The prevailing notion of abusive men is that it's due to toxic masculinity - i.e. men are just violent and some are better at controlling it than others. The reality is that most abusive men have the same condition as abusive women - borderline personality disorder. The key criteria for which are:

  • Affective (emotional) instability including intense, episodic emotional anguish, irritability, and anxiety/ panic attacks
  • Anger that is inappropriate, intense and difficult to control, and
  • Chronic feelings of emptiness
  • Emotional over reactivity (“emotional storms”)
  • Self-damaging acts such as excessive spending, unsafe and inappropriate sexual conduct, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating, and
  • Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-injurious behavior
  • A markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of your self (your identity), and
  • Paranoid ideation or severe dissociative episodes (transient and stress related)
  • Expectations of negative and harmful attitudes and behaviors from most people
  • You may engage in frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, and
  • Your relationships may be very intense, unstable, and alternate between the extremes of over idealizing and undervaluing people who are important to you

You may recognise these in men described as NiceGuys - the sudden flips from nice to nasty, and domestic violence - almost always a coping mechanism to prevent abandonment. The concept of a manchild too - an inability to cope with emotions, threats of suicide, poor sense of self. It is pathetically underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed in men, mainly due to gender stereotypes:

One study found that when 52 professionals from a mental health agency in California assessed patient vignettes, they were unable to accurately diagnose the presence of BPD in males--even though the symptoms were identical to those in vignettes of females.

This results, in part, in the way anger is interpreted differently depending upon whether it comes from a man or a woman. "For the most part, when women are angry they are classified as irrational, frenzied, or too emotional," says therapist Andrea Brandt. "On the other hand, men's anger is sometimes recognized as strength and aggressiveness."

The effects are two-fold:

  1. The abusive behaviour of men that suffer BPD is normalised such that all men are labelled as potentially abusive and abusive men are thought to be the norm.
  2. Men with BPD do not get the help they need, and in fact just get criminalised or marginised.

The first is sexism, the second is injustice, and both are men's right's issues.

https://www.bpdcentral.com/help-for-families/bpd-articles/?Borderline-Personality-Disorder-in-Men-Overlooked-Misdiagnosed-5

Both men and women can express their fear of abandonment as physically aggressive rage toward the "cause" of their distress. However, men's level of violence is more lethal. A perceived betrayal or a real or imagined act of abandonment may trigger acting out activities such as kicking down a door, forcing sexual activity, blocking the partner's escape, and threatening the partner with a weapon. Some are involved in controlling and stalking behaviors such as bugging phones, installing secret cameras, and hiring private detectives.

This aggression often results in a misdiagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (sociopath) or, in adolescents, a conduct disorder. As a result, they don't get the right treatment. What they do get is incarcerated. As a matter of fact, so many males with BPD have been incarcerated that a form of therapy for BPs, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, has been adapted for male offenders in correctional settings.