Title: Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
Author: Lundy Bancroft
Genre: Relationships
Trigger Warnings: Descriptions of abuse (physical, verbal, psychological, and sexual), cisgendered language
Back Cover:
He says he loves you. So…why does he do that?
You’ve asked yourself this question again and again. Now you have the chance to see inside the minds of angry and controlling men–and change your life. In Why Does He Do That? you will learn about:
– The early warning signs of abuse
– The nature of abusive thinking
– Myths about abusers
– Ten abusive personality types
– The role of drugs and alcohol
– What you can fix, and what you can’t
– And how to get out of an abusive relationship safely
Review:
This book is written for women who think they may be in an abusive relationship but aren’t sure, or women who are in an abusive relationship and want to know more about how their abusive partner thinks and how to get out. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot from reading this if you’re not in that situation, because you definitely can.
Lundy Bancroft writes this book from experience – he works with abusers as his profession, running an abusers program that tries to help men unlearn the things that make them abusers. This book is absolutely packed with information about how abusers work, how they think, how they got that way, and what you can do about it. It is super informative.
I saw my past abusers in the pages quite a bit. I got angry (and I’ll admit, a little triggered) reading through some of the descriptions of abuse. (If you’re not currently in an abusive relationship and are trying to recover from one, I highly recommend you make sure you’re emotionally ready before reading this.) Mostly, though, I learned how abusive men think and operate.
There are some shortcomings, though. This book does touch briefly on issues of same-sex abuse, but most of what it does mention is about abusive relationships between women. There’s hardly anything about a man abusing his male partner, and barely any mentions of male victims of abuse, whether abused by a man or a woman. It’s also written by a white man, so it’s unsurprisingly but disappointingly lacking in discussions of intersectionality – situations where victims are even more limited by things like race or immigrant status – and views the police as a generally good recourse unless the abuser is or has friends on the force.
The information laid out here about how abusers think and operate and how to recognize them are excellent, and definitely worth reading. And there is a resources section that does list abuse resources specifically for women of color, as well as a lot of other information for different circumstances (for teens, for people who want to support someone in an abusive relationship, etc.). Although there’s not a lot of intersectionality to it, it is still a fantastically valuable book and absolutely worth reading.
Bluejay Reads 