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Anatomy of a violent relationship


by Jacobson, Neil S.; Gottman, John M. | Mar 01 '98


Yet we know surprisingly little about why somany men erupt into
violence, and why they feel such a need to control their women with
brutal behavior

Here, two leading marriage researchers plunge into the red hot core
of domestic abuse--observing violent couples in the heat of conflict-
-and surface with some startling answers.

Don was having a miserable day. There were rumors of layoffs at
work, and his supervisor I had been on his case for coming in late.
Not only was he sick of not getting credit for doing his work well,
he was sure he was about to get caught in some kind of vise he could
not control. Now Don was test-driving the car he had asked his wife,
Martha, to pick up from the garage. As he listened to his car's
motor, he knew instantly that she had been hoodwinked. That damn
rattle was still there when he drove up hills! By the time he pulled
into their driveway, he was so mad that he almost hit Martha's car.

"What is it with you?" Don railed as he walked into the
house. "Couldn't you tell that the damn car still wasn't running
right?"

Martha, who was cooking dinner, responded calmly. "Is something
wrong with the car? It sounded fine to me."

"Couldn't you tell you'd been had by the garage mechanics? Are you
really that stupid?" he continued.

Martha started defending herself. "Wait a minute. I may know nothing
about cars, but I resent being called `stupid.'"

Don continued railing against the mechanics and against Martha for
not standing up to them. He was beginning to see red, and he warned
her to shut up.

But Martha didn't shut up. "If you're such a big man, why didn't you
stand up to the mechanics the last time they gypped you?"

Don punched Martha in the face--hard. It was not the first punch of
their marriage. But she deserved it, he told himself as he continued
to hit her and yell at her. All he had wanted, he said, was a little
empathy about his problems--and here she was siding with the enemy.
Only a small part of him, a dim whisper in his brain, wanted to beg
her forgiveness, and by the next day he would manage to squelch even
that dim light of remorse.

How does a marital argument like this, one that seems to start out
in near-ordinary frustration. escalate so quickly into violence?
This question had come up time and again in our work as creators of
couples-therapy techniques and in our two decades as social
scientists studying marriage. We knew that the existing studies of
the dynamics of battering didn't provide adequate answers, because
they relied on after-the-fact reports by batterers and their
victims, reports which are often biased and easily distorted.
Particularly with battering, abundant psychological research shows
that people are simply not reliable observers of their own or their
intimate partner's behavior. So we decided to do something that no
one had ever done before--directly observe the arguments of violent
couples ourselves.

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=====================================
Using a simple public service announcement asking for couples
experiencing marital conflict, we were able to obtain a sample of 63
battering couples, as well as a control group of couples who were
equally dissatisfied with their marriages but had no history of
violence. All these volunteers agreed to come into the laboratory,
have electrodes hooked up to their bodies to record heart rate and
other vital signs, and be videotaped in the midst of arguments. (We
also provided important safeguards, including exit interviews to
ensure the woman's safety, and referrals to battered women's
shelters.)

As you'll see, in the eight years of this study we made a number of
myth-shattering discoveries:

Batterers share a common profile: they are unpredictable, unable to
be influenced by their wives, and impossible to prevent from
battering once an argument has begun.

Battered women are neither passive nor submissive; sometimes they
are as angry as the batterers. But women almost never batter men.

Batterers can be classified into two distinct types, men whose
temper slowly simmers until it suddenly erupts into violence, and
those who strike out immediately. This difference has important
implications for women leaving abusive relationships.

Emotional abuse plays a vital role in battering, undermining a
woman's confidence.

Domestic violence can decrease on its own--but it almost never
stops.

Battered women do leave at high rates, despite the increased danger
they face when leaving the relationship.

Battering's Beginnings

Battering is physical aggression with a purpose: to control,
intimidate, and subjugate another human being. It is always
accompanied by emotional abuse, often involves injury, and virtually
always causes fear in the battered woman. In our study, battering
couples had at least two episodes of kicking or hitting with a fist,
or at least one incident of potentially lethal violence, such as
strangling.

Can women ever be batterers? In our study, we found that some
battered women defend themselves, and hit or -push as often as their
husbands do. Some people claim that there is a huge underground
movement of battered husbands. However, statistics on violent women
do not take into account the impact and function of the violence.
According to research conducted by Dina Vivian, Ph.D., at the State
University of New York at Stonybrook, women are much more likely to
be injured and in need of medical care than men, and much more
likely to be killed by their husbands than the reverse. Women are
the ones who are beaten up. These injuries help to sustain the fear,
which is the force that provides battering with its power.

What about couples who periodically have arguments that escalate
into pushing and shoving, but not beyond? We discovered large
numbers of these couples, and we found that the husbands almost
never become batterers. While it is important to know about this low-
level violence, we were concerned with the dynamics of severely
violent couples.

Arguments under The Microscope

Through our research, we were able to reconstruct hundreds of
violent arguments. Although we knew we would not directly observe
violence between our subjects, we could observe their nonviolent
arguments in the laboratory, ask them about these encounters, then
judge their accounts of violent arguments by the accuracy of these
reports.



When we put violent arguments under a microscope this way, we
discovered a number of familiar themes. One of the most startling
was our inability to predict when batterers would cross over into
violence. While emotional abuse often preceded physical abuse, it
was such a common occurrence in the relationship that it did not
serve as an accurate warning sign. Further, there was no way for the
battered woman to control when emotional abuse would turn into
physic al abuse. Martha could have shut up when Don told her to. But
would this have stopped Don from hitting her? We have discovered
that once an episode starts, there is nothing that the woman can do
to affect its course.

Despite this inability, the women in our study did not become
passive or submissive. Even when the batterers reacted to everyday
requests with emotional abuse, the women typically responded calmly
and assertively. We found that they wanted to inject as much
normalcy into their lives as possible, and they didn't want to give
up on their dream of the family life that they wanted.

However, in all the videotapes we made, never did we hear a batterer
say anything like, "That's a good point," or "I never thought of
that,"--comments that most married men (and women) say all the time
during an argument. Instead, we observed that batterers became more
aggressive when their wives asserted themselves. When Martha
challenged him, we saw that Don responded violently in an attempt to
maintain his dominance, no matter what the costs.

Another way that batterer's arguments diverged from those of
nonviolent couples--perhaps the key difference--is that nonviolent
couples have what we call "a withdrawal ritual," where at some point
the escalation process stops or reverses itself. Some couples take
breaks, other couples compromise, still others do both. In battering
couples, the women are typically quite willing to stop at a point
where they start to sense danger, but once the husbands
are "activated," violence follows. Although the violence is
unpredictable, we were able to identify certain warning signs. When
belligerence and contempt during an argument were combined with
attempts to squelch, control, or dominate a wife's behavior, that
was a sign that a batterer was close to crossing the line. Don's
contemptuous way of asking Martha whether she was "really that
stupid," and his attempt to dominate her by telling her to shut up,
demonstrate a classic prelude to battering.

Surprisingly, both in the lab and at home, battered women expressed
as much belligerence and contempt as their husbands did. Like most
people, battered women get angry when they are insulted and
degraded. We saw much effort on the part of the women to contain
their anger, but it tended to leak out anyway. Nevertheless, their
initial responses--like Martha's retort to Don about not standing up
to the mechanics--could hardly be considered provocations to
violence.

The Slow Burn: "Pit Bulls"

Men like Don metabolize anger in kind of slow burn: it gradually
increases but never lets up. We call them "Pit Bulls" because they
grow more and more aggressive until they finally attack. These men,
we have found, constitute about 80 percent of batterers.

Pit Bulls have unrelenting contempt for women, and yet are extremely
dependent on them. This creates a unique dynamic in their behavior.
In many unhappy marriages, when one partner (usually the woman)
requests change, the other one (usually the man) resists change, and
eventually the woman's requests become demands, and the man's
avoidance becomes withdrawal. But Pit Bulls often both demand and
withdraw We can see this in the incessant demands that Don made of
Martha. Everything she did (including getting the car fixed) was
wrong because nothing she did was quite enough for Don. Martha had
to watch every move she made, give up her friends and family,
account for all of her time, avoid Don's jealousy, and try to
satisfy what he called his "simple need for a little empathy." Yet
even as she walked on eggshells, she was attacked for being
a "stupid bitch." Don blamed Martha for his own neediness, and
punished her for it almost every day they were together.

Through this scrutiny and these constant demands, Pit Bulls
establish control. Control is important to these men because they
genuinely feel that they will be abandoned if they do not maintain
constant vigilance over their wives. One particularly sinister form
of control they use is known as "gaslighting." This technique--which
gets its name from the film Gaslight, in which Charles Boyer
convinces Ingrid Bergman she is going insane--involves a systematic
denial of the wife's experience of reality For example, when one of
our subjects slapped his wife in front of a neighbor, he denied that
he had done it, telling her that this kind of behavior was
inconsistent with his personality, and that her accusations of abuse
came from her own disturbed mind. Although her face still hurt from
the slap, she thought to herself that maybe she had made it all up.
The neighbor, a friend of the husband's, went along and said he
didn't see anything.

This technique of denying the woman's reality can be so effective
that, when used in combination with methods to isolate the woman
from other people, it causes battered women to doubt their own
sandy. This is the ultimate form of abuse: to gain control of the
victim's mind.

Lightning Strikes: "Cobras"

When Don and Martha started arguing, Don's heart rate would go up,
he would sweat, and he'd exhibit other signs of emotional arousal.
Most people show this response. However, we were astonished to find
that as some batterers become more verbally aggressive, there is a
decrease in heart rate. Like the cobra who becomes still and focused
before striking its victim at over 100 miles an hour, these men calm
themselves internally and focus their attention while striking
swiftly at their wives with vicious verbal aggression.



When we separated these calm batterers from those who became
internally aroused, we found other profound differences between the
two groups. These Cobras"--who constituted about 20 percent of our
sample--were more likely to have used or threatened to use a knife
or a gun on their wives, and were more severely violent than the
other batterers. Only three percent of Pit Bulls had a history of
extramarital violence, while 44 percent of Cobras did. And while
about 33 percent of Pit Bulls qualified for a diagnosis
of "antisocial personality disorder"--which includes a long history
of impulsive criminal behavior, childhood episodes of lying,
stealing, fire setting, and cruelty to animals--fully 90 percent of
the Cobras met the criteria. Finally, even though both groups abused
alcohol at high rates, Cobras were more likely to be dependent on
illegal drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, and were much less
emotionally attached to their wives.

George was a typical Cobra. In the year prior to entering our
research project, George had threatened to kill Vicky numerous
times. One night several weeks before coming to see us, George came
home late after he'd been out drinking and found Vicky and their two
year-old daughter Christi sharing a pizza. Vicky was angry with 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
spat pizza in her face. He then beat her up, yelling, "You've ruined
my life!"

The contrast between this incident and the altercation between Don
and Martha over the car shows how Cobras are far more emotionally
aggressive towards their wives at the start of their arguments than
Pit Bulls. While Don became increasingly heated and less controlled
over the course of the argument, George escalated the situation
extremely rapidly, using both physical and verbal abuse in the
service of control, intimidation, and subjugation. He was in Vicky's
face twice as fast as she ever expected. This quick response is
typical of the way Cobras control their wives--a tactic which they
use because it often quiets the partner quickly and with minimal
effort.

Another main difference between Cobras and Pit Bulls is that Cobras
come from more chaotic family backgrounds. In our study, 78 percent
of the Cobras came from violent families, compared to 51 percent of
Pit Bulls. (In the population at large, 20 to 25 percent of children
grow up in violent homes.) George's childhood was a classic example.
He was beaten and neglected by both parents, and sexually abused by
his prostitute mother's male customers. Like other Cobras, he came
from a background that seriously crushed the implicit trust that
every child has in his or her parents. This horrible childhood
background, we believe, had somehow led the Cobras to vow to
themselves that no one would ever control them again.

MEN CAN CHANGE

An astonishing 54 percent of our male volunteers showed decreases in
violence during the second of two follow-up years. In fact, some men
no longer met our standards for being included in our violent group.
But this decrease in violence may be misleading. Once control is
established over a woman through battering, perhaps it can be
maintained by continued emotional abuse with intermittent battering
used as a terrifying reminder of what is possible in the marriage.
Cobras' violence was so severe that it may have been easier for them
than for the Pit Bulls to maintain control through emotional abuse
alone. Still, only seven percent of batterers in our study stopped
their violence altogether in the two-year follow-up period.

We did observe several examples of husbands stopping the violence
when it was unsuccessful in controlling their wives. George stopped
beating Vicky as soon as she responded to his bullying with anger of
her own.

WHEN WOMEN WON'T LEAVE

Three years after our two-year follow-up, we recontacted many of the
battered women and their husbands. Despite the greater incidence of
mental illness, drug addiction, emotional abuse, and severe violence
in Cobra relationships, the typical pattern among the Cobra couples
was for the wives to be committed to the marriages. While almost
half of Pit Bull marriages dissolved within two years, by the five
year follow-up point, only 25 percent of women married to Cobras had
left them; these women not only recognized the danger of trying to
leave them, but often were quite attached to them.

Why would a woman be attached to a man as dangerous as George?
Surprisingly, Vicky--like 80 percent of women married to Cobras--
tested normal on our personality scales. However, she described her
childhood as a "war zone" where her father would one day be absent
and disengaged, and then suddenly become physically abusive toward
Vicky's mother and all of the kids. She ran away from home to find a
better life. And when she became pregnant by George, she tried to
build her dream life. With her dashing new husband, she would
finally have the home she had always wanted.

But when Vicky realized her dream of a normal, non-abusive
relationship would never come to pass with George, she made the
decision to leave. With Vicky and other battered women, "giving up
the dream" was a pivotal step in shifting from fear to contempt and
a determination to leave. Battered women need to be helped to "give
up the dream" sooner, and this process should occur in conjunction
with a careful safety plan and the support of an experienced helper.

Once Vicky implemented her safety plan, which included restraining
orders against George and notifying his employer, the Navy, she
found that George lost interest in her and went on to new pursuits.
We found that Cobras will not pursue women who leave them unless it
is easy and causes them little hassle to do so. But there are
exceptions, and this is where help from an expert is essential.

Pit Bulls are the opposite of Cobras: easier to leave in the short
run, but harder to leave in the long run. When Martha left Don and
called it a trial separation, Don had little problem with it. But
when she continued the separation for more than a month, he began to
abuse and stalk her.

After three years of this, Martha consistently and forcefully
asserted her rights. She divorced him. She hung up on him. She ended
a definitive conversation with a "Fuck you!" and refused to talk to
him. Don might have killed her at this time. Pit Bulls have a great
capacity to minimize, deny, or distort reality, and they can often
justify to themselves stalking, continued abuse, and at times even
murder. But Martha got lucky Don began to leave her alone when it
was clear that she would no longer be responsive to his threats. By
that time, she had decided that even death was preferable to being
under Don's spell.

EMERGING FROM HELL

We began this study with the goal of learning about the relationship
between batterers and battered women, and we learned a great deal.
We expected to focus on the men, especially when we came upon the
distinction between Pit Bulls and Cobras. But during our exit
interviews, we found the women in our study to be resourceful and
courageous, and over time we began to realize that our work was also
about the heroic struggle of battered women. These women start with
a dream and truly descend into hell, and for a period of time seem
stuck there. But they do not give up. They continue to struggle. Our
main cause for optimism is that many of them emerge from hell and
live to love again.

From When Men Batter Women: New Insights into Ending Abusive
Relationships. Copyright Copyright 1998 by Neil Jacobson and John
Gottman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Each year at least 1.6 million U.S. women are beaten
by their husbands