SHALVA Presents: A Conversation with Lundy Bancroft

Summary

In a thought-provoking video presented by SHALVA, Lundy Bancroft discusses the complexities of domestic abuse, particularly within Jewish communities, challenging the myths around it. Bancroft emphasizes that domestic abuse is not limited to physical violence but includes a wide array of psychological controls. Throughout the conversation, various aspects of the abuser's mindset and the effects on both victims and children are explored, highlighting the societal misconceptions and attitudes that perpetuate such behaviors. Bancroft and Vicki Rivkin engage in a detailed discussion, offering insights into recognizing abuse, the limitations of couples counseling, and approaches to supporting both victims and their children.

Highlights

• Lundy Bancroft debunks myths that domestic abuse is rare in Jewish or educated households. 📘
• Abusers view their right to control their partners as justified, often manipulating behind the facade of normalcy. 🎭
• Understanding abuse isn't merely about detecting physical violence but recognizing psychological violations. 🧠
• Bancroft emphasizes that true change in abusers requires years of hard work, not sudden epiphanies. 🔄
• Domestic abuse's impact on children is profound, affecting emotional and behavioral development. 🙍‍♂️
• Recognizing warning signs in relationships is crucial for early intervention against domestic abuse. 🚨
• The problematic role of couples counseling in abusive contexts, potentially enabling abuser's narratives. ❌
• Empowering victims with the necessary language and understanding can help them reclaim their lives. 🔑
• Abusers exploit societal stereotypes and misconceptions to justify their behavior and manipulate perceptions. 🤥

Key Takeaways

• Domestic abuse is not just physical; it's fundamentally about control and enforcing obedience. 🔐
• Abusers often justify their actions with 'good enough' reasons, but it's all about manipulation. 🎭
• Patterns of abuse are rooted in societal beliefs and not purely psychological issues. 🧠
• Education level doesn't shield against domestic abuse; it occurs across all socioeconomic backgrounds. 📚
• It's crucial to listen to and respect the experiences of abuse survivors. 🗣️
• Misconceptions about abuse impact interventions – it's not about anger management, but attitude change. 🔄
• Empower children with words to understand and defend against abusive behavior. 🧒
• Couples counseling isn't suitable for abusive relationships; it could reinforce abuse. 🚫
• Post-separation, abusers remain a risk, often continuing manipulation and control over victims and children. ⚠️

Overview

In Lundy Bancroft's insightful conversation with SHALVA, he addresses the pervasive and misunderstood issues surrounding domestic abuse. Dispelling myths that it occurs less frequently in Jewish or affluent homes, Bancroft highlights that abuse transcends cultural and educational barriers. The dialogue uncovers the manipulative attitudes of abusers, who believe in their inherent right to control and punish partners. These attitudes are often overlooked by society, which focuses mistakenly on anger management rather than the careful dismantling of an abuser's harmful beliefs.

Bancroft passionately urges the need for a societal shift in understanding domestic violence—not as occasional outbursts of anger but as a deep-seated pattern of control. He underscores the ineffective nature of couples counseling in these situations, as it misplaces responsibility and can inadvertently perpetuate abuse. His insight exposes how abusers are not psychologically out of control as many presume, but rather strategically exercise their perceived rights over intimate partners, making interventions challenging without proper understanding and approach.

Particularly concerning is the impact of domestic abuse on children, which Bancroft elaborates with empathy and clarity. He discusses how children often internalize the abuse, leading to long-term psychological and social difficulties. To combat this, Bancroft advocates for equipping children with the vocabulary to articulate their experiences and challenges the misconception that post-separation, abusers inherently become less dangerous. Through practical advice and grounded theory, he offers a roadmap for effectively supporting victims and changing societal narratives around domestic abuse.

SHALVA Presents: A Conversation with Lundy Bancroft Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 novel in custody a mystery about a mother and daughter who disappear in the midst of a custody dispute lundy is the former training director of emerge the first counseling program in the u.s for men who batter and was involved in over 2 thousand cases as a counselor and clinical supervisor he has served extensively as a custody evaluator child abuse investigator and expert witness lundy will be joined today by our very own chavez staff member vicki rivkin vicki serves as our outreach and legal
• 00:30 - 01:00 liaison vicki has been instrumental in bringing many of our virtual programs to fruition including this one she was the first one to reach out to lundy and we were thrilled when he said yes so i'm now going to turn over the program to vicky and londy thank you all hi everyone um so this format is going to be question answer we have some questions that we um discussed a little bit with london the beginning um if you have questions of your own you can drop them in and we can get we will get to as many of them as we can
• 01:00 - 01:30 um so first melendi thank you again for today it was great just to talk to you before we got started um and your wisdom is gonna um impact a lot of lives today so we really appreciate that um so one of our missions at chava is to break the stigma that domestic abuse doesn't happen in jewish homes or to certain socioeconomic statuses education levels etc um and we just want to confirm with you that is true have you talked about that
• 01:30 - 02:00 a little bit and what does domestic abuse look like because we all know that it is more than a broken bone or black eye so and the two questions are actually related because i think the the the myth somehow that domestic abuse wouldn't happen in jewish relationships or that a jewish man wouldn't be a domestic batterer is connected to a lot of the misconceptions that people have about abusers in general and why who they are and why they're doing what
• 02:00 - 02:30 they're doing and i i also just want to point out that that myth to me not only perpetuates a lot of misconceptions about abusers i feel like it simultaneously perpetuates some stereotypes about jews so i think there are multiple reasons why we should try to give that that mythology up so domestic violence is domestic violence is fundamentally about a person who is a bully in intimate relationships he really
• 02:30 - 03:00 believes in his right to rule and that he that his partner actually owes him obedience and even more importantly than that that if she does not obey he has the right to punish so what's really at the core of domestic violence is enforcement so the abuser has a whole set of attitudes that support his behavior and the core attitude of all of those is his belief in his right to use
• 03:00 - 03:30 enforcement if he is not getting his way about things that he believes he has a right to have done in certain ways so day-to-day life with an abuser is not about physical violence day-to-day life with a domestic abuser is about the woman being torn down and torn down and torn down psychologically it's about her having her rights taken away on a broad spectrum her right to social
• 03:30 - 04:00 contact with people she wants to spend time with her right to control her own money and her right to have an equal say over the family's money her right to integrity and her own body and sexual mistreatment is such a common aspect of the domestic abuse pattern her her right to have ambitions and her own thoughts and opinions and have a life that has its its own direction in the abuser's mindset it's all supposed to be subsumed to who he is and
• 04:00 - 04:30 what matters to him her needs come second her opinions come second and she has in his mind she has no inalienable rights that her rights can be removed by him at any time as long as in his mind he has good enough reason to do so and you know running abuser groups we hear you know from time to time one of the guys in the abuser group will say you know i'm not one of those guys who comes home and abuses his wife for no reason
• 04:30 - 05:00 and that's a very very telling statement when an abuser makes it because it lets us know that he believes that he has a good enough reason and that as long as he has a good enough reason his behavior is justified and we see actually in abuser groups that abusers become very critical of other abusers in the group who if they feel that that man didn't have a good enough reason for what he did or if they feel that the other man went too far that he used too much abuse
• 05:00 - 05:30 or too much violence so sometimes even in the ways guys criticize other abusers they still are revealing core aspects of how they think that as long as you have a good enough reason and as long as you use the right amount of abuse and the right amount of violence then your behavior is justified and so the actual physical violence is those of us in domestic violence really look at that as a trump card it's just
• 05:30 - 06:00 one aspect of the abuse it's just when he wants kind of the biggest stick to use against her that's when he goes to physical violence when he feels like she really has to be punished or he really has to reassert his right to rule then he reaches for the violence or another way to think of it is he reaches for the violence when his other ways of bullying her are not working to his full satisfaction but day-to-day life he bullies her through all these other kinds of abuse
• 06:00 - 06:30 and this understanding is really important to how social groups and agencies and communities decide to respond to the abuser because if we think of his problem as just having to do with his violence then we think oh well he just blows up he just explodes he has inappropriate responses to conflict and we have to settle down his temper we have to teach him to be calmer we have to teach him anger management we have to
• 06:30 - 07:00 help him have better responses to conflict and we have to teach him that violence is not an appropriate way to resolve conflicts so these are all expressions that i hear people use that are well intentioned and entirely mistaken because none of those little catch phrases have anything to do with why abusers are abusing or even what their pattern of behavior looks like the abuser is completely different from the
• 07:00 - 07:30 non-abusive man all the time not just while he's being physically violent he's different day in and day out his so-called good periods are different from a non-abusive man's good periods the abusers good periods are very self-serving they're manipulative he's still kind of pulling tricks below the surface he he's he's up to stuff all the time he's been part of this also that he's not just he's he's doing this with his
• 07:30 - 08:00 intimate partner in a way that's very different from how he presents to everyone else and that's an important point for people to understand that this is not somehow characterological to him this for most abusers it's not characterological to him it's how he operates in intimate relationships and it's how he thinks about intimate relationships and he believes he has the right to operate this way in intimate relationships and another
• 08:00 - 08:30 thing from your point vicky is that it also shows the difference between how he deals with her and how he deals with other contexts also shows that he's not out of control because the abuser is fond of saying oh i just lost it i just lose control of myself i get so upset and people who are trying to intervene often accept his formulation and say yeah he needs to learn better self-control abusers don't have self-control problems with rare exceptions they don't have self-control problems if you ask him well did you
• 08:30 - 09:00 ever keep beating her after the police arrived never if you ask him have you ever lost a job because you became violent at your workplace almost never yeah any other time you were violent where it was really against your own interest oh another great question you can ask the the abuser or the abused woman is when he breaks stuff up around the house when he has one of his rampages where he's smashing stuff does he ever smash anything that's important to him
• 09:00 - 09:30 and you're gonna hear that the answer is almost exclusively no that he breaks stuff that matters to her or it's just random stuff but anything that really matters to him survives so it's the the this pattern of behavior is not nearly as out of control as it looks there is so much method to the madness and it's not rooted in psychological problems and this is a hard one for people to let go of there are all kinds of other
• 09:30 - 10:00 behavior problems and emotional problems that are rooted in psychological problems but domestic violence turns out to be to not be one of those that the domestic violence perpetrator has a particular pattern of different behaviors that trauma can't create it actually takes a bunch of societal training and some really bad role models to create this whole fabric of behavior that virtually all domestic abusers use
• 10:00 - 10:30 they virtually all follow a script of all these different tactics and attitudes that you can't get just from trauma and so we have to address abuse as a problem of values and attitudes not as an emotional problem then there are a couple of other things i really want to underline for people one is that this has nothing to do with lack of education
• 10:30 - 11:00 and one of the very widespread beliefs that people have is that a more educated man is much more likely to be uh to not to to not be an abuser he's much less likely to be an abuser and and you know there's that unf unfortunate term that you'll never hear me use where people refer to this kind of like working class style of shirt as a wife as a wife beater you know that shirt's called a wife beer i hate it that's not an appropriate term it's it's
• 11:00 - 11:30 actually disrespectful towards working-class men to begin with it's it's so it's very classist right big big from a classroom way but it's also inaccurate because the more educated more successful man is just as likely statistically to be an abuser and there's quite a bit of research on that and so because of the stereotype the jews tend to be more educated which may have some aspects of truth to it but it's that's still very heavily stereotyped
• 11:30 - 12:00 and the notion that jews tend to be more economically successful which again is very heavily stereotyped right then that also leads somehow to the myth that like oh a jewish man wouldn't be likely to be an abuser and it doesn't line up at all and these these fundamental beliefs that that abusers tend to carry that once a woman's involved with me she owes me sex that once a woman is involved with me she owes me deference she did that that i that i need that i
• 12:00 - 12:30 get to make the decisions and she has to obey them that if she doesn't obey them i have the right to enforce we don't have any reason to believe that that somehow is going to be less common with jewish men than men of any other kind of ethnicity or any other kind of religious background and the statistics don't don't bear that out right thank you thank you i i just have to nod my head a lot because it's everything that we hear in the office from our clinical staff um everything and we refer to it very compactly as a power you know
• 12:30 - 13:00 a power and control situation um but that's a little too you know it's clinical and it has a whole lot to it which he really unpacked beautifully for us so thank you um so in in your your world famous book why does he do that um uh you and and from your speech today or you're speaking you definitely have a strong and direct tone and um you don't pussyfoot around
• 13:00 - 13:30 the issue at all and um just wondering if you could talk about that like why why is it that you that you've chosen and this wasn't something you decided to do yesterday um this is how you've spoken about the issue for 30 years now is in a very direct manner can you talk about that a little bit sure absolutely absolutely so one of the issues is that i think writers have a tendency particularly writers about social issues
• 13:30 - 14:00 have a tendency to talk down to people to sort of assume that people maybe aren't that educated or aren't that smart or can't understand complicated concepts and so there's a tendency of writers to develop a condescending tone and i think that's always a mistake but it's an extra mistake when you're talking to abused women because abused women that's already what they're being subjected to all the time is being talked to like they're stupid you know by the abuser being talked to like they're stupid like they can't
• 14:00 - 14:30 understand concepts being infantilized by him and so we have to be very conscious if we're going to be effective and successful in assisting abused women including women in our personal lives that we care about i'm not talking just in a work context that we've got to talk to women with respect and we've got to talk to them as equals so that we're countering this like one person up and one person below dynamic that the abuser creates and the
• 14:30 - 15:00 the other decision which is related that i made as a writer and that i believe is important for writers in general is that we often need to simplify our language in order to reach more people who aren't who aren't as comfortable reading books but but you're even on video it's it's important to simplify our language in order to reach people who aren't as comfortable with long complex sentences or don't use as big words
• 15:00 - 15:30 that doesn't mean those people are any less intelligent it just means they're not as much on the whole verbal thing with the big words and the long sentences and the complicated this and the sort of intellectual thing that doesn't mean they're any less smart that's just those are just different styles that people have and a lot of times that also divides by class because people are more upper class tend to be like very big words very complex ways of speaking and so you can simplify your language without dumbing down your
• 15:30 - 16:00 concepts and without assuming that people can't understand so i made a point and why does he do that of of saying things in simple and straightforward ways while simultaneously assuming that my reader is bright and that's what i would encourage other writers to do that's what i would encourage other public speakers to do not only on the subject of domestic abuse but anything that you want to reach people about assume that people are smart because people are smart
• 16:00 - 16:30 and assume that people have who've been victimized are smart because people who've been victimized are smart this happens to ever these kind we all have experiences of victimization in life we have them in all different ways domestic abuse obviously is overwhelmingly perpetrated by male and the targets are overwhelmingly female of it but there's all kinds of other kinds of victimization in life that don't follow that pattern and we've got to talk to everybody who's been traumatized which is really all of us we've got to
• 16:30 - 17:00 talk to everybody who's been traumatized with respect and with the assumption that their minds work just fine and then i guess the other decision i made is that you can be pretty blunt about certain subjects if you speak to people in a kind way i think unfortunately bluntness is often combined with a kind of harshness and and being very judgmental and those two things don't have to go together you can speak quite bluntly but
• 17:00 - 17:30 not get harsh and not get judgmental you can speak quite directly to people and remain very kind and kind of keep your heart soft and and listen well and be understanding we can do that yeah thank you thank you um i think that that's we have programs at shalva that you know are teaching people how to talk to others about domestic abuse and you know part of that is respecting
• 17:30 - 18:00 someone and meeting them where they are and that's that is exactly what you're saying you're coming from a place of respect and being someone where there is not telling them where they are not telling them what to do um working on the issue together and and walking the path together one like i could pipe one more thing in there vicky none of us none of us digests shocking information rapidly anytime we're learning some new piece
• 18:00 - 18:30 about the world or some new piece about somebody that we cared about or some new piece about some organization that we care about we're stunned and we don't digest that stuff overnight i'm no exception to that it takes when you're learning something about the world that's really different from what you thought and that's unpleasant it takes a while to take it in and so we have to understand abused woman is trying to come to some very shocking realizations about her partner and she's trying to come to some very shocking realizations about how
• 18:30 - 19:00 the abuse of women works in society in general because her personal experience is linked to a societal experience it's just so totally unfair to expect that somehow she can digest that overnight none of the rest of us could so that was it that was all i wanted no and i think that that's a valid point and and she's she's starting from a point where she thinks she's the only one who this is happening to she doesn't know that there's a whole world of people out there that this has happened to and that she's not alone and um that kind of gets to to what our next question was which was
• 19:00 - 19:30 um having a little bit more this conversation of how do you talk to someone who is um experiencing abuse like if you have a a neighbor who you reached out to once and you tried to say something but it didn't go over very well like what what kinds of pieces of advice do you have um for for continuing the conversation or how how can we help you know on an individual level and also you know a little bit we can get into this now or later you know as far as the community goes
• 19:30 - 20:00 so so a few thoughts that come to my mind first of all is give her two or three or four thoughts and leave it at that and when when we really understand what's happening to a woman because we can see it from the outside we often want to just bombard her with an explanation of what's being done to her and that's well intentioned i mean i i feel exactly the same way and i'm as honestly i've made the mistake multiple
• 20:00 - 20:30 times of sort of bombarding a woman with with information and it doesn't help her it's way too much it's too shocking it's indigestible so choose like two you know one two three four points to make to her about what you're observing and then listen and what you're going to hear a lot from her typically is going to be a lot of reasons why it's not what you think and she's just trying to digest and she's trying to think out loud and so she's often and
• 20:30 - 21:00 she's trying to manage a very a kind of unmanageable stage in life and and we need to have let her have room for that not just argue back argue back argue back against her but let her have some space for that to that she's probably gonna minimize things that he's doing and she's gonna say oh i'm really fine when you can tell she's not oh he's not so bad when you can tell he is just prepare yourself to that's part of what you're gonna be hearing and you're
• 21:00 - 21:30 gonna be much more effective if if you can listen to you don't have to agree with it but if you can really listen to it and give her some space to go there and trust her you need to have faith in her that she will gradually be able to take in what you're saying she's not gonna be able to do it that day she probably won't be able to do it that month it's gonna take time but that you've planted a seed the two or three things that you said that day will plant the seed that are gonna grow for months inside of her it's really important what you already did
• 21:30 - 22:00 and i think the the helper often leaves these interactions thinking oh that was a waste she just wasn't ready to hear anything i said or that you know she's just uh bonded with him or she's in denial you hear all these kinds of things about abused women and that's not true the truth is you accomplished more than you realized you accomplished but you're not going to see it for quite a while so that's the first thing i would say secondly oh and make sure you listen enough like i see people trying to help abuse women and again i've made these mistakes myself uh of doing doing 80 of the talking
• 22:00 - 22:30 while trying to help her well that's again that's what the abuser does he does 80 90 of the talking so when we're interacting with her we have to make sure that we're talking 30 or 40 or 50 percent not 80 or 90 of the time and that we're sending her the message you're someone who deserves to be listened to and the only way we can send that message is by listening to her and then it's really useful to ask questions well what do you think about this what do you think about this rather than telling her things so try to put things as questions
• 22:30 - 23:00 and then a couple things that i find particularly powerful with abused women one is to ask her about double standards ask her are there ways that he has very different rules for you than he has for himself like you're not allowed to talk to any guys but is he been allowed to talk to women as much as he wants or you're if you yell you're crazy but if he yells it was
• 23:00 - 23:30 necessary for him to be yelling and just you know various other things like that you know like you can work yourself to the bone but when he comes home from work he has to like put his feet up on the on the stool and that i find that that entering into conversations about double standards often works much better than using the word abuse which i actually encourage you to steer away from and or trying to talk about violence
• 23:30 - 24:00 there's a place for that but mostly better if it comes from her and what more valuable than what comes from us is pointing out unfairness because that that's sort of at a level where she's often is ready to start to talk about some of the ways that it's just not fair and then really make sure to leave a message that the door is open say we can talk about this another time i'm always here for you i may not bring it up a lot because i want to respect your privacy but i hope
• 24:00 - 24:30 you'll bring it up with me and but i just want you to know that you know what i see may not be the whole story but i am worried about what i see and so i just wanted to share with you what i see because i care about you and i i don't think you deserve to be treated like this and and and i would really love to see you not having to live in those kinds of circumstances yeah it goes back to you know what you said in the beginning um of this answer in that when you're when you're bringing this up to someone they
• 24:30 - 25:00 may they may have never thought of it before they may not they're not thinking that they're being abused and here you are you're for the first time even noticing that something is wrong or that something could be different than what it is so i think having that kindness and that compassion is is key and really listening yeah i think that's so important vicki because a situation viewed from the outside looks so obvious where and when we're living in the midst
• 25:00 - 25:30 of it it's not and again this isn't just the experience of abused women this is the experience of all of us we all struggle with situations that we cannot see well while we're in the midst of them that once we're outside of them we go whoa it's so plain now what was going on there the most common i think probably the single most common response i get to my book why does he do that was i had no idea what was going on until i read this book
• 25:30 - 26:00 and then suddenly it was like so clear and again from the outside we'd be tempted to say well how could you possibly not have known this was going on but when you're living it it it casts you into a very dense fog that's not your fault right right agreed thank you that was great um we have a ton of questions um but i think you know we wanted to
• 26:00 - 26:30 talk about a little bit um about you know we could do a whole presentation on this and i'm trying to decide which way to go um so it looks like a few questions have come in regarding kids so let's talk a little about that um so what are some of the long-term effects of domestic abuse on children um in particular in your in your book in custody um the daughter um her relationships with her friends
• 26:30 - 27:00 start to change and and people noted people are noticing that where she used to be a close friend of someone she's no longer she's doing some things and things and things that are completely inappropriate and not age appropriate um so can let's let's hear a little bit from you about the long-term impact on kids and i know you've spent a lot of your professional careers specifically in this area yeah i took a particular interest in
• 27:00 - 27:30 kids under the influence of one of my early mentors carol souza who really pushed me in that direction i took an interesting kids from pretty early in my in my domestic abuse career so there's so many things to be concerned about that i'm gonna have to just pick a few of the ones that that we tend to need most urgently to attend to but first of all the abuser does tremendous damage to kids relationships with their moms and he also does often a lot of damage to kids relationships with their siblings so that's where i would ask
• 27:30 - 28:00 people to put their attention first is is he harming mother child relationships and is he harming sibling relationships so we want to look at are there always tensions brewing between mom and kids that aren't that aren't really from them that are really from him and of course all relationships are going to have tensions i'm not saying he's the cause of all the tensions but i'm saying when we look carefully we start to discover that so many of the tensions in this particular family have
• 28:00 - 28:30 their roots in ways that the abuser is setting people against each other and so so that's number one and then right close all nearly tied for first what that one is we need to look at the struggle that kids are having internally with deciding who's to blame for what is happening so they're struggling from a very young age they're struggling with whether mom is causing the things that the abuser is
• 28:30 - 29:00 doing to her and they're struggling with the question of whether they themselves are causing what's happening to mom or whether their siblings are causing what's happening to mom and so there's a fair there's a fundamental question being grappled with here which is is the abuser responsible for his own actions or are we all somehow causing him to do these things so
• 29:00 - 29:30 friends relatives professionals if they're professionals involved actually have to take a stand on this question with kids you don't have to speak badly about the abuser in fact it's much better if you don't speak badly about the abuser you speak only critically about his behaviors you don't say he's a this he's he's an abuser he's a he's selfish he's unreasonable it's better not to put any labels on him but just name the behavior like that's scary behavior or that's that's mean
• 29:30 - 30:00 or that's you know language is really helpful for kids to have language that's a put down that's sarcastic that's an insult that's demeaning it's so helpful for kids to learn these words that kids are noticeably less likely to internalize abuse as soon as they have words for things words help you protect your heart from from behaviors what behaviors are where we don't know what they are and we don't know what to name them have an easy easier time getting in and hurting us
• 30:00 - 30:30 i'm not saying that the words are a perfect defense but they help they help so we want to help kids have word for things and we want to say like mom is responsible for what she does but she's not responsible for what he does and you're responsible for what you do but you're not responsible for what he does and your siblings are responsible for what they do but they're not responsible for what he does and we have to go over and over and over this with kids because the abuser
• 30:30 - 31:00 to a great extent deliberately causes great confusion in children about whether mom is causing his behavior she he causes tremendous confusion in her about whether she's causing his behavior in fact i've never worked with an abused woman who wasn't struggling with the question of whether she's responsible for his actions that's one of the abuser's top campaigns is to make her feel that she causes him
• 31:00 - 31:30 to do what he does so you can imagine if mom is already struggling with that question then of course kids are going to end up struggling with that question and they don't just see these incidents where where dad is being or step dad is being mean to mom or scary to her or assaulting her or threatening to assault her or grabbing her sexually or all these different things that abusers do right in front of the kids they're also hearing what he says about those incidents
• 31:30 - 32:00 so they're hearing the abuser say you pushed me too far they're hearing the abuser say it's your own damn fault if you weren't wasting all the family's money our kids would have be able to have more of this and that and and he's and they're hearing him say if you weren't sleeping with every guy in town i wouldn't be upset and you'd be here home like you should be to look at after our children he's just got all these statements that he will openly say right in front of the kids that whether he intends it or not to some extent he does intend it but whether he
• 32:00 - 32:30 intends it or not are indoctrinating those kids to have a view of the abuse that's going to cause them lifelong difficulties and i argue quite strongly in what i write and in my public trainings that it is just as dangerous in the long run for kids to believe that the abuse is mom's fault as it is for them to believe that is their own fault and that's a dynamic that i feel like not only does the public typically not
• 32:30 - 33:00 grasp very well-trained professionals typically don't grasp that in fact the vast majority of audiences that i train and i give typically like all-day trainings i will ask them what should you tell a child who discloses that mom is being abused and every audience with maybe a couple of exceptions but almost every audience that i've ever put this question to one of their answers is correctly
• 33:00 - 33:30 you we should tell the child it's not their fault that's great but what hasn't happened is what's so striking which is that i have put this question to over 200 audiences and i have never yet had any audience members say to me you should tell the child it's not their mom's fault i've never once had any audience member say to me you should tell a child it's not their sibling's fault so the assumption which i think is mistaken
• 33:30 - 34:00 is that it's much more risky for the children to believe it's their own fault than for them to believe that it's mom's fault and i completely disagree and i think the evidence backs me up on this that the children are just as likely to have mental health problems long term from believing it's mom's fault they're just as likely to have behavioral problems long term from believing it's mom's fault in fact i would argue more likely in many ways to have behavioral problems from believing that it's mom's fault they're headed for a lifetime of relationship problems from
• 34:00 - 34:30 believing that it's mom's fault because if it's mom's fault now then when you're in an adult relationship and you're being abused it's your fault right if it was mom's fault when i was growing up and it's happening to me now must be my fault now and from the perspective of a boy if it was mom's fault when i was growing up and i'm abusing my girlfriend now must be her fault and actually the research for example specifically finds that boys who grow up believing that it was mom's fault are the next generation
• 34:30 - 35:00 of abusers and the boys who do not grow up believing it was mom's fault do not have particularly high right high rates as adults of becoming abusers themselves in other words the key line between which boys who have a batterer in the home dad or step dad in the home the key demarcation line between which of those boys will grow up to be abusers themselves and which will not is whether they believe the abuse was mom's fault because if it was mom's fault then he's not responsible for his actions
• 35:00 - 35:30 and if he's not responsible for his actions then i'm not responsible for mine then you know i could talk for a long long time about all these other issues that the research has found about how much more difficulty kids have when they're being exposed to an abuser in their school behavior in their school learning in their peer relationships and you were talking vicki about how we see the character brandy in my novel in custody starting to have a lot of problems in her peer relationship she's in addition to some of the things you pointed out she's also becoming quite aggressive
• 35:30 - 36:00 and just critical and bossy and yeah aggressive with her peers and that's the typical thing that we see and the this higher rate of health physical health problems and just higher rate of suicidality i mean just all these different difficulties what i most like to emphasize to people about all that is that's not the research indicates that that's not due to the conflict between the parents
• 36:00 - 36:30 it's due to the fact that the children are being exposed to abuse and i will see sometimes professional writers uh people in the court system people in child protection get very blurry on this point and say the problem here is that the children are caught in the middle in this conflict between their parents and we need to say to them no that is difficult for kids it's difficult for kids when there's a lot of conflict between their parents and when they feel caught in the middle yeah that's hard for kids that doesn't
• 36:30 - 37:00 remotely lead to the kind of collection of symptoms that you see in kids whose mom is being abused so it's it's a mistake to mix those things together and another reason why it's so important not to mix those things together is that when you when you decide the problem is the conflict then you think well now the couple's split up there's nothing to worry about anymore these kids should have normal visitation with their battering dad whereas when you realize the problem is their
• 37:00 - 37:30 exposure to the abuser well then why would you want to send them into tons of unsupervised visitation with this man who's the same man he was before or maybe a little worse because abusers either stay this post-separation either stay the same as they were before or get worse they do not get better post-separation they sometimes fake a little good behavior post-separation that makes them look like they're getting better but they do not change in any significant way post-separation if anything in many many cases they get
• 37:30 - 38:00 much more dangerous and destructive than they were before i don't even use the term children exposed to domestic violence which is the common professional term i say and i would love to see everybody say children exposed to a domestic violence perpetrator or children exposed to an abuser because it's not just their exposure to his violence it's their exposure to him he's a highly toxic manipulated individual manipulative individual who wants to damage their relationships with
• 38:00 - 38:30 their mother wow we're going to expose kids to violence and then send them into visitation unsupervised with the perpetrator of that violence who we know is determined to damage their relationship with their mother and who we know is a key role model teaching them that when a man is abusive to a woman he's not responsible for his actions the woman is responsible for his actions how wise can it possibly be to send children into an extensive
• 38:30 - 39:00 program of unsupervised contact with a domestic abuse perpetrator it's not in children's best interest to have extensive unsupervised contact with him right you know it's interesting we've gotten a couple questions that come through and you know why why do men continue to abuse after the divorce which i think you've already touched on um [Music] you know i just think a couple more quick things about that vicki which is one is the he's a he is so kind of winning and losing oriented that he feels like if
• 39:00 - 39:30 she leaves him somehow that means she's one and so she's lost control right he feels he's lost he's lost control and he no longer has access to her to prove to her that he's right and so he's gonna he wants to find other ways to show that that she is to be punished for what she's done um another question that's come through is um can men change and do better
• 39:30 - 40:00 interventions work yes but it really takes first of all a long period of time secondly they do not change from epiphanies and this is a hard thing for people to explain they really want to they for people to accept they really want to believe that he can change from big breakthroughs from big realizations that he felt sorry that he suddenly woke up one morning and realized that he didn't want to be this way anymore and that he'd been a jerk all this time and it unfortunately that never works it never it's like a movie
• 40:00 - 40:30 it's like a tight it would be great it's a great movie ending but it's not life right and this is what happens in movies and this is what happens in sitcoms vast human problems are solved in five minutes and that's unfortunately not happening in real life and so the abusers do change and there are abusers who do change they change over a period of years of very very hard work on themselves where they are day after day after day accepting this is my issue not her issue i don't get to put this on her i have to look at myself i have to stop
• 40:30 - 41:00 blaming her i have to fully admit to everything i've done i've got to stop lying and saying oh she made that up and so the question that's important for women to reflect on is well if this process is gonna like i don't know if he's serious about changing or not it's very hard to tell that's one of the things that's going through your mind but let's suppose he is serious about changing if he is serious about changing we're looking at something like a two to five year process
• 41:00 - 41:30 do i really want to sacrifice another two to five years of my life for a process that at the end of he may just decide to flip back to how he was before so that's the question i would encourage you to reflect on is how much more of my life do i want to invest in this i've had so many women more than i could possibly count over the years say to me i wish i could get those five years of my life back i wish i could get those 20 years of my life back
• 41:30 - 42:00 that i was around there somehow hoping that things were going to get different i've never yet heard a woman say oh i really wish i'd given him more of a chance to change i gave up on him too quickly i mean i've heard women actually i have a couple experience of women saying that about non-abusive men that they feel they gave up on too quickly about other issues i've never yet heard a woman say about a man who was abusive to her oh i you know i i wish i'd hung in there a little bit longer so the and the other thing is that we see very very few
• 42:00 - 42:30 men make any lasting changes unfortunately in the absence of criminal prosecution that led to a criminal conviction and a supervised probation and a a very strong competent abuser program so it's just yeah some abusers change when all these ducks line up they don't all line up very often right so we we had a question here and i think you pretty much answered it about determining the best path forward when
• 42:30 - 43:00 um dad is abusive and parents split up um regarding whether or not they can have a healthy relationship at all i really think that you've covered most of that um you know and just going forward saying that and you know in reality dad is you know as much as we don't you know we don't want kids exposed to this to the abuse um they probably will have some kind of custody um yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure what the question is in here um
• 43:00 - 43:30 except you know the question the further question was how does that impact the child and understanding of their father and their roles and i i maybe um maybe you can talk a little bit more about like how how mom can help i think you know what you said before about pointing out that it's you know pointing out the behavior and calling out the behavior and not even necessarily using the word abuse that's what i really encourage moms and talking to kids is to name the behavior is wrong to name it she didn't deserve it to name that they didn't deserve it to name that he it's his issue not call
• 43:30 - 44:00 him an abuser or anything but just say his behavior is his issue he needs to get help for those problems kids don't want to hear about punishment they don't want to imagine dad being punished they like the concept of help so so even if we know that really what he needs is legal consequences not help that's not the way to talk about it with kids with kids we're going to use the language of help like he needs help and it's his responsibility to go get the proper help that he needs that's not on mom or on us to somehow make him go do it
• 44:00 - 44:30 and but what i encourage in some ways even more with kids is to try to talk to them about mistreatment on other fronts that doesn't have to do with him and let them connect the dots to how that's connected to what he does so when they're being mistreated by a friend or they're being mistreated by a teacher or a sports coach or when you observe when you're with your kids and you observe mistreatment being done by other adults like in a
• 44:30 - 45:00 shopping mall or at a park or anywhere else engage your kids in conversations about what you just saw like did you see how that adult was talking to that kid did you see that adult you know slap that kid or did you see that adult insult that kid or tell a kid you better get over here or you're going to get a whip in you know whatever it is engage the child in the conversation about that what that signals to kids is a number of things first it signals to kids that
• 45:00 - 45:30 it's okay for them to have their own opinions about adult behavior secondly it signals to kids that some adults are really bad to kids and that's not okay three it helps kids develop the language and i was talking about developing the language about sarcasm and intimidation putting the child in fear demeaning all those kinds of words silencing the child all those kinds of words and and they'll apply it to dad in fact they're more likely to apply it to dad if they feel like you're not talking
• 45:30 - 46:00 critically about dad so it's it's really better to look for other situations particularly other people who are using behaviors that we that we think are kind of like the behaviors that dad or stepdad uses that the abuser uses talk about those things with the kid with no reference to dad and they will connect the dots over time so that way we're equipping them with and with an analytical ability and that's what's going to be most crucial to them and then the other thing that i say to moms is
• 46:00 - 46:30 the abuser is gonna whether you're still together or you've split up the abuser is on the lookout for cracks in your relationship and every relationship has cracks in it nobody has a perfect relationship with anybody they're to be on the lookout for cracks in the relationship with your kids and they're going to try to figure out how to take a little crack and blow it into a big wide crack so you need to work even harder than other mothers it's not fair but it's just the reality you're going to have to work even harder than other mothers to resolve your
• 46:30 - 47:00 conflict with kids that principle of never go to bed mad is going to be even more important for you because you're being sabotaged and undermined by the other parent i really encourage people to read two short quick easy but powerful parenting books written by the same people one is called how to talk so kids will listen and how to listen so kids will talk or it might be the other way around how to listen so kids will talk and how to talk so kids will listen and the other one is called siblings without rivalry
• 47:00 - 47:30 and even a very busy parent has time to read those books they're short they've got drawings in them they're like and they're this isn't just about abuse i use these concepts in the raising of my own children these books were the most helpful thing i came across as a parent but they're also extremely relevant to raising kids who have a dad who's an abuse perpetrator and just to work extra hard to to really value yourself as a parent to think i'm i'm this kid's mother i'm
• 47:30 - 48:00 really really important to them my relationship them is really really important i'm a really important role model not just for my girls but for my boys i'm a really important role model and their dad's not gonna be so i'm gonna have to really really make my relationships with them my top priority we're gonna have to work out issues it doesn't mean to get all namby pamby about discipline you still have to have real authority you can be really close to your kids without getting mandy pamby about discipline you can be so loving with
• 48:00 - 48:30 kids while still holding the line on things and that's what i encourage you to do is just really consider yourself important in those kids lives and make a close relationship with them the priority because the the fewer cracks you leave the less there is for the abuse the less opportunity the abuser has to to use those cracks to sow divisions okay um could you um say the names of those the those books again it's totally yeah listen to the kids
• 48:30 - 49:00 we'll talk and how to talk so kids will listen that's what that's all one title how to listen so kids will talk and how to talk so kids will listen i think the author's last name is is maslish i think it's maslish and maslish but anyway you can find it by the title and the other title is called siblings without rivalry an amazingly effective book that that guided me so much and how to help my kids have a better relationship with each other siblings without rivalry may amazing resources those two books quick great really quick we'll
• 49:00 - 49:30 confirm who the author is but those are the books um and then another question that came in is regarding um warning signs and we have four minutes left in our hour i think we might run over a little bit oh there's lots of questions coming in um so can you talk um briefly for like a minute or two about warning sign like early relationship warning signs so the main thing is not to be focused on sort of anger or temper but to be
• 49:30 - 50:00 focused on control like is he is does he get bent out of shape when you don't do what he wants you to do does he have to control the outcome of things so that's really crucial including watch out for control that's that's that's masked as generosity like if you say no i'd rather you didn't do such a thing for me and he does it for you anyhow that's not generosity that's control watch for disrespect like does he talk
• 50:00 - 50:30 down to you does he interrupt you is everything all about him watch for how he talks about past partners this is can be really really revealing if he if he just seems to be the victim of all these past women and they were all terrible to him and none of them understood him and they would falsely accuse him of being abusive and all this kind of stuff heads up for that heads up for disrespect about sex for young women really heads up for pressure to have sex before you want to have sex or for anything sexual that's demeaning or pressuring you to do things specific
• 50:30 - 51:00 things sexually that you don't want to do really watch out about jealousy and possessiveness perhaps the number one warning sign of the domestic abuser again for young women in particular jealousy can be flattering you can feel like oh he's just crazy the fact that he's jealous shows that he's so crazy about me jealousy is not a measure of how strong a man feels about a woman it's a measure of how focused he is on possessing her a man can be just head over heels in love with a woman and not be jealous so
• 51:00 - 51:30 jealousy has almost no connection to how strong a man's feelings are about a woman jealousy shows how focused he is on ownership and possessiveness so watch out for jealousy and then the last thing i mean i could give you lots and lots of warning signs but just in the interest of time the last thing i'll say is just watch if he's someone who has excuses for his behavior all the time rather than someone who's actually capable of accepting responsibility for his actions yeah that's great
• 51:30 - 52:00 um do we want to take one more question you got time for one more there's i can even run a few minutes over if other people can um okay let's see i'm i'm looking here we talked a little bit about better interventions we've talked about warning signs um thank you vicky yes you have one more jordan yeah yeah we have so many great questions thank you to everyone um
• 52:00 - 52:30 someone asked if couples counseling can help if you're in an abusive relationship no and and i'm really glad you're asking a question and the answer is no because abuse is not caused by the dynamics in the couple and that's what couples counseling is about couples counseling is about trying to help your dynamics abuse is caused by this terrible set of attitudes that an abuser has and those are not going to be in any way addressed through couples counseling it can only
• 52:30 - 53:00 be addressed through him being an abuser program a properly run abuser program is about changing the client's attitudes that's in fact all a properly run abuser program should be focused on and there's no way that's going to be addressed in couples counseling and unfortunately entering into couples counseling actively sends the wrong message to him because entering into couples counseling sends him the message that the problems with his behavior are co-created and he needs the opposite message he needs the message she has nothing to do
• 53:00 - 53:30 with how you behave your behavior is entirely your own responsibility so entering letting him enter into a a forum where he's allowed to make his behavior partly her responsibility is reinforcing the abuse i have i'm not exaggerating and i want you to know i'm not a dogmatic person i'm truly not a dogmatic person so i hope you'll believe me on this one point i have never yet seen a single example in my 30 years in the field of couples counseling leading
• 53:30 - 54:00 to better treatment for a woman who was being abused yeah yeah i think that that says it um okay someone asked about ceus and we are not offering cds for this program i'm sorry to say we do i mean i can send you a certificate of attendance and you can make a case for it i think on your own i know people have done that before with our other programs um there are so many great questions out here we may have to have you back lundy
• 54:00 - 54:30 to talk about the court system in a little more detail or a lot more detail specifically about how do you even prove abuse without having to go to the police and getting an op and expect me a whole nother program so with that um carol you had a few last words that you wanted to say i did just because we are getting a ton of fabulous questions and you're really um sparking conversation and there's more
• 54:30 - 55:00 questions um that we just you know don't have the time to answer if you want to go a little longer i guess we can but i just want everyone we will save the chat um if you for some of these remarks and questions please call us or another agency we can talk you through there's some of them are more individual um you can go to our website childhoodcares.org or call us at our phone number um and we'd be happy to address i think also there's so much um room here for future programming uh so
• 55:00 - 55:30 just by the questions that you've asked i think each one delivers a deeper dive and lundy i just it was uh such a treat to hear you speak you um you understand this so so well and i think it's been enlightening actually for all of us those who are more knowledgeable and those those lists so thank you so much and and we will look at follow-up programming to address some of this some of these things so i just wanted to thank everybody thank you all
• 55:30 - 56:00 and you're and you're very welcome i'm really glad i got to be part of this very enlightenment program on on brainwashing our kids there was a lot about that yeah yeah which i think you gave some good pieces of information on that um recording will be available on our website um give me a day or two to get it up there and i think that's it thank you to all who attended and um have a great day do you oh londy has one more thing i was just going to say
• 56:00 - 56:30 that i wrote a book called when dad hurts mom that has tons of actual very concrete suggestions about things to try with kids and i try not to be like a promoter of my own books but i'm just bringing it up because it's the only book i know of that has tons of ideas try this with your kids try this with your kids try this with your kids so that might be helpful for some of the folks who are asking questions about how to have conversations with kids should i do this should i do that but i hope we get a chance all together to continue these issues also great okay
• 56:30 - 57:00 all right thank you everyone okay i stopped recording okay complete