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John Hamel, PhD, LCSW - Guest
has authored several books on domestic violence, including Gender Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, Family Interventions in Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner and Family Abuse: A Casebook of Gender-Inclusive Therapy, and is currently editing the upcoming book, Beyond the Gender Paradigm: A Legal Primer on Evidence-Based Criminal Justice Approaches to Intimate Partner Violence. John provides therapy, oversees an anger management program, is an expert witness, teacher, and author. He has published numerous books, chapters, and peer reviewed research on the topic of domestic violence. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Dr. Keith Sutton: (00:21)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be interviewing John Hamel PhD LCSW, who has authored several books on domestic violence, including gender, treatment of intimate partner abuse, family interventions in domestic violence, inner partner, and family abuse, a case book of gender inclusive therapy, and he is currently editing the upcoming book Beyond the Gender Paradigm: Illegal Primer on Evidence-Based Criminal Justice Approaches to Intimate Partner Violence. John provides therapy overseas, an anger management program, is an expert witness, a teacher, and an author. He has published numerous books, chapters, and peer reviewed research on the topic of domestic violence. Let's listen to the interview.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:19)
So thanks for coming and joining us today and we wanted to find out a little bit more about your work. I know we were talking the other day on the phone and it sounds like you are doing a lot of work, and a lot of expertise in the domestic violence field, and this is an area that also often brings up a lot of questions from a lot of therapists. Particularly even this week, I was talking with a client of mine and working with a family. There was some potential domestic violence in the couple, and then there's the question of, can we then work with them? Do we need to refer out? And particularly as an emotionally focused couples therapy supervisor and EFT, one of the things that they say is that it is contract indicated if there's domestic violence. But I think as we were talking that oftentimes, assessing for what's what, what allows one to do couples work or individual work or group work is very nuanced, and you had some really interesting perspectives on it. So I'd love to hear about your work and what you've been doing and your thoughts on all of this.
Dr. John Hamel: (02:22)
All right. Well, I'll start by saying that, the key consideration in trying to understand domestic violence is to understand that it's highly politicized. It's a highly politicized field. So in order to talk intelligently best practices, best policies, it's really important that we all, remain free of ideological allegiances, and that we look at the facts and we look at what the science tells us: what works and what doesn't work. In the 1970s and 80s in the United States, a number of states began to enact laws that made it a criminal offense for one partner to abuse their partner in a marriage. And at the time, even today, the primary consideration was protecting women from husbands who were quite violent and who weren't held accountable. It's not that no one was ever arrested for domestic violence, but it took a lot for someone to actually get arrested and convicted back in the seventies. Police sometimes were well-intended, but what they would try to do is mediate and tell the couples to work it out. Inevitably there would be cases where someone would be seriously injured. So, what happened was that there arose in the United States, a movement, the Batter Women's Movement that sought to protect women from being abused by their husbands and to hold them accountable. And that of course was wonderful. What happened, however, is the Battered Women's Shelter Movement, which was a grassroots movement of women who had been abused, along with their family members and friends really didn't have the political power and the resources to make the kind of changes that were necessary to call attention to the problem. So they came up with second wave feminists who were politely organized back in the seventies and eighties. Second wave feminists were fighting for the era and they were fighting for the political and social rights of women.
Dr. John Hamel: (04:44)
What happened was that domestic violence became subsumed as one of the causes under that broader feminist umbrella. Now that sounds fine, except that domestic violence became a political issue rather than, a therapeutic or an empirical problem to be resolved like any other mental health issue or substance abuse. And what's happened since then is we've had a series of laws and policies that for the most part, have done a lot of good but have had a downside. The downside is that because it's been so politicized and because domestic violence is associated with women's rights, what happens when you suggest that, sometimes women are not the victims sometimes they're the abusers. Men can be abused as well, and there's a huge impact on men's mental well-being and physical well-being of being battered.
Dr. John Hamel: (05:53)
When you say things like that, you run that danger of coming off as though you're an anti-feminist or you're minimizing the problem. And, I'm pretty staunch feminist and have been since the 1960s. So most of my colleagues in the field who do research on domestic violence are women, and I'm pretty certain, they're all feminists. But they're also researchers, they're scholars. And we believe that it's perfectly compatible to champion the rights of women and at the same time, push for evidence-based practices that are free of ideology right? So that's the main thing I wanted to say. If you understand that, then I think a lot of the research you might come across, makes more sense. I started, as a clinical social worker in the early nineties in the San Francisco Bay Area, doing just regular therapy with a number of different types of clients and within six months of my practice, I had an opportunity to basically buy or purchase a colleague's therapy practice, which consisted of domestic violence treatment programs for offenders. And I just inherited several groups. These were men who have been arrested on a domestic violence charge and I was trained by my colleague who sold me his practice in what is known as the Duluth Model of Treatment. The Duluth model references, a program in the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where one of the first shelters was established for women and was one of the first programs for the men who battered these women that was established. A treatment program to help these offenders, become non-violent. And the central core of the Duluth model is that domestic violence is not a psychological issue.
Dr. John Hamel: (08:12)
It's a control issue. And furthermore, it's a societal issue. And that domestic violence is essentially the way that men maintain patriarchal dominance over women. So in other words, in the Duluth model, a man who hits his wife is not a man who has problems with anger or stress or a personality or grew to develop mental issues. Ordinary men use violence against women, because they believe it's the right of the man to control the women. This is second wave feminism or one faster, then second wave feminism. Well, it turns out that that's completely incorrect. Certainly a lot of men who are misogynistic or have strong views about the place of women in society, far less so in the United States and some other countries. But even in the United States, there are men like that.
Dr. John Hamel: (09:14)
I've had hundreds of those guys at my groups. However, my clinical experience and what the research shows is that, there are many causes to domestic violence perpetration and having, traditional views about marriage and the place of women in society is not considered to be a major risk factor. The major risk factors, what correlates most with domestic violence perpetration would be having an aggressive personality, which could be partly inherited genetically and partly learned. It's growing up in a family where there is violence and abuse. It's having problems with emotional regulation, the inability to manage strong impulses, substance abuse ; low income people who are poor, or are less educated, are more likely than others, and there's some parallels in a criminal logical research literature, that lower-income people tend to commit the most crimes. Lastly, being in a high conflict relationship, just being in a relationship with someone who is abusive themselves, predicts domestic violence.
Dr. John Hamel: (10:39)
So those are the main risk factors. Patriarchy really isn't a major risk factor. This has been demonstrated over and over again, in China and most of South Africa, in Eastern Europe, in many countries in South America and Central America, where we all know patriarchy is a lot stronger than in the United States in those countries, the domestic violence rates are pretty equal across men and women. So, the idea that domestic violence is a gendered crime is just not supported by the facts. When I was trained in the Duluth model, I found out within a few months afterwards, working with my clients for a while, getting to know them that the model wasn't sustainable. I wasn't going to be able to use that model in my practice very well. It would work for some of the guys, but a lot of them had no problems with their women working or their women having the same rights as them.
Dr. John Hamel: (11:42)
They just didn't know how to handle their anger impulses. They didn't know how to deal with stress. Furthermore, many of these guys had wives who were aggressive themselves, who were abusive themselves and that led me to do a lot of investigating and research on my own. Over a period of the last 30 years, I eventually got my PhD along the way. I have been working as the Editor-in-Chief of a scholarly journal on domestic violence. And yes, I can take you to this day to provide groups for men and women who abuse their partners. I no longer do individual work, I'm sort of semi-retired, but I do a lot of work for the court system as an expert witness. I testify on behalf of both, that are women and the men who were unfairly accused of abusing them.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (12:35)
Okay. Wow. Sounds like you're doing a lot of work. Now, one of the things you said earlier was that, some men also are abused and, physically or verbally, and that bringing that up, or that new point, might be non-feminist or so on. And it is that because in the feminist viewpoint, there's the focus on the power differential? And also as I'm hearing that, I'm thinking about, I know my training in, domestic violence that, from what I remember, I'm not an expert in this field, but that the percentage of women abusing men was very small. And I don't know if that's, because of the definition. So yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Dr. John Hamel: (13:25)
You were misinformed.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (13:25)
Okay.
Dr. John Hamel: (13:26)
My colleague, Donald Dutton at University of British Columbia, he's now retired, but he's very well known in the field. He actually worked as a consultant in the OJ Simpson case, working for the prosecution. He coined the term, the gender paradigm, the gender paradigm is a set of assumptions that permeate our society and that permeate domestic files treatment policies. And you just voiced some of that, the idea that most domestic violence is perfect created by men. So just to review what the research actually says, and it's not really open for debate. It's just the fact. When I talk about the research, I'm saying 30 years of numerous large scale national surveys and hundreds of smaller surveys, including university students, clinical populations, and so forth find that the rates of physical aggression between men and women are the same.
Dr. John Hamel: (14:37)
In fact, if you look, it's slightly higher for female perpetrators aggression, so there's physical violence, physical violence could be anything from grabbing your partner, throwing things at them all the way to shooting them or stabbing them or beating them up right? So women do all those things as well, as often as men in general. Women push, grab, punch, just as often as men do. The main difference is that because women are typically smaller, not as strong as men, and because men are better able to protect themselves, men cause a larger share of serious injuries. Three quarters of the partner homicides, involve female victims. I think the rates of women victims going to emergency rooms because of their injuries is about two to one or three to one over men. So, clearly men caused more serious physical damage. And also women report higher rates of psychological trauma compared to male victims.
Dr. John Hamel: (15:50)
It's not to say that men don't suffer psychological trauma. They do. And there are women who stab and shoot their partners and beat them up and do all those things. But on the whole, men, generally don't incur the same extreme levels of injuries psychologically or physically. The other psychological abuse and controlling behaviors again, are equally perpetrated by men and women. One of the big lies is that women aren't as controlling. Anyone who has ever been married, anyone who is just above the age of 18 and has been in a relationship, knows how absurd that statement is. And in fact, numerous surveys, including some that I've conducted on my own show, that women are just as capable and willing as men to be controlling of their partners. Now, there are some differences in the tactics used. Men are more able to intimidate. Women are better at withdrawing sex and affection and certain other things, but in general, men and women psychologically abuse each other and physically abuse each other at comparable rates.
Dr. John Hamel: (17:04)
Aside from the impact that these behaviors have on the victims. The other main area where there's a lack of symmetry, where there is a major difference is with sexual abuse. Where a man clearly sexually abused women, much larger extent than the other way around. Right? But in almost every other aspect of domestic violence, whether it's the impact on children, whether it's the motive, the reasons for why people are violent, the risk factors, the rates, aside from those caveats that I just mentioned, domestic violence is not a gender problem. It's a human problem. And there are explanations for that when people say to me, when I pointed this out is, well, how can that be? Men perpetrate the vast majority of violent crimes. And if this is true, men are more aggressive than women in general.
Dr. John Hamel: (18:02)
Men do perpetrate the vast majority of homicides and violent crimes in general, but in the home women have more of a vested interest in advancing, their interests. There are evolutionary and there are social reasons why women are as violent as men in the home. I read articles on that, that go into a lot of details, but, because a lot of people want an explanation they just don't understand. How can that possibly be? Men, engaging in trafficking of women. They rape them in war, they kill each other in war. But in reality, women are just as angry as men. Studies show that when asked about the amount of time during the day that they feel hostile or feel angry about something, nailing female subjects report equal rates of anger. It's just that women have not had permission to express the same level of aggression outwardly in society over the centuries as men, but behind closed doors, women are free to express themselves and they do.
Dr. John Hamel: (19:19)
So now this brings us to the issue of treatment and what does all that information mean in terms of your treatment models? If you're a psychotherapist and you're working with a couple and they come in, and you ask them about their conflicts, and it turns out that, there's been some domestic violence and, by domestic violence, I mean, grabbing, pushing anything well, then you should take it seriously. Right? You should look into that because if there's any domestic violence there is a possibility that things could get out of hand and someone could get seriously hurt.
Dr. John Hamel: (19:58)
So, what do you do in a situation like that? Well, you were probably trained, you're a psychologist, but whether you're a social worker or a licensed professional counselor or a psychologist, you probably were trained by people who were up to their necks in the gender paradigm.
Dr. John Hamel: (20:24)
You probably learned that you just don't do couples counseling when there's any kind of domestic violence because of this differential power situation. Right? Well, again, that was an extreme reaction to actually a serious problem, which was that up until the seventies and eighties, when we learned about domestic violence and the fact that some domestic violence was perpetrated specifically by men to dominate their partners. Because some of these men who went into counseling would punish their wives for disclosing any violence during the sessions. Because in those situations, there was a power differential, it became sort of a standard for therapists to say, you just can't do any kind of couples counseling. It was gross reaction for a number of reasons. Number one, that kind of domestic violence where one person really dominates the other with serious violence and threats of violence is just a small piece of the pie. Most domestic violence occurs very infrequently. It's reactive. We would call it expressive violence where someone is angry, they're stressed out, their partner yells at him and he shoves them. And they feel really sorry afterwards. That kind of domestic violence is not the kind you've seen in the movies. It's not the kind that you should be concerned about where the police need to be called in. It's just high conflict couples who occasionally allow themselves to get physical with one another. That's not a good thing. And it needs to be addressed, but that's more amenable to therapy than it is to legal interventions. And what's been happening is that we've confounded serious domestic violence where a legal response is required. Shelters are required to protect victims, usually women from normal couples, conflict that get out of hand and sometimes it leads to physical aggression.
Dr. John Hamel: (22:43)
So if it's the emotional reactive type of domestic violence, usually couples counseling is a great vehicle for that. In fact, it's probably the best modality of treatment because you get a chance to work with both people. Most domestic violence is bilateral. Both partners are engaging in it. And if that's the case and you lump both parties to be in the therapy session with you, right. That's not to say that group isn't also useful for lower level violence as well. But what I say is that, for most domestic violence, the therapist should have the option of the best treatment based on the needs of the client.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (23:33)
I'm wondering, as you're talking about the reactive and the expressive kind of anger and the later remorse, back in grad school, I was doing research, I did my dissertation on bullying. I was looking at aggression and particularly, I know on some of the Gottman research, they looked at the more reactive, aggressive, versus the proactive kind of instrumental aggression, or they called it. I think it was the cobras versus the pit bulls, where the pit bulls were more reactive and the cobras heart rate decreased. And then would be more proactive in their use of aggression.
Dr. John Hamel: (24:14)
So let me clarify that. I think we're confirming a couple of things here. First of all, Gottman, when he was talking about pit bulls and cobras, he was talking about the more serious offenders. He was only talking about men. He wasn't even mentioning women at all. He was talking about men who engage in serious violence, serious injury, producing violence. That he called batterers. Another term is controlling coercive violence, and he was saying that there were two major types of serious offenders and his typology consisted of cobras and pit bulls. Others have formulated similar typologies. Holzworth Monroe came up with a typology where she separated the serious offenders into two camps. One would be the equivalent of the pit bulls, which she called borderline dysphoric, or dysphoric borderline. Borderline personality individuals are very needy and when they feel abandoned, they lash out, and the more extreme man will stalk their partners and pose a real danger to them.
Dr. John Hamel: (25:32)
Whereas what she'd call the antisocial type or the generally violent type, similar to Gottman's cobras. These are individuals who don't really have a lot of sympathy for the victims. Not necessarily psychopaths, but they tend to be very controlling and their violence is more instrumental. What I was talking about earlier was the difference between more common domestic violence and more severe violence. I was talking about the difference between conflict that escalates to get to the point where there's physical aggression, where the intent is not to dominate the partner. The intent is to protect oneself from hurt, to get a point across. Maybe it's retaliatory, maybe it's jealousy, but that's known as common couple violence or situational violence. Situational violence is just that, it arises in the situation.
Dr. John Hamel: (26:42)
Now, if the violence occurs frequently, and it's accompanied by a lot of overt attempts to control and dominate the partner, threatening the partner, keeping them from leaving the house, hyper jealous behaviors, those kinds of things. Now you're getting into what we call battery. Now you're getting into more serious domestic violence. There's no perfect line. It's a gray area between situational violence and the kind of violence that Gottman was talking about. Gottman did a lot of things right. But he was also politically motivated. His book When Men Batter Women mentioned nothing about female on male violence, but if you read his research papers, as I have on domestic violence, you'll find that in the footnotes and in the tables and the appendices in his research papers, he acknowledged that when the men - well, let me put it this way. He acknowledges that about 40-50% of the cases where he's reporting on these couples, the women were also violent, so he acknowledges this, but he never really talks about it. I could be wrong. I love Gottman. I love his marital techniques. He's fantastic. He's done a lot of great work in the field, but I think he was really motivated by political considerations. Up until about 15 years ago, there were no books, and I mean, no books on domestic violence that were written in a gender inclusive way. Not since the early 1980s and in the early 1980s, a guy named Peter Knighted, a psychologist wrote a book on couples therapy for Navy men and their wives. Between 1985 and 2005, when my book came out over a period of 20 years, there were zero books, pre-planned books, on domestic violence that acknowledged that women could be offenders. So there's only one explanation for that, you know, and that's political consideration.
Dr. John Hamel: (29:15)
So Gottman, as great as he was, devising some wonderful marital and science-based marital intervention techniques, unfortunately played the little of the game. Also I must say that the idea that calling clients cobras and pit bulls is rather offensive. I think earlier, Keith, you were asking about what kind of work I'm doing these days. I'm doing a lot of different things. I'm editing a new book on the criminal justice response, to domestic violence. My other work is on treatment. What are the best approaches of working with domestic violence offenders and probably the most important lines of research have to do with client centered, motivational interviewing approaches. Where in order to get clients, especially court mandated clients to change their entire worldview about relationships and about violence, you really have to get their buy-in. You have to get them to trust you, and you're not going to do that when you call them cobras or pit bulls or batterers. So I really object to the term. It's like calling a substance abuser, a slime or a lizard. We have substance abusers who do heroin well they're lizards and the ones who drank well maybe they're I don't know, pick your term. ...
Dr. John Hamel: (30:55)
So I've done a lot of different research projects and what I've been focused on more recently is weaving together lines of research based on interviews with men and batterer intervention groups, getting their input. Ethnographic study of men and better intervention, getting their input on what works for them. Along with lines of research on motivational interviewing and other client centered approaches. That's been a big emphasis of my trainings recently. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was doing more of research on family interventions that we're talking about now. Couples counseling, I've kind of veered away from that a little bit only because in reality, I get very few couples referred to me for domestic violence. If you have a couple that are engaged in situational violence, then it's best to work with them as a couple, if they're willing to do that.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (32:09)
For yourself, how are you assessing whether or not you're going to do couples or individual or group, what are the lines? And I know, I think for some therapists I imagine, and even myself, when I've worked with clients, it's trying to understand where that line is, how risky things are. And I think oftentimes the concern that this has happened and like you're saying that the men ended up inflicting more damage. And so there's also the concern that once that line has been crossed, then in an instance of kind of explosiveness something happens and somebody usually in a heterosexual couple, the woman gets hurt. So trying to evaluate that with whether working with the couple, and again, many people ask me when I do EFT trainings and so on. I don't do much work with domestic violence, but they asked, what is the treatment? And it says well, emotionally focused couples therapy, and by the way, this might be updated now. I'm not totally up on the latest with EFT, but that it's contraindicated. And so then they say, well, what else do you do then? And then I'm not so sure at that point. Love to hear your thoughts on that.
Dr. John Hamel: (33:33)
It's like saying that with alcoholics, CBT is contraindicated, and you should go to AA. No! AA works with some people and doesn't work for other people. It's just lazy thinking. There's no substitute for a good assessment. There are some sort of guiding principles. Let me just say this. If you have a couple, and if she's afraid of him, you can see that in the session, but she's afraid of him and she's reporting serious violence. You shouldn't work with them as a couple. Work with her separately, try to get her to establish some boundaries, provide her a safe Haven, safe resources. Try to induce him to come in separately and work with them separately. And if you can do that, then maybe at some point down the road, they can come in as a couple.
Dr. John Hamel: (34:32)
If the violence is low level, but he has a history of serious violence with other women, then again, there's a history of serious violence. If you're going to do emotionally focused couples therapy in particular, where you're really focusing on emotions, which could lead to volatile reactions in the therapy session. No, you wouldn't have somebody in the session who can't control their impulses, doing emotionally focused therapy. If you were focusing simply on ground rules for engagement, if you were focusing on safety, basic communication skills, time-outs basic anger management techniques, then maybe you could do that. So that's what would guide me. The history of violence, the propensity for violence in the background of either partner. And then, when was the last violent incident, if he had shoved around, five years before and now he's yelling again.
Dr. John Hamel: (35:42)
Does that mean that he's going to be hitting her? Well, you don't know that. I would say, give her the option, tell her, well, what do you think? The victim is generally best as to whether their safety is threatened or not. So I would love to guide you. But I think that there's another consideration. I have colleagues who actually believe as I do that couples counseling is probably indicated almost all cases. Just think about it. Logically, if you decide that you're not going to see this couple, because he or she is too violent and they're not making enough progress, then what are your options? What if the victim doesn't want to continue seeing you? Then what? Then who's going to work with that couple?
Dr. Keith Sutton: (36:39)
Nothing kind of thing.
Dr. John Hamel: (36:43)
If it looks like there's serious, domestic violence, you don't see the couple together initially. You would see the person that appears to be the primary victim. You would see them separately first. We would do an assessment and they tell you, I'm really afraid of him. He's just beat me up last week. You're not going to do couples counseling, but if it looks like, okay he was violent in the past, he's doing better. He seems to really mean business. He wants to come in with me. The victim is okay with that. Then you see the couple, you continue your assessment along the way. But let's say you get to a point where he's still grabbing and shoving her occasionally and feels bad about it. Do you just discontinue couples counseling at that point? See that's where I have an issue with the doctrine errors. The people who say it's contra-indicated my next response is okay, then what? What if she says I'm not going to come in here without him.
Dr. John Hamel: (37:46)
And maybe she's saying that because she's afraid or he's kind of dictating that. So what I'm saying is if I have a couple where it's clear that the man is the more dominant partner, the only way he's going to get any kind of help is to come in with his wife. Maybe, the reason for that is because he wants to show that she's partly to blame. Most feminists would say you don't do couples counseling there because you would be allowing him to dominate her. And what I would say is, well, don't underestimate my abilities as a therapist to figure out what to do here, because if he's willing to come in under those circumstances, he'll come in with her that's better than him not coming in at all. I'm not going to do emotionally focused therapy or in depth psychotherapy with this couple, I might, the first 12 weeks just focus specifically on anger management and establishing ground rules.
Dr. John Hamel: (38:50)
Furthermore, I'm not going to necessarily make it about him, even though it may be about him. It may be that he's the dominant aggressor I'm going to act as though they both have a stake in this. What I'm saying is that it's better to avoid early confrontations. What's best? Telling the client that they're a jerk and they're responsible so that you feel better? Or is it better to work with the couple and make them a four functional unit? Because what I'm banking on is that, a lot of these guys and women who are abusive, they may objectively be the dominant aggressors. They may objectively have more of a problem with their anger than their partner, but very often the partners are engaging in all kinds of abusive or unhealthy behaviors. So why do I need to split hairs and point out that while they're the real abuser, when there's enough going on in a relationship that would warrant a more objective view of it.
Dr. John Hamel: (40:11)
So what I'm saying is that I'm not diluting with anyone. If I'm agreeing with them, that their partner sometimes does things that really piss them off. If Mrs. Andrews tells her partner that he's lazy and useless because he hasn't found a job and he slaps her around, he's engaging in a criminal act and abusive behavior that cannot be in any way justified. But in order for me to help that couple work out their issues, I cannot ignore the fact that she verbally abuses him or treats him like he's a lowlife. My line of questioning and my interventions will be based on a number of factors, including not just who's the more dominant aggressor. I always know that I keep that in the back of my mind, but it's also their level of acceptance of their problems, their motivation, the safety factors. And if it looks to me like it might be worth exploring her undesirable behaviors for a few minutes to get him to think like I'm being fair, then that's a small price to pay for him perhaps listening to the next 30 minutes as she explains how much he's hurt her. Right. So what I'm saying is that if you know what you're doing, if you're a good couples therapist and you know something about systems and you know something about domestic violence, and you're careful, then you could work with couples even when the violence is pretty pervasive. I would agree with the victims advocates, however, couples that don't have a lot of experience working with the high conflict couples therapists, who don't really know much about domestic violence dynamics, especially a battering dynamics, then they probably shouldn't be doing couples therapy. So that's the caveat. It really needs to be done by someone who knows what they're doing.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (42:26)
Yeah, I agree. I think that that is really important. That therapists that are able to hold and contain a high conflict couple because some therapists hands, and they are not as kind of involved in holding. Sometimes if you just let them go at it, things will escalate. I think the way that I conceptualized it is that if there is, that incidence of aggression or violence or so on, most of the times in the couple of times I've worked with it it's been reactive and part of conceptualized with the emotionally focused couples therapy, cause actually the EFT does great and looking at the primary more vulnerable emotions that are leading to these more secondary emotions like anger or so on. I think the concept has been around not necessarily getting the victim vulnerable and being more, I think like you're talking about safety and so on.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (43:19)
And ideally I'm building enough rapport and relationship to be able to help talk to the, if it's a heterosexual, couple, the male and sending a woman out and talking about like that, it's not justified. It validates that it makes sense of why they'd be so angry, but then it crosses that line and there's really no justification for physical violence, physical threats, those kinds of things pushing or so on, even the emotional abuse and then beginning to help them contain some of that and work on all the other stuff. Because I feel like sometimes that there is that potential for crossing that line into violence then it it's harder to do any of the other work. A lot of times the clients are responsive to that and kind of getting that. I'm not working in the more severe domestic violence situations, but that's kind of the way I conceptualize it. I don't know if that's correct way or so on, but that's my reaction.
Dr. John Hamel: (44:17)
Well, let me just say something else here. There's not such a clear cut difference between physical and psychological abuse. Victims of domestic violence, male and female victims of serious domestic violence will tell you most of them that the psychological abuse is worse than the physical abuse. Not always, but I would be careful about explaining to a couple that you're working with, or giving the impression that you can never push or grab the other person ever and even if they do, I'll kick you out of therapy and you'll go to jail. But if you're allowed to yell at your partner or to treat them like crap because they know that a reactive grabbing or shoving is very easy to forgive, but calling your wife, a c**t in front of your friends or her telling you that she's going to divorce you because you have a small penis. Okay. Think about that. Well, it's far more devastating than someone touching your shoulder, right? So let's be clear that when we're talking about crossing that line, it's not necessarily crossing the line into physical aggression. Although I agree psychological abuse is harder to define whereas physical aggression is much more clear cut. So that's helpful to setting limits, but I just want to remind you Keith, that couples can wreck huge devastation on each other psychologically.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (46:09)
Yeah, definitely. That's a huge piece. I think that in my mind I can work with that, the emotional abuse in a way that yes I'm concerned that something's going to get so violent that they're going to physically put the other person in the hospital or something that. I have to focus on safety. But, I was wondering about, and actually we've been talking a lot about heterosexual couples and I was wondering do you have any knowledge about gay, transgender, lesbian couples, bisexual couples and what that looks like with the domestic violence? Whether it be physical aggression or emotional and how that plays out?
Dr. John Hamel: (46:59)
Well, if you understand that domestic violence is a human problem, it's not a gender problem than research on LGBTQ populations will make sense. So the rates of domestic violence are very similar across all human beings. Yes, there's higher rates of domestic violence amongst African-American and Latino populations. That's a function of their lower income status overall. It's not a function of their skin color. Rates of domestic violence are actually highest, amongst lesbians than they are amongst heterosexuals or gay men. No one really knows exactly why, but the rates overall are very similar between heterosexual and gay and lesbian domestic violence situations. Gay and lesbian victims, report experiences, same types of power control behaviors, jealousy, threats, economic abuse, and so forth as their heterosexual counterparts. I don't see a lot of difference.
Dr. John Hamel: (48:20)
There just isn't a lot of difference. The only difference would be in the specific types of controlling behaviors that are available to certain groups. For example, women who want to control their partners are going to be much more effective in threatening to take the kids, withdrawing affection, as compared to say threatening, physical harm. Because women, generally, there's exceptions, are not able to control men in that same way. Gay men will threaten out their partners.They'll have unprotected sex. If you think about different groups, there may be certain things that controlling people in those groups can do, as a function of being in that group. But in general, there aren't a lot of differences. The vast majority of gay or lesbian intimate partner violence is low level, just like with straight people, it's situational.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (49:31)
Sure.
Dr. John Hamel: (49:34)
Yes, there's been investigations into the psychodynamics of lesbian battering and theories around that may explain some of this phenomena of lesbians. Women are more relational, women are more emotive than men, the lesbian community is kind of a small community. Traditionally has experienced homophobia. That might account for the more intense relationships amongst lesbians. Those are some of the theories that we have. So, it's not like there aren't any differences at all, there may be some dynamics that are somewhat different among heterosexual populations. But, in terms of the frequency of the violence and the general motive, the risk factors they're very comparable.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (50:31)
Sure. Now I want to go back to something that you said earlier too, you were talking about that Duluth model and that idea of the patriarchy and the men having collared with the women, and that was not actually one of the central pieces. I was just thinking, almost devil's advocate, that they may not be saying that they're doing this, but is there some unconscious gender norms, some privilege. Particularly, I also think about, socio-politically with white males, feeling marginalized or demonized. Right now we're doing this interview in January 2021 and a lot of the stuff with the Trump presidency and so on.... I think it'd be interesting if you have any thoughts on that. It sounds like explicitly they're not saying I'm doing this to dominate because of my gender or so on, but has that been looked at whether it's unconscious or implicit or something they're not even aware of because of their privilege.
Dr. John Hamel: (51:45)
Well, this has been explored in different ways. Let me just say this. When large scale surveys have been conducted, where women have been asked about the violence that they perpetrated and receive, when they'd been asked about their violence, and there's about 15 studies I'm aware of, where they were asked when you were violent with your partner, what percentage of the time did you initiate the violence as opposed to respond to your partner? Women are just as likely as men to say I initiated it. So we know that women initiate violence by their own accounts, it has nothing to do with what men believe subconsciously or unconsciously, and what men have been indoctrinated with in terms of white privilege or male privilege or anything like that. Women, when they're asked about violence in their relationships, say that they initiate at least half the time. Women, who were asked about their motives for their violence in their relationship, rarely say it's in self-defense.
Dr. John Hamel: (53:05)
When I say studies, I mean hundreds of studies. Maybe four or five dozen studies show almost all of them, when women are asked about their motives for being violent towards their partners it's very rarely self-defense. It's usually either jealousy, retaliation to control the partner. Very often, it's reactive. It's to punish them, a tit for tat. So women tell us that their violence is done for purposes other than self-defense and they initiate it. So that pretty much negates theories that women must be just defending themselves and so forth. Studies that have been done that tried to correlate gendered attitudes about relationships with domestic violence, find that there is no correlation. So men who believe in the kind of traditional arrangement, the woman works in the home, I work outside the home, she raises the children. Those men are not statistically any more violent than men who have egalitarian relationships. The woke-est guys in Berkeley, California, right? They're not any more or less violent than those guys. The key is the personality. What my colleague, Don Dutton pointed out is that men who are violent towards their partners have aggressive personalities, just like the women who are violent towards their partners. Sometimes they use male privilege as an excuse for their behavior. In other words, I'm the man of the household.
Dr. John Hamel: (54:59)
You see the difference there? The difference is highlighted when you look at another comparison group. Men, and women who are religious, who have religious merit arrangements, they read the Bible. There are millions of these people. 70 million of these people voted for Trump. They're not any more violent than anybody else. So if patriarchy and male privilege was the cause of domestic violence, you'd find a lot more domestic violence amongst these Christians and you don't. They're not any more violent than your woke couple in Berkeley.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (55:38)
Sure.
Dr. John Hamel: (55:38)
If you know that aggressive personality, poor impulse control and growing up with violent role models are some of the major risk factors you'll know, those will always supersede anything else. That's not to say that our society doesn't have some misogynistic and sexist components to it.
Dr. John Hamel: (56:07)
I know we don't need to get into a debate about the extent of white privilege. I mean, all that pretty much exists. But what I'm saying in terms of domestic violence is the risk factors for domestic violence are so powerful, and the research is so clear that it's not that the societal factors have no impact. They do, but in a more oblique way. They certainly don't explain all of domestic violence and they don't justify something like the Duluth model. Do you understand that if you read the Duluth model literature, they explicitly say it has nothing to do with anger, it has nothing to do with stress. It has nothing to do with substance abuse. In other words, don't even bother looking at those factors because the only thing that matters is the man's desire to control his partner.
Dr. John Hamel: (56:59)
So we're not talking about societal influences that some men buy into. By the way, Keith, there is such a thing as female privilege, which few people want to talk about.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (57:11)
What privilege?
Dr. John Hamel: (57:12)
It's female privilege. We usually don't think of women having a lot of privilege. Well, they do. They're generally awarded custody of the children. Courts favor women in that respect. There's research showing that women are arrested much less frequently than men for all crimes, including domestic violence, because they're considered to be more helpless than men. So some of these traditional, sexist attitudes, both hostile, and benevolent types of sexism against women, ironically have served to perpetuate myths about domestic violence. Some of the more extreme elements amongst feminists in the field of domestic violence are heavily aligned with law enforcement, which is a traditional heavily patriarchal institution.
Dr. John Hamel: (58:17)
They both benefit by maintaining a stereotype of women as helpless children. They have to be protected. It's a narrative that goes really well with cops traditionally, not all cops but cops who are there to protect the women, the little woman from the guy, and some of the feminists who believe, ironically, that women lack a sufficient degree of agency and will, to assault their partners, even though the narrative also states that women should be included amongst the decision makers in society and so forth. Usually I will argue when it comes to this particular debate that, if we're going to consider women to be strong enough and agentic enough to make tough decisions to become corporate CEOs if we think women can be police officers and firefighters and pull people out of burning buildings, why would we think that they're completely helpless in relationships?
Dr. John Hamel: (59:39)
Unfortunately the sexist gender role attitudes have played out in such a way that they don't benefit women or men. They don't benefit women in general, in society for obvious reasons. But they also don't play themselves out well in the field of domestic violence, for reasons a little bit less obvious. But women who aren't getting the treatment that they need for their violence are not really helped. They're likely to continue that violence. They're likely to become distanced from their children. They're likely to be unhappy. They might run a foul of the legal system. Unfortunately the second wave feminist doctrine of the gender paradigm is still with us. When I talk with women, privately separately, when I talk to second wave feminists separately, and we talk about domestic violence, they usually are open to hearing what I have to say, but the research just isn't getting out there.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:00:55)
I mean, it sounds like you're a pretty, successful psychotherapist in a really well established practice, and yet you seem to be holding some of those assumptions yourself. I can tell you, because the American Psychological Association, just like the National Association of Social Workers are dominated by that kind of thinking. I'm a very liberal person, very progressive. It's been kind of a challenge for me to get my liberal friends on board with this idea that women are capable of inflicting a great deal of damage, and knowing that doesn't mean that women are disadvantaged throughout society, it's kind of a dual message there.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:01:54)
Well, I think too that sometimes, and I don't know for others, but as I'm thinking about this, I think sometimes the concern probably is that that will dismiss or justify the violence that happens to women. I think that it all gets dichotomized in that way, but both can be true at the same time. It doesn't mean that, if there is some aggression from women then therefore violence that's done to them in the sexual violence, physical violence is not valid and not a concern. One of the things that I'm thinking about as we're talking about all of this, is the piece around trauma. I mean, I imagine that trauma is a huge factor, as I'm hearing about, you mention violence in the home, the substance abuse. I know what they've done from the ACEs research on childhood experiences of trauma that substance abuse and addiction is highly correlated. My last two questions are one, any thoughts on that? The research on trauma? The other last question is that, again a lot of the couples that I hear from when they do act "badly", whether physical or belittling, or these low blows. Oftentimes it's this feeling that I have to do this to get them to hear me. They won't hear me unless I basically just hit him below the belt. I heard that on both sides of the genders and same sex couples that I've worked with.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:03:42)
Yeah, that's right Keith. I'm thinking of this survey that was conducted in England in the nineties with a representative sample of 3000 respondents. They were asked if there'd been violence in the relationship. And if so, what was their reason for being violent? And the vast majority said it was to get through to the other person. So in addition to jealousy control, retaliation trying to get through. The guy is watching TV, his wife says pay attention to me, he keeps watching TV, she throws the remote control at him. That's an act of expressive violence because she didn't think ahead of time that she's going to dominate him. She just reacted, and what was her motive? If you asked what her motive was, she'll say, well, I was trying to get his attention.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:04:39)
In fact, if you really break down that motive, she was trying to control him, wasn't she? Because he wouldn't stop doing what she asked him to stop doing, and when he refused, she just decided to do something that she thought would get his attention. So, you can analyze that interaction as one where she was controlling. You could also analyze their reaction as one where she's feeling needy and ignored by this guy and it was her desperate attempt to try to get a connection, right.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:05:21)
And having that connection, is the true motive. Well, we can have all kinds of academic debates on that one, but the reality is that clinically it's more useful to go with the well-intended motive. In other words, stay with that, because then it taps into her needs her fears, her abandonment issues or whatever they are. I totally agree with you, Keith, that when we get clients to talk about the real feelings, the male clients in particular are more reluctant at least initially to talk about their feelings. And when we sometimes do address their core issues, these groups are not meant to be heavy duty therapy groups, but we do talk a little bit about their trauma.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:06:16)
We talk about their experiences, and the guys, when they're able to talk about those things are able to see that they're acting out behavior is just an attempt to communicate. It's an attempt to protect themselves. If you grew up with an abusive parent and your partner is yelling in your face, it's easy to interpret that as it's just more of the same, I have to protect myself. I couldn't do it as a child, but I can do it now. I can yell. I'm bigger. I can grab her. I can keep her from doing that. That's why couples counseling is so important in these cases because, in group, we can teach these guys about these things, but they go home and they try to take a timeout and their partners feel abandoned when they take a time out.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:07:01)
But with a couple, you can explain that the timeout is not an attempt to abandon you, it's an attempt to gain control of the situation. Trauma can be done individually, but sometimes in the relationship, it's important to bring up those trauma issues so that the client has a better standing where their partner is coming from. I've done a lot of research recently on trauma, but specifically in terms of adult attachment styles. In fact, one of my assessment instruments uses one of the attachment style questionnaires, and it looks at differences between anxious attachment and dismissive attachment. Generally the most severe domestic violence generally involves more of the anxious type, but you have an anxious attachment type with a dismissive type, and it's a recipe for disaster. Because one person really badly needs that validation and that connection, and the other person doesn't because of trauma, recoil from that.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:08:27)
Recoil, and especially the avoiding goes in to take care of themselves and they go into an independent mode. I need to take care of myself, and then it creates that withdrawal pursuer cycle. Particularly, with the attachment in the emotionally focused couples therapy, the idea of the responsiveness and when we're not getting that responsiveness from the partner, we go into a panic because as a child, if your parent was not responding, that could mean death if you're not getting your needs met because you're completely dependent. So yeah, very interesting.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:09:06)
Keith, couples, I mean, there are times in the relationship where they feel attacked by the partner and sometimes it's all in their mind, and sometimes it's partly true, but they feel like they're literally going to die. If they don't respond that some kind of statement or physical act to protect themselves, it's like they're being killed. They're so invalidated, and again, much of the time it's all in their mind. A partner says, no, I don't want to do that, and they hear it as you're a piece of s***, you're worthless. That's what they hear, and the partner says "I'm just setting limits", and the more reactive people are then probably the more trauma they're suffering. Unless they're sociopaths. Unless they have that kind of personality, it's usually tied into the trauma. The problem is, if you introduce trauma issues too early, without some success by the perpetrators in controlling their violence, you're putting the cart before the horse. So that's going back to safety issues.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:10:27)
The last piece that I want to touch on before we wrap up here is, ultimately what also needs to be accessed is mens' vulnerability. I think that, like you were saying again with the violence and that there isn't much room for acknowledgement. I've had clients that have been victims of sexual abuse by women as a child and so on, and many white males feeling like there's a discrepancy that men also are hurt by women, but that's not really given any space or room in our culture or society, which I think further ends up also leading to men being more guarded about their vulnerability and not bringing that out in the relationship.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:11:18)
I am interested in your thoughts on this field and whether this topic or different topic of where things coming in the future. I'd be interested to see and, hopeful that more room can be made there without it feeling like it's invalidating the violence to women, and not that because men are heard that therefore it's okay that women get hurt, but more that they exist in the same realm, at the same time without necessarily negating one or the other.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:11:57)
Yeah well, there is a double standard when it comes to emotions. In the countries, you hear this all the time: "Men are jerks, who need to be more in touch with their emotions, blah, blah, blah." But in reality, a lot of the men I work with, when they actually talk about their emotions, it doesn't always go well. One of the reasons it doesn't go well is because a lot of women, unfortunately, don't want to be with guys that are very emotional. They say they do, and I'm not saying all women, I'm just saying, there's a large number of women I've talked to them, I've worked with them, they really want their men to be sensitive, but not so sensitive that they can't kick a** and make money and support them, just putting that out.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:12:53)
That doesn't invalidate what women are saying about men needing to be more communicative, and men are notorious for not being very good at communicating their emotions. I've been working on that for 30 years, trying to get guys to be more emotive and more committed to this. I'm just saying that when they do that, it's not like the partners say "oh my God, you're communicating, it's wonderful." They run into problems sometimes because women are people. And people want what they want. Along with societal attitudes about women that are hostile attitudes, there's this benevolent sexism that researchers have pointed to. It's very insidious, and women have bought into. The idea that we're vulnerable and we are victims. It's why most young women today don't identify as feminists, the vast majority of young women in their twenties and thirties today on surveys, when they're asked if you're a feminist, they say no, but they act like feminists, they are feminists. The term has been tainted. One of the reasons I think it has been tainted is because there's been that double standard, and men know that it's all well and good if they express themselves a little bit more to their partners, but God forbid if they would've stopped working for six months, because they wanted to just relax and potty around the house, a lot of their female partners would divorce them for that. So a lot of these traditional gender roles and expectations are still with us, and what I'm saying is that it's not just men that take advantage of those gender role expectations in the area of domestic violence in area of divorce. Women take advantage of those as well. We have to have an honest discussion about how those gender roles play themselves out and how sometimes women take advantage of those roles, and how sometimes they don't benefit men at all.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:15:07)
And I think too, that because women are a majority of ones that experience sexual assault and the majority ones that are hurt and killed by domestic violence, then that is something that's significant. Although again, there is conflict that happens from both in the relationship and to your point too, about the men sharing their vulnerability, particularly from an EFT point of view, ultimately when we help the other person get vulnerable, they're usually saying "I'm feeling hurt by you", or "I'm feeling sad" and connect it to whatever it may be. Typically at least in the beginning stages of therapy, when one hears that the other feels hurt by them, usually they're not intending to hurt. Sometimes they are, but sometimes it's reactionary. Usually they're trying to do the thing that makes most sense to them to get closeness or maintain closeness, like shut down in a fight to not make it worse or to keep talking about it or throw the remote to get the other person's attention.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:16:08)
But when they hear that the other person felt hurt they tend to get defensive or justify or say "Well, you hurt me too", or "Well you're just being too sensitive". Typically more women tend to be the pursuer. They're trying to share their hurt, and as you engage the withdrawer and the men start sharing their hurt, then it flips the script. Then oftentimes the women end up responding in the way that the withdrawal or the men were in that situation of saying, "Well, you're being too sensitive" or, "Oh, well, I didn't mean it that way", or, "Well, I had to do that". Ultimately helping both of them be able to get to that vulnerability and sharing that. I think, like you're saying there's the demand for more vulnerability from men, but then sometimes, they get the response that oftentimes the, women get; feeling dismissed or so on.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:17:05)
Keith, the clients that I work with are less psychologically minded. So if you're working with couples, they generally have a little bit more disposable income to afford couples therapy. I think it's a little different with a lot of the clients I work with. I'm just saying that they're married to partners that aren't necessarily as psychologically minded. They're married to partners who often are very aggressive themselves. So they just have to be careful in how they proceed in sharing vulnerabilities is what I'm saying. It can go awry very easily. I get what you're saying with higher income couples or couples that are dedicated to the relationship that generally, if the man is more emotive, it dramatically improves the tenor of the relationship. But with the lower income couples, it doesn't always work that way. We have to be careful that we don't try to get our clients to do more than they're capable of.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:18:08)
Or they're ready, I would say.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:18:10)
So I know you're working on your book and your ethnography of the experience of these men and what are your thoughts on where this field is going and the domestic violence research and treatment and so on. What are you seeing on the horizon?
Dr. John Hamel: (01:18:31)
Well, right now I'm really focused on my new book on a criminal justice response. It's going to be a breakthrough book. We have 16 chapters written by attorneys and scholars on reforming the criminal justice system. That's what I'm really focused on right now. Not just making sure that the police don't just arrest guys because of that gender paradigm, but also that we don't overreact and that we don't put in jail people that can be handled in different ways. So we have chapters on restorative justice alternatives, we have chapters on alternatives to arrest, deferred prosecution, the use of couples and family therapy when it's safe, reforms of that nature. That's not to say that that lots of people, don't need to be arrested and held responsible.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:19:48)
They do. It's just how we go about it. The prosecutors in many jurisdictions are very gung-ho to prosecute and sometimes to the point where they dismiss or ignore the needs of the victims. Sometimes the victims don't want the prosecution to go forward because either threats of retaliation by the abuser or the money drain that they'll be faced with. If the abuser is in jail for protracted amount of time, I mean, it's been a really good thing overall that there was a Battered Women's movement. But as I said earlier in the podcast, it's had some negative implications that we're still dealing with and one of them is the gender paradigm. The other one is the whole idea that domestic violence is one monolithic phenomenon, and there are no differences in that if somebody ever grabs you once, that means that they're going to be more violent in the future and you're doomed right? We're trying to dispel those attitudes and provide the criminal justice system and the policy makers some alternative ways of dealing with the problem.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:09)
Well, thank you so much for your time today. This was really interesting to hear your point of view, and hear about your contributions to the field and really bringing to the forefront of my mind, this even larger perspective on domestic violence rather than the myopic male is bad. It's much more nuanced than that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:21:37)
I've enjoyed it Keith. Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to do this.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:41)
Right. Take care. All right.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:43)
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Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be interviewing John Hamel PhD LCSW, who has authored several books on domestic violence, including gender, treatment of intimate partner abuse, family interventions in domestic violence, inner partner, and family abuse, a case book of gender inclusive therapy, and he is currently editing the upcoming book Beyond the Gender Paradigm: Illegal Primer on Evidence-Based Criminal Justice Approaches to Intimate Partner Violence. John provides therapy overseas, an anger management program, is an expert witness, a teacher, and an author. He has published numerous books, chapters, and peer reviewed research on the topic of domestic violence. Let's listen to the interview.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:19)
So thanks for coming and joining us today and we wanted to find out a little bit more about your work. I know we were talking the other day on the phone and it sounds like you are doing a lot of work, and a lot of expertise in the domestic violence field, and this is an area that also often brings up a lot of questions from a lot of therapists. Particularly even this week, I was talking with a client of mine and working with a family. There was some potential domestic violence in the couple, and then there's the question of, can we then work with them? Do we need to refer out? And particularly as an emotionally focused couples therapy supervisor and EFT, one of the things that they say is that it is contract indicated if there's domestic violence. But I think as we were talking that oftentimes, assessing for what's what, what allows one to do couples work or individual work or group work is very nuanced, and you had some really interesting perspectives on it. So I'd love to hear about your work and what you've been doing and your thoughts on all of this.
Dr. John Hamel: (02:22)
All right. Well, I'll start by saying that, the key consideration in trying to understand domestic violence is to understand that it's highly politicized. It's a highly politicized field. So in order to talk intelligently best practices, best policies, it's really important that we all, remain free of ideological allegiances, and that we look at the facts and we look at what the science tells us: what works and what doesn't work. In the 1970s and 80s in the United States, a number of states began to enact laws that made it a criminal offense for one partner to abuse their partner in a marriage. And at the time, even today, the primary consideration was protecting women from husbands who were quite violent and who weren't held accountable. It's not that no one was ever arrested for domestic violence, but it took a lot for someone to actually get arrested and convicted back in the seventies. Police sometimes were well-intended, but what they would try to do is mediate and tell the couples to work it out. Inevitably there would be cases where someone would be seriously injured. So, what happened was that there arose in the United States, a movement, the Batter Women's Movement that sought to protect women from being abused by their husbands and to hold them accountable. And that of course was wonderful. What happened, however, is the Battered Women's Shelter Movement, which was a grassroots movement of women who had been abused, along with their family members and friends really didn't have the political power and the resources to make the kind of changes that were necessary to call attention to the problem. So they came up with second wave feminists who were politely organized back in the seventies and eighties. Second wave feminists were fighting for the era and they were fighting for the political and social rights of women.
Dr. John Hamel: (04:44)
What happened was that domestic violence became subsumed as one of the causes under that broader feminist umbrella. Now that sounds fine, except that domestic violence became a political issue rather than, a therapeutic or an empirical problem to be resolved like any other mental health issue or substance abuse. And what's happened since then is we've had a series of laws and policies that for the most part, have done a lot of good but have had a downside. The downside is that because it's been so politicized and because domestic violence is associated with women's rights, what happens when you suggest that, sometimes women are not the victims sometimes they're the abusers. Men can be abused as well, and there's a huge impact on men's mental well-being and physical well-being of being battered.
Dr. John Hamel: (05:53)
When you say things like that, you run that danger of coming off as though you're an anti-feminist or you're minimizing the problem. And, I'm pretty staunch feminist and have been since the 1960s. So most of my colleagues in the field who do research on domestic violence are women, and I'm pretty certain, they're all feminists. But they're also researchers, they're scholars. And we believe that it's perfectly compatible to champion the rights of women and at the same time, push for evidence-based practices that are free of ideology right? So that's the main thing I wanted to say. If you understand that, then I think a lot of the research you might come across, makes more sense. I started, as a clinical social worker in the early nineties in the San Francisco Bay Area, doing just regular therapy with a number of different types of clients and within six months of my practice, I had an opportunity to basically buy or purchase a colleague's therapy practice, which consisted of domestic violence treatment programs for offenders. And I just inherited several groups. These were men who have been arrested on a domestic violence charge and I was trained by my colleague who sold me his practice in what is known as the Duluth Model of Treatment. The Duluth model references, a program in the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where one of the first shelters was established for women and was one of the first programs for the men who battered these women that was established. A treatment program to help these offenders, become non-violent. And the central core of the Duluth model is that domestic violence is not a psychological issue.
Dr. John Hamel: (08:12)
It's a control issue. And furthermore, it's a societal issue. And that domestic violence is essentially the way that men maintain patriarchal dominance over women. So in other words, in the Duluth model, a man who hits his wife is not a man who has problems with anger or stress or a personality or grew to develop mental issues. Ordinary men use violence against women, because they believe it's the right of the man to control the women. This is second wave feminism or one faster, then second wave feminism. Well, it turns out that that's completely incorrect. Certainly a lot of men who are misogynistic or have strong views about the place of women in society, far less so in the United States and some other countries. But even in the United States, there are men like that.
Dr. John Hamel: (09:14)
I've had hundreds of those guys at my groups. However, my clinical experience and what the research shows is that, there are many causes to domestic violence perpetration and having, traditional views about marriage and the place of women in society is not considered to be a major risk factor. The major risk factors, what correlates most with domestic violence perpetration would be having an aggressive personality, which could be partly inherited genetically and partly learned. It's growing up in a family where there is violence and abuse. It's having problems with emotional regulation, the inability to manage strong impulses, substance abuse ; low income people who are poor, or are less educated, are more likely than others, and there's some parallels in a criminal logical research literature, that lower-income people tend to commit the most crimes. Lastly, being in a high conflict relationship, just being in a relationship with someone who is abusive themselves, predicts domestic violence.
Dr. John Hamel: (10:39)
So those are the main risk factors. Patriarchy really isn't a major risk factor. This has been demonstrated over and over again, in China and most of South Africa, in Eastern Europe, in many countries in South America and Central America, where we all know patriarchy is a lot stronger than in the United States in those countries, the domestic violence rates are pretty equal across men and women. So, the idea that domestic violence is a gendered crime is just not supported by the facts. When I was trained in the Duluth model, I found out within a few months afterwards, working with my clients for a while, getting to know them that the model wasn't sustainable. I wasn't going to be able to use that model in my practice very well. It would work for some of the guys, but a lot of them had no problems with their women working or their women having the same rights as them.
Dr. John Hamel: (11:42)
They just didn't know how to handle their anger impulses. They didn't know how to deal with stress. Furthermore, many of these guys had wives who were aggressive themselves, who were abusive themselves and that led me to do a lot of investigating and research on my own. Over a period of the last 30 years, I eventually got my PhD along the way. I have been working as the Editor-in-Chief of a scholarly journal on domestic violence. And yes, I can take you to this day to provide groups for men and women who abuse their partners. I no longer do individual work, I'm sort of semi-retired, but I do a lot of work for the court system as an expert witness. I testify on behalf of both, that are women and the men who were unfairly accused of abusing them.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (12:35)
Okay. Wow. Sounds like you're doing a lot of work. Now, one of the things you said earlier was that, some men also are abused and, physically or verbally, and that bringing that up, or that new point, might be non-feminist or so on. And it is that because in the feminist viewpoint, there's the focus on the power differential? And also as I'm hearing that, I'm thinking about, I know my training in, domestic violence that, from what I remember, I'm not an expert in this field, but that the percentage of women abusing men was very small. And I don't know if that's, because of the definition. So yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Dr. John Hamel: (13:25)
You were misinformed.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (13:25)
Okay.
Dr. John Hamel: (13:26)
My colleague, Donald Dutton at University of British Columbia, he's now retired, but he's very well known in the field. He actually worked as a consultant in the OJ Simpson case, working for the prosecution. He coined the term, the gender paradigm, the gender paradigm is a set of assumptions that permeate our society and that permeate domestic files treatment policies. And you just voiced some of that, the idea that most domestic violence is perfect created by men. So just to review what the research actually says, and it's not really open for debate. It's just the fact. When I talk about the research, I'm saying 30 years of numerous large scale national surveys and hundreds of smaller surveys, including university students, clinical populations, and so forth find that the rates of physical aggression between men and women are the same.
Dr. John Hamel: (14:37)
In fact, if you look, it's slightly higher for female perpetrators aggression, so there's physical violence, physical violence could be anything from grabbing your partner, throwing things at them all the way to shooting them or stabbing them or beating them up right? So women do all those things as well, as often as men in general. Women push, grab, punch, just as often as men do. The main difference is that because women are typically smaller, not as strong as men, and because men are better able to protect themselves, men cause a larger share of serious injuries. Three quarters of the partner homicides, involve female victims. I think the rates of women victims going to emergency rooms because of their injuries is about two to one or three to one over men. So, clearly men caused more serious physical damage. And also women report higher rates of psychological trauma compared to male victims.
Dr. John Hamel: (15:50)
It's not to say that men don't suffer psychological trauma. They do. And there are women who stab and shoot their partners and beat them up and do all those things. But on the whole, men, generally don't incur the same extreme levels of injuries psychologically or physically. The other psychological abuse and controlling behaviors again, are equally perpetrated by men and women. One of the big lies is that women aren't as controlling. Anyone who has ever been married, anyone who is just above the age of 18 and has been in a relationship, knows how absurd that statement is. And in fact, numerous surveys, including some that I've conducted on my own show, that women are just as capable and willing as men to be controlling of their partners. Now, there are some differences in the tactics used. Men are more able to intimidate. Women are better at withdrawing sex and affection and certain other things, but in general, men and women psychologically abuse each other and physically abuse each other at comparable rates.
Dr. John Hamel: (17:04)
Aside from the impact that these behaviors have on the victims. The other main area where there's a lack of symmetry, where there is a major difference is with sexual abuse. Where a man clearly sexually abused women, much larger extent than the other way around. Right? But in almost every other aspect of domestic violence, whether it's the impact on children, whether it's the motive, the reasons for why people are violent, the risk factors, the rates, aside from those caveats that I just mentioned, domestic violence is not a gender problem. It's a human problem. And there are explanations for that when people say to me, when I pointed this out is, well, how can that be? Men perpetrate the vast majority of violent crimes. And if this is true, men are more aggressive than women in general.
Dr. John Hamel: (18:02)
Men do perpetrate the vast majority of homicides and violent crimes in general, but in the home women have more of a vested interest in advancing, their interests. There are evolutionary and there are social reasons why women are as violent as men in the home. I read articles on that, that go into a lot of details, but, because a lot of people want an explanation they just don't understand. How can that possibly be? Men, engaging in trafficking of women. They rape them in war, they kill each other in war. But in reality, women are just as angry as men. Studies show that when asked about the amount of time during the day that they feel hostile or feel angry about something, nailing female subjects report equal rates of anger. It's just that women have not had permission to express the same level of aggression outwardly in society over the centuries as men, but behind closed doors, women are free to express themselves and they do.
Dr. John Hamel: (19:19)
So now this brings us to the issue of treatment and what does all that information mean in terms of your treatment models? If you're a psychotherapist and you're working with a couple and they come in, and you ask them about their conflicts, and it turns out that, there's been some domestic violence and, by domestic violence, I mean, grabbing, pushing anything well, then you should take it seriously. Right? You should look into that because if there's any domestic violence there is a possibility that things could get out of hand and someone could get seriously hurt.
Dr. John Hamel: (19:58)
So, what do you do in a situation like that? Well, you were probably trained, you're a psychologist, but whether you're a social worker or a licensed professional counselor or a psychologist, you probably were trained by people who were up to their necks in the gender paradigm.
Dr. John Hamel: (20:24)
You probably learned that you just don't do couples counseling when there's any kind of domestic violence because of this differential power situation. Right? Well, again, that was an extreme reaction to actually a serious problem, which was that up until the seventies and eighties, when we learned about domestic violence and the fact that some domestic violence was perpetrated specifically by men to dominate their partners. Because some of these men who went into counseling would punish their wives for disclosing any violence during the sessions. Because in those situations, there was a power differential, it became sort of a standard for therapists to say, you just can't do any kind of couples counseling. It was gross reaction for a number of reasons. Number one, that kind of domestic violence where one person really dominates the other with serious violence and threats of violence is just a small piece of the pie. Most domestic violence occurs very infrequently. It's reactive. We would call it expressive violence where someone is angry, they're stressed out, their partner yells at him and he shoves them. And they feel really sorry afterwards. That kind of domestic violence is not the kind you've seen in the movies. It's not the kind that you should be concerned about where the police need to be called in. It's just high conflict couples who occasionally allow themselves to get physical with one another. That's not a good thing. And it needs to be addressed, but that's more amenable to therapy than it is to legal interventions. And what's been happening is that we've confounded serious domestic violence where a legal response is required. Shelters are required to protect victims, usually women from normal couples, conflict that get out of hand and sometimes it leads to physical aggression.
Dr. John Hamel: (22:43)
So if it's the emotional reactive type of domestic violence, usually couples counseling is a great vehicle for that. In fact, it's probably the best modality of treatment because you get a chance to work with both people. Most domestic violence is bilateral. Both partners are engaging in it. And if that's the case and you lump both parties to be in the therapy session with you, right. That's not to say that group isn't also useful for lower level violence as well. But what I say is that, for most domestic violence, the therapist should have the option of the best treatment based on the needs of the client.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (23:33)
I'm wondering, as you're talking about the reactive and the expressive kind of anger and the later remorse, back in grad school, I was doing research, I did my dissertation on bullying. I was looking at aggression and particularly, I know on some of the Gottman research, they looked at the more reactive, aggressive, versus the proactive kind of instrumental aggression, or they called it. I think it was the cobras versus the pit bulls, where the pit bulls were more reactive and the cobras heart rate decreased. And then would be more proactive in their use of aggression.
Dr. John Hamel: (24:14)
So let me clarify that. I think we're confirming a couple of things here. First of all, Gottman, when he was talking about pit bulls and cobras, he was talking about the more serious offenders. He was only talking about men. He wasn't even mentioning women at all. He was talking about men who engage in serious violence, serious injury, producing violence. That he called batterers. Another term is controlling coercive violence, and he was saying that there were two major types of serious offenders and his typology consisted of cobras and pit bulls. Others have formulated similar typologies. Holzworth Monroe came up with a typology where she separated the serious offenders into two camps. One would be the equivalent of the pit bulls, which she called borderline dysphoric, or dysphoric borderline. Borderline personality individuals are very needy and when they feel abandoned, they lash out, and the more extreme man will stalk their partners and pose a real danger to them.
Dr. John Hamel: (25:32)
Whereas what she'd call the antisocial type or the generally violent type, similar to Gottman's cobras. These are individuals who don't really have a lot of sympathy for the victims. Not necessarily psychopaths, but they tend to be very controlling and their violence is more instrumental. What I was talking about earlier was the difference between more common domestic violence and more severe violence. I was talking about the difference between conflict that escalates to get to the point where there's physical aggression, where the intent is not to dominate the partner. The intent is to protect oneself from hurt, to get a point across. Maybe it's retaliatory, maybe it's jealousy, but that's known as common couple violence or situational violence. Situational violence is just that, it arises in the situation.
Dr. John Hamel: (26:42)
Now, if the violence occurs frequently, and it's accompanied by a lot of overt attempts to control and dominate the partner, threatening the partner, keeping them from leaving the house, hyper jealous behaviors, those kinds of things. Now you're getting into what we call battery. Now you're getting into more serious domestic violence. There's no perfect line. It's a gray area between situational violence and the kind of violence that Gottman was talking about. Gottman did a lot of things right. But he was also politically motivated. His book When Men Batter Women mentioned nothing about female on male violence, but if you read his research papers, as I have on domestic violence, you'll find that in the footnotes and in the tables and the appendices in his research papers, he acknowledged that when the men - well, let me put it this way. He acknowledges that about 40-50% of the cases where he's reporting on these couples, the women were also violent, so he acknowledges this, but he never really talks about it. I could be wrong. I love Gottman. I love his marital techniques. He's fantastic. He's done a lot of great work in the field, but I think he was really motivated by political considerations. Up until about 15 years ago, there were no books, and I mean, no books on domestic violence that were written in a gender inclusive way. Not since the early 1980s and in the early 1980s, a guy named Peter Knighted, a psychologist wrote a book on couples therapy for Navy men and their wives. Between 1985 and 2005, when my book came out over a period of 20 years, there were zero books, pre-planned books, on domestic violence that acknowledged that women could be offenders. So there's only one explanation for that, you know, and that's political consideration.
Dr. John Hamel: (29:15)
So Gottman, as great as he was, devising some wonderful marital and science-based marital intervention techniques, unfortunately played the little of the game. Also I must say that the idea that calling clients cobras and pit bulls is rather offensive. I think earlier, Keith, you were asking about what kind of work I'm doing these days. I'm doing a lot of different things. I'm editing a new book on the criminal justice response, to domestic violence. My other work is on treatment. What are the best approaches of working with domestic violence offenders and probably the most important lines of research have to do with client centered, motivational interviewing approaches. Where in order to get clients, especially court mandated clients to change their entire worldview about relationships and about violence, you really have to get their buy-in. You have to get them to trust you, and you're not going to do that when you call them cobras or pit bulls or batterers. So I really object to the term. It's like calling a substance abuser, a slime or a lizard. We have substance abusers who do heroin well they're lizards and the ones who drank well maybe they're I don't know, pick your term. ...
Dr. John Hamel: (30:55)
So I've done a lot of different research projects and what I've been focused on more recently is weaving together lines of research based on interviews with men and batterer intervention groups, getting their input. Ethnographic study of men and better intervention, getting their input on what works for them. Along with lines of research on motivational interviewing and other client centered approaches. That's been a big emphasis of my trainings recently. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was doing more of research on family interventions that we're talking about now. Couples counseling, I've kind of veered away from that a little bit only because in reality, I get very few couples referred to me for domestic violence. If you have a couple that are engaged in situational violence, then it's best to work with them as a couple, if they're willing to do that.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (32:09)
For yourself, how are you assessing whether or not you're going to do couples or individual or group, what are the lines? And I know, I think for some therapists I imagine, and even myself, when I've worked with clients, it's trying to understand where that line is, how risky things are. And I think oftentimes the concern that this has happened and like you're saying that the men ended up inflicting more damage. And so there's also the concern that once that line has been crossed, then in an instance of kind of explosiveness something happens and somebody usually in a heterosexual couple, the woman gets hurt. So trying to evaluate that with whether working with the couple, and again, many people ask me when I do EFT trainings and so on. I don't do much work with domestic violence, but they asked, what is the treatment? And it says well, emotionally focused couples therapy, and by the way, this might be updated now. I'm not totally up on the latest with EFT, but that it's contraindicated. And so then they say, well, what else do you do then? And then I'm not so sure at that point. Love to hear your thoughts on that.
Dr. John Hamel: (33:33)
It's like saying that with alcoholics, CBT is contraindicated, and you should go to AA. No! AA works with some people and doesn't work for other people. It's just lazy thinking. There's no substitute for a good assessment. There are some sort of guiding principles. Let me just say this. If you have a couple, and if she's afraid of him, you can see that in the session, but she's afraid of him and she's reporting serious violence. You shouldn't work with them as a couple. Work with her separately, try to get her to establish some boundaries, provide her a safe Haven, safe resources. Try to induce him to come in separately and work with them separately. And if you can do that, then maybe at some point down the road, they can come in as a couple.
Dr. John Hamel: (34:32)
If the violence is low level, but he has a history of serious violence with other women, then again, there's a history of serious violence. If you're going to do emotionally focused couples therapy in particular, where you're really focusing on emotions, which could lead to volatile reactions in the therapy session. No, you wouldn't have somebody in the session who can't control their impulses, doing emotionally focused therapy. If you were focusing simply on ground rules for engagement, if you were focusing on safety, basic communication skills, time-outs basic anger management techniques, then maybe you could do that. So that's what would guide me. The history of violence, the propensity for violence in the background of either partner. And then, when was the last violent incident, if he had shoved around, five years before and now he's yelling again.
Dr. John Hamel: (35:42)
Does that mean that he's going to be hitting her? Well, you don't know that. I would say, give her the option, tell her, well, what do you think? The victim is generally best as to whether their safety is threatened or not. So I would love to guide you. But I think that there's another consideration. I have colleagues who actually believe as I do that couples counseling is probably indicated almost all cases. Just think about it. Logically, if you decide that you're not going to see this couple, because he or she is too violent and they're not making enough progress, then what are your options? What if the victim doesn't want to continue seeing you? Then what? Then who's going to work with that couple?
Dr. Keith Sutton: (36:39)
Nothing kind of thing.
Dr. John Hamel: (36:43)
If it looks like there's serious, domestic violence, you don't see the couple together initially. You would see the person that appears to be the primary victim. You would see them separately first. We would do an assessment and they tell you, I'm really afraid of him. He's just beat me up last week. You're not going to do couples counseling, but if it looks like, okay he was violent in the past, he's doing better. He seems to really mean business. He wants to come in with me. The victim is okay with that. Then you see the couple, you continue your assessment along the way. But let's say you get to a point where he's still grabbing and shoving her occasionally and feels bad about it. Do you just discontinue couples counseling at that point? See that's where I have an issue with the doctrine errors. The people who say it's contra-indicated my next response is okay, then what? What if she says I'm not going to come in here without him.
Dr. John Hamel: (37:46)
And maybe she's saying that because she's afraid or he's kind of dictating that. So what I'm saying is if I have a couple where it's clear that the man is the more dominant partner, the only way he's going to get any kind of help is to come in with his wife. Maybe, the reason for that is because he wants to show that she's partly to blame. Most feminists would say you don't do couples counseling there because you would be allowing him to dominate her. And what I would say is, well, don't underestimate my abilities as a therapist to figure out what to do here, because if he's willing to come in under those circumstances, he'll come in with her that's better than him not coming in at all. I'm not going to do emotionally focused therapy or in depth psychotherapy with this couple, I might, the first 12 weeks just focus specifically on anger management and establishing ground rules.
Dr. John Hamel: (38:50)
Furthermore, I'm not going to necessarily make it about him, even though it may be about him. It may be that he's the dominant aggressor I'm going to act as though they both have a stake in this. What I'm saying is that it's better to avoid early confrontations. What's best? Telling the client that they're a jerk and they're responsible so that you feel better? Or is it better to work with the couple and make them a four functional unit? Because what I'm banking on is that, a lot of these guys and women who are abusive, they may objectively be the dominant aggressors. They may objectively have more of a problem with their anger than their partner, but very often the partners are engaging in all kinds of abusive or unhealthy behaviors. So why do I need to split hairs and point out that while they're the real abuser, when there's enough going on in a relationship that would warrant a more objective view of it.
Dr. John Hamel: (40:11)
So what I'm saying is that I'm not diluting with anyone. If I'm agreeing with them, that their partner sometimes does things that really piss them off. If Mrs. Andrews tells her partner that he's lazy and useless because he hasn't found a job and he slaps her around, he's engaging in a criminal act and abusive behavior that cannot be in any way justified. But in order for me to help that couple work out their issues, I cannot ignore the fact that she verbally abuses him or treats him like he's a lowlife. My line of questioning and my interventions will be based on a number of factors, including not just who's the more dominant aggressor. I always know that I keep that in the back of my mind, but it's also their level of acceptance of their problems, their motivation, the safety factors. And if it looks to me like it might be worth exploring her undesirable behaviors for a few minutes to get him to think like I'm being fair, then that's a small price to pay for him perhaps listening to the next 30 minutes as she explains how much he's hurt her. Right. So what I'm saying is that if you know what you're doing, if you're a good couples therapist and you know something about systems and you know something about domestic violence, and you're careful, then you could work with couples even when the violence is pretty pervasive. I would agree with the victims advocates, however, couples that don't have a lot of experience working with the high conflict couples therapists, who don't really know much about domestic violence dynamics, especially a battering dynamics, then they probably shouldn't be doing couples therapy. So that's the caveat. It really needs to be done by someone who knows what they're doing.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (42:26)
Yeah, I agree. I think that that is really important. That therapists that are able to hold and contain a high conflict couple because some therapists hands, and they are not as kind of involved in holding. Sometimes if you just let them go at it, things will escalate. I think the way that I conceptualized it is that if there is, that incidence of aggression or violence or so on, most of the times in the couple of times I've worked with it it's been reactive and part of conceptualized with the emotionally focused couples therapy, cause actually the EFT does great and looking at the primary more vulnerable emotions that are leading to these more secondary emotions like anger or so on. I think the concept has been around not necessarily getting the victim vulnerable and being more, I think like you're talking about safety and so on.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (43:19)
And ideally I'm building enough rapport and relationship to be able to help talk to the, if it's a heterosexual, couple, the male and sending a woman out and talking about like that, it's not justified. It validates that it makes sense of why they'd be so angry, but then it crosses that line and there's really no justification for physical violence, physical threats, those kinds of things pushing or so on, even the emotional abuse and then beginning to help them contain some of that and work on all the other stuff. Because I feel like sometimes that there is that potential for crossing that line into violence then it it's harder to do any of the other work. A lot of times the clients are responsive to that and kind of getting that. I'm not working in the more severe domestic violence situations, but that's kind of the way I conceptualize it. I don't know if that's correct way or so on, but that's my reaction.
Dr. John Hamel: (44:17)
Well, let me just say something else here. There's not such a clear cut difference between physical and psychological abuse. Victims of domestic violence, male and female victims of serious domestic violence will tell you most of them that the psychological abuse is worse than the physical abuse. Not always, but I would be careful about explaining to a couple that you're working with, or giving the impression that you can never push or grab the other person ever and even if they do, I'll kick you out of therapy and you'll go to jail. But if you're allowed to yell at your partner or to treat them like crap because they know that a reactive grabbing or shoving is very easy to forgive, but calling your wife, a c**t in front of your friends or her telling you that she's going to divorce you because you have a small penis. Okay. Think about that. Well, it's far more devastating than someone touching your shoulder, right? So let's be clear that when we're talking about crossing that line, it's not necessarily crossing the line into physical aggression. Although I agree psychological abuse is harder to define whereas physical aggression is much more clear cut. So that's helpful to setting limits, but I just want to remind you Keith, that couples can wreck huge devastation on each other psychologically.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (46:09)
Yeah, definitely. That's a huge piece. I think that in my mind I can work with that, the emotional abuse in a way that yes I'm concerned that something's going to get so violent that they're going to physically put the other person in the hospital or something that. I have to focus on safety. But, I was wondering about, and actually we've been talking a lot about heterosexual couples and I was wondering do you have any knowledge about gay, transgender, lesbian couples, bisexual couples and what that looks like with the domestic violence? Whether it be physical aggression or emotional and how that plays out?
Dr. John Hamel: (46:59)
Well, if you understand that domestic violence is a human problem, it's not a gender problem than research on LGBTQ populations will make sense. So the rates of domestic violence are very similar across all human beings. Yes, there's higher rates of domestic violence amongst African-American and Latino populations. That's a function of their lower income status overall. It's not a function of their skin color. Rates of domestic violence are actually highest, amongst lesbians than they are amongst heterosexuals or gay men. No one really knows exactly why, but the rates overall are very similar between heterosexual and gay and lesbian domestic violence situations. Gay and lesbian victims, report experiences, same types of power control behaviors, jealousy, threats, economic abuse, and so forth as their heterosexual counterparts. I don't see a lot of difference.
Dr. John Hamel: (48:20)
There just isn't a lot of difference. The only difference would be in the specific types of controlling behaviors that are available to certain groups. For example, women who want to control their partners are going to be much more effective in threatening to take the kids, withdrawing affection, as compared to say threatening, physical harm. Because women, generally, there's exceptions, are not able to control men in that same way. Gay men will threaten out their partners.They'll have unprotected sex. If you think about different groups, there may be certain things that controlling people in those groups can do, as a function of being in that group. But in general, there aren't a lot of differences. The vast majority of gay or lesbian intimate partner violence is low level, just like with straight people, it's situational.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (49:31)
Sure.
Dr. John Hamel: (49:34)
Yes, there's been investigations into the psychodynamics of lesbian battering and theories around that may explain some of this phenomena of lesbians. Women are more relational, women are more emotive than men, the lesbian community is kind of a small community. Traditionally has experienced homophobia. That might account for the more intense relationships amongst lesbians. Those are some of the theories that we have. So, it's not like there aren't any differences at all, there may be some dynamics that are somewhat different among heterosexual populations. But, in terms of the frequency of the violence and the general motive, the risk factors they're very comparable.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (50:31)
Sure. Now I want to go back to something that you said earlier too, you were talking about that Duluth model and that idea of the patriarchy and the men having collared with the women, and that was not actually one of the central pieces. I was just thinking, almost devil's advocate, that they may not be saying that they're doing this, but is there some unconscious gender norms, some privilege. Particularly, I also think about, socio-politically with white males, feeling marginalized or demonized. Right now we're doing this interview in January 2021 and a lot of the stuff with the Trump presidency and so on.... I think it'd be interesting if you have any thoughts on that. It sounds like explicitly they're not saying I'm doing this to dominate because of my gender or so on, but has that been looked at whether it's unconscious or implicit or something they're not even aware of because of their privilege.
Dr. John Hamel: (51:45)
Well, this has been explored in different ways. Let me just say this. When large scale surveys have been conducted, where women have been asked about the violence that they perpetrated and receive, when they'd been asked about their violence, and there's about 15 studies I'm aware of, where they were asked when you were violent with your partner, what percentage of the time did you initiate the violence as opposed to respond to your partner? Women are just as likely as men to say I initiated it. So we know that women initiate violence by their own accounts, it has nothing to do with what men believe subconsciously or unconsciously, and what men have been indoctrinated with in terms of white privilege or male privilege or anything like that. Women, when they're asked about violence in their relationships, say that they initiate at least half the time. Women, who were asked about their motives for their violence in their relationship, rarely say it's in self-defense.
Dr. John Hamel: (53:05)
When I say studies, I mean hundreds of studies. Maybe four or five dozen studies show almost all of them, when women are asked about their motives for being violent towards their partners it's very rarely self-defense. It's usually either jealousy, retaliation to control the partner. Very often, it's reactive. It's to punish them, a tit for tat. So women tell us that their violence is done for purposes other than self-defense and they initiate it. So that pretty much negates theories that women must be just defending themselves and so forth. Studies that have been done that tried to correlate gendered attitudes about relationships with domestic violence, find that there is no correlation. So men who believe in the kind of traditional arrangement, the woman works in the home, I work outside the home, she raises the children. Those men are not statistically any more violent than men who have egalitarian relationships. The woke-est guys in Berkeley, California, right? They're not any more or less violent than those guys. The key is the personality. What my colleague, Don Dutton pointed out is that men who are violent towards their partners have aggressive personalities, just like the women who are violent towards their partners. Sometimes they use male privilege as an excuse for their behavior. In other words, I'm the man of the household.
Dr. John Hamel: (54:59)
You see the difference there? The difference is highlighted when you look at another comparison group. Men, and women who are religious, who have religious merit arrangements, they read the Bible. There are millions of these people. 70 million of these people voted for Trump. They're not any more violent than anybody else. So if patriarchy and male privilege was the cause of domestic violence, you'd find a lot more domestic violence amongst these Christians and you don't. They're not any more violent than your woke couple in Berkeley.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (55:38)
Sure.
Dr. John Hamel: (55:38)
If you know that aggressive personality, poor impulse control and growing up with violent role models are some of the major risk factors you'll know, those will always supersede anything else. That's not to say that our society doesn't have some misogynistic and sexist components to it.
Dr. John Hamel: (56:07)
I know we don't need to get into a debate about the extent of white privilege. I mean, all that pretty much exists. But what I'm saying in terms of domestic violence is the risk factors for domestic violence are so powerful, and the research is so clear that it's not that the societal factors have no impact. They do, but in a more oblique way. They certainly don't explain all of domestic violence and they don't justify something like the Duluth model. Do you understand that if you read the Duluth model literature, they explicitly say it has nothing to do with anger, it has nothing to do with stress. It has nothing to do with substance abuse. In other words, don't even bother looking at those factors because the only thing that matters is the man's desire to control his partner.
Dr. John Hamel: (56:59)
So we're not talking about societal influences that some men buy into. By the way, Keith, there is such a thing as female privilege, which few people want to talk about.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (57:11)
What privilege?
Dr. John Hamel: (57:12)
It's female privilege. We usually don't think of women having a lot of privilege. Well, they do. They're generally awarded custody of the children. Courts favor women in that respect. There's research showing that women are arrested much less frequently than men for all crimes, including domestic violence, because they're considered to be more helpless than men. So some of these traditional, sexist attitudes, both hostile, and benevolent types of sexism against women, ironically have served to perpetuate myths about domestic violence. Some of the more extreme elements amongst feminists in the field of domestic violence are heavily aligned with law enforcement, which is a traditional heavily patriarchal institution.
Dr. John Hamel: (58:17)
They both benefit by maintaining a stereotype of women as helpless children. They have to be protected. It's a narrative that goes really well with cops traditionally, not all cops but cops who are there to protect the women, the little woman from the guy, and some of the feminists who believe, ironically, that women lack a sufficient degree of agency and will, to assault their partners, even though the narrative also states that women should be included amongst the decision makers in society and so forth. Usually I will argue when it comes to this particular debate that, if we're going to consider women to be strong enough and agentic enough to make tough decisions to become corporate CEOs if we think women can be police officers and firefighters and pull people out of burning buildings, why would we think that they're completely helpless in relationships?
Dr. John Hamel: (59:39)
Unfortunately the sexist gender role attitudes have played out in such a way that they don't benefit women or men. They don't benefit women in general, in society for obvious reasons. But they also don't play themselves out well in the field of domestic violence, for reasons a little bit less obvious. But women who aren't getting the treatment that they need for their violence are not really helped. They're likely to continue that violence. They're likely to become distanced from their children. They're likely to be unhappy. They might run a foul of the legal system. Unfortunately the second wave feminist doctrine of the gender paradigm is still with us. When I talk with women, privately separately, when I talk to second wave feminists separately, and we talk about domestic violence, they usually are open to hearing what I have to say, but the research just isn't getting out there.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:00:55)
I mean, it sounds like you're a pretty, successful psychotherapist in a really well established practice, and yet you seem to be holding some of those assumptions yourself. I can tell you, because the American Psychological Association, just like the National Association of Social Workers are dominated by that kind of thinking. I'm a very liberal person, very progressive. It's been kind of a challenge for me to get my liberal friends on board with this idea that women are capable of inflicting a great deal of damage, and knowing that doesn't mean that women are disadvantaged throughout society, it's kind of a dual message there.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:01:54)
Well, I think too that sometimes, and I don't know for others, but as I'm thinking about this, I think sometimes the concern probably is that that will dismiss or justify the violence that happens to women. I think that it all gets dichotomized in that way, but both can be true at the same time. It doesn't mean that, if there is some aggression from women then therefore violence that's done to them in the sexual violence, physical violence is not valid and not a concern. One of the things that I'm thinking about as we're talking about all of this, is the piece around trauma. I mean, I imagine that trauma is a huge factor, as I'm hearing about, you mention violence in the home, the substance abuse. I know what they've done from the ACEs research on childhood experiences of trauma that substance abuse and addiction is highly correlated. My last two questions are one, any thoughts on that? The research on trauma? The other last question is that, again a lot of the couples that I hear from when they do act "badly", whether physical or belittling, or these low blows. Oftentimes it's this feeling that I have to do this to get them to hear me. They won't hear me unless I basically just hit him below the belt. I heard that on both sides of the genders and same sex couples that I've worked with.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:03:42)
Yeah, that's right Keith. I'm thinking of this survey that was conducted in England in the nineties with a representative sample of 3000 respondents. They were asked if there'd been violence in the relationship. And if so, what was their reason for being violent? And the vast majority said it was to get through to the other person. So in addition to jealousy control, retaliation trying to get through. The guy is watching TV, his wife says pay attention to me, he keeps watching TV, she throws the remote control at him. That's an act of expressive violence because she didn't think ahead of time that she's going to dominate him. She just reacted, and what was her motive? If you asked what her motive was, she'll say, well, I was trying to get his attention.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:04:39)
In fact, if you really break down that motive, she was trying to control him, wasn't she? Because he wouldn't stop doing what she asked him to stop doing, and when he refused, she just decided to do something that she thought would get his attention. So, you can analyze that interaction as one where she was controlling. You could also analyze their reaction as one where she's feeling needy and ignored by this guy and it was her desperate attempt to try to get a connection, right.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:05:21)
And having that connection, is the true motive. Well, we can have all kinds of academic debates on that one, but the reality is that clinically it's more useful to go with the well-intended motive. In other words, stay with that, because then it taps into her needs her fears, her abandonment issues or whatever they are. I totally agree with you, Keith, that when we get clients to talk about the real feelings, the male clients in particular are more reluctant at least initially to talk about their feelings. And when we sometimes do address their core issues, these groups are not meant to be heavy duty therapy groups, but we do talk a little bit about their trauma.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:06:16)
We talk about their experiences, and the guys, when they're able to talk about those things are able to see that they're acting out behavior is just an attempt to communicate. It's an attempt to protect themselves. If you grew up with an abusive parent and your partner is yelling in your face, it's easy to interpret that as it's just more of the same, I have to protect myself. I couldn't do it as a child, but I can do it now. I can yell. I'm bigger. I can grab her. I can keep her from doing that. That's why couples counseling is so important in these cases because, in group, we can teach these guys about these things, but they go home and they try to take a timeout and their partners feel abandoned when they take a time out.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:07:01)
But with a couple, you can explain that the timeout is not an attempt to abandon you, it's an attempt to gain control of the situation. Trauma can be done individually, but sometimes in the relationship, it's important to bring up those trauma issues so that the client has a better standing where their partner is coming from. I've done a lot of research recently on trauma, but specifically in terms of adult attachment styles. In fact, one of my assessment instruments uses one of the attachment style questionnaires, and it looks at differences between anxious attachment and dismissive attachment. Generally the most severe domestic violence generally involves more of the anxious type, but you have an anxious attachment type with a dismissive type, and it's a recipe for disaster. Because one person really badly needs that validation and that connection, and the other person doesn't because of trauma, recoil from that.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:08:27)
Recoil, and especially the avoiding goes in to take care of themselves and they go into an independent mode. I need to take care of myself, and then it creates that withdrawal pursuer cycle. Particularly, with the attachment in the emotionally focused couples therapy, the idea of the responsiveness and when we're not getting that responsiveness from the partner, we go into a panic because as a child, if your parent was not responding, that could mean death if you're not getting your needs met because you're completely dependent. So yeah, very interesting.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:09:06)
Keith, couples, I mean, there are times in the relationship where they feel attacked by the partner and sometimes it's all in their mind, and sometimes it's partly true, but they feel like they're literally going to die. If they don't respond that some kind of statement or physical act to protect themselves, it's like they're being killed. They're so invalidated, and again, much of the time it's all in their mind. A partner says, no, I don't want to do that, and they hear it as you're a piece of s***, you're worthless. That's what they hear, and the partner says "I'm just setting limits", and the more reactive people are then probably the more trauma they're suffering. Unless they're sociopaths. Unless they have that kind of personality, it's usually tied into the trauma. The problem is, if you introduce trauma issues too early, without some success by the perpetrators in controlling their violence, you're putting the cart before the horse. So that's going back to safety issues.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:10:27)
The last piece that I want to touch on before we wrap up here is, ultimately what also needs to be accessed is mens' vulnerability. I think that, like you were saying again with the violence and that there isn't much room for acknowledgement. I've had clients that have been victims of sexual abuse by women as a child and so on, and many white males feeling like there's a discrepancy that men also are hurt by women, but that's not really given any space or room in our culture or society, which I think further ends up also leading to men being more guarded about their vulnerability and not bringing that out in the relationship.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:11:18)
I am interested in your thoughts on this field and whether this topic or different topic of where things coming in the future. I'd be interested to see and, hopeful that more room can be made there without it feeling like it's invalidating the violence to women, and not that because men are heard that therefore it's okay that women get hurt, but more that they exist in the same realm, at the same time without necessarily negating one or the other.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:11:57)
Yeah well, there is a double standard when it comes to emotions. In the countries, you hear this all the time: "Men are jerks, who need to be more in touch with their emotions, blah, blah, blah." But in reality, a lot of the men I work with, when they actually talk about their emotions, it doesn't always go well. One of the reasons it doesn't go well is because a lot of women, unfortunately, don't want to be with guys that are very emotional. They say they do, and I'm not saying all women, I'm just saying, there's a large number of women I've talked to them, I've worked with them, they really want their men to be sensitive, but not so sensitive that they can't kick a** and make money and support them, just putting that out.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:12:53)
That doesn't invalidate what women are saying about men needing to be more communicative, and men are notorious for not being very good at communicating their emotions. I've been working on that for 30 years, trying to get guys to be more emotive and more committed to this. I'm just saying that when they do that, it's not like the partners say "oh my God, you're communicating, it's wonderful." They run into problems sometimes because women are people. And people want what they want. Along with societal attitudes about women that are hostile attitudes, there's this benevolent sexism that researchers have pointed to. It's very insidious, and women have bought into. The idea that we're vulnerable and we are victims. It's why most young women today don't identify as feminists, the vast majority of young women in their twenties and thirties today on surveys, when they're asked if you're a feminist, they say no, but they act like feminists, they are feminists. The term has been tainted. One of the reasons I think it has been tainted is because there's been that double standard, and men know that it's all well and good if they express themselves a little bit more to their partners, but God forbid if they would've stopped working for six months, because they wanted to just relax and potty around the house, a lot of their female partners would divorce them for that. So a lot of these traditional gender roles and expectations are still with us, and what I'm saying is that it's not just men that take advantage of those gender role expectations in the area of domestic violence in area of divorce. Women take advantage of those as well. We have to have an honest discussion about how those gender roles play themselves out and how sometimes women take advantage of those roles, and how sometimes they don't benefit men at all.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:15:07)
And I think too, that because women are a majority of ones that experience sexual assault and the majority ones that are hurt and killed by domestic violence, then that is something that's significant. Although again, there is conflict that happens from both in the relationship and to your point too, about the men sharing their vulnerability, particularly from an EFT point of view, ultimately when we help the other person get vulnerable, they're usually saying "I'm feeling hurt by you", or "I'm feeling sad" and connect it to whatever it may be. Typically at least in the beginning stages of therapy, when one hears that the other feels hurt by them, usually they're not intending to hurt. Sometimes they are, but sometimes it's reactionary. Usually they're trying to do the thing that makes most sense to them to get closeness or maintain closeness, like shut down in a fight to not make it worse or to keep talking about it or throw the remote to get the other person's attention.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:16:08)
But when they hear that the other person felt hurt they tend to get defensive or justify or say "Well, you hurt me too", or "Well you're just being too sensitive". Typically more women tend to be the pursuer. They're trying to share their hurt, and as you engage the withdrawer and the men start sharing their hurt, then it flips the script. Then oftentimes the women end up responding in the way that the withdrawal or the men were in that situation of saying, "Well, you're being too sensitive" or, "Oh, well, I didn't mean it that way", or, "Well, I had to do that". Ultimately helping both of them be able to get to that vulnerability and sharing that. I think, like you're saying there's the demand for more vulnerability from men, but then sometimes, they get the response that oftentimes the, women get; feeling dismissed or so on.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:17:05)
Keith, the clients that I work with are less psychologically minded. So if you're working with couples, they generally have a little bit more disposable income to afford couples therapy. I think it's a little different with a lot of the clients I work with. I'm just saying that they're married to partners that aren't necessarily as psychologically minded. They're married to partners who often are very aggressive themselves. So they just have to be careful in how they proceed in sharing vulnerabilities is what I'm saying. It can go awry very easily. I get what you're saying with higher income couples or couples that are dedicated to the relationship that generally, if the man is more emotive, it dramatically improves the tenor of the relationship. But with the lower income couples, it doesn't always work that way. We have to be careful that we don't try to get our clients to do more than they're capable of.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:18:08)
Or they're ready, I would say.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:18:10)
So I know you're working on your book and your ethnography of the experience of these men and what are your thoughts on where this field is going and the domestic violence research and treatment and so on. What are you seeing on the horizon?
Dr. John Hamel: (01:18:31)
Well, right now I'm really focused on my new book on a criminal justice response. It's going to be a breakthrough book. We have 16 chapters written by attorneys and scholars on reforming the criminal justice system. That's what I'm really focused on right now. Not just making sure that the police don't just arrest guys because of that gender paradigm, but also that we don't overreact and that we don't put in jail people that can be handled in different ways. So we have chapters on restorative justice alternatives, we have chapters on alternatives to arrest, deferred prosecution, the use of couples and family therapy when it's safe, reforms of that nature. That's not to say that that lots of people, don't need to be arrested and held responsible.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:19:48)
They do. It's just how we go about it. The prosecutors in many jurisdictions are very gung-ho to prosecute and sometimes to the point where they dismiss or ignore the needs of the victims. Sometimes the victims don't want the prosecution to go forward because either threats of retaliation by the abuser or the money drain that they'll be faced with. If the abuser is in jail for protracted amount of time, I mean, it's been a really good thing overall that there was a Battered Women's movement. But as I said earlier in the podcast, it's had some negative implications that we're still dealing with and one of them is the gender paradigm. The other one is the whole idea that domestic violence is one monolithic phenomenon, and there are no differences in that if somebody ever grabs you once, that means that they're going to be more violent in the future and you're doomed right? We're trying to dispel those attitudes and provide the criminal justice system and the policy makers some alternative ways of dealing with the problem.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:09)
Well, thank you so much for your time today. This was really interesting to hear your point of view, and hear about your contributions to the field and really bringing to the forefront of my mind, this even larger perspective on domestic violence rather than the myopic male is bad. It's much more nuanced than that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.
Dr. John Hamel: (01:21:37)
I've enjoyed it Keith. Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to do this.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:41)
Right. Take care. All right.
Dr. Keith Sutton: (01:21:43)
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