Science Vs - Is Your Relationship … OK?

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Forget the questionable relationship advice from internet influencers. Today, we’re diving into the science of lasting love, fighting, and "red flags” to find out what really matters for a healthy relationship. We’ll find out what it means to fight well with your partner. And we’ll also look at the signs that a relationship might become dangerous or abusive. For all this, we speak with Professor Ben Karney, Dr. Megan Haselschwerdt, Dr. Elizabeth McLindon and Matt Brown. U.S. National Domestic Violence Hotline: [phone] or www.thehotline.org Find international resources and more at spotify.com/resources Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsIsYourRelationshipOK  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Influencers love giving advice (02:36) How to have a ‘healthy fight’  (09:44) If you fight badly, will you get divorced?  (13:55) What are ‘red flags’?  (21:01) Red flags you should watch for (28:23) Approaches to try to change abusive partners (34:00) Why do people try to control their partners?  (37:57) Can an abusive partner change?  This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Michelle Dang, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wylie, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to our consultants Maya Serelis and Jess Hill. A special thanks to the researchers and folks working in the space of domestic violence that we spoke to including, Dr Áine Travers, Claire Marshall, Professor Sharon Dawe, Professor Kelsey Hegarty, Dr Franscesca Righetti, Dr Andrea Meltzer, Professor Amy Rauer, and Dr Amie Zarling. A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Verses. All over the internet, people are doling out advice about your relationship. These are the nine things you need to know about love. You figure let me try to make your work. You're wasting your time. There's advice about all kinds of relationship things, like people saying if you're in a fight with your partner, here's the things you need to be doing. And it kind of feels like if you're in a fight with your partner, here's the things you need to be doing. And it kind of feels like if you don't follow their advice, you'll be breaking up before someone can say,

why do you keep restacking the dishwasher? See, psychologists say the strongest predictor of a lasting relationship isn't how well you avoid conflict. It's how well you repair after conflict. If you keep getting into the same dump fights with your partner, please, I'm begging you to do this. Here's how you can repair any fight in three easy steps. I've watched video after video about red flags, signs that this person

person that maybe you thought was great actually isn't. Have you ever looked back and thought, I really should have seen that red flag sooner. If she's doing these three things, bro, she's cut off. If he has a girl best friend, keep your goddamn eye out. You're not being loved, you're being controlled.

That's a huge red flag. And while some of what people are saying online seems reasonable enough, some of it kind of seems terrible. So, today on the show, So rather than getting our relationship advice from some rando on the internet, we're going to get it from scientists. Because there have been these amazing scientific studies that in some cases follow couples for years. And using that research, we're going to find out, one, what is the best way to fight with your partner and how important is this?

Two, what are the science-backed red flags in a relationship? And as part of this, we are going to talk a bit about what can happen when a partner becomes controlling or even violent. And three, if you are in an unsafe relationship, can your partner change? Or will things only get worse? When it comes to relationships, we all want to know if... You're wasting your time. And science is going to help us get there. Science Busters is coming up just after the break.

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Missler water worldwide by Garnier. Welcome back today on the show. Bad relationships. How can we avoid them and get, you know, Good ones. And to kick us off, I want you to meet Ben Carney. He's a psychology professor at UCLA who studies love and relationships. And he told me that what's kept him at this after decades of research is this. Everyone wants a connection that lasts. And when they have it, it feels so good. And yet it is so hard to find it and maintain it. People are desperate for a love potion

or a trick or a hack? Hence the gazillion videos on social media about it and this podcast. So Ben told me that when it comes to relationships, the stakes are high. Being in an unhappy, stressful relationship doesn't just suck. It's bad for your health. It is exceedingly harmful.

There's a ton of data that shows that is tremendously harmful on a lot of levels to be in a distressing intimate relationship. It ups your chance of mental health problems like depression, and not just that. Scientists have actually hooked couples up to IV lines during fights to take samples of their blood while they're fighting. And they've found that a bad fight ramps up your stress hormones and even messes with your immune system. Other research has found that being in an unhappy relationship increases your chance of dying earlier. So Ben is trying to help us avoid these relationships.

and to understand how couples can be happy. And to do this, he studies a very particular kind of couple, newlyweds. Those couples are in love. They're feeling optimistic about the future. And if you ask them, what do you think the future holds for you as a couple? They will all say the same thing. And they all do say the same thing because we ask them. They say, we're going to be together forever.

It's going to be great. It's going to be great. Exactly. And what we study is. is what happens next. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Over more than 30 years,

he studied more than a thousand couples. And these days, here's how he does it. So let's say you and your partner sign up for one of Ben's studies. So we come to your home. So the lab is your home, your apartment, or your house. Ben and a colleague will then interview you

and your partner separately. And then they'll pop you together again, set up a video camera on a little tripod. And from here, it's basically Jerry Springer meets Nerdville. So he'll tell you. We're going to ask you to talk to each other about a topic that you disagree about.

Can you come up with a topic that the two of you don't see eye to eye on? And of course they can. Even Nileweds can. There's something we disagree about. Then we're saying, great, then we're going to leave the room. I'm going to push play, leave the room. You guys talk for eight minutes, then we'll come back. And what are the things people tend to be fighting about?

All right, guess. Money. Yeah, nice work. That's the top three. Is that top three? Family? Yeah, that's also the top three. In-laws, especially newlyweds, right?

Because they're learning, they're having to deal with each other's families for the first time. So in-laws are a big issue for newlyweds. And the other one is... And then, can I guess, is the other one chores around the house? 100%. Chores, yes, household chores, for sure. After eight minutes of fighting, Ben will then take the video back to his lab, and him and his colleagues will analyze.

it. And basically, they're looking to see as this fight is unfolding. Are people compromising? Are they blaming? Are they criticizing? Are they withdrawn? Are they engaged? Are they affectionate? And then we come back in six or nine months. And we do it all again. And then again and again and again and again for years. And we see how the relationship evolves. Through Ben's work and other researchers who do similar stuff, we've found some clues as to what makes a great healthy fight, and one that's not so much like that. So one sign that the fight that you're in

is not a particularly healthy one is if you're trying to convince your partner that you are right. And this might sound a bit like, you know, you don't need to wash the dishes before they go in the dishwasher because you're just wasting water. Or perhaps we should send our kids to public school.

that's obviously the morally correct thing to do. In other words, What I want is the right thing to want. And what you want is the wrong thing to want. So if I can just explain to you why you're wanting what you want is wrong, then you'll realize that we should both want what I want and I'll get what I want. And that is sort of a pitfall that it's easy to fall into. Even loving couples can fall into this.

A good fight isn't about who's right, but it's about making things better for both partners. Which means another thing that Ben is looking for is, are you thinking about you and your partner as a team with a problem that you've got to solve together? Or not so much. The pitfall is that the problem is between us, or worse, the problem is you. So if I say, this is a problem, and you know what, you need to solve it. You need to shape up. Here's another clue. Asking curious questions is a way of bringing my partner in.

It's a clue that I want to be on the same page with you. So asking you a question, well, what does being clean mean to you? Or what kind of sex life would be ideal for you? Oh, why is your father so annoying? Okay, well, see, now we're getting to, there's another kind of question, which implies its own answer that is not a question that pulls your partner in, but actually shuts your partner down. I know. It's so tempting. I was curious. Did you really believe that was reasonable? That is not a question that has a real answer to it.

Why are you such an idiot? Yeah, exactly. That's not a curious question. But asking curious questions brings your partner in. And Ben says that having a good fight, it's really important. In one of his studies of more than 400 couples, he found that those who fought well were more likely to say that they were more satisfied in their relationship and more trusting of their partner. Ben's team has also found that bad fights,

where, say, couples aren't listening to each other, are particularly hard on the relationship when people are already really stressed out. You don't care what your partner does every minute, but when you've had a bad day and you come home and you're looking to your partner for support, that behavior matters. But online, you might have seen a lot of videos

where it feels like fighting well almost reaches this mythic status. That once you master this skill, it's basically your ticket to living happily ever after. You might have heard that just by watching a couple fight, you know, basically doing what Ben does, researchers can predict down the line who will get divorced and who won't. With 93.6% accuracy, he can tell you if a couple will get divorced by watching a silent video of them.

Predict breakup or divorce at the rate of over 90%. It's scientifically proven that if you show all these signs, your marriage is in trouble. And so I asked Ben, is that true? No. That's just not true. It's not even close to true. The data on that is shockingly complicated. and surprisingly weak. I know.

The research folks online are quoting is often getting misinterpreted. And in fact, Ben says that while you can find studies showing that fighting badly predicts higher divorce rates and less relationship satisfaction, there's other studies where it's a bit messy. And one big review paper ultimately concluded

that when you follow couples over time, their communication style or how well they fight, doesn't consistently predict relationship satisfaction. So bottom line, you cannot just look at a couple fighting, look into your science crystal ball, and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Here's Ben. Predicting the fate of a marriage is a lot like predicting the weather.

So there are clearly many couples who don't fight well and still have long and happy relationships. So then the question becomes, how? How do they do it? Well, Ben says that some happy couples who fight badly really try not to fight. That is, they avoid conflict. He gave me an example. Your political beliefs offend me.

I don't agree with you. We don't vote for the same candidate. But I love you in other ways. So guess what? We're not going to be talking about politics very much in this relationship. Wow. And that can last. It can. For some people.

For other people, like, I can't not talk about politics. So this is a conflict we can't avoid. Therefore, we either figure out how to address it or we have a very bad relationship and leave it. And then money fits into this, right? Because if you have a lot of money, you maybe don't need to fight about it. Like if it's, you know, are we going to buy the fancy couch

or the not fancy couch? Go ahead, honey, buy the fancy couch. I don't care. Yeah, buy both couches. You're absolutely right. The same conflict over spending maybe has a lot of higher stakes. If we're not deciding which couch to buy,

we're deciding which bill to pay. and which bill to not pay. Now the stakes are higher. This is a conflict we must resolve, and if we can't resolve it, we're in trouble. And this is one reason why Ben says couples in lower-income situations have higher rates of divorce. On the flip side, Ben's research has found

that when certain states in the U.S. raised the minimum wage, the divorce rate dropped by around 10% 10% lower, which isn't nothing. That's not nothing. That's not nothing at all. That's real. Here's where we're at. A healthy fight, while it doesn't guarantee you some fairy tale relationship,

staying together forever, it is still important, and it ups the chance that you're going to be happier together. And a healthy fight is one where you're not fighting about who's right, you're thinking of each other as a team, and you're both curious about what you need. After the break, red flags. how to tell early on in a relationship when things might get bad.

You want to know about these. Trust me. And it's all coming up just after the break. This winter, we are cheering for our home nations, but your story might stretch far beyond one flag. With ancestry DNA, you can discover all the places from your family's past. Now, up to $65 off for a limited time.

Explore the cultures that shaped you across more than 3,600 regions worldwide. More pride, more connection, more to cheer for. Start your journey with Ancestry DNA today. Sail on February 19th terms apply, visit ancestry.ca for more details. Welcome back today on the show. Forget agony aunts and getting relationship advice from influences online. Today, we're getting it from scientists.

Now, I want to talk about red flags. Online, people throw around the word red flags to mean all sorts of of things. Sometimes it even feels a bit silly. But for scientists who study relationships, they say that knowing red flags is actually super important if you want to avoid nasty and even potentially dangerous relationships. And one of those scientists is Dr. Megan Hazelschwerp at the University of Tennessee. As a kid, what did you want to be growing up? As a kid, I wanted to be Oprah. I wanted to talk to people and uncover their secrets. And so I just was very intrigued as to like how things weren't always what they seemed.

Since Megan is interested in people's secrets, aka relationship goss, I asked her if this one odd thing that happened to me on a date was a red flag. Date number one, first dinner date, first dinner date. So he was wearing very tight skinny jeans. And just as he sat down, he just unbuttoned. Because he was like, it's more comfortable this way. I do. I do that because...

First date. Megan, you wouldn't do it on date number one. Yeah. No, no, no. No, you're right. No, I wouldn't. No, that's like a marriage thing. That's like a marriage.

That's a marriage. That in and of itself to me would not be red flagged. It would probably just be something I don't. My head is like, huh. Like, I wonder why he doesn't just wear pants that are more comfortable to him. And also, Be more subtle, do better.

Megan tells me that this is more of an ick, a somewhat innocuous but perhaps annoying quirk. In science land, that's very different to a red flag. To scientists like Megan, a red flag is a sign that the person you're dating is starting to control you, what you do, what you wear, who you see. And this pattern of their behavior could ultimately put your mental and even physical health at risk. And according to the data, quite a lot of us have actually been in abusive relationships like this, which is why it's really important to know

how to spot what might be coming and to get out before you're in too deep. So the further we get in, the harder it is to get out. One thing to think of is like, okay, if you went on a first date with someone and they slapped you on the first date. The overwhelming majority of people would be like, yeah, peace out, we're done. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. If they were to have some irrational angry outburst on the first date, most people would be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. But the challenge is oftentimes these red flags kind of build, and they're kind of like these little subtle flags. And by the time, maybe you're a couple months in. Maybe you really like being in a relationship. Maybe you really are feeling like this pinch that you want to get married. All your friends around you are getting married.

Or maybe you just fall in love with them. And so the further along you get, the more likely you are to excuse what you can later look back on as red flags. And from social media, it can feel like it's really easy to spot these red flags, you know, just look for this one thing. But Dr Elizabeth MacLendon at the University of Melbourne in Australia says that often it's actually quite tricky to know what you're looking for here. It's hard to spot these things sometimes. The myth to dispel is that people who use abuse in relationships looks like monsters and act like monsters all of the time.

The problem is that they're often. really charming and lovely, and they have really great ways of making up when you confront them about something. And so that's what makes it really hard. And I wanted you to meet Elizabeth and Megan because they've done two different studies to try to work out exactly what these red flags are. And they both found very similar things. It's things that other researchers in this space have found too. It almost feels like some universal playbook that I really wish anyone venturing into a relationship would be warned about. Also, as we're getting deeper into this episode, we are going to be talking more explicitly about abusive relationships. So please just take care when you're listening.

Okay, let's start with what Megan did in her study. She drove out to a township in the Midwest. It gives off a vibe of just quaint, pleasant, beautiful white picket fences. White picket fences and just very pristine and comfortable wealth. It's big homes and it feels like, it feels very nice. It doesn't feel like domestic violence. But it didn't take long for Megan to find it. She interviewed almost a dozen women. Many were professionals, so think CEOs, attorneys,

doctors who had been or still were in awful relationships. And what they went through was relentless. Sometimes their partners would explode with anger, calling them names, cursing at them. Some had been kicked, choked, pushed downstairs. And even though the women were in some cases making good money, their partners often controlled the finances. One woman said she had to get approval to do anything. Quote, I couldn't dress myself. I couldn't spend any money on me. This pattern of behavior is what's known as coercive control. And so these relationships, none of them, um, were violent until for these women, it was all at the honeymoon or, oh, at the honeymoon. Jeez. Yes. Or during pregnancy. So like later into the relationship.

But as Megan talked to these women for hours, asking them, what happened at the start. She could see that in each of these relationships, there were red flags if you knew what to look for. With Elizabeth's study, which was published just this year, she asked more than 800 women who had been in abusive relationships, mostly with men, but some with women, to put on a timeline various kinds of behaviours so that she could then see what happened first. It's one of the largest studies to ever do this kind of thing. And he's a lot of the is what these and other researchers have found. So Megan saw that one of the first things that partners would do

is move the relationship fast. This is sometimes called love bombing. And Megan says that they might say things like, I just want to spend all my time with you, I love you, I just want to move faster, I just want to move faster. I just want to eat you up. Like I want all my time with you. And so like that really fast, like if people around you are like,

this is really moving fast. a warning sign of kind of like, why? Why are we trying to move so fast? Now, it can be totally normal when you're excited about someone and falling in love with them to want to spend a lot of time with them. That's not the problem here. The problem can be what happens next. During all this love bombing, while you're spending all this time with your new person, you can start to get isolated from your family and your friends, which Elizabeth saw as the first red flag on her timeline, isolation, where your new partner is making it harder and harder for you to see other people in your life. So your partner making little comments about, I don't really love it

when you see this person or, you know, can we not see your family today? You know, can you not go to that family lunch? It'd be really nice if we could spend some time together. The next big thing that people put on their timeline, their partner started to control them, directing not only who they saw, where they went. But also things more subtle than that. I don't think that dress really suits you. I think it's a bit slutty. Or I really like it if you wear clothes like this or if you speak like that or you're going to meet my family on the weekend. Can you do this or that? And it's funny because some of that stuff, it kind of feels okay, right? I mean, just, saying a dress doesn't suit you or even, can you try not to swear in front of my family?

And so I thought I'd throw out another weird example from my past, and I asked Elizabeth if this was in the red flag ballpark. I was going to go to the beach with my now ex, and he lived close to the beach, and I forgot my bathers, and I was like, whatever, I'll just go in my undies, who cares? And he said, no, don't do that. Don't do that. And it felt like he was rather than jealous, embarrassed for me. You can't go to your undies to the beach. And then I went to the beach with my undies and he stayed at home and sulked.

What is that? Well, it's tricky because in and of itself, if that was the only thing that your partner did in that early phase of a relationship that made you feel like your choices were a bit dumb, then that would be fine. That wouldn't be abusive. But if that behaviour came and you were often being told, that's not a good idea, like, what are you thinking?

That's such a silly idea. I'm embarrassed for you. People are going to think you're a bit of an idiot. If that's happening quite a bit, then that's something to pay attention to. Elizabeth told me that what you're really looking for with these red flags is you're asking yourself, do you feel like you're doing something wrong?

but really when you think about it, you're not. Another question is, do you feel like your partner is making a suggestion that you can more or less brush off and it's no big deal? Or that there are these rules that if you don't follow them, there will be consequences. So it's really not about one weird thing that your partner did. It's this pattern of behavior where your independence is getting riddle. away. On the timeline in Elizabeth's study, folks said that verbal abuse tended to come next,

which included getting insulted, maybe humiliated in front of other people. And after that, folks started to feel like they were getting monitored. Maybe their phone was being tracked, or they were kind of harangued when they got home. Who did you see? You said that you were going down to the shops, but you were gone for three hours. That doesn't seem like you were at the shops. Another study surveyed hundreds of people who were early in their relationships about their partners. And they found that if they said yes two sentences like this, my partner questioned me about where I had been or who I was with, but also my partner disregarded my reasoning or logic because it did not agree with theirs.

My partner resented being questioned about how they treat me. Six months down the line, they were more likely to have experienced some, kind of abuse from that partner. In Elizabeth's study, on average, it was only after the couple moved in together that more obvious signs of abuse came. First being threatened, and then if it happened at all, physical abuse, starting with maybe pushing and shoving, but then escalating into things like punching.

Later again, often after the couple had kids, you might see sexual assault. In an analysis of more than 200 men who had killed their current or former female partner, more than 80% had done things like frightening, humiliating, and undermining their victim's self-worth before they killed them. But to be really clear here, the research shows that, even if there is no physical violence. A lot of those red flags that we talked about, the isolating, controlling, monitoring,

they can be abuse as well. In Elizabeth's study, around half the women who were in abusive relationships, said they didn't experience physical violence. Here's Megan. Research consistently shows that incidences or discrete acts of physical violence are the least harmful

and the bigger picture of a victim's or survivors experience. So the psychological abuse, the financial abuse. Really? Yeah, those pieces are actually far more detrimental and hard to move on from. So much of like our imagery around like black eyes or bruises tends to minimize the tremendous toll of psychological abuse and like years of being kind of worn down.

And Elizabeth said that a lot of the time early on in a relationship, when we see some of these red flags or feel like something's not quite right, we waste time getting hung up on the, why did my partner do this? Did they mean to hurt me? Those questions are really hard to have answered. And in a way, it doesn't really matter what the intention was. Think about how a behaviour makes you feel.

That's the thing to focus on. That's what matters. But a lot of folks in these unhealthy relationships want to know, is there a chance that my partner could change? Maybe you've seen them on a good day and the relationship is great and you just think, what if they could always be like that? Which takes us to our last question. Can they change?

Now, what's curious is that this kind of abuse, coercive control, it's more often perpetuated by men. And one of the common models that's trying to change men who use this kind of violence is, say, in a court-ordered men's group, teaching men that the reason they're behaving like this is because of patriarchal ideas that men should be allowed to dominate women.

And this approach, as well as others out there, have had pretty mixed results. Some haven't worked well at all. In fact, one researcher told me, quote, it was pretty jolly ineffectual. Even tactics that might be seen as go-toes here, like couples therapy, that isn't recommended for people who use this kind of violence. So what do we do? Well, there is a movement that's trying to change people who use coercive control,

and they're going about it in a different way. It's one that a lot of academics that I spoke to were on. optimistic about. And for this, I want you to meet our last guest for today. He's not a scientist. He was a barber from New Zealand. And his name is Matt Brown. And his whole journey started when he went with his dad to get his first hair cut at a barbershop. And his dad told the barber, just give him a plain boy's haircut. But the barber told Matt. Yeah, the barber whispered to me, what do you want? And I said, can you please make me look like the wrong? And I said, can you please make me look like the rock. And what did the rock look like back then? Well, he had these big cyberans, you know,

when he was wrestling in the WW airfield was back then. And so I remember walking out of that shop, just feeling so cool. I thought I was the man, you know. I couldn't stop looking in the mirror. When I got home, I kept looking at myself, just looking at my clean Chris Cyburns. He felt like a million bucks. And that was a feeling that Matt didn't have a lot of growing up. At home, things were tough. He told me about his earliest memory of Chris My first Christmas, I'll never forget, my father picking up our Christmas tree and using it as a weapon to then go in, beat up my dear mother. And as boys, I would have been three or four. And I remember I just jumped on top of mum.

And my older brothers too were, you know, trying to stop dad's anger. His dad was incredibly abusive. Sometimes Matt and his brothers got hit, but mostly his dad's anger was directed at. his mom. You know, waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning to the screams of her being dragged by her hair down the hallway. But she's a typical Pacific Samuan, island woman, very private. She would always say to me, son, why you always want to tell the sad stories of her family, you know, tell the happy stories? And I remember this one time I responded to her and I said, which one's mum? And I was just meant with silence.

Matt moved out of home when he was 15 and eventually he became a barber. starting off in this tiny shed where he could just fit him and a client. But he built up his business and eventually got a bunch of attention online. He went viral for this sick haircut he did on his housemate. It's a portrait of two-pack.

It's awesome. But meanwhile, Matt had this idea that while cutting men's hair, he'd open up about his childhood and he'd asked them questions. And he wondered if maybe men would start opening up to him too. And they did.

Some clients really appreciated just talking to Matt. And often men would always say, bro, you know, you're not the best barber. You're a good barber. I would have to argue with that, you know. I have done some amazing haircuts. But I really come in here for the conversation. You know, you're a cheap therapist, but just someone to listen to you, you know. But it was beautiful.

And it became this little hub of men really just open. up, you know? Do you remember some of the first few times that someone started talking about using violence in a relationship? Did that come up? Yeah, all the time. All the time, right. You know, and some men have this close to me over the year that they've laid hands on

their partners, have perpetrated similar violence to what I endured and experienced, but they didn't want to be these men. Men are not monsters whom society paints us to be, you know? I've never met a man who wakes up, who has woken up and wants to terrify his, you know, terrorises his partner and children. Matt read more and more about why people can be abusive to their partners. Turns out it's not just the patriarchy. He wrote a book that's been given to thousands of men in prisons across New Zealand.

He did a TEDx talk called The Barbershop where men go to heal. And now he does talks at prisons and schools and community centers. He's been all over the world. Meanwhile, Matt is still asking men questions. Why are you perpetrating violence? You know, what triggers you, you know, what's lying beneath all those feelings? So how many, in total, how many men do you think you've talked to about domestic violence, family violence? Thousands.

Thousands. And Matt, as well as a bunch of scientists, are hoping that by going deeper into understanding what is going on in someone's head when they control their partners, will be able to help them change their behaviour. And what Matt has seen over and over again, and studies find this too, is that one risk factor for becoming abusive is growing up in a violent house or being abused yourself. A review paper including hundreds of men who had been violent in their relationships found that roughly 60% of them said they grew up in violent homes,

which was a lot higher than those who weren't violent. That's what you've seen growing up, you know? A lot of the men that I've seen, sat with in prison who have done some of the most heinous crimes in our society, when I listen to their stories, I realize and I can recognize that they too were once upon a time a victim themselves. While Matt says that's no excuse for violence, researchers have told me that growing up in this environment teaches you that love and violence can coexist.

For men, if their fathers were abusive and mum appeared submissive, but I can really screw around with how you think men and women should be in the world and that as a man you need to be powerful, aggressive and controlling. Matt says that for a lot of the men that he's spoken to as they were growing up and watching that violence,

they interpreted it in really different ways, which he sees in his family too. Well, and that's the thing, you know, you grew up in a household of five boys, all of us have reacted different. You know, some of us have perpetrated violence, some of us ended up incarcerated. I'm fortunate that I've never, you know, perpetrated violence, physical violence on my partner, my wife or anyone.

But I have definitely, you know, throwing out colorful language, you know. And so how can you not when you grow up watching and witnessing violence every day? And there are other risk factors here too. National Academy of Sciences report found that if you're surrounded by other folks who are in violent relationships. If you believe in traditional ideas about the role of women and men in society, that increases the chance you'll be an abusive partner.

Another review paper found that having a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, which is where you can be impulsive and aggressive, that was also a big risk factor here. And Matt told me that often the men that he talks to have no idea how this stuff from their childhood might connect to what they're doing to their partners at home. In fact, there's a lot they're not saying.

Because once Matt hears about how they're behaving, he'll tell them. You're just controlling, you know, the every move, thought, well-being, really. And so a lot of men, when I finally break it down for them in that plain Jane explanation, they're like, oh, shit. They don't realize what they're doing. Yes. And just how it makes them feel. And a lot of guys, when I talk to them,

so you guys don't like feeling like that. So why would you, you know, do that to the person that you say you love? So what do they think they're doing? They think they're loving. Oh, right. Well, they think they're loving, they're helping. So it's a lot of time when I've worked with men who are doing coercive control, they don't like to feel inadequate.

A lot of men don't like to feel useless. Somewhere in their life, you know, there was a powerlessness there where there was, you know, the people who they trusted or the people in their life who were meant to look after them didn't look after them. So now they've taken their ownership back into their lives and extremely making sure that no one will ever hurt me again. So in order to do that, I have to control the narrative.

So then the big question is, does understanding all of this and then teaching it to those who use violence work? Does it help them to become better partners? Well, one study from Iowa, which included more than 3,000 men who were arrested for domestic assault, compared those who were mandated to go to a men's group that used a more traditional model, versus one that incorporates a bunch of the stuff that we just talked about. So over about six months, they taught men how their ideas about gender might be affecting their behavior, but also why things that happened in their childhood might be affecting them today, what they're not. It triggers are how to notice when they're getting angry to take a breath and stop. And it found that while this was no silver bullet to solving domestic violence at all,

it did help. For the men who completed the course, they were less likely to get a new domestic violence charge five years on. A big review paper called it certainly promising. There's also a little bit of research to suggest that if your partner only gets a bit aggressive when a fight gets out of hand and there's no other red flags, there is more of a chance that they can change and get help. But even though there is hope here, right now, science can't tell us what's the chance that your partner will change.

We don't even have good numbers on how many folks who use coercive control later become great supportive partners. But what we do know is that your partner really has to accept responsibility for what they're doing and want to change. And some folks don't. In fact, while some men, like those that Matt works with, have grown up in tough backgrounds and maybe really struggle being intimate without being in control, there seems to be another perhaps smaller group of men who know exactly what they're doing here and deliberately exploit their partners, perhaps financially, perhaps sexually.

They don't give a fuck. That's a direct quote from one researcher. And with these folks, they're very hard to change. For Matt, though, he keeps telling the men that he works with this one line over and over. Take responsibility. Yes, your childhood trauma wasn't your fault. happened to you was not your fault, especially as an innocent child. But your healing is completely

your responsibility now, you know? Do you want to carry on the cycle, you know, just because it happened to you, do you want to keep repeating the cycle? Do you ever get pushback? Oh yeah, I've had pushback my whole career, you know? But yeah, I've had pushback, I mean, I work with men, you know, and men have sat in my chair. Men have booked in for head cuts just to come and challenge me. Oh, and what do they say? Well, you know, oh, man, you know, but, you know, violence goes both I've had men sit in my chair crying because they don't have access to their children. I come from a place of, yeah, I hear, but that's not what my, this, what we call Kaupapa, our movement, that phrase is.

It's an invitation for us men to call each other forward. Matt, and in fact, all of the researchers I spoke to, said that if you are feeling unsafe in a relationship and you still can safely leave, don't wait for someone to change. Elizabeth said, even if you know they've had a rough childhood. That is sad, and I have empathy for somebody using violence who was exposed to violence in childhood, but that is not a good reason to stay in a relationship with that person. And so this obsession that we can have, and I can understand the reason for it about, will he change, can I help him, I'm just trying to understand him better.

it's really fraught because at the end of the day, you can have as much empathy in the world for somebody who was exposed to violence in childhood. That doesn't mean that your relationship is going to become safer. That's science verses. This episode has 98 citations in it. So if you want to read more about anything we talked about in the show, then please just have a look at our show notes

and there's a link to the transcript. Also, if this episode, episode brought up anything for you and you want to get more resources or you just want to talk to someone, we're going to put resources in the show notes. Matt Brown has a new kids book out called This Is Not Yours to Carry and you can find more about the new book and his work at she is not your rehab.com. If you want to get in touch with us, we're on Instagram, Science underscore VS, and I am on TikTok at Wendy Zuck. Come and say hello.

Let me know what you thought of the episode. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Michelle Dang, Merrill Horne, Rose Rimler and Aketti Foster Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munga,

So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hedaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to our consultants, Maya Sorrellas and Jess Hill. A special thanks to all of the researchers, as well as the folks working in the space of domestic violence that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Orna Travis, Claire Marshall, Professor Sharon Dore, Professor Kelsey Hegarty, Dr Francesca Rieti, Dr. Andrea Meltzer, Professor Amy Rauer, and Dr. Amy Zalding.

A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zuckerman family. Science Versus is a Spotify studio's original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere. If you like what we're doing, give us a five-star review. It really helps people find the show. And if you are listening on Spotify, you can follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman and I'll fact you next time.