January 18, 2020:
"It seems likely that many other confrontational, injurious behaviors are manifestations of male depression. In most Western societies, admissions of weakness are held to be feminine. This has a negative effect on men, preventing them from crying, making them feel shame in the face of irrational fear and anxiety. The batterer who believes that hitting his wife is the only way for him to exist in the world manifestly buys into the idea that emotional pain is always a call to action, and that emotion without action negates him as a man."
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression (pp. 178-179). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
From the perspective of a survivor of childhood abuse, this makes emotional sense. He grew up belittled and bullied, until he learned to fight back in the socially most obvious manner available to him, with his fists. So that violence became his mode of self-survival, lashing out against his own depressed feelings of inadequacy as much as anything external.
Like this:
"I felt as though I were disappearing, and somewhere deep in the most primitive part of my brain, I felt that violence was the only way I could keep my self and mind in the world."
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression (p. 179). Scribner. Kindle Edition.