Q&A: Expert with Truro-based centre talks about working with domestic violence offenders
Therapist Tod Augusta-Scott says client goals include stopping violence, repairing harm with victims
In the four months since the Nova Scotia government adopted a bill declaring domestic violence in the province an epidemic, five high-profile cases of deadly intimate partner violence have been reported.
Most recently, the bodies of a 60-year-old woman and a 75-year-old man were found in a home last weekend in Mahone Bay. On Thursday, police said the deaths were the result of a murder-suicide where a man killed his intimate partner.
CBC News has spoken to front-line workers who work with survivors of abusive relationships. There are also organizations, including Bridges Institute in Truro, that help rehabilitate people who have been violent in their intimate relationships.
The counselling centre specializes in domestic abuse and anger management.
Tod Augusta-Scott, Bridges Institute's executive director and lead clinical therapist, has worked in the sector for 30 years. He spoke with Information Morning Nova Scotia's Portia Clark about the work the organization does with people who have been abusive partners.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Tod, tell us how your clients typically come to you initially.
We're a community-based program, so they can come voluntarily, which is often the case in terms of, you know, that they've been trying to make their families work and their relationships work for a long time. And then become challenged by the difficulties of making that happen.
They may get referred by other men who've been through the program, by uncles or brothers who get traction, and actually start moving towards the kind of relationships they want and away from the yelling and the screaming and violence when it's happening. So there's a lot of men who come on their own and then there's also men who are mandated through the courts or through child protection services.
Does the degree of success with the therapy with them depend, in some sense, on how they come to Bridges?
Not really. Most people are pretty ambivalent in the beginning because there is a lot of shame around this issue and a lot of fear in terms of how they're going to be treated once they come into the program. We work [on] that with all the guys. It's a hard task to show up for that, the first number of conversations, for sure.
And is there always a main goal you're working toward with men who've been abusive and that's been the pattern of how they deal with stress in their relationships or whatever is creating that?
For sure. Our overall objective is really looking at how to create safety. Beyond stopping the violence, [we] would also be looking at how you repair harm with the person that you hurt and also when you've been hurt. Those are our big themes in terms of safety and repair. To move in that direction, we often have to challenge ideas, and a lot of them are outside of the men's awareness when they first come in, ideas that stem from their own experiences of unresolved trauma in their lives.
It's not uncommon for guys [for their] close relationships [to] get coded as dangerous. So when they bring that into their adult relationships and they're experiencing closeness in their adult relationships, they actually experience it as quite threatening. There's lots of ideas from their past that need to be identified and challenged.
And also, [there are some] unhelpful gender ideas, too, around you wanting power and control in relationships and feeling like they need to have power, control over their partners to be real men. Some of those ideas need to be challenged, too, because they often influence men's choices to use abuse in relationships.
How do men … respond to that challenge, because often it's a challenge that sets off an incident?
When the men come in — and they are often ambivalent about being there in the beginning — where we start the conversations is really inviting them to consider the kind of relationships they want and the qualities they want in their relationships and their own values and what their own aspirations have been for their relationships.
And so men will often have, often for the first time, conversations about the respect they want in a relationship going both ways, about what they want their kids to learn about being in a relationship, the role model they want to be for their kids. Those are often new conversations for a lot of the guys, kind of setting out those values and those ethics that they have not always been able to live up to, clearly, but they may have even had these values for a long time.
I really find that through joining with them in those kinds of values, we can move the work forward without creating a lot of opposition.
And can you give a specific example of a method that seems to work in undoing or getting at the trauma or erasing patterns or creating new ones?
The first part of the conversation will be looking at the men's files, but it's common for guys to be confused in the past and the present. So when they feel threatened in the present, they are often confusing their partners, in those moments, with dad who was violent or mom who was violent. They often feel like that closeness [is] where they could get hurt because they're actually getting close.
It's not uncommon for men to be in a situation where they crave the closeness because they haven't had it … but when they get close, they actually experience that as very threatening. There's this push-pull that happens in relationships where they're afraid to be apart from her, but they're also afraid to be close to her, that's a common experience.
Unpacking those experiences so the guys can actually notice what's going on here and they can separate her out from past experiences. And it may not just be childhood, it could be other experiences of violence that they've experienced in their lives. So that's just one of the many kinds of conversations that might happen around that.
Is it feasible … to prevent future violence with someone who's been abusive in the past and that's been their life pattern?
Definitely. There's certainly a percentage of the population that I work with who I'm not hopeful about changing and who aren't amenable to therapy conversations. There's mental illness going on that they can't see themselves and they're just blaming the world.
But that's often how we talked about all the men around domestic violence, as if they weren't going to change, as if they couldn't see themselves. And really, that's not the majority of the men. Those men are the high-risk guys that can't see themselves and they're just projecting outwards and they're experiencing themselves, often, as victims in the world and they're being very violent at the same time.
Most of the men are not like that. Most of the men can change. And in the early days we thought that all the women just wanted to leave the men and really for the high-risk stuff, which makes the media, that's the case.
But most of the work that we actually deal with is the emotional abuse, the throwing things, the slamming doors, threats and so forth. And a lot of those relationships, whether they stay together or not, there's a lot of safety and repair that can be established.
