With the introduction of laws which recognise coercive control and mental cruelty, it is time for the broader women’s movement to take a new position when working with clients who are living with or in contact with male intimate abusers. In taking a new position we must be fully informed about the problem. We must examine the tumour at the core of all intimate abuse.
The man who treats his wife/partner as a second-class human being does so on the understanding that she will see herself as the problem. His ability to control her mind is developed by constant degradation of her humanity and persistent undermining of her femininity. This bombardment of her spirit causes her to focus on her own inadequacies while ignoring his behaviour.
This deviousness allows the man to develop an ability to invade the thoughts of his partner until she is unable to think for herself. He fills her analytical mind with doubt and confusion until she loses faith in her own intuition and her own opinions. She lives with this anxiety as it grows to fear and then to terror. She becomes afraid to be herself.
It is in this highly ambiguous state that she presents to agencies and support services:
- She arrives believing that she is partly to blame for her own misery.
- She also is aware that she cannot explain her confusion as she is unsure about the setting-up and grooming phases that she has been subjected to. [Read: How the male intimate abuser sets-up & grooms a target woman.]
- She is conflicted between her need to be both truthful and loyal, which leads her to minimise his abuse and to maximise her own inadequacies.
While she is in this turmoil we, the domestic violence and support services, offer her support, empowerment and sympathy. We begin to encourage her to ignore him or to challenge him. Many of my clients have been encouraged to leave him. Some of my clients have been required to have him barred before further help will be offered to her. This is an inadequate response. It is inadequate primarily because it puts the onus firmly on the person with the least amount of power to solve the problem. Our support adds to her responsibility, while we can witness her further abuse without sharing that responsibility.
Evan Stark says the revolution is stalled. It is stalled because the movement has realigned its position from one of protection to one of support.
[Watch: Evan Stark didn’t interview abusive men to analyse their thinking and behaviour.]
When intimate abuse and violence first became an issue, our reaction was to build physical refuges. This response was predicated on the belief that the problem was one of male violence and sexual assaults. We now know that these abusive behaviours are developed and maintained after a level of mind control is achieved. This mind control can be triggered into action in many ways and will allow the abuser to repeat the abuse and not suffer any sanction.
Our response needs to move from requiring the target woman to solve the problem, to one where the whole community moves to protect her and sanction her abuser.
Rather than being critical of our work, let us acknowledge that we have all been hoodwinked by the male intimate abusers.
These men, whom I have labelled psychephiles, are more cunning and more devious than pedophiles. [Watch: The psychephile befriends the mind of the target woman and surreptitiously brainwashes her, while pretending to be in love.]
Psychephiles weave their self-centred way through society while devastating the lives of their intimate partners. They also manipulate their children in whatever way is most painful for their mother. The damage done to children when he uses them as pawns in his game is both traumatic and hidden.
He is an expert in avoiding exposure and can divert any attempt to focus on him. [Read more: How He Wins.]
We all – professionals and bystanders – are guilty at times of seeing his partner as inadequate and of seeing his parenting as being helpful. This has been our excuse for failing to intervene in the relationship, and it is the psychephile who has groomed us into this false sense of being helpful. [Read more: Society has been hoodwinked by men who abuse their female intimate partners.]
If we accept that the basis for all intimate abuse is an ability to control her thoughts and an ability to groom her into forgiveness or at least into ‘moving on’, we must also accept that we all have been groomed by him. This grooming can happen even when we only meet her, because she brings his thoughts to our conversations, and she brings his reaction to our suggestions. [Read more: For professionals who work in Domestic Abuse.]
If we wish to intervene in this process, we need to do so in at least two stages.
The first stage is to attempt to protect her mind from hearing any more of his messages. If she is living with him she can tell us what he is saying and invite us to respond to his agenda by text, email, or a face to face encounter. This intervention requires skill and timing but can be effective if we impress on him that we will now be privy to his behaviour, and that we will be obliged to report him if it occurs again.
The second stage is to encourage her to begin to be herself again. She does not need therapy as she is a decent woman. When she reassesses her talents, her kindness, her loyalty, her honesty, and her dedication, she can use these gifts to make her way in the world. Our role then becomes one of shielding her spirit from his influence. In order to do so we need to work together so that the psychephile is confronted by a barrier of goodness against which his malevolence will fade.
I will develop some detail on both stages one and two in subsequent blogs. I will do a post on team-work, and also a post on the recruitment and training of practitioners.
We can no longer leave the target woman alone to cope with a man who acts as a psychopath and a sociopath within the confines of his relationship. We are failing her if we let her feel abandoned when she hears him arriving home or when she sees another text or email from him.
Before any intervention is used, we must get the permission and co-operation of the target woman. This is a skill that can only be developed while working with experienced practitioners. Each client must get the benefit of all the skills of our agencies. Instead of working in isolation, with occasional supervision, we need to work in teams that use the combined wisdom of all our colleagues. We should not do the work unless we are clear that what we are dealing with is criminal behavior.
I do not wish to change any services that are proving effective but I believe that until the community response actively includes protection, the behavior of the psychephiles will be repeated. The psychephiles can be ruthless until they find out that they are being monitored. Because they operate in the secrecy of the home, they find it difficult to cope with outsiders who are not groomed by them. When the whole community send a clear message that any future abuse will not be tolerated, most of them change tactics. They do not give up their control but they attempt to exercise it in more subtle ways.
I despair of the legal and justice systems. I don’t think they will ever understand the abuser. I believe that we must not wait for these systems to reform. I am convinced that if we are to eradicate intimate abuse we need society to declare it abhorrent and for all of us to become active.
***
This post was written by Don Hennessy. Links have been added by Barbara Roberts. Barb will add this post to her Don Hennessy Digest.
Read and watch: Don Hennessy and Barbara Roberts talk about Domestic Violence and Abuse, Part 1
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I appreciate much of what is being addressed here. Psychological abuse, coercive control, manipulation, and the profound confusion experienced by many victims are real and deeply damaging realities. I also agree that society and even professionals often fail to recognize abuse that does not present primarily as physical violence.
That said, I found myself troubled by several aspects of the article’s framing.
Most notably, the piece speaks about abusive men almost entirely as fixed predators to be monitored, sanctioned, and resisted, while offering little reflection on what forms such men in the first place or whether transformation is possible. The absence of that discussion feels significant.
Understanding causation is not the same as excusing behavior. Men remain morally responsible for cruelty, intimidation, manipulation, or domination. But if we are serious about reducing abuse rather than merely reacting to it, we must also ask difficult upstream questions:
How are boys formed?
What kinds of masculinity are being modeled?
What role do shame, trauma, addiction, emotional illiteracy, family dysfunction, humiliation, abandonment, or narcissistic injury play?
How do some men come to equate love with control or vulnerability with danger?
What interventions actually help prevent these patterns from emerging?
Without engaging those questions, the framework risks becoming fatalistic – dividing people primarily into victims, protectors, and predators – rather than seeking restoration, accountability, and prevention together.
I was also uneasy with language that at times seemed to move beyond psychological analysis into moral absolutism. Terms like “psychephile” may carry rhetorical force, but they risk portraying abusive individuals as nearly archetypal or irredeemable figures rather than damaged and morally accountable human beings. History suggests we should be cautious whenever social movements begin speaking in categories that leave little room for complexity, rehabilitation, or due process.
I also worry that a framework centered almost entirely on surveillance, sanction, and community intervention can unintentionally undermine careful discernment in situations that are often psychologically and relationally complex. Some cases are clear and horrifying. Others involve mutual toxicity, mental illness, addiction, trauma histories, or deeply fractured relational dynamics that do not fit neatly into a single moral template.
Most importantly, I believe any durable solution must include the healing and formation of men themselves. A society cannot merely police male behavior externally; it must cultivate men internally – teaching emotional regulation, accountability, empathy, restraint, responsibility, healthy attachment, and forms of strength that are protective rather than dominating.
Otherwise we may succeed only in treating symptoms downstream while leaving the deeper human and cultural roots untouched.
None of this diminishes the reality of abuse or the urgent need to protect victims. But I believe a truly comprehensive response must hold protection, accountability, prevention, and the possibility of transformation together.
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Maxim, I’m wondering why you are keen to pick holes in Don’s article. It’s easy to be an armchair critic. I’m wondering what YOU are doing to prevent and reduce male violence against women. Your comment was submitted very soon after this post was published. I’ve sat on your comment for days before answering it, partly because I was busy, and partly because I wanted to let it mull over in my mind so I could write a comprehensive reply to it.
It’s true that Don’s article didn’t discuss primary prevention. But Don’s suggestions would help reduce domestic abuse if they were widely adopted. I say they would reduce abuse because something like what Don is suggesting has (to a small extent) already been adopted in some parts of the world where the various agencies (police, court officials, agencies that support victims, child protection departments, family agencies, etc, all convene regularly to share information about the high-risk cases they have on their books and confer about what they can/will do to reduce the risk for those victims. Because this is only being done for ‘high risk’ victims, and there aren’t enough funds to do it for all victims, the evidence that it is reducing abuse overall is, as yet, pretty small, but it does seem to be helping reduce the risk for some high-risk victims.
In my opinion, your discomfort with moral absolutism says something about you, even though your couched your discomfort with intellectual reasoning.
I’m wondering why you are so quick to throw your hands up about the term ‘psychephile’. Is it because the term captures so well the surreptitious tactics used by men who target women for long term intimate-partner abuse? The term ‘psychephile’ has helped target women understand what has been done to them. It helps a target woman come out of the fog, get mental clarity and feel more confident she is not blameworthy or foolish or stupid. That in itself helps reduce abuse, because when target women feel better about themselves, they are more able make decisions and take actions that will foster safety and dignity for themselves and their children.
Don is not suggesting that the word ‘psychephile’ become a diagnostic label in the health field, or a legal definition. But the term has value because it helps expose the tactics of the male intimate abuser. Predatory men have been very crafty at obscuring their bad-faith conduct. Terminology and language that exposes what predators are doing is vital in the overall project of reducing interpersonal violence and abuse.
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Maxim, I think it’s unfair of you to critique Don’s article for not talking about primary prevention. Primary prevention has never been Don Hennessy’s focus or expertise. Your comment comes across as a deliberate distraction tactic, designed to take people’s minds away from what Don is proposing in this article.
There are lots of other people working on primary prevention (how boys and men are formed, the kinds of masculinities that are being modelled, etc.).
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Maxim, in my first reply to you I said, “I wonder what YOU are doing to prevent and reduce male violence against women.” I was being courteous and I hoped you’d elaborate.
Now I’m going to put the question directly. What are YOU doing to prevent and reduce male violence against women?
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I appreciate your thoughtful reply, and I certainly agree that immediate protection and practical intervention matter deeply, especially in high-risk cases.
I also understand why those working closely with victims can become wary of conversations that appear to intellectualize abuse or redirect attention away from perpetrators’ responsibility. That was not my intent.
My concern was simply that I do not believe protection, sanction, and monitoring alone are sufficient if we hope to reduce these patterns across generations. I believe it is also necessary to ask how destructive relational patterns form in the first place, how boys and men are shaped, and what kinds of interventions cultivate emotional maturity, accountability, restraint, empathy, and healthy attachment before abuse emerges.
To me, those questions are not distractions from victim protection but part of a comprehensive prevention framework.
I also think discussions like these benefit from leaving room for complexity and careful discernment without assuming that raising broader questions implies minimization of abuse itself.
For what it is worth, one area where I have personally felt deep concern is within some religious environments where abused women are encouraged to return to harmful situations under the language of submission, forgiveness, prayerfulness, or “having more faith,” while the abusive dynamics themselves remain insufficiently confronted. I have seen the burden of preserving the relationship placed disproportionately on the woman, even in situations involving coercion, intimidation, or emotional degradation. I believe that has caused real harm and deserves far more serious attention than it often receives.
In any case, I appreciated the opportunity to read Don’s perspective, even where I see some important differences in emphasis and framing.
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Thanks Maxim for clarifying your intent, and I’m glad to understand you better. :)
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Reflecting on our exchange afterward, I realized I did not communicate my perspective as clearly or carefully as I intended.
Part of what is often on my mind in conversations like this is how these issues are heard by the broader communities and institutions that most need to change, especially communities that may already be defensive, uncertain, or resistant when these subjects arise.
Because of that, I sometimes approach these discussions asking not only whether something is morally urgent and true, but also how it will be received by people who may initially be reluctant to listen. I suspect that concern shaped my response more than I made clear.
My intention was not to minimize abuse, redirect attention away from victims, or undermine Don’s work. Quite the opposite. I believe these realities need to be spoken about honestly and courageously. My concern is simply that conversations around abuse, power, accountability, and prevention are often emotionally and psychologically complex, and I tend to value approaches that leave room for nuance, persuasion, discernment, and ultimately transformation alongside protection and accountability.
I also recognize that people working closely with victims may hear certain questions or concerns differently than I intended them, particularly after years of encountering minimization or bad-faith responses from others.
I genuinely appreciate the seriousness with which you and others are addressing forms of suffering that have too often been ignored, misunderstood, or hidden. My own tone in these comments doesn’t reveal the human suffering I’ve personally had to address in evangelical settings.
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The way our words and our concerns can be heard / misheard, and interpreted / misinterpreted by other people is often a problem, isn’t it? Thanks for articulating this so clearly.
I strive to avoid ambiguity in my writing. But often for reasons of space (and people’s limited concentration span) I can’t always give all the nuances in an article. Or even in a book!
If you want to say more about how you’ve addressed human suffering in evangelical settings, I’d be interested.
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Don Hennessy says, “The person called Maxim is someone who believes that there is good in everyone. She is unable to accept that people can override that good with evil.She dismisses the Lords suggestion that there men should have a millstone tied around their necks and they should be drowned.”
I contacted Don asking him what he thought about Maxim’s comment and he’s said I can post this on his behalf.
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