A choice to manipulate, overpower and control those you are supposed to love. It’s a choice to treat your needs as automatically superior. Bancroft spent fifteen years working closely with abusive men, learning about how they thought and what they believed, and his point is crucial: Abuse is a choice. Lundy Bancroft, author of “Why Does He Do That,” comes back to this point over and over. The fact is, nothing makes a person abusive. We believe that poverty, or stress, or addiction, or mental illness, has made them abusive.īut then, don’t you know plenty of people with trauma, poverty, addiction, and mental illness in their life, who treat their partners with respect? We believe that a person becomes abusive because they have been traumatized–in childhood, maybe, or by a previous partner. Society believes a lot of myths about abusers. (Note: for the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to the abuser as a “he,” but I want to make it clear that although physical violence is much more often perpetrated by men, psychological abuse is not a gendered phenomenon.) How do you tell the difference between charisma and real character?

So how do you know if he’s going to turn abusive? Abusers are famously charming, especially at the beginning of a relationship. Worst case scenario, though? Well, there are a lot of worst-case scenarios, but one of the scariest is finding yourself a victim of psychological abuse or domestic violence. Best case scenario, you’ve already had your last first date. Especially if your relationship is new, it’s hard to tell what your future as a couple is going to look like.

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft