Training?

I've been thinking about an incident that happened not long after we moved in together. Our youngest was about 10 months old, Alexis had just turned 2, and Jordan was 5. Life was bad, but I tried to make the best of it and to figure out what I was or was not doing that was causing him to be so "insecure" and unhappy all the time. By this point, I had given up on going to college because he made it too damn hard with his constant yelling, threatening, and ripping up my school assignments (because I thought I was smarter than him, because I was trying to be too good, because I was too old, because it was taking too much attention from my family, and on and on). He was gone much of the time. He would come home from work, take a shower, and go out until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes he would get home as late as 7 AM; drunk as hell and mean as a snake. I felt guilty because I found myself praying that he just wouldn't come home; that he would either die in a fiery car crash, end up in jail for fighting, or just find someone else that would be able to deal with him. I wasn't allowed to leave the house unless it was to go to the grocery store, to the laundromat (to which I had to take three small kids--boy was that fun!), or to work. That was it. On this particular evening, I had gone to the laundromat earlier. He got home sometime around 1 or 2 AM I think.
I was woken to him sitting on me and trying to choke me because he had seen those two men leaving the house through the back door when he was pulling up to the house. Now, this freaked me out in and of itself because now I thought someone had been trying to break into the house, and the back door happened to be down the hall by the children's bedrooms. Not to mention, this was not a pleasant way to be woken up. When I protested that maybe we needed to call the police, he began screaming about my underwear being in the floor (two pair by the front door according to him). I assumed at the time that I must have dropped them out of the laundry basket in the process of carrying the baskets and the kids back into the house from the laundromat. Amazingly, those two pair of phantom underwear never reappeared, nor did he want to call the police to investigate the supposed men running from our door, which today leads me to wonder if any of this really happened, or if he made it up to justify his violence. Anyway, back to my story....
I managed to get out from under him by telling him I was going to go fix his dinner. I remember clearly at this point going back to Jordan's room and waking him as quietly as I could, telling him to put on his shoes. By this point, the yelling had woken one of the girls and I quickly went to get both of them in jackets only (their pj's were enough at this point), and grabbed a diaper bag. He must have been alerted to the fact that I was grabbing up kids and things at this point and he met me in the hallway to scream and rage some more. I pushed past him and tried to make it to the door; carrying the 10 month old, the 2 year old and dragging my son as best I could. He grabbed the diaper bag strap and yanked me backward nearly pulling me and the three children to the floor. My fear and adrenaline somehow kicked in and enabled me to fight my way to the door (I believe I simply dropped the diaper bag at this point), and I managed to run to the car and lock us all in. Imagine my surprise when my car wouldn't start. He appeared at my window laughing and holding up something in his hand (at the time I didn't have a clue what it was, but now I know it was the distributor cap). I was terrified and had a car full of terrified, screaming children at this point. No phone, no one around except us, and a maniac standing outside taunting me.
He returned to the house at this point and I thought it may be over with, but alas that was not to be. He returned with the tools to jimmy open the doors from the window that he had in the house (he did this on the side), and snatched both girls out and carried them in, locking the front door. He then opened the window and started yelling at me that he was going to call the police to report that I had abandoned my babies in the house. I could hear them screaming and didn't know what the hell to do. I was terrified to return to the house, afraid he would kill me and my son (who wasn't his), and terrified not to. I just wanted my kids out and wasn't sure if the police would honestly think I had abandoned them with this maniac if I ran to the neighbors house. After several minutes of me pleading with him to open the door and let me in to the girls, I finally took my son by the hand and figured we were going to have to walk to a payphone or somewhere where I could make a call. Mind you, we did not live in the nicest of neighborhoods, so walking at 3 or 4 in the morning down the street was not the safest thing, but honestly I was in a war zone anyway, how much worse could it get.
Unfortunately, he didn't let me get far. When he saw that I was trying to walk away, he ran out, grabbed me by my hair and began to physically drag me back to the house. I held tight to Jordan's hand and managed to keep him with me. The kids were locked in their rooms after that, screaming and frantic, while I got kicked and terrorized until about 7 in the morning when he finally passed out. Of course afterwards it was all my fault (and the alcohol, I can't forget) because I had left those underwear in the living room and had men running out the back door. After all, how did I expect him to react to such blatant disrespect?!