Does an abuser not always know they are being abusive?

I left my husband not long ago. The reason I left is because he is addicted to pornography. I could not let my children live in a home where their father left porn laying around the house for them to see....

Anyway I have been seeing a therapist. My therapist tells me that what he is doing is emotional abuse. He tries to manipulate me and control every aspect of my life. Telling me "If you come back i will destroy all my porn" even tho I told him i wouldnt come back until his addiction was over, and all of the porn was gone. or, he shifts his porn addiction onto me, saying he wouldnt need porn if i just did this or that.. knowing full well when we were doing "this or that" he was STILL using pornography....He also is financially abusive. He always cashes his pay check and keeps all the money on him so i have to beg for money if me or the kids need anything. Or I will tell him a bill is due and its 70 dollars.. so he will leave me 50 dollars and tell me to go pay the bill.

My question is... does he know that what he is doing is considered abusive or could he be so stuck in his addictive behavior that he doesn't understand what he is doing is abusive?

It's very hard to say, I'm pretty sure some abusers know what they are doing there are some very manipulative people about. It's almost impossible for an outsider to tell whether they are intentionally doing these things. The only person that really knows the answer to this question is the abuser. Whether they give you the honest answer or not is anyones guess, most abusers would claim they don't know when they are doing it / don't mean to do it but from personal experience I find that hard to believe.

It's always funny how they magically have the ability to reason and converse with everyone else in the world.

I would say some people don't really notice they are being emotionally or verbally abusive.. Let me explain.. I would get mad at my wife and it would escalate to where I was calling her names that i shouldn't have. I would get so furious that I would sit and contemplate on what I could say to win the argument. I didn't think I was abusive I thought I was pushing buttons like she was the only difference was the ones i pushed were getting under her skin worst than the buttons she was pushing on me. It was only when she called me and emotional/verbal abuser that i looked it up and noticed that some of the signs were some of the things I did...

From the perspective that what counts as abuse might be considered relative, I'd say that it must be true that some people don't consider what they do to be abuse, so in a way those people don't know.

I'm being literal with the word 'always' (I usually am literal... that seems to annoy people but anyway) meaning that if even one person doesn't know what they are doing, then it is not always.