Breaking the Cycle: Understanding and Changing Abusive Behavior | Stephen Ing S4E10

That's amazing.

You know, you, you have said some things that are, ugh, you know, when you're talking about your own childhood, I was thinking about my own son who witnessed some- Horrible things when he was three and strangely still remembers despite the young age.

But, you know, I don't work with men, both in the capacity of I don't work with perpetrators and I don't tend to work with male victims, though I have worked with some.

But the thought of working with perpetrators, I'm like, "Ugh, I don't-- I could never." But what's interesting is just I don't know that I have the patience or temperament for that.

I'm not sure that I'm the right-

Mm-hmm

... fit.

Having said that, I'm always like, I want there to be some resource and actually, you know, where, where do you send these men? Someone that I work with closely, Aisha Grevenberg, says this frequently, and I agree with her.

I bet you don't.

But I, I, I agree with her in that therapy is not an appropriate place to send an abusive man.

But what she means, I'm sure, not to correct this woman, but she means, I think, your average therapist.

You can't just send, you know, y- an abusive man to go do IFS work because that's not the reason he's abusive.

So there's different work, not to say that no therapy could work, but just she means generally speaking.

But what's your take on that?

Oh, man.

You know, I'm so glad you said that.

Sometimes I have so many things to say, they crowd out all the other things, and then I hear someone, you know, share a prompt like that and it's...

There's such an important thing, and I think every woman listening to this, and every man too listening to this, needs to know what is, what is overwhelmingly contraindicated is referring an abusive relationship to marriage therapy.

Because all marriage therapy, no matter what the theory, no matter what the therapist is, it's all designed to bring two people into a place of equality where they can talk comfortably, where they can work on problems without attacking each other.

And when you do that, if I could use my hand puppets here for a minute, when you do that, so the abuser is sort of up here on top and, you know, controlling things the best way he thinks he can.

And for the therapist to put her up here is experienced by him as a relative loss of power.

And that is a problem because if he feels like he's losing it, like he's out of control, he is going to become more controlling, and that is going to cause abuse in the very near future.

So it's really important that when there is any sort of domestic violence, that we don't refer to therapy.

I hope that message gets out in time to help some people, because I, I think a lot of marriage therapists naively think they can handle that because, well, they never lived through it.

Once you've lived through it, it changes your perspective a lot.