Life has been hard and unfair for the Victim. To hear him tell it, his intelligence has been chronically underestimated; he has been burned by people he trusted; and his good intentions have been misunderstood. The Victim appeals to a woman's compassion and desire to feel that she can make a difference in his life. He often tells persuasive and heart-rending stories about how he was abused by his former partner, sometimes adding the tragic element that she is now restricting or preventing his contact with his children. He maneuvers the woman into hating his ex-partner and may succeed in enlisting her in a campaign of harassment, rumor spreading, or battling for custody. As a counselor of abusive men, I have dozens of times been in the position of interviewing a man's former partner and then speaking with the new one. The new partner usually speaks at length about what a wicked witch the woman before her was. I can't tell her what I know, much as I wish I could, because of my responsibility to protect the confidentiality and safety of the former partner. All I can say is: I always recommend, whenever there are claims of emotional or physical abuse, that women talk to each other directly and not just accept the man's denial.

Women sometimes ask me: But what if a man I am dating really was victimized by his former girlfriend? How can I tell the difference? Here are some things to watch for: If you listen carefully, you often can hear the difference between anger toward an ex-partner, which would not be worrisome in itself, and disrespect or contempt, which should raise warning flags. A man who has left a relationship with bitterness should nonetheless be able to talk about his ex-partner as a human being, with some understanding of what her side of the conflicts was and some ways he might have contributed to what went wrong. If he speaks in degrading or superior ways about her, or makes everything that went wrong in the relationship her fault, be careful, because it is likely that he was the abusive one.

Try to get him to talk about his own conduct in the relationship, especially around the time of the breakup. If he blames his own behavior on her, that's a bad sign. Be particularly careful with a man who claims to have been the victim of physical violence by a previous female partner. The great majority of men who make such claims are physical abusers. Ask him for as much detail as you can about the violent incidents, and then try to talk to her or seek out anyone else who could give you a different perspective on what happened. Watch for warning signs of abusiveness (see Chapter 5).

Pay attention to how he talks and thinks about abused women. A genuine male victim tends to feel sympathy for abused women and support their cause. The Victim, on the other hand, often says that women exaggerate or fabricate their claims of abuse or insists that men are abused just as much as women are. The Victim may adopt the language of abuse victims, claiming, for example, that his ex-partner was focused on power and control, disrespected him, and always had to have her own way. In a few years, he will be using similar reality-inversion language about you—unless, of course, you kowtow to him to his satisfaction.

The Victim is highly self-centered in relationships. Everything seems to revolve around his wounds, and he keeps himself at the center of attention. If you have children, he tries to get them to feel sorry for him as well. He seems forever to be telling you: You don't understand me, you don't appreciate me, you hold my mistakes over my head. Yet you sense that the dynamic is actually the other way around. If you stand up to him about these distortions, he tells you that you are abusing him or says, You just can't tolerate my standing up to your bullying. This recurring inversion of reality is similar to what happens with Mr. Sensitive, but without the introspective psychology, gentle man, or recovering alcoholic routines. If you leave him, you risk his seeking custody of your children, presenting himself to the court as the victim of your abuse and of your efforts to turn the children against him. Often the Victim claims to be victimized not only by you but also by his boss, his parents, the neighbors, his friends, and strangers on the street. Everyone is always wronging him, and he is always blameless. When the Victim joins an abuser group, his story tends to go like this: I put up with my partner's mistreatment of me for years, and I never fought back or even tried to defend myself. But I finally couldn't take it anymore, and I started to give her back a little taste of what she was doing to me. So now I've been labeled abusive. Women are allowed to do those things and nobody cares, but as soon as a man does it he's a pariah. This line of reasoning many times develops into a discussion of how men are the victims of women overall in society, because women run the world. This is a startling distortion, given which gender actually dominates almost all legislatures, police departments, judgeships, businesses, and so on ad nauseam. When I point out this reality to the Victim, he describes a kind of paranoid fantasy in which women are behind the scenes secretly pulling the strings, largely by getting men to feel sorry for them. His capacity for turning things into their opposites in this way is a central cause of his abusiveness. If you are involved with the Victim and want to escape his abuse, you may find that you feel guilty toward him, despite his treatment of you, and have difficulty ending the relationship as a result. You may feel that because his life has been so hard, you are reluctant to add to his pain by abandoning him. You may worry that he won't take care of himself if you leave, that he will wither away from depression, won't eat or sleep, or might even try to kill himself. The Victim knows how to present himself as helpless and pathetic so that you will find it harder to take your own life back. The central attitudes driving the Victim are:

• Everybody has done me wrong, especially the women I’ve been involved with. Poor me.

• When you accuse me of being abusive, you are joining the parade of people who have been cruel and unfair to me. It proves you're just like the rest.

• It's justifiable for me to do to you whatever I feel you are doing to me, and even to make it quite a bit worse to make sure you get the message.

• Women who complain of mistreatment by men, such as relationship abuse or sexual harassment, are anti-male and out for blood.

• I've had it so hard that I'm not responsible for my actions.