There must be some mistake. I am standing in a small, dingy, windowless chamber fitted with what appear to be two old wooden electric chairs cast off a grade B movie set. They are even electrically rigged, the wires running down under the cheap carpet and across the hall to a console hidden in a closet-size space. I have flown 3,000 miles and hiked across the huge University of Washington campus to... this? I was expecting something flashier, some tangible sign of the drama playing in here when the research is in session.
"This much I will tell you," one of its proprietors, psychologist Neil Jacobson, Ph.D., had said conspiratorially months before, "anger has nothing to do with it." He was talking about domestic violence—specifically, the latest "hard" evidence from this laboratory, where he is recording every physiologic flicker of violently distressed couples as they light into topics that, at other times and places, generally lead to blows.
In the scheme of things, this is not a politically correct thing to do (focusing on the couple relationship is seen by some as implying that women somehow collaborate in their own abuse). It is possibly even a dangerous thing to do. But it appears to contradict the little anyone really knows about spouse abuse—that anger is to batterers what acrylics are to painters.
It is hard to believe that this dreary little room is one of the major fronts in a revolution now unfolding in thinking about and looking at why men batter the women they love. It is part of a seismic shift in the whole field of psychology—a new awareness that all behavior unfolds in a specific context, and it is necessary to understand the context in order to understand the behavior.
For decades, the puzzle of spouse abuse has been summed up in the question, "Why do they stay?" As if that were all there is to it—the manufacture of victims of a gender hierarchy that encourages men to demonstrate their dominance. But the question is misogynistic; it fails to grapple with a very obvious fact: that between batterer and batteree there is a relationship, and a very powerful one. It has a dynamic that stubbornly defies what is well known at the nation's 1,300 shelters for abused women: the vast majority of battered women return to their abusers. If intellectual curiosity is not enough of a reason, then certainly protecting women requires that their marriages finally be probed.
Researchers and clinicians (many of them hard-core feminists) now peering into the very heart of domestic violence find, even to their own surprise, that it is far more complex, and far less dark, than most had imagined. In a turnabout that might just as well serve as a symbol of all else that is now being learned, the crucial question turns out not to be "Why do they (the women) stay?" Rather, it is "What makes them (the men) so vulnerable, so dependent?"
Violence may indeed reflect patriarchy run amok and men may indeed use violence to exert power and control over women. But there's a dirty little secret in the world of domestic violence: It almost always arises from feelings of powerlessness. Men experience their own use of force as a loss of control. Abusers do not enjoy being abusive.
"These men give women too much power—to take care of all their needs, to solve their loneliness, for example. They expect women to be their psychic nurses," reports family therapist Virginia Goldner, Ph.D. This is just one of the many paradoxes one must now entertain about domestic violence to see it clearly.
In the whole new picture of domestic violence that is emerging, spouse abuse looks a lot like a very strange onion—the product of many forces operating and interacting at many levels between an individual and his environment. There are intimations of influences at the biological level, including disturbances in the activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin, high levels of testosterone production prompting men to aggression, possibly frank brain damage from head injury. There are elements that work at the cognitive level, like a propensity to misread social cues and attribute hostile intent to others. There are defects in interpersonal skills, like a lack of ability to deescalate the conflict that is inevitable in relationships. There are intrapsychic deficits—a hypersensitivity to abandonment, inability to control negative emotions, and poor impulse control.
And, of course, there are general cultural contributors like the traditional role structure of marriage. Just when one thing is true at one level, its opposite appears to be true at another.
Among the many provocative findings shaping a new, more holistic view of domestic violence:
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