Isabelle Narayana

“What I'd like is to meet a man I could take off my hat to and say: "Thank you for having got born, and the longer you live the better.”
― Maxim Gorky

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“THE MYTHS ABOUT ABUSERS
1. He was abused as a child.
2. His previous partner hurt him.
3. He abuses those he loves the most.
4. He holds in his feelings too much.
5. He has an aggressive personality.
6. He loses control.
7. He is too angry.
8. He is mentally ill.
9. He hates women.
10. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.
11. He has low self-esteem.
12. His boss mistreats him.
13. He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution.
14. There are as many abusive women as abusive men.
15. His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner.
16. He is a victim of racism.
17. He abuses alcohol or drugs.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“The abuser’s mood changes are especially perplexing. He can be a different person from day to day, or even from hour to hour. At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. As so many partners of my clients have said to me, “I just can’t seem to do anything right.”
At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable. Looking at him in this deflated state, his partner has trouble imagining that the abuser inside of him will ever be back. The beast that takes him over at other times looks completely unrelated to the tender person she now sees. Sooner or later, though, the shadow comes back over him, as if it had a life of its own. Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men