No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder

Author:Rachel Louise Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

When Adams first began studying how to change the behavior of abusive men, before he’d made the connections to narcissism, nearly all the research from the 1960s and ’70s described violence in the home as the product of a manipulative woman who incited her husband. That victims provoke their own abuse is an attitude that persists today. In the early 1980s, Ellen Pence, a domestic violence advocate in Minnesota created the Power and Control Wheel.7 The Wheel highlights the eight ways a batterer maintains power and control: fear, emotional abuse, isolation, denial and blame, using children, bullying, financial control, and brute force and verbal threats. Advocates point out that abusers don’t walk around with a conscious notion that they’re seeking power and control. Instead, they say things like, “I just want her to be sweet [obedient and subservient] and have dinner on the table at six.” Or, “I just want her to have the house cleaned, and the kids in bed.” Or, “I just pushed her a little. She’s overreacting.” Or, “I wouldn’t have broken that plate if she hadn’t screamed.” All of these are variations on the same thing. (Later, I would hear Jimmy Espinoza tell a group of men to be on guard for the words “just,” “if,” and “but,” which seemed to me a fairly decent summation).

Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.”

For Adams this extreme narcissism is at the root of understanding batterers, and while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are often high-functioning, charismatic, and professionally successful. The narcissists are “hiding among us,” Adams says, “and they’re clustered at the top.” Such people are not easy to identify, in part because they have outsized people skills, and “we live in a world that is increasingly narcissistic. We extol success more than we extol anything,” he says. Adams points to the kind of “charismatic narcissist who is worshipped by others.” This is the kind of white-collar batterer who—through money and connections—manages to evade judicial and law enforcement systems. A man for whom status and reputation are everything. He and other researchers I spoke with often talk about our collective vision of criminals, especially murderers; how we tend to picture rageaholics when the reality is that they are impossible to divine from the general population.

The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress.

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