Short fuses and off-ramps: Anger management and domestic violence prevention†
Matt Boulton
When we lose our temper we do things we wouldn’t do otherwise, things that cause pain and regret. Matt Boulton has lived this story, found help, and come out the other side. Now he wants to give others the tools they need to find the off-ramps and avoid the crash.
It was pretty tough time when I was born, and a pretty tough time for my parents. I was a toddler when my parents moved from Victoria to Queensland with me and all of their belongings piled in the back of a Mini Minor to start a new life.
I loved my primary school on the Gold Coast, but then I went to a boys’ high school. The culture there was a classic example of a toxic masculine culture. It was a church school, but it was far from a Christian sort of culture. I didn't subscribe to a lot of the nonsense that was going on and that set me back a little socially, and I got bullied quite badly. There are pros and cons to being part of the group. But I was an introvert and quite happy spending a lot of time in my own company.
Being at a boys’ school meant interactions with girls were a bit light on. Somebody came to the school talking about Scripture Union camps, and I thought, ‘Awesome, I'll bet you there'll be a lot of girls on that camp.’ So I went along, and that's where I heard the gospel for the first time. My life really changed from that point. I hadn’t grown up in church and while my family were respecters of God, up to that point I’d had no idea of having a relationship with him.
The next holidays, I went along to the next Scripture Union camp. I met my wife on that camp. Once I’d met her—this sounds cheesy but it's the truth—I knew that being with anybody else was not an option. So I waited.
When I finished school, I felt called to become an Anglican priest. I wasn't old enough to go straight into the seminary. So I went to university and did a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Australian Studies and History and Philosophy of Science, which has really been valuable for my work
I married my wife six years after meeting her at camp. I’d had various jobs, including working in diners and the fast-food industry. When you’re 20 you know everything, and so when an opportunity to buy an industrial takeaway food business came up, I thought, ‘We can smash this! Let’s do it.’ The day after our honeymoon, my wife and I bought it and put ourselves into the pressure cooker environment of running a small business.
Submerged rocks
That was during what Paul Keating called ‘the recession we had to have’. Times got tough, and it was also my first time out of home. I went from living with mum and dad as an only child straight into marriage, and felt like a boy trapped inside a man’s body. I had a lot of things to work out. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a husband? What does it mean to be a Christian man and husband? Some people were saying I had to be the head of the house, and I was thinking, wow, what does that even mean? Then there were the pressures of the business, and the recession, and—for an introvert loner—the relational intensity of being constantly with my wife at the diner all day, and at home dealing with the bills. That's when problems began to surface.
It’s not that tough times create the issues, but they expose what's already there. When you go down to the foreshore at low tide you see rocks you couldn’t see before. They’re there all along, but when low tide comes, they’re exposed.
That low tide time of my life exposed some of the really poor tools I had for dealing with conflict and the temper that began to show its ugly head. First it was raising my voice, then yelling, and then crossing some lines with my language. Bear in mind that at this point I'm in a church and I'm getting quite involved. I'm one of the liturgical assistants, I’m serving on the parish council, and I’m teaching Religious Education. I’m still hoping to become a priest one day. But at home, shameful language and name calling was coming out of my mouth towards my wife.
This would have been a good time to reach out and ask for help. But I felt a lot of shame—how could I talk to anybody about it? It was the same for my wife. So things got worse, to a point where one day in the shop, I crossed a line that I really thought I'd never cross by getting physical. That, again, would’ve been a really good time to get help. But again, I didn’t, and from that point things got just a little bit worse in every conflict we had. They say that if you put a frog into boiling water, it jumps straight out. But if you heat it slowly from room temperature it won’t jump out because it won’t notice the temperature changing. That’s what our marriage was like: we were boiling but we didn't know it. There was so much denial stopping us reaching out for help. You never want to believe you're that couple.
And then one day I came home to an empty house. There was a note from my wife saying that she'd left, that things were not sustainable, and that unless things changed profoundly there was no hope for us in the future.
Still I didn’t get help. Instead I came up with an excuse. Customers would come into the shop and ask, ‘Where's your wife?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, she's just gone on holidays. She'll be back soon. We can't go on holidays together because of the shop.’ People seemed to accept the lie, and I believed, too, that she would come back. But time went on and she didn’t. Then a man from the church, a tradie, gave me the jolt I needed. He came down to the shop one day and asked where my wife was. I told him the story I’d come up with, and he said, ‘Come on, Matt. Trying to hide a broken marriage is like trying to hide a broken leg.’ It hit me like a ton of bricks then. I’d have to face up to it and admit I have a problem. We have a problem. And I've got to get some help.
Needing help
In some ways being involved in church back then made getting help harder. The shame factor was probably bigger, and there were some strongly held beliefs about separation and divorce. In fact, at one time I thought that my wife was in the wrong for separating from me because it was unbiblical, and a church we were going to at the time agreed with that. A minister at another church I went to for help pretty much told me the way I’d been acting was wrong and I should stop it. I said I hadn’t come to be told I was a naughty boy, I came to get some help. He didn't know what to do with that.
That was the state of things thirty years ago. A lot of clergy are better trained these days, but churches at that time were poorly equipped to know what to do, and I have some sympathy for them. But the situation led me to find out about a program at Lifeline. It was a men’s domestic violence program. And I thought, ‘I could do that, but I'm not really one of those domestic violence guys, you know, it's not that bad.’ I was in a world of denial.
My big fear was that I’d meet somebody I knew there or someone might see me going in—especially someone from my church. So I said I wasn’t sure the program was right for me. They said, ‘That's all right, Matt. Just fill out this questionnaire and we'll see what's going on and take it from there.’ So I filled it out. I must have ticked just about every category. That was the first point at which I realised ‘wow, this is domestic violence. I do have a problem, and I do belong in this group’. And then I was filled with fear because I thought the group would be full of truckies and bikies and ‘domestic violence guys’. But of course, when I got there, there were all kinds of men—a cross section of society.
The Lifeline program changed my life. It gave me a supportive environment where I could say whatever I wanted. Everybody in the group was on the same journey, so there wasn't a reason not to tell the truth. And it wasn't just a waffle-fest. They gave me practical tools that I could use straight away to prevent things getting out of hand. Each week we would come back, and often a few of us had failed, hopefully not in domestic violence, but maybe verbally, or by losing our temper, and we would report in. From that, even from the failures, we’d learn what we could’ve done better. That was a 13-week program, and I can honestly say that since doing that program, I've never relapsed into physical violence and those abusive behaviors.
Starting over
My wife and I were separated for 10 months. Neither of us wanted to rush back into things too quickly. I did my counselling, she did hers, then we did counselling together. We wanted to get it right and make sure I’d really changed and that I could manage my anger in a way that didn’t escalate into abuse.
One of the really important things I learnt at the time is to never try to work out anything—never try to argue, never try to do conflict—under the influence of anger. It's like trying to drive under the influence of alcohol. It's never going to go well. You'll be overconfident. You’ll underplay how affected you are. You won’t have any common sense or wisdom. You won't have what it takes to solve any problems. You need some off ramps so you can leave the situation, because there comes a point in a conflict when you don't want to stop. You don't want time out. You want to keep going, and you want to win. And it’s the issues we most care about that we're most likely to get angry about.
The person you're having conversations with about these issues that are important to you is the most important person in your world—the person you're most intimate with. And so the tragedy is that this is the relationship that is most likely to be damaged if your anger's not in check. So for me, having some strategies to be able to take that time out and calm down was really important. Then we’d come back to the conversation by invitation, not expectation: ‘Would you like to talk about it?’ ‘No, I don't feel ready.’ ‘Ok.’ That's great. It took away the pressure that had been there before.
Another thing that was such a gift to us was a good friend offering us the use of a granny flat they had under their house: ‘If your wife's not feeling like she's got 100% trust, you could come and live under our house and we can keep an eye on things and there’s some accountability’. That guy’s my best friend now, and we ended up sharing more houses with them just because we love them. It's been great.
Seeing the need
Getting to the point where I could think beyond my own situation to think of helping anyone else took a long time. I thought I was a bit of a scumbag, to be honest. Jesus tells the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector. Before recognising my problem, I’d been closer to thinking about myself like the Pharisee does, thanking God I wasn’t one of the bad guys. But afterwards I was very much beating my breast and thanking the Lord for having me on his team at all. And so we humbly came into a new church, a church where we could be real, where it was okay to have problems and work through problems. Fast forward a few years, I did Bible College and then my church, Hope Centre, invited me onto the ministry team, and I became that guy that everybody spills their guts to. I think it was because I was open with my story. And then I thought, whoa, I’m out of my depth, I need to get some training as a counselor.
So I did a post-grad diploma and ran a counseling centre for the church for about seven years. It was in that space that I realised the scale of the problem of domestic violence in our country, and that the very few good domestic violence counselors we have are massively outnumbered by those who need their help.
I thought about the information and tools I’d been given in the course that had changed my trajectory so profoundly, and about how we could scale it up to reach more people. Could we get some ordinary people involved in doing something like that? What could we do so that people wouldn't have to wait to get help from experts?
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Snapshot: Family and Domestic Violence in Australia
Experience of violence (since the age of 15)[1]
· 1 in 12 women (8.1%) and 1 in 17 men (5.9%) experienced violence by a family member · 1 in 4 women (23%) and 1 in 14 men (7.3%) experienced violence by an intimate partner
Policing[2]
Prisons
· Estimates put the number of incarcerated women who have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused as children or adults between 70 per cent and 90 per cent[3] · Almost 25% of inmates are FDV offenders, and of this group, 95% are male[4]
Homelessness[5]
· Domestic and family violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women, with 45% of all women and girls seeking homelessness assistance identifying family and domestic violence as a cause
Youth Crime[6]
· Exposure to FDV is a positive predictor of young people going down the path of offending, with 53% of youth offenders having been exposed to or being victim-survivors of FDV
Economic Cost[7]
· A 2015 report found that violence against women and their children costs Australia $21.6 billion each year
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Starting in the right place
I wanted to develop a program that could help tackle the prevalence of the anger and domestic violence problems we were seeing. It needed to be a program that could be run by non-experts who, without too much training, could lead groups by facilitating discussion, keeping the group a safe space for sharing, and moving it through the material in a reasonable time frame. And the material needed to be engaging and offer real practical help. It was built around content from my counselling experience, from my own story, and from what I've seen work with other men and women with anger and violence and abuse problems.
The result is a ten-week program called Circuit Breaker. It falls into the category of a secondary intervention. At the primary prevention level are activities that sensitise the community to the harms of family and domestic violence (FDV),[8] like wearing a white ribbon, or attending a demonstration. At the tertiary level there are interventions for perpetrators—people who have already crossed a line. Falling between these are secondary prevention interventions for people on the trajectory to being abusers. These people are often quite open to help and change, and there’s a lot non-experts can do with a little bit of training so they understand the dynamics of FDV, can offer helpful tools, and get alongside people. So it’s an effective space to work in in terms of prevention and efficient resource use. But unfortunately there is not much going on at this secondary level and Circuit Breaker is one of the rare programs that operates in this space providing early intervention.
It was important for the program to start with tools for managing anger, because we can’t do anything else of value unless a person can create that safe, calm space to work. There are a lot of programs with good content out there, but they start in the wrong place: ‘let's talk about your attitude towards women’, or ‘let's talk about the patriarchy’, or ‘let's talk about gender-based violence’. In my experience, that’s not what people come for or need. When people come to me for counselling for domestic abuse, what they want is to talk about their anger problem. Ironically, it’s frowned upon to talk about anger in the domestic violence space. And of course, it’s not just anger—there's a whole pattern of control and behaviours of power and control. But it’s a mistake to say that anger has nothing to do with it, because we do things when we’re angry that we would not do when we’re calm.[9]
There are some cool-headed people who use violent and controlling behaviours, but according to the data, the majority who do so are ‘rush of blood’ angry people.[10] Retooling these people—giving them good strategies, giving them some off ramps—makes a massive difference on the ground. So that’s where the Circuit Breaker program starts. We spend about three weeks talking about tools for managing anger in a really fireproof way, and then reinforcing it in that trust environment with other people on the same journey.
It’s also true that some people use gender-based issues to create excuses for their behaviour. But in my experience, people don't go looking for excuses when we’re giving them the tools they really need to gain respect, intimacy, and have a feeling of security in their relationships. They’re the big three that men, in particular, are usually looking for, but both men and women look for these. And there are counterfeits for all of these.
If I don't know how to earn your respect, I can make you fear me. And maybe fear feels just close enough to respect for now.
If I can’t have intimacy—that is, have you freely choose to be in my space, my circle—I can isolate you and make you stay with me.
If I can’t control the insecurity I feel inside, I can externalise it and control you. And that can feel good enough as a temporary fix.
So people are using the best tools they have, they’re just not very good ones. That’s not to excuse these behaviours, but to recognise the opportunity to give people better tools. And so over the next seven weeks of the program we replace people’s old patterns of relating with great new tools for communicating and for building trust and intimacy—things people have wanted all along but were using the wrong tools for.
Bad attitude
The correlation between negative beliefs about women and FDV is often taken to mean that it is negative beliefs that drive violence towards women. Programs take for granted that the causality is all in one direction. If that’s so, the way to stop FDV is to change disrespectful attitudes towards women; and the way to change these, the story goes, is to improve gender equality.
A clear example of this is the much-touted ‘Let’s Change the Story’ video produced by Our Watch in 2015. In the video, which claims to be evidence-based, general statistics on FDV in Australia are applied to a narrative about how toxic masculinity is created in men, as though this gender-based violence narrative accounted for every case of FDV in Australia. The video concludes with the line, ‘Because ending violence against women starts with gender equality.’ The message is that we can’t end gendered violence unless we have gender equality.
Decades of repetition of this folklore inside the echo-chamber of the FDV sector has at times led to presumptions about the data. But correlations don’t actually tell us anything about causation, and I think we’ve made a mistake in jumping to the conclusion that negative attitudes are always the cause of violence towards women. My experience suggests the causality often goes in the opposite direction, and that violent behaviour towards women sometimes leads offenders to adopt misogynistic attitudes to rationalise their behaviour.
Creating narratives like this is something we do all the time. When we feel that we couldn’t be expected to act differently, we reverse-engineer our belief structures to justify our actions. Christian guys create narratives around abusive behaviour using the Bible to shift blame onto their partners—like I did. She should submit. She should forgive. God hates divorce so she shouldn’t leave me. Secular men have their own versions that they build communities around.
So perpetrators do often have negative views about women, but the relationship between the attitudes of these individuals and whole-of-society measures of gender equality is not obvious. The Nordic paradox, for example, describes the combination of very high levels of gender equality and very high levels of intimate partner violence against women in Nordic countries. This is difficult to explain with a simplistic causal story.[11]
If attitudes and social structures are not the only cause of FDV, and maybe not even a main cause, we need to do things differently. For instance, if someone makes a wrong or misogynistic comment about women in a typical FDV program it would be jumped on because it’s seen as the cause of the problem. In Circuit Breaker we take a ‘dismiss and divert’ approach to such comments: ‘I don’t agree with you there, John, but let’s talk about …’. We’ve found that by doing the behavioural work, and giving people the tools for change, they are then in a position to be able to re-evaluate their attitudes and let go of beliefs that are no longer serving any purpose. And we find that after 10 weeks, a lot of the negative beliefs about women dissolve. They’re not needed any more. When people have changed their behaviour, they’re proud of themselves and don’t have to hide behind blaming others, or go on the internet to find self-justifying content. We can actually be doing damage—alienating the men we’re trying to reach and putting up barriers to their getting help—if we focus too much too early on attitudes and beliefs.
If you misdiagnose the illness, you will take the wrong medication. And that’s what I think we're doing on this. We’re assuming FDV is primarily a gender issue,[12] that anger plays no significant role, and we’re prescribing treatments accordingly. But they’re treatments that don't work on the ground, and certainly don’t work in engaging the people who need the help. So I think there’s a lot to be desired in some of our dominant narratives around gender-based violence.
Who needs help
Another mistake we make as a community is that we think of domestic violence offenders as ‘those guys’. There’s them, and there’s us. Two different types of people. But that’s not the way it is. We’re all on that continuum, and we all cross lines we thought we’d never cross. How many parents say, ‘I’m never going to say or do such and such to my kid’ and then say or do it? We cross lines all the time, and it’s unhelpful to create an ‘us and them’.
A better approach is to ask how can we help people to find the help they’re looking for? It’s a win for the person needing help; it’s a win for their partner; it’s a win for the community. It’s also a win for the next generations. One of the beautiful things we hear when the course is delivered in prisons is people saying they wish they’d had these tools before they came to prison—and now they can’t wait to get out and teach them to their kids. Generational change can happen.
Of course, we still need a lot of response services to deal with abuse after it happens, and I salute people who work in that space. We also need good legislation. But if that’s all we have, we’re just moving the problem around. We’re already relying on the law and police and magistrates, and we’re in the midst of an epidemic. Dealing with domestic abuse has got to be a whole-of-community issue, and we’ve got to work more with the people who can actually change it. Police can’t change it. Magistrates can’t change it. Victims certainly can’t change it. The only people who can change abusive behaviour are the ones doing it. We need to go upstream, to do the preventative work and give people the tools they need to change. Otherwise, they’re going to do the same thing again and again. Ideally, we give people good tools before lines get crossed. There are a lot of people who need a tune-up in the anger department. So whenever a church wants to deliver a program, I say ‘Start with your own people’. They’ll be there.
The last thing to point out here is that while it is mainly men, it isn’t only men who struggle with anger. Sometimes we run mixed groups, and every time I’ve been involved in a mixed group it’s been powerful and wonderful. There’s so much common ground between men and women around anger. I suspect it would surprise most people just how similar it is and how much it’s not about gender.
Men’s voices
It makes me sad when I go to a domestic violence rally or event and find that, once again, it’s mostly women and not many men who turn up. Especially because in working with male abusers, it’s male voices that are going to get through to those guys the best. Abusers may have an attitude towards women. They may have a worldview built around their shame that’s created disrespect for women and is used to excuse their behaviour. A courageous male voice tactfully challenging those ideas about things that are not okay can be really important in that space.
The other thing men can do is be ready to help and believe women when we hear their stories, and to be a safe, stable male presence. Sometimes a female victim of domestic violence doesn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the relationship she’s in because she’s not being treated as badly as her dad treated her, or as her ex treated her. There is no good man in her life to compare her abuser to. In my role there have been times when I’ve had to go to police with women to be an advocate. To be with someone and say, ‘we’re going to stay here until we get the help this woman needs’ can make a big difference.
FDV and the church
The church of thirty years ago didn’t make it easy for me to get help. I’d even go as far as saying they were part of the problem. But I’ve been involved with the Joint Churches Domestic Violence Prevention Project for a long time now, and they’ve done some wonderful work to educate clergy. We’re not 100% there yet, but the situation with churches now is a lot better than it was then.
Communities of faith might feel intimidated about getting involved, thinking ‘Oh, domestic violence, I don’t know if we can do anything, that’s for the experts’. But have you seen the statistics? Have you seen the scoreboard? Have you seen how the experts are doing? Have you seen how outnumbered they are? Whenever I ask groups if anyone in the room knows a domestic violence counsellor, the same number of hands go up: zero. The need far outstrips the available experts.
But if we’re serious about our beliefs, churches and Christian communities have a few strengths and natural assets that can give us a massive advantage:
i) We believe in redemption. We believe people can change because we’ve changed.
ii) We know how to separate a person’s behaviour from the person. We can, as Christians like to say, ‘love the sinner and hate the sin’. Who else is going to do that? People know if you hate them. They know if you are disgusted with them. But they also know if you love them and want to help them find that win-win. You can’t work with people you can’t have compassion for. It doesn’t work. There’s an incongruity.
iii) The sort of profound change we’re aiming for needs a community of support wrapped around it, and Christians have those communities of support already there.
Christians aren’t the only ones who can help, and Circuit Breaker is not a specifically Christian program, but I do think Christians have a bit of an advantage when it comes to prevention and offering help. And, as a Christian, I also believe we have the power of the Holy Spirit to take our efforts and do something exceedingly, abundantly bigger and better than that.
Matt Boulton is a domestic violence trainer, advocate and speaker based in Logan, Queensland. He is best known as an author, developer of the Circuit Breaker program, and as the former Counselling Director for CityCARE Counselling Centres, where he specialised in DV cases and working with abusers.
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Finding Help
Call Triple Zero (000) and ask for Police if you are in a dangerous or life-threatening situation.
If you don't want to speak to the police you can also call the following 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:
Recommended Books (available at circuitbreaker.au)
· Robin Parry, Opening the Door from Inside: How to deal with domestic violence (PsycheScope Partners, 2016) answers many of the questions abused women struggle with, including when it’s safe to speak out, and how to change the destructive circumstances of your life one step at a time
· Robin Parry, After the Honeymoon: Why treating women badly ends badly (PsycheScope Partners, 2016) was written specifically for abusive men with a focus on insight and skills development
Circuit Breaker Course
Go to circuitbreaker.au to find out more about:
· Registering to deliver Circuit Breaker courses at your church or community group · Training to become a Circuit Breaker facilitator
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† This article is based in part on a conversation between Major Bryce Davies and Matt Boulton on the Stories of Hope podcast on 20/8/2022. Used with permission.
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