"MYTH #4: He holds in his feelings too much, and they build up until he bursts. He needs to get in touch with his emotions and learn to express them to prevent those explosive episodes.
My colleagues and I refer to this belief as 'The Boiler Theory of Men.' The idea is that a person can only tolerate so much accumulated pain and frustration. If it doesnât get vented periodicallyâ kind of like a pressure cookerâthen thereâs bound to be a serious accident. This myth has the ring of truth to it because we are all aware of how many men keep too much emotion pent up inside. Since most abusers are male, it seems to add up.
But it doesnât, and hereâs why: Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelingsâand act them outâall the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuserâs emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partnerâs life crises, the childrenâs sicknesses, meals, birthdaysânothing else matters as much as his feelings.
It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partnerâs feelings and his childrenâs feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to 'get in touch with.' My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion away from how my clients feel and toward how they think (including their attitudes toward their partners â feelings). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters. For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuserâs selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.
Part of why you may be tempted to accept 'The Boiler Theory of Men' is that you may observe that your partner follows a pattern where he becomes increasingly withdrawn, says less and less, seems to be bubbling gradually from a simmer to a boil, and then erupts in a geyser of yelling, put-downs, and ugliness. It looks like an emotional explosion, so naturally you assume that it is. But the mounting tension, the pressure- cooker buildup of his feelings, is actually being driven by his lack of empathy for your feelings, and by a set of attitudes that we will examine later. And he explodes when he gives himself permission to do so."
