from the book by Lundy Bancroft

The basic concept is that an abusive man is abusive…..

not because of his rotten childhood

not because he is overly sensitive

not because he has a hard lot in life

not because he has trouble controlling his temper

but because he feels entitled. Abusive men think it is their right to dominate and control because they think they matter more than you. And because they matter more than you, their anger is righteous while YOUR anger is OUT OF LINE, unjustified and never acceptable.

In my own case, the Ex was most definitely of this mindset. HIS opinion was all that mattered. HIS opinion was the only right or righteous one. MINE, if it disagreed with his, was WRONG. He considered HIMSELF the ultimate judge and arbiter of my feelings and emotions, including and ESPECIALLY anger. And of course MY anger was always WRONG. No matter what he’d done or said to me I never, ever had ANY RIGHT (in his opinion) to be angry or upset about it. If I was, then I was told “you’re oversensitive!” by Mr. Superior Judge Himself. My thoughts and feelings (and most of my actions) were always deemed wrong, incorrect, inferior, flawed, and unjustified by Mr. Superior Judge Himself.

So THERE YOU GO.

My own personal experience bears out Lundy Bancroft’s assertion that abusive men are abusive partially because somehow THEY FEEL ENTITLED and they feel that they matter more than their partners. Dan clearly felt that he was a superior human being to me and he treated me accordingly.

I was constantly under his surveillance. Everything I thought, read, said, wrote, and felt was subject to HIS ultimate evaluation, judgement, and criticism.

EVEN in public, which was particularly humiliating. Of course if I brought up his constant verbal battering I got - you guessed it - told once again that I was “oversensitive“, or “imagining things“, “crazy“, or that I “deserved to be humiliated“.