Don Hennessy and Barbara Roberts talk about Domestic Violence and Abuse, Part 1

Don Hennessy and Barbara Roberts talk about Domestic Violence and Abuse, Part 1.

Don Hennessy is an Irish counsellor and author who spent years working with abusive men and their female partners. When he realised that treating the men was making things worse for the women, he continued to analyse the thinking and behaviour of the abusive men.

He concluded that the abusive man’s core goal is sexual. Don calls these men psychephiles. He says the psychephile befriends the mind of the target woman and surreptitiously brainwashes her while pretending to be in love, so that he can dictate the level of sexual activity in the relationship.

Chapters

00:00  Intro
07:00  Smokescreen behaviours hide the abuser’s real intention.
15:25  The Power & Control Wheel doesn’t show the steel rim which holds the wheel together: the man’s goal to dictate the level and type of sexual intimacy in the relationship.
18:09  The Wheel doesn’t show the predatory entrapment phase of the relationship. Ellen Pence got all her information from abused women.
24:40  An image for the predatory entrapment phase is being developed.
30:26  Evan Stark didn’t interview abusive men to analyse their thinking and behaviour.
35:53  Don’s upcoming book We Need To Talk About Him.
37:02  The psychephile befriends the mind of the target woman and surreptitiously brainwashes her, while pretending to be in love.
39:59  The brainwashing and mind control was developed by men because they could no longer beat their wives with impunity.
42:20  How psychephiles differ from pedophiles.
47:46  Psychephiles can also be pedophiles.
53:52  Exposed psychephiles get sympathy; exposed pedophiles loose status.
57:32  Don Hennessy’s books.

All my posts on Don Hennessy are here.

Don Hennessy’s first three books:

How He Gets Into Her Head: The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser
ebooks.com   amazon (affiliate link)

Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control
I specially recommend the final chapter ‘Some concluding thoughts about abusers’. 

How He Wins: Abusive Intimate Partners Going Free
ebooks.com   amazon (affiliate link)
5 min promo video for How He Wins
11 min promo video for How He Wins

Notes on things mentioned in the video

Predatory entrapment. I learned the term from Dr Allan Wade.

Opportunistic child molesters. Carla van Dam discusses these on p 42-43 of The Socially Skilled Child Molester [affiliate link].

Scott Peck, author of People of the Lie, was a Christian. Read his biography here.

Kerry McAvoy’s interview of Don Hennessy.

Don Hennessy was the Clinical Director of the National Domestic Violence Intervention Agency in Ireland (NDVIA) [internet archive link]. Don has told me that the NDVIA was defunded in 2011.

I’m going to be publishing at least one more video interview with Don, and interviews with other people whose work I admire. My video producer is Campbell Baird.

This post will be added to my Don Hennessy Digest.