Does violence at home have a throbbing beat for a backdrop and erotic sex burning up the house? Eminem might think he’s presenting a case against domestic violence, but with lines like these:

“Just gonna stand there and watch me burn

But that’s alright because I like the way it hurts”

pouring from co-star Rihanna’s beautiful lips as her liquid kohl-rimmed eyes show us how caught in erotic fascination she is, we see one long rationalization about how two people caught up in alcohol and sex flame out to a passion-soaked burn.

That’s the song your kids will be humming and dancing to while they watch a glamour-drama of domestic abuse amidst love gone wrong.

After watching Eminem’s “Love The Way You Lie” video, I wonder if it’s meant to warn women from bad boys, or if the message tells us to be more understanding girlfriends, and thus rescue our tortured battering boyfriends. Certainly Eminem shows himself as an alarmingly appealing, if dangerous, (more…)

When I taught in a batterer intervention program—an educational, not counseling program—we’d draw a triangle on the board to help the men look at their belief system. During this lesson on the hierarchy of power, we’d use different ‘systems’ so they could identify the ways they classified people.  Schools, corporations, and prisons were just a few of the organizations we sliced and diced.

They stratified prison, showing the prisoners on the bottom, squashed under the guards, wardens, politicians, and everyone else in the world. When I asked if the guards had any chance of having an “authentic relationship” with the prisoners as they loomed over them as shown in the hierarchy triangle, their laughs were loud and derisive.

When we asked them to define the layers of family, the woman usually laid on the bottom of the heap. Some men argued that the women rated a place above the male children, but they were always wedged under the husbands and fathers. Men who’d grown up in single mother households still stuck the father figure on top.

This doesn’t come from the air.

The Boston Globe today reported on another domestic homicide, the sixteenth in Massachusetts since January. Sarin Chan was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. The murder was witnessed by her 4-and 6-year-old children. (The article does not say if they are boys or girls, and it is not known if the alleged murderer is the father.)

Honestly? I feel a bit shaky writing the above. My novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, revolves around young girls witnessing their father murdering their mother, I worked with men who savagely beat (and some murdered) their partners. My father tried to kill my mother, and still I try to pretend (more…)

When someone shares the truth of her life, it is a gift. When we hear a story that speaks to our own experience, especially the rarely revealed parts, we feel less alone, and more powerful. Last Thursday, Diane Patrick told her story. She is the wife of Deval Patrick, who is both the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the man who helped Diane Patrick recover from an abusive relationship. Speaking in front of 400+ women and girls who’d gathered to watch her receive the Strong, Smart and Bold honor from Girls Inc. of Lynn, she spoke her truth, and with that made a difference in someone’s life.

Sometimes all a troubled child needs when teetering on the balance bar between drug-pregnancy-crime and school-career-esteem is one encouraging adult. The steady hand of a mentor, a teacher, librarian can pull a girl up from the abyss. Girl’s Inc. exists to provide that helping hand.

Summers rescued me from a sketchy Brooklyn childhood and changed my life when The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies sent me to Camp Mikan. The director, Doris Bedell, along with women like Julia Rubnitz and Jay Bentivegna taught me women can be strong, warm, dance, discuss politics, swim like a dolphin, and live peacefully in a wondrously mixed cultural and ethnic soup.

It was only in the summer that I felt visible, able to live outside the safety of the world of books and my imagination.

Yesterday, at the annual fundraising event for Girls Inc. of Lynn, I remembered those women who held out their hands to me. As I toured the building where the girls play ball, create art and learn exactly how one says no and when one says yes, the ghosts of those women smiled down.

The powerful women sitting at my table beamed as Stephanie Hardy received the Lucille Miller Wright scholarship for academic achievement, crying along with Stephanie as she described the life she’d escaped and her plan to give back to her community when she’d finished her education.

All the recipients of the Girl Hero Scholarship shared that spirit. Like Stephanie, Jacklyn Crowley, Phumana Phim, and Ivanna Solano all want to hold out the same helping hand that pulled them up.

Love for these girls radiated throughout the room. Pride poured out as we listened to Executive Director Patricia Driscoll describe the program offered by her incredible agency, which recently moved from a shabby building held together by Band-Aids to a bright clean renovated space—a space worthy of the girls and staff. A space made real by the hard work of the women sitting in that room.

I thank Stacy Meyers Ames for bringing me to this event (and for devoting so much effort helping girls grow up whole.) I thank all the women at our table for the hands they hold out to these girls. And I thank First Lady Diane Patrick for opening up to all the girls and women in that room. Revealing a private truth to provide hope for others, that is strong, smart and bold.

For ten years I co-led groups for violent men. I sat in a circle with a male co-leader and anywhere from 8 to 18 men who’d been violent with their wives, girlfriends, dates, sisters, or another woman in their lives.

Their violence ran the gamut from emotional abuse of the most devastating sort, to smacking, to slapping, to punching, pushing, prodding, to breaking bones to murder (thankfully not many.)

This was a Certified Boston Batterer Intervention Program. Most men were ordered into the program by the Massachusetts courts, some by the Department of Social Services, and a few were volunteers—or as we called them, wife and girlfriend-ordered.

We followed one of the state-approved educational curriculum (this was not counseling)—in this case, the Duluth Model. The men were in the program for over 40 weeks. They ‘checked in’ with their behavior, they did homework, they did role-playing (where guess who acted the woman,) and they studied a series of topics in the quest to learn control.

We taught them that they didn’t have ‘buttons’ on their chest.

Him: She pushed my buttons! Me: Oh, really—where are they? I don’t want to accidentally push one.

We tried to teach them that they actually had plenty of control.

Me: So, how often do you hit your boss? Him: Whaddya crazy? I wouldn’t hit my boss. Me: Why? Doesn’t he make you mad? Him: Of course. But he’d fire me.

Their women couldn’t fire them. They could leave, but facing that, the men fell into Plan B:

I’ll kill myself if you leave!

You’ll never see the kids again—I’ll tell the court that you’re a drug addict.

I love you! Please give me another chance. You’re the only person in the world who understands me.

Other than the men we weeded out—the mentally ill and the truly unstable—the men were able to control themselves. Some didn’t believe it or they chose not to. Only they could choose a different way.

They fought this idea. Thinking themselves victims of invisible buttons was more comfortable than thinking themselves men who chose violence as a way to get what they wanted. And what did they want? Why did cheeks get shattered and tender skin become black and blue.

Money, sex, jealousy, children, television shows, cold food, in-laws: getting what they wanted.

The most oft-said reason when I asked what it was they wanted so very much?

Him: For her to shut the eff up. Me: Did you get what you wanted? Him: Naw. I got the cops.

It’s about intent. Most men didn’t have the goal of breaking a bone. They had the goal of a hot supper or a quiet minute or making love or . . . any of a hundred things. They reached for these things the quickest way they knew: with their fists or a raised voice.

It’s too much for me to pack this all into one post, so I’ll try to sum up with this:

What was it like to work with these men?

It was sad.

It was enraging.

At times, it was toxic to see the sheer hatred of women raw and out there.

It was never just about being drunk or high, but being drunk and high never helped.

It was about power, control, and a violence that seemed all-too-accessible.

It was about denial, and about how the shame these men felt could block their change. Because to change, they had to admit they’d done a hateful thing to people they loved.

People often ask if our program made a difference. For some it did. For others it didn’t. On the other hand, not being in the program meant there was almost no chance they’d examine their behavior.

On the best day of my almost-ten years, a woman walked in with a former client of mine. It was her husband. He’d started the program belligerent and angry. In denial.

When he began, his eyes told me how deeply he hated me.

Halfway through the program, this man (who’d grown up seeing his father abuse his mother) almost cried as he spoke of how he’d done the one thing he’d promised himself he’d never do.

He left the program wanting to work with young men in an anti-violence program.

That day, his wife came in carrying a home-baked cake and offering me and for the man with whom I co-led groups these words: Thank you for giving me back my husband.

That sums it up for me.

When people ask me if it worked, this is what I say:

It worked for that family.

When I worked with batterers the very last thing they were willing to give up was the notion that screaming at their children would somehow teach them to be better people.

“Listen up.” My client stuck his chin out, ready to prove me wrong. “My Pops stuck his face in mine and he’s screamed until I thought his eyes would pop out.” This said with a great deal of pride—as though perhaps this eye-popping bellowing was proof of how much Pops loved him.

Perhaps we end up adopting the very thing that hurt us to prove our own pain wasn’t suffered in vain. Or perhaps it’s just laziness.

To help the men I worked with at least consider not using words to terrify their children with—just rent the idea, we’d say– (this wasn’t counseling—it was an educational-intervention program) I’d stand at the blackboard and ask them to let loose with the adjectives that described how they felt as children when they were yelled at and hit:

Humiliated. Terrified. Stomach pain. Scared. Throw-up. Sad. Nauseated. Embarrassed. Shamed. Disgraced. Wanted to kill myself. Wanted to run away. Wanted to die. Wanted my father/mother/sister/brother to die. Hated them. Hated myself. Small. Invisible.

Look at those words, I’d say to them.  Read them all quietly to yourselves.

Not one of those words that sprang out from the guys defined learning or improving or changing to a better person.

Now think, about it. Are those the feeling you want to engender in your children? If you think so, then I guess you should keep on screaming. If not, perhaps it’s time to learn control.

The thing about yelling is this—it’s never about the other person–not unless we’re warning someone of an oncoming truck. It’s about our own frustration, our own unhappiness, our own inability to withstand the pain that we’re feeling. So we pass it on. Sadly, when we take the rage and fear out of our own heads in this manner, we’re placing it right smack into our loved one.

My children were already in high school when I started working with violent men. If I’d known how many lessons I’d learn from them, I’d have started earlier. I look back at the times I screamed and yelled and threw my own anger tantrums and all I can do is close my eyes and thank God that I have or giving and loving children.

Most of all, I look at my daughter and her husband, raising their small daughter, and see that the sins of the mother do not always get passed down. Perhaps if we’re lucky and spend out time trying to change, we can water down the worst of our traits more and more, until finally they’re only a trickle of mean.

The first step is believing that control is within us:

When’s the last time you hauled off and screamed at your boss because she mocked your ideas? Sounds almost ridiculous right?

How recently did you turn to a stranger and bellow at him because he took up too much seat room? Most of us want to—few of us would.

Do you spend much time buttonholing your neighbors to enumerate their most annoying traits, or do you swallow hard, take a minute and move on?

Do we love our bosses, strangers or neighbors more than our husbands, wives, children, girlfriends or boyfriends? Of course not. However, it’s easy to use them as sponges for our own anger, disappointment and frustration.

So perhaps the next time, you can rent the idea of using these two tools:

1) Self-talk:

Replace the negative thoughts with calming ones. Do you actually want to hurt someone you love?

2) Intents & Effects:

Think of your goals before you use ugly words. Will screaming insults help you reach that goal, or simply make some one feel awful? Goals versus outcomes are often eons apart.

3) Bite your tongue:

Really. Literally. Try it. Maybe hurting oneself a tiny bit is better than hurting a loved one a whole lot.

A few days ago I wrote my warning about falling for the ‘bad boy.’ Now it’s time to figure out if you have one lying next to you. And what kind. You may think you have a Marlboro Man while in truth you’re harboring a Hannibal Lector.

Take a look below. Which one is your bad boy?

The Romantic Lead: Rhett Butler. Heart of gold hiding inside a scallywag. Has tons of money. Always shows up to rescue you. Loves children. Once committed to you, he’ll sweep you away to a fully staffed mansion and the best big O you’ve ever had.

The Thug: Tony Soprano. Will sweet-talk you while trying to get some. Smack you away when done. Unless you’re his wife. In which case, he’ll buy you diamonds after giving someone else the big O.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself, to determine whether you’re harboring a romantic lead or a thug:

1) When you speculate about whether he’ll ever cheat on you, your instinct tells you:

a. Of course. He cheated with me before we got married.

b. Um . . . I guess it’s possible.

c. Are you kidding? Before or after he finishes sorting out receipts for the taxes?

2) During an argument, he is most likely to:

a. Swear, call you names, pin all the blame on you.

b. Yell until you back down.

c. Walk away until he calms down.

3) For Christmas, he will:

a. Have his mistress or secretary pick something out for you.

b. Run into Macy’s on Christmas Eve and buy the first three gift sets he sees.

c. Agonize so much that whatever he buys, you feel the effort and love.

4) When you’re sick, you expect:

a. Nothing.

b. He’ll move the remote to your side of the bed.

c. He’ll ask if you need him to stay home.

5) When your mother becomes ill, he might:

a) Pout because you’re not home to make supper.

b) Ask how long this is going to go on.

c) Offer to let her come live with the two of you

If your man is an ‘a’ – get yourself to a therapist, if you’re not yet married, and to a lawyer if you are.

If he’s a ‘b’—do you have lots of girlfriends to mop up your tears? Thank goodness!

You have a ‘c?’ Congratulations, you’ll have someone to watch the Oscars with this weekend!

Perhaps the lure of the bad boy is similar to the lure of climbing Mt. Everest. It feels so good to conquer it and get to the top—despite all the pain you felt on the ascent. Unfortunately, you have to climb down and start all over again to get back up to that thrilling peak.

Working with batterers for almost ten years afforded me plenty of material and plenty of insight. The clearest and most useful lesson I learned was this: a ‘bad boy’ isn’t edgy, exciting, and a bag of fun, he’s mean and selfish and looking out for number one—himself—all the time.

Many of the batterers were classic bad boys; they could charm like no one else. They gave me smoldering glances so I’d know that I was the ONLY one in the entire world who they’d let inside their soul. When they didn’t have money to pay for classes, or had been picked up on a new charge, or failed a drug test, they’d look at me with their carefully tortured eyes and tell me how sorry they were.

And they really were sorry. Sorry they’d been caught and sorry they had to spend another night pretending to pay attention to this crap we were teaching.

At their core, these guys weren’t very different from the bad boys I’d once been drawn to. But never again, not after working that job. I wish I could share with every woman the experience of sitting in a circle with 15 court-ordered-to-be-there bad boys, because at some point during the 42 weeks they occupied that chair in the church basement, they let loose with some truth that revealed the dime a dozen ordinariness of bad boy behavior.

So, while I can’t put you in that room, I can try to share with you what I learned there:

1) When you and your bad boy get in that insane fight, and you don’t know how it began, why it happened, or why he stormed out the door . . . when you’re ready to follow him so you can beg his forgiveness—but you don’t have any idea what to apologize for—here’s what’s really going on:

He wanted to get out of the house. So he caused the fight. The men admitted it. Turns out this sleazy little tactic is very, very common.

2) Which leads to this: What did most men admit they wanted to get out of the truly awful battles? You know, the ones where he yelled so loud you finally backed down?

If Jeopardy could have more realistic categories, the response to “most common thing men want women to do during a fight?” would be “Alex, what is “shut the f*** up.”

3) Think this when he tells you “you’re the only one I’ve ever been able to talk to.” Yeah, right. First of all he’s probably said the same thing to 100 other women before you. Because he knows it’s like catnip.  The men I worked with were very clear that they used this line only to manipulate.

4) When he says, “I can’t live without you,” here’s a news flash. Yes he can. And he will. Quite well. The question is, can you live with him? Do you want to? Do you like being kept off balance? Do you treasure being used like medicine for someone’s lack of self-confidence or need to control?

5) You want to believe it will change. Things will get better. If you explain it once more, write one more email, one more letter, or cry one more time, then finally he will understand! And once he understands, those moments of incredible tenderness and bliss —when he gives you that crooked smile and takes you in his arms and then gently helps you onto his exciting motorcycle—will last forever.

I promise you, things will not change. He will not get better. There’s nothing you can do without him wanting change, and the cycle will continue as long as you let it.

So here’s my advice, as a mother, a sister, a friend and most of all, from a woman who worked with those bad boys:

Choose kind over thrilling. It wears much better.

Choose responsible over devil-may-care. It will keep you and your children warm and safe at night.

Choose a man who wants to be your friend, not one who will be your life-long home improvement project.

For ten years I co-led groups for violent men. I sat in a circle with a male co-leader and anywhere from 8 to 18 men who’d been violent with their wives, girlfriends, dates, sisters, or another woman in their lives.

Their violence ran the gamut from emotional abuse of the most devastating sort, to smacking, to slapping, to punching, pushing, prodding, to breaking bones to murder (thankfully not many.)

This was a Certified Boston Batterer Intervention Program. Most men were ordered into the program by the Massachusetts courts, some by the Department of Social Services, and a few were volunteers—or as we called them, wife and girlfriend-ordered.

We followed one of the state-approved educational curriculum (this was not counseling)—in this case, the Duluth Model. The men were in the program for over 40 weeks. They ‘checked in’ with their behavior, they did homework, they did role-playing (where guess who acted the woman,) and they studied a series of topics in the quest to learn control.

We taught them that they didn’t have ‘buttons’ on their chest.

Him: She pushed my buttons! Me: Oh, really—where are they? I don’t want to accidentally push one.

We tried to teach them that they actually had plenty of control.

Me: So, how often do you hit your boss? Him: Whaddya crazy? I wouldn’t hit my boss. Me: Why? Doesn’t he make you mad? Him: Of course. But he’d fire me.

Their women couldn’t fire them. They could leave, but facing that, the men fell into Plan B:

I’ll kill myself if you leave!

You’ll never see the kids again—I’ll tell the court that you’re a drug addict.

I love you! Please give me another chance. You’re the only person in the world who understands me.

Other than the men we weeded out—the mentally ill and the truly unstable—the men were able to control themselves. Some didn’t believe it or they chose not to. Only they could choose a different way.

They fought this idea. Thinking themselves victims of invisible buttons was more comfortable than thinking themselves men who chose violence as a way to get what they wanted. And what did they want? Why did cheeks get shattered and tender skin become black and blue.

Money, sex, jealousy, children, television shows, cold food, in-laws: getting what they wanted.

The most oft-said reason when I asked what it was they wanted so very much?

Him: For her to shut the eff up. Me: Did you get what you wanted? Him: Naw. I got the cops.

It’s about intent. Most men didn’t have the goal of breaking a bone. They had the goal of a hot supper or a quiet minute or making love or . . . any of a hundred things. They reached for these things the quickest way they knew: with their fists or a raised voice.

It’s too much for me to pack this all into one post, so I’ll try to sum up with this:

What was it like to work with these men?

It was sad.

It was enraging.

At times, it was toxic to see the sheer hatred of women raw and out there.

It was never just about being drunk or high, but being drunk and high never helped.

It was about power, control, and a violence that seemed all-too-accessible.

It was about denial, and about how the shame these men felt could block their change. Because to change, they had to admit they’d done a hateful thing to people they loved.

People often ask if our program made a difference. For some it did. For others it didn’t. On the other hand, not being in the program meant there was almost no chance they’d examine their behavior.

On the best day of my almost-ten years, a woman walked in with a former client of mine. It was her husband. He’d started the program belligerent and angry. In denial.

When he began, his eyes told me how deeply he hated me.

Halfway through the program, this man (who’d grown up seeing his father abuse his mother) almost cried as he spoke of how he’d done the one thing he’d promised himself he’d never do.

He left the program wanting to work with young men in an anti-violence program.

That day, his wife came in carrying a home-baked cake and offering me and for the man with whom I co-led groups these words: Thank you for giving me back my husband.

That sums it up for me.

When people ask me if it worked, this is what I say:

It worked for that family.

I’ve worked with men who battered their wives, their girlfriends, their sisters, and sometimes their mothers. For almost ten years, I listened to their stories as they admitted bullying, hitting, smacking, punching, and breaking bones. Some had murdered.

When asked where their children were during these incidents, almost all answered the same way: they were sleeping.

Children do not sleep through these traumatic moments. Some freeze. Some bury the horror so deep it can’t be accessed. Some become stuck on the road of re-creating the incident in their own lives (like so many of my clients had.)

The lucky children-witnesses become strong at the broken places, and as adults are teachers, nurses, law enforcement; they are all over the helping professions.

October is Domestic Violence Month and during that time, it’s important to think of the children who watch as their parents raise fists to each other, to them, and to strangers.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, in 2001–2005, children were present in 216,490 (35.2 percent) households experiencing Intimate Partner Violence.

Yet, when researching my novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, I found only one book about how children were affected when their father murdered their mother:

“Since the killings occur in the context of family life, all routines familiar to the children disappear forthwith . . . we have shared with children their horror at realizing that their dead mother’s body was concealed in a garage or had been taken from the house and hidden… One family of three children were taken to school unwittingly with their mother’s body wrapped in plastic dustbin liners in the boot of the car.”

When Father Kills Mother: Guiding Children Through Trauma and Grief by Jean Harris-Hendriks, Dora Black and Tony Kaplan.

During my many years working with batterers, the men in my groups swore that their children slept while they assaulted their children’s mothers.

Children do not sleep through their parent’s screaming matches.

I believe that we don’t want to accept as true that children see and feel the violence around us. I believe there is a strange sort of cognitive dissonance in the country that allows us to believe that children can watch bloody homicides on television, can feel the sting of a mother or father’s hand slapping them, can listen to violence against women being sung on the radio, can even watch their fathers beat their mothers–and somehow remain innocent.

Children witness 87% of the domestic violence assaults in this country.

Children do not lie dreaming as their mother is beaten.

Children in violent homes are the abuse targets at a 1500% higher rate than the national average.

Children huddle in terror.

Perhaps, for Yom Kippur, The Day Of Atonement, in one huge ecumenical move, we could vow to fast against all violence, and raise our children in peace.