Most people are nice, cooperative and communal by default. Some people are not – they are selfish, self-centred and can be harmful. Harm can be collateral to being selfish and self-centred, or it can be the point of their relationship with you. Harmful people are Abusive People, aka Abusers. Cyclic Violence is where an Abuser uses the relationship dynamic to keep their victims available for harm. Understanding Cyclic Violence explores, in depth, the mechanisms of how Abusers keep their victims available for repeated violence.

Violence can occur in many different forms. While traditionally people only consider violence to be physical harm, there are many forms of violence that Perpetrators use to control their Victims. The defence “I never struck them” when challenged with an accusation of domestic violence does not address the fear the victim had when the Perpetrator raised their hand, harmed the dog, or denied resources to the Victim. The cyclic nature of fear and harm is the telling feature of domestic violence.

Background

Terminology

Different regions and professions have different terminology to describe people who do harm. When discussing Cyclic Violence, Perpetrator or Perpetrator of Harm is a common term. For most of the Jomida website, we refer to Abusers or Abusive People.

Different regions and professional have different terminology to describe Cyclic Violence. Most often, people refer to Domestic Violence or Intimate Partner Violence. While this is a major problem, Cyclic Violence can also happen in the workplace, friendships or in family units.

Cyclic Violence is a more accurate, but less well known, name. The nature of the violence is cyclic from the Perpetrator of Violence to the Victim. While it was first noted in family units, most commonly from male Perpetrators to female Victims, this same method of Cyclic Violence can occur in the workplace or in social groups.

A relationship is between 2 or more people. The relationship may be ‘a brief one off interaction’ to ‘repeated long lasting interactions’.

If you meet a random person on the street who is unpleasant, you are likely to back off and avoid them. This strategy has a high chance of success because you are unlikely to meet them again. If you do, the more unpleasant the interaction was, the more you will remember to avoid them.

For an Abuser, a brief domination is a lot of work for very little satisfaction. Abusers want readily available victims for them to perpetrate harm upon. This is why they seek to create situations, through relationships, where their victims feel like they can’t leave.

For this purposes of this document, and the pages for Domestic or Cyclic Violence, we are assuming the person is Abusive. They are the Perpetrator of Violence, often referred to as Perpetrator.

Traffic Light System

Violence is More than Physical

Violence is about dominating another person, through threatening actions, cognitive and emotional coercion, and eliciting the victims emotions. While physical violence is an easily recognised form of violence, it is but 1 amongst many.

Listed below are a number of different forms of violent behaviour, each with the outcome of ‘victim behaviour control‘ through fear or pain.

Fear is a key element in domestic violence and is often the most powerful way a Perpetrator controls their victim.

The Abuser has 3 fundamental drives / goals for their harmful behaviour.

Cycle of Violence

Understanding the Cycle of Violence

When violence is on-going, it falls into a rhythm and metre. This will start to evolve into a cycle that is very predictable. At each stage the violence can stop should either the Perpetrator wishes to address their underlying issues, or the either leaves. The cycle will continue until it is stopped.

Perpetrators do not go to school to learn how to do these predictable actions, and yet their general pattern of abuse almost always fits this Cycle of Violence. Why this is so is a debated topic.

My hot take on this is that Perpetrators convergently evolve this cycle based on the most common Victim – someone who is caring, communal, cooperative, giving and civil. There is a strong bias towards Neurodivergent Victims as they are often already compensating for inconsistent social rules by being People Pleasing, and are generally Conflict Avoidant and Rejection Sensitive.

Phases of the Cycle of Violence

Explosion

In Essence: An action the Perpetrator commits that pushes the Victim to want to do something to avoid having that hurtful or frightening act to happen again.

Generally, many lesser acts of violence have preceded this Explosion. They may have been smaller physical violence, sniping, name calling, or restriction from funds, friends etc.

The Explosion is the final act that creates an unmistakable recognition of wrongness – something that couldn’t be glossed over and dismissed as a misunderstanding or an accidental hurt. While this is most easily observed in an act of physical violence, it can be any forms of the violence listed above (Types of Violence).

This explosion is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and creates the recognition that this was too far, too wrong or needs to change.

Blame

In Essence: The Perpetrator will deny responsibility for the Explosion action and deny their part in the mechanism of the action.

The Explosion has just happened, objectively done by the Perpetrator. Yet they will avoid stating what they have just done, and will not own that what they just did was wrong. Both the Victim and the Perpetrator are aware that something wrong just happened. The Perpetrator needs to blame someone or something else on what it was that they did.

Common phrases:

• “Work has been really tough right now”,
• “Look what you made me do”,
• “I wouldn’t have had to do this if you’d only…”
• “You are over acting / reacting”,
• “You are too sensitive”,
• “You caused this”.
• etc.

Pursuit Phase

If such a violent act occurred to you by some stranger in the street, you’d work hard to avoid meeting them again. You wouldn’t give them the chance to do this to you twice. You would at least walk away and not come back to that person. When you walk away, there can be no Cycle of Violence – the Victim broke the Cycle of Violence by not being there for the next time – and there will be a next time.

If the Victim is aware that they can just leave, breaking the Cycle of Violence, then the Perpetrator has lost control of their possession, and will have to expend significant energy into finding a new victim. It is cheaper for the Perpetrator to convince the Victim to stay than to groom another Victim.

If the Perpetrator thinks the Victim might leave, they will enact one or more of the following Pursuit Mechanisms to convince their Victim to stay. A common theme is convincing the Victim to believe that things will be different this time. It is a lie, since the Perpetrator is the cause of the Cycle of Violence, the Perpetrator is the only one who can stop the Cycle of Violence without ending the relationship. The Victim can end the Cycle of Violence by simply leaving (Escaping Abuse).

If the Perpetrator is convinced that the Victim cannot escape, then the Perpetrator will skip this phase.

Pursuit Mechanisms

Hollow Words

The Perpetrator says these words because they think they mean something to the Victim. They don’t actually mean anything to the Perpetrator. A dictionary meaning, perhaps, but otherwise just a meaningless word. They want the Victim to falsely believe that this somehow means growth – but it is a lie. In believing that lie, the Victim will stay.

These words have meaning to the Victim, and if the Victim said it, then they would not only mean it, they’d make changes to stop the Explosion phase.

While Perpetrators can seem so damned sincere when they say these things, yet they do not change, proving the hollowness of their words.

Empty Gestures

The Perpetrator uses Empty Gifts and or Useless Acts of Service to bribe the Victim to stay. The reason why they are Empty is that none of these items or actions makes any change to why the Perpetrator harmed the Victim, and thus the Perpetrator will just harm the Victim again next time. A real gift would be making a life change to stop the Cycle of Violence – yet that isn’t the one offered and delivered upon.

From the Perpetrator’s perspective, this is far cheaper than addressing their problems with control and violence.

False Promises

The Victim is more likely to believe False Promises because the comment element in the False Promise is that the Perpetrator understands what the problem and solution are, and will then go and do them, ending the Cycle of Violence.

Crocodile Tears

Crocodile Tears are about eliciting the Nurturer Response in their Victim.

Perpetrators will act very upset, full of remorse, and are excellent at faking emotion. Strangely, when the Victim either promises to stay, or stays just a little too long (implying that they have decided to stay), the Crocodile Tears dry up and the Perpetrator moves on to the next phase. The speed of their dried up tears shows you that it is fake.

Combo Deal – “I’m the bad guy”

The Perpetrator may also use the phrase “I’m the bad guy” or some variant of it, often using strong emotive affect and tone to show anger, fear or disgust. This combines the Hollow Words and Crocodile Tears.

This trick aims for the Victim to think that the Perpetrator finally gets it, or the Victim becomes worried about how badly the Perpetrator is blaming themself for the Perpetrators actions and are worried about the risk, so they are tricked to seek to comfort and forgive the Perpetrator.

False Hope of Change

Many of the above Pursuit Mechanisms lie to the Victim to give them False Hope.

Next time you hear a variant of “I’m the bad guy” ask them “What did you do that makes you the bad guy? Why was it bad and what will you actually do to make a change?”

Perpetrators can almost never answer what they did that was bad and cause harm. “I was bad”, “I f’d up”, “I hurt you” are not valid explanations or details. Those are cyclic logic answers to fake details. Where is the demonstration of comprehension into their bad actions? Perpetrators can’t admit what they have actually done. They do know, because they suppressed these behaviours when they first got to know you, or they supress these behaviours to their boss (who is free to fire them), or to a police officer who pulls them over.

Hunted / Wanted – not Romantic

Effectively, the Victim is pursued by the Perpetrator, who needs to reconnect after having gone too far (Explosion).

If the Victim is certain of ending the Cycle of Violence by leaving, that is, leaving the abusive relationship, they are likely to feel hunted.

If the Victim is not committed to leaving the abusive relationship or in denial about how abusive it is, the Victim can feel wanted, and the Perpetrator’s actions can be mistaken for romantic instead of coercive. The Perpetrator will often either feign helplessness to trigger the Nurturer, or is actually unable to look after themselves, hence they need their slave back (how they see the Victim – a tool and or possession).

Unfortunately most Promises are False, the emotive Words are Hollow, the Gifts and Services are Empty, the displayed emotion and remorse are Crocodile Tears without truth, so it won’t take long for the cycle to repeat. The Perpetrator resets back to how they were just a little while ago, because none of this was actually addressing what is wrong and doing anything to fix it. Even if the Perpetrator did actually leave and get the act together, the Victim should never go back, see Perpetrator Reformation.

Hunting can easily turn into Stalking if the Perpetrator doesn’t let go of their human property. They need to con the Victim back, or they feel powerless – and dominating their Victim is how Perpetrators feel powerful.

Honeymoon

The Honeymoon Phase is about lies, lies and more damned lies. The Perpetrator lies about being good and changing, while the Victim lies about how bad it was and that the Perpetrator will be different this time.

Once the Victim has agreed to re-join the Perpetrator, or stayed long enough that the implication is effectively the same, the Perpetrator may put effort into trying to seem ‘better’. Victims will often mistake this as serious effort and that things are good again. Victims will deny that the Explosion was that bad, Perpetrators will deny that it was that bad, both will deny that the Honeymoon phase is bad. There is a general denial of previous abuse, or minimising of that harm, forgiveness of previous abuse and extra efforts to be, or seem, nice.

The Victim has accepted the Perpetrator back into their lives, often with terms and conditions and a delusion that the Perpetrator will stick to those terms. The Perpetrator is initially meeting these terms and conditions, paying plenty of positive attention and doing enough of the good things to con the Victim. Life seems wonderful and the way it should be again. The Victim will reminisce on previous visits to this part of the cycle and may delude themselves into thinking that this is how it always was. Unfortunately, it isn’t, hence the cycle. From a healthy outsider’s perspective, this is full of lies and not at all pleasant to be near, yet the Victim will think this is the best part (for them it is) and so mistake this for ‘good’.

The Victim has also likely made promises and is managing to stick to these, often taking on greater responsibility for the violence in the cycle than is fair.

The Perpetrator hates this bit. It takes an enormous amount of effort to hold back their normal harmful self. They do love how much the Victim is distorting themselves to forget the past and take on the lion’s share of the work to “make this relationship work”. The enjoyment is in conning the Victim yet again, especially after the previous violence in the Explosion.

If the Perpetrator is convinced that the Victim cannot escape, then the Perpetrator will skip this phase.

Build-up of Tension

Stand Over / Threats

The stage before the explosion is full of controlling actions that inspire fear, revulsion and actions to try to avoid the oncoming explosion.

The perpetrator externalises their inadequacies by blaming the Victim, exaggerating real things or making things up to blame. Escalating acts of violence and or meanness appear, showing the true nature of the relationship. Eventually this bubbles over into an act that crosses the line, which is the Explosion listed above as the Cycle of Violence completes.

Walking on Eggshells

The Victim is Walking on Eggshells – a hypervigilant state where the Victim tries to predict the time and nature of the upcoming Explosion. The Victim falsely believes that if they can succeed at doing so, they can either decrease the magnitude of the Explosion or somehow stop the Explosion. This is false because only the Perpetrator can stop it.

The freedom’s won in the Honeymoon Phase are evaporating as the controls are clamping down from the Perpetrator. More and more of the Perpetrators lack of inner control is being blamed on the Victim and the Victim is Walking on Eggshells to avoid triggering the Explosion. Frequently the experienced Victim will purposefully trigger the Explosion at a time of their choosing, to get it over with, to minimise the size of the Explosion, to be more conveniently timed, or to hurry back to the Honeymoon. The frequent excuses for this are “better a black eye than a broken arm”, or “I just couldn’t bare the uncertainty anymore”.

Unfortunately this exercise in Victim control over the violence only restarts the cycle rather than stopping it, and feeds into the Perpetrator’s Blame Game – “See, it was your fault.” The lie in this is, that same ‘trigger’ wouldn’t cause anyone else to do that violence Explosion. The Perpetrator uses the trigger as an excuse to be awful.

The victim is hypervigilant for signs of impending violence.

Exiting the Cycle of Violence

Stalking

When the victim gets away, this can lead to stalking. If this happens, you should gather evidence that you have told them to go away and that they are not welcome (text messages, emails or some other form of writing you can give the court).

If they continue

• Take photographs of them if they come to you in person, or drive past your house frequently
• Keep a log of calls, SMS or social media contacts from them
  • Especially if any threats are included

Once a few unsolicited contacts have occurred per day for a few days, go to the family law court and apply for a restraining order. Call the police if they breach the restraining order, including photos or text copies of what they did.

It is very important to not contact them during this process. You need to show that they are the one who is crossing your clear “no” boundary. If you reach out to them, then you are muddying that boundary.

Enticement

The perpetrator will make lots of promises of better behaviour, and try to give the appearance of helplessness in this cycle with phrases like “I couldn’t help it”, or “there’s nothing I can do”. This will be repeats of the Cycle of Violence Pursuit phase, but may also include elements of trying to isolate you by creating a public relations campaign against your contacts, or threats of them taking their life.

At this point, it is highly recommended that you get a DV Therapist to help you.

Leaving

The most common point to exit for the cycle of violence is after a particularly aggressive explosion and or during the “Blame” phase. The victim recognises that this is not right, often has the thought “never again” and seeks help, often through a DV Therapist or trusted family. Please take a look at the page Escaping Abuse for more details on how to do this.

Occasionally the Perpetrator will also share this view, recognising a need to do something about their violence. Often though, this is just another False Promise to improve and do something (Pursuit Phase). If the Perpetrator genuinely wants to change, they will go to their doctor and get an urgent referral to a therapist or Relationship Counsellor.

The Victim knows that the Perpetrator’s claims of change are false when nothing comes from it.

Often this time of review is more an attempt to speed run the cycle to get back to the Honeymoon Phase, because that seems nice.

This isn’t the only point where you can exit the cycle of violence. Any part of the cycle can be a point of exit, just not as common. The thought “I won’t do this again”, or a the recognition that this is yet another phase in the Cycle of Violence can be the inspiration to exit.

Staying Together

Exiting the cycle of violence and Staying Together and working on the factors of violence and control, or the Victim and Perpetrator Separating.

Once the cycle has been disrupted, the emphasis is on learning how to live in harmony.  It is vitally important both parties recognise their parts in the cycle and how both parties, working together, can dismantle the cycle of violence, even if separation from each other is the wisest path forwards.

The default answer of most people in a domestically violent relationship is to stay together. This can be due to a host of reasons, such as the Victim’s fear of consequences at leaving, overvaluing the “good side” of the cycle (Honeymoon and Tension), an overestimation of the value of “love” within the relationship, old fashioned “till death do us part” values, concern for any children within the relationship etc. Most of these are illusions and part of the grooming.

Let us say that you do want to stay together, and the Perpetrator has realised that things needs to change and genuinely wants to make those changes. It is vital that the Perpetrator is actually on board. It takes two to make a relationship – both have to put the effort in. One cannot compensate enough for the failures of the other. It is important to state that while staying together is very common, it is rare that it works, mostly because it is rare for the Perpetrator to really want to change, despite their words and promises (see Pursuit above).

The challenges for people staying together is avoiding bringing the habits of history back into the present. Both the Perpetrator and the Victim have a role to play in dismantling the Cycle of Violence.

The Perpetrator needs:

• to identify their strengths and weakness and find ways to use their strengths to address their weakness
• understand their anger and find non aggressive ways to address that
• relearn to respect their partner
• to learn how to communicate to their partner in an effective way
• identifying the key aspects of what is good in the relationship and using that as a focus for forming the new relationship of harmony.

The victim needs to:

• identify what their own strengths and weaknesses are
• how to manage their anxiety of impending explosion
• the key aspects of what is good in the relationship
• better means of communication

All parties need to:

• find safe words to indicate upcoming concern / fear / need before the emotions become an imperative (a requirement to react, vs a desire to act)
• a means of safely taking time and space from each other without suspicion
• to identify what it means to be a concrete functioning family again

We also need to address the Mental Health concerns of both the Perpetrator and the Victim. This will be a combination of nature and nurture. Nature is the biological / neurological aspect of each of the people, and nurture represents the lessons that have taught them to think that the Cycle of Violence was acceptable. It is rare to have a Cycle of Violence in people without Mental Health and Neurodivergent components.

Separating

Frequently the best option is to separate.

A separation usually follows either an extreme explosion that has crossed too many lines, a history that seems to be unforgivable, failed attempts to break the Cycle of Violence, or a recognition that even if the violence were to be gone, the trust is now lost and can never return. Generally, the Victim decides it is enough and is either Angry or Disgusted.

Separating is hard.

It is rare that assets are divided evenly, that support is mutual and space is respected. Usually the separation is more of the slash and burn, salting the earth behind you style of separation. It always costs to get out.

The Perpetrator can shift to stalking mode, or become a hunter with a real potential of aggravated assault or murder. Collateral damage can occur to objects, friends and pets. The danger is real, but should not stop the Victim from separating – just change how. For fear of safety, some Victims have changed state or even country, changing their name, left behind all family and started from the very beginning again. This is almost as rare as the mutual separation, but the risk is significantly higher.

Mutual children can complicate separation. All parents have a technical default right of visitation. To change this requires evidence, court support or effective hiding. If you fear this is going to be a problem, get a good therapist (such as us) and a good lawyer.

Extended families can be unsupportive if they hold to old fashioned values, have a culture of gendered domination, are abusive themselves, or if they have been fooled by the charm and charisma of the Perpetrator. Extended families can also be a point of vulnerability that the Perpetrator will take advantage of.

To exit might require cutting off large portions of family. Look for family members that didn’t like the Perpetrator and swallow your bride as you seek their aid.

Once separation has been successful it is important for both the perpetrator and victim to begin looking at their relationship pattern and recognise the power they have to avoid a cycle of domestic violence in their next relationships.

We cover more specifics in Escaping Abuse.

Learning How to Live in Harmony

Whether a family stays together or separates, living in harmony is an important goal. Frequently separated people look for a new partner that has similar qualities to their last partner, or bring the habits of a cycle of domestic violence into a new relationship with the result that their new relationship becomes violent too. Frequently families that stay together bring back old habits in times of stress and cycle back into violence.

To change the nature of the relationship, each person must make changes. While neither has the strength to change the nature of an existing relationship on their own, both together can do so, and either can corrupt a new relationship with violence.

A Victim of Anxiety

This is a touchy subject. While the victim may not want violence, without an occurrence of expected violence their anxiety can increase to the point where they goad their partner into violence just to get it done. The victim can be wondering when the explosion is going to take place. The longer the explosion takes to arrive, the greater the fear of an enormous explosion becomes. Imagine a balloon being filled up with air. You know that at some point it must burst, but you don’t know how big the balloons capacity is. If it only has a small capacity, the explosion won’t be too loud and scary, and may seem quite manageable, yet it means the balloon will pop in only a small amount of time. If the balloon is a regular sized balloon, the explosion will take longer to simmer but will be quite loud and scary. If the balloon is huge, then the end explosion will be massive and the anticipation along the way will be awful. This is how the anxiety behind anticipating the cycle of domestic violence can goad the victim to pop the balloon early, just to trigger the explosion when it isn’t so big and scary. It gives the victim a feeling of power over the inevitable explosion, allowing the victim to approximately time the explosion to their convenience and scale.

The victim’s partner is not necessarily a balloon though. There may be an escape valve that means when the pressure builds to dangerous levels, the vessel releases pressure in a safe and harmless way. This is how most people work. The problem is, for the sake of personal safety and probably limited exposure, the victim views all partners as perpetrators and keeps waiting for the inevitable bang. The perpetrator may have learned the skills to install a safety valve, but never get to a point of using it successfully as the fear of the victim prematurely triggers a rupture before the safety valve can be used, or the safety valve has been used a few times, but the victim does not see this, so thinks the balloon must be truly massive by now… A new partner may have all the safety valves in place to regulate their aggression, but if the former victim has not addressed their anxiety, then they will groom the new partner into a cycle of violence in order to address the anxiety.

Some may read this and be angry that I have stated that the victim brings it on themselves. This is NOT what I am stating. I am attempting to explain the mechanism of anxiety and habit and the risk that creates in prolonging a cycle of existing violence, or corrupting a new relationship into such a cycle. There is no excuse for the perpetrator to lose their temper and commit an act of aggression. Ever.

Perpetrating Aggression

The perpetrator’s primary failings are around power and aggression. Fundamentally the perpetrator feels they have lost power in some area of their life, which triggers the warning emotion of anger. Either the perpetrator cannot address this loss of power directly, or is unaware of it’s consequence. The anger builds and the perpetrator does not know how to peacefully deal with this emotion. Aggression is used to reassert power, but only achieves a brief respite in their feelings. The aggression is an act of violence against those who do not deserve it, the innocent family. Because the initial loss of power hasn’t been rectified, the anger builds again and the aggression is used again to create a momentary and temporary correction to the feelings of internal power with the consequence of family harm.

Let’s look at the three different parts of this. The loss of power, the warning anger and the rebalancing aggression.

Each of us lives in a world of action and reaction, of cause and consequence. When we make decisions and then actions, we change the environment around us. This exercises our direct power on the world. If we act and no change occurs, we feel like the action was a waste, that there was no power in it. If the action has only a partial success, we can see the effect of our action, but feel like it wasn’t enough. If we can lift a finger and create a huge effect, we can feel very powerful. This is a direct example of power.

Indirect power can be just as fulfilling. Indirect power is the perception of how we are viewed by others. Consider when you were at school. Your teacher gave you an instruction and you did it because they were in authority over you. When you didn’t, they either raised their voice, gave you a poor mark or told you to go to the principle. If you ignored their raised voice, didn’t care about the poor mark and just left school when you got out of the classroom instead of going to the principle, the teacher has no power over you. The teacher is going to become very frustrated because they can’t create the change their action was supposed to do. Indirect power is full of assumptions. You act as the teacher bids because you fear the consequences, or you just think it is the right thing to do. You respect your boss because they are a nice person, can fire you, or can give you a pay rise. You believe your gender is superior and should be respected by the other gender, or that children should respect you because you are older, that you can tell older people what to do because you are in your prime and they are passed it and so on. So long as the world reacts to your actions as you expect, your assumptions are secure.

When the world does not act as you expect, or a situation changes and the extent of your ability to effect the world around you changes to become less, you can feel less powerful. This could be a work situation where you are demoted, or put into a precarious work situation; your friends pecking order has changed and you are now at the bottom; a diagnosis of some nasty ailment has been handed to you; your position in the relationship has changed; or some other situation occurs where you are not in a good position.

When your power changes, the emotion that warns you of this is anger. Anger is a fundamental emotion all humans across all cultures feel. Anger is an emotion written about in both some of our earliest texts and in our modern books. Fundamentally it informs you of when a boundary has been crossed that increases your danger or lessens your ability to act. We do not become angry when an event occurs that increases our ability, only when it is perceived to lessen our ability to act on the world around us. When we feel that there is nothing we can do to address the thing that is lessening our power, we can become very frustrated and seek to redress this power loss by gaining greater power over something or someone else. We can transfer the anger we feel from one thing into another thing, either by amplifying a petty anger or frustration, or by distorting what we perceive to justify the anger we feel. For example, the perpetrator may be frustrated by a loved one’s illness, or having been made a fool of at work, they can’t address this directly, so instead targets their partner. The partner may have done a mostly innocuous thing for years, such as stacking the forks on the left of the draw and the knives on the right, but this is no longer acceptable and a fight breaks out over the order of the cutlery. Another example of transferred anger could be suspicion that the partner is cheating on the perpetrator. The perpetrator now begins to see lots of signs and signals of cheating, even though it is completely an hallucination. There is no evidence because there is no cheating.

Aggression is a tool humans use to fend off an attacker. Consider the iconic attack of the cave koala, coming out to eat you. You try to look bigger and scarier, yelling, screaming and making noise. If it keeps coming, you strike at it, trying to drive it back. Fear is the emotion you wish to instil in killer koala so that it no longer wishes to attack you. These are the same tactics humans use on each other to gain dominance and power. While this is a primal method of balancing power in an attack situation, it is mostly useless when dealing with a social situation, or when not able to directly address the perceived attacker or unknown threat (when the source person who is diminishing the perpetrators power is known, or if the source situation is unknown).

To identify when aggression and control are unbalancing a relationship, it is important to identify if the aggression is addressing an actual threat, and if the control is actually improving the situation. Both of these actions are creating a momentary salve of comfort for the perpetrator, but if they don’t actually change the situation of power imbalance, they are useless and should be discarded as soon as possible.

To break this cycle of violence, the perpetrator must look at their own emotions and learn how to recognise what they are feeling. Head over to the section on Basic Emotions (Workbook) to learn more about this. They need to learn to separate the emotion and the reaction so that you can insert thought. This changes event -> emotion -> reaction into event -> emotion -> thought -> action. Also learn to identify the source of the power problems, whether it is a cultural misperception, an event that has occurred or a person who is in conflict. Take steps to address that problem and learn to not take out frustration on their family. If habits are ingrained, then the perpetrator may need to consider separation until they can retrain themselves and either rejoin their partner, or find a new partner.