haven’t just done something wrong – you are wrong. Even emotionality – a supposedly approved trait in women – can be evidence of women’s inherent defectiveness: proof that females are innately irrational and not to be trusted in positions of power. So plentiful are the triggers for women’s shame that they’re almost impossible to avoid. ‘For women,’ says Brené Brown, the renowned researcher on shame and vulnerability, ‘shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat.’14

  Male shame, on the other hand, is built around one unbreakable rule: do not be weak. To be a man is to be strong, powerful and in control. Weakness, vulnerability, dependency: these all break manhood’s number one rule. For some men, the merest emotional disturbance – the slightest hint of vulnerability – can be so intolerable they must immediately expel it, usually by finding someone or something else to blame. In this moment of pain, they may also feel an urgent need to be cared for – even by the very person they are attacking.

  The more closely one identifies with strict gender norms, the more likely one is to feel shame for disobeying them. In both sexes, the reactions to these feelings of shame can be extreme – but the way men and women respond to shame is itself gendered, as we will see.

  *

  Shame is no excuse for men’s violence. Many men who feel shame or jealousy, even acutely, don’t respond in violent or abusive ways. Consider the men who, after suffering childhoods of abuse, shame or neglect, grow up vowing never to repeat their mother’s or father’s violence – men whose pride stems from modelling love and tenderness with their lovers and their children. Or those who have spent years working through their deep shame and anger so they don’t end up taking their pain out on others.

  However, when abusive people are confronted with feelings of shame, they take the path of least resistance. Instead of acknowledging their own sense of powerlessness and sitting with the discomfort, they blame others and, like the schoolyard bully, use violence to achieve a phony – and often short-lived – feeling of power and pride. Women and children suffer horrific abuse – and sometimes death – at the hands of men who refuse to deal with the true source of their own pain and frustration.

  It’s a basic human instinct to defend ourselves against shame, because by its very nature shame is an unbearable feeling. But as therapists never tire of repeating: it’s not the feeling that
causes all the trouble, it’s the way we respond to it. And the way individuals respond to shame differs enormously. In his 1992 book Shame and Pride, prominent American psychiatrist Donald Nathanson identified four basic human reactions to shame: withdrawal, attack self, avoidance and attack others. Within each of these responses is a ‘library of methods people use when shame strikes’.15 Someone reacting to shame by going into withdrawal may do something as mild as look at the ground, or as extreme as avoid human contact altogether. The withdrawal response is driven by the fear that if we are seen in our experience of shame, people will hold us in contempt. It is actually the most courageous way to deal with shame: people who tend towards withdrawal are the ones most likely to do the emotional work necessary to process their shame and move through it without harming themselves or others.

  Another reaction is to ‘attack self’ – to negate or annihilate oneself in an effort to control the punishment one feels is not only inevitable, but deserved. A mild version of this is self-deprecating humour (to make fun of yourself before others get the chance); but when the shame becomes overwhelming, the responses become more intense: self-loathing, self-harm and, at the furthest extreme, suicide.

  Perhaps the most invisible response to shame is avoidance. In extreme cases, this is the province of narcissists – people who have constructed their entire identity and lifestyle to avoid ever feeling shame. If you think shame and narcissism are polar opposites, think of the contradiction at the core of the narcissist: despite their grandiosity, attention-seeking and seemingly unassailable high self-esteem, the narcissist continually seeks approval and flattery from others – and will respond aggressively to the merest hint of challenge or humiliation. This is not a confident and powerful personality type; this is, as Lewis writes, an individual hiding from deep-seated feelings of shame and worthlessness. This is what makes narcissistic men particularly dangerous. If the narcissist is prepared to build his entire personality – his hubris, excessive self-love and grandiosity – as a firewall against feelings of shame or guilt, what might he do to someone who threatens to demolish this wall and expose his true self?