So. I've been doing my reading on intimate aggression, and rather than being paralyzed by anxiety, I am so excited! My professor asks us to email him a couple of questions ahead of class. Here are some of my thoughts (remember, since it's an email, not an essay, the terminology is not always academic lol).
this text rocks.
The inset on resilience reminded me of something. One thing that was very important for me in my relationships w both my father and my ex was that I protect them. Since abusers, once identified, were essentially outcast, i didn't want anyone to think that of them. I used to say to myself "they are not throw-away people!" But it seemed to me that once a person was identified as an abuser, that was, to the world, the only thing they were. That wasn't ok with me, 'cause I knew it wasn't true! Why ruin their lives because they were awful sometimes? It made no sense to me, even if they were hurting me a lot.
Do you think this ostracism of abusers was a backlash to a culture that for centuries has accepted and even encouraged intimate abuse?
Do you think it's time for the pendulum to come back to the middle and recognize that abusers, like victims, are people engaged in a transactional process involving mutually contingent interaction and that they are not just rotten to the core if they hit? That they are people as in need of intervention as the victims, in large part because the behavior may be mutually contingent? This helps victims, too, in that they're less likely to feel society will judge them as "weak" or "stupid."
Wouldn't it be helpful for us as professionals to try to remove the stigma from both parties so early intervention is possible?
After all, this idea put forth in the Age of Oprah that a victim need not feel shame while the abuser should shows little understanding of the dynamics within an aggressive intimate relationship. If there is shame to be felt, everyone is gonna feel it. That's just true. I don't need a single study to support that hypothesis, 'cause I know it's true.
...and the family becomes a closed system with "tight controls on information transmission."
Who does that help, really? And isn't that what we're really supposed to want? To help families be healthy? That's what I want, anyway.
Plus, the idea that "if he hits you once, he will hit you again, so leave then and never come back" is so rarely gonna be effective, based on social exchange and investment models. And maybe it even shouldn't, since, through the lens of family systems theory, these families are often characterized by periods of adaptation and stability, and conflict theory notes they are characterized by both conflict and harmony. So, while the bathwater is pretty nasty and toxic, why is it always necessary to throw the baby out with it?
The resilience inset suggests primary intervention efforts are best aimed at promoting competence and promoting positive outcomes while not ignoring risk-focused strategies. I really like the sound of that!
I also liked the idea that damaged families are seen not only as damaged. Because that's usually the end of the story and we folks from damaged families end up feeling pretty crappy and stuck. I like being though of as being challenged and able to address challenges adaptively.
Remember how panicked I was last week? Who would have thought I'd approach this particular class with excitement and hope? Great reading! :)
Those are just some cursory thoughts I had during reading. My thoughts are already evolving, as I read more, and I can't imagine what ideas I might have by the end of class.
The chapter in our text on intimate aggression ends with what the authors are willing to say they assume about the phenomenon. I found it so interesting I will transcribe it...
We assume that control is at the heart of intimate aggression. We assume that intimate aggression is simultaneously situated as a learned behavior; as a pattern of interaction; as a phenomenon that perpetrators and recipients react to, understand, and act on within prevailing discourses of gender, intimacy, sexuality, and violence; and as an occurrence that is deeply rooted in hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, and inequity. We assume that intimate aggression is filled with contradictions and tensions: it occurs in the context of a loving relationship, it is shocking and hurtful behavior, and it may be preceded and followed by everyday acts of care/hostility/concern/control. We construct perpetrator/victim and/or mutually aggressive partners as active agents who are embedded in a context of romance and joy, control and dominance, patriarchy and equality. In addition, we assume that a both/and perspective can advance our understanding of the paradoxes and the processes of intimacy and aggression.
Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research
by Alan C. Acock (Editor), Vern L. Bengtson (Editor), David M. Klein (Editor), Katherine R. Allen (Editor), Peggye Dilworth-Anderson (Editor)
Maybe I've found my field?
I'm soooooo not about blaming the victim. I am also, though, not about demonizing the perpetrator. I'm not about name-calling, at all.
I just want it to stop. Everywhere. I just want it to not happen anymore. How can we make it not happen anymore?
9 charged with bullying Mass. teen who killed self
By STEPHANIE REITZ, APMon Mar 29, 3:38 PM EDT
Insults and threats followed 15-year-old Phoebe Prince almost from her first day at South Hadley High School, targeting the Irish immigrant in the halls, library and in vicious cell phone text messages. Phoebe, ostracized for having a brief relationship with a popular boy, reached her breaking point and hanged herself after one particularly hellish day in January — a day that, according to officials, included being hounded with slurs and pelted with a beverage container as she walked home from school.
The complete article is linked in the headline.
I have nothing to say about this right now...
I actually typed out these words last night...
"How does a girl learn to be the kind of girl a man wants to hold hands with at Walmart?"
I typed them into an email, I entered my mercurial boyfriend's email address, and then I........
Clicked send.
Yes. Yes I did.
My daughter and I had been wandering Walmart, as we often do when I am simply out of ideas. It's relaxing, in a way, and I needed relaxing last night. But everywhere I looked were these couples, in the parking lot and in the aisles, holding hands. I watched one couple, fingers laced, just so simply connected. They let go for a moment as she readjusted her jacket, then their fingers found each other again, easily.
They seemed so secure with each other. So together. So safe. There was no fear or shame...or showing off, either. Just belonging.
I have never experienced such public ease with another human being in my life.
"What's wrong with me?" I complained to the universe, bitterly, "Why doesn't anyone want to hold my hand?"
I remember two times in more than two years that my mercurial bf has touched me like that on purpose. Once we were walking into a bar, and he put his hand on the small of my back to guide me gently through the maze of people. Once we were going into a restaurant, and he casually threw his arm around me as we fell into step.
Both times I thought my heart would burst with joy.
Maybe that's why he doesn't often do it? I have a feeling a joyful me is quite a lot of joy to behold. Maybe too much by half.
Carson McCullers wrote in 1940 that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm not sure my heart hunts, so much. It waits. It hopes. It doesn't expect much. It doesn't ask for much. My heart is more like a Venus Flytrap.
When I was little, not much bigger than my daughter is now, we had these neighbors. They were nice enough people. Catskill folk. My dad used to go deer hunting with the son-in-law. They had a daughter, much older than I, but who rode the bus with me. I attached myself to her until she one day told me to go away. I get it. I was little and annoying and probably waaaay more clingy than your average next door neighbor.
Anyway, the daughter-with-a-husband babysat us sometimes, and the parents were in our lives, somehow, though I don't remember if they babysat or what they did, really.
I just remember that I liked to be at their house. I didn't like to be at home. One day I decided I wanted to eat dinner there. It was winter. Snow. Coat hat scarf mittens. I knocked on their door and asked to be invited for dinner. The mom said no. She closed the door.
I sat on their stairs and cried. I wailed, I think. I wanted to be in there in the warm with that family. I watched them move around in the artificial golden glow of family time on a winter night in Upstate New York and sobbed. I don't remember if she came to the door again, but I'm pretty sure I knocked several more times. I remember crying loudly until I was crying softly. I sat on their stairs with an icy face drenched in tears and snot. It was getting dark. The path home was through the trees. When the sobs subsided and the hiccups ceased, I went home. That's what I remember.
When I started thinking about this post, last night, it was going in a whole 'nother direction. I have been so lonely this weekend. Disconnected and lost. But my friend Tam had us over to color eggs. Just that little bit of normal life for my girl and me helped. It changed the course of my thinking from focused on the alone part. The fishing line in my brain began to angle for connections, instead. After all, I'm blessed in so many ways.
So, while I want to give that little lonely girl on the outside looking in a hug, dry her face, check that she's warm, tell her she's gonna be ok -- honest -- pat her bum and send her home, 'cause there really is no place else to go (I'd send her to the home I have now, if I could, but all I can really do is take good care of the daughter she will someday have, who is now safely asleep in the next room)...I can't let myself get lost in what she doesn't have but really wants and what I don't have and really want.
What I do have is pretty amazing. My eyes are on the wrong prize. My girl, my school, my sparkling circle of friends (sisters, really), even my mercurial bf whose gotten 8.7 billion odd emails from me over the years, and has almost never made me feel like the true nutcase that I am because of them.
Seriously, what am I whining about? I'm blessed.
Another use for this tool acquired by the little girl who was me, called empathy!
This is gonna be some full-on rambling, so beware...
My good friend Tam has invited me to Easter services at her church. It will be hours long. A vigil. I want to go. Sure I do...
But I'm getting this feeling in my tummy about going that is like the feeling I've been having over my Family Interactions class.
Fear.
I'm a church shopper. I want to find a place where I can explore my thoughts feelings about goodness and mercy. I want my daughter to have a sense there is something greater than herself. So I shop. I go for awhile and love it, but then a switch flips and the thought of going to this place again for even one more moment makes me feel as though I'm in the river and someone has tied lead blocks to my feet and I'm going down, down, down...sucking in ragged breaths of nothing but dirty water and seaweed until I've reached the rocky bottom, and all is black. We don't go back.
What is that about?
A friend was talking to me about his own journey with Christianity, and we disagree on many thing (I'll probably have lots to say about that at some point lol), but so much of what he said is so gorgeous, I want to give in to it.
Give in...isn't that a telling choice of words? I think it is. For me, anyway.
This empathy, I think, may also be a shield, for me. If I'm taking on another person's emotional experience, I am protected from my own. Empathy is a wall between me and my roiling emotional self.
I have an idea that nothing is more frightening to me than feeling my own feelings.
When I listened to a recording shared with me by my friend of his church choir, the unfettered joy and freedom I could hear in their voices nearly gave me an anxiety attack. Tears started to leak from my eyes, for reasons I don't understand.
In fact, whenever I have tears about something that has to do directly with me, it never feels like I'm actually crying. It just feels like water is coming out of my eyes. I cry over movies or songs or the pain of those I love.
When it's about me, water comes out of my eyes.
I know this is probably not the optimum way to experience life, you know, through others, but when I start feeling things about my own life and my own experience I am 100% sure I am going to either die or go completely off the rails out of my mind. In that order.
So I find some way to shut down.
What does a person do about that?
My Little Fire and I went to the movies tonight to see the delightful How to Train Your Dragon. If you know me, you will not be surprised to discover the crying started, oh, about five minutes in, and simply gained in intensity during poignant moments throughout the film until I was choking back sobs.
Yes, choking back actual sobs. At a kids' movie. About dragons. Which are not real.
As a child, my mom wouldn't let me watch The Incredible Hulk because I became inconsolable when the closing music began and Bill Bixby was again forced to walk away from whatever tenuous connections he had made in Whereversville, U.S.A...alone.
Most people possess a degree of empathy. It is an emotional capacity the develops in early childhood. It is described by many as the ability to understand the emotional states of other people, and perhaps the ability to feel what they are feeling. You might think of it as the ability to cognitively put yourself in someone else's shoes, see how they feel, and start walking down the road for awhile with your thumb out, like David Banner when he wasn't busy smashing things up as The Hulk.
It appears my ability to empathize has gotten a heavy dose of Banner's gamma radiation, because it is alarmingly easy for me to slide into another person's shoes and not just assess their emotional landscape, but to integrate those emotions into my own emotional landscape.
This is not good.
I take that back. It can be good. My ability to empathize has given me a unique strength as a reporter, because I am almost always interested in the multiple facets (both sides?) of a story. Even if we're dealing with a straight crime story, where - to most folks - there's good and bad and right and wrong and hang 'em high is the only answer, I always want to know what's underneath. In the most evil actions, I want to understand how the evil person got that way. I want to walk in their shoes.
In my life, however, I struggle with this...empathy. I get angry with myself. I call myself names, like "idiot" and "sucker" and it is true that I have been victimized by my own ability to feel another person's pain. I am all emotion with no capacity for calculation. I became enmeshed with my father and my ex, and held on tightly to these relationships long after it was clear that each, in its time, was killing me. I could see these men as the little boys they once were, and I wanted to protect them. I thought if someone could just be kind to them...
Blah.
I was barraging myself with these sorts of insults one day when a friend stopped me and pointed out that this ability to empathize must have, at some point, been a very useful tool.
So I began thinking about some of the things I know about child development and infant attachment. I began to wonder what use empathy might have been to me, as a small girl, in a dangerous place. It seems a rather useless tool, when you're trying to stay alive.
Hmmmm....
The Wiki on the Hulk series from the 70s says this...
Doctor David Banner is a physician/scientist who is traumatized by the tragic car accident that killed his beloved wife Laura. Haunted by his inability to save her, Banner studies incidents of people who, while in danger, somehow managed to summon superhuman strength in order to save their loved ones.
My dad once related to me a tale I found chilling yet luridly fascinating. I don't remember this incident, but because of where he said we lived at the time (we moved a lot when I was small), I must have been about five or six. That would have made my brother - ten months my junior - about four or five.
Dad told me my brother and I had misbehaved in some way, so he took us out on the back deck, tied us up, and left us there. He said after some time, he heard a pounding on the door. It was as forceful a pounding as can come from a tiny fist. When he opened the door, he saw his oldest child, a quivering whisper of outrage, who immediately demanded he go untie her brother
right now.
He said to me, with great and - to me - perverse pride, "That's when I knew you were strong."
Um...
ok, dad. That may or may not be when I knew you were crazier than a
shithouse rat, but I digress...
I hadn't been "strong" for me, if that, in fact, could even be called strength. I was "strong" for my brother. In fact, I can't think of a time when I was ever really "strong" for me.
When in danger (following the line of thinking from The Hulk Wiki lol), it is from this well of empathy that I summon the strength to save my loved ones, and in saving my loved ones, I save myself. Interesting.
I was able to love my parents, even when they did awful things, because I could recognize and even feel their pain. Every little girl needs to be able to love her parents. Empathy was the tool I used to be able to do that. And I still love them, um, most of the time, even though one is dead and one mostly drives me crazy.
It was when my empathy for my daughter became more powerful than my empathy for my husband that I was able to emotionally disengage from him, which eventually allowed me to leave him.
It is my empathy for my baby that allowed me to care for her in a healthy way when I had no models for positive parenting.
I guess it has been a pretty useful tool, now that I think about it. Maybe I haven't learned to control it yet. David Banner still hasn't learned to control his anger.
But, guess what? My Little Fire and I and learned tonight that you can make friends even with a Night Fury, put a saddle on it, and together you can soar.
My life worked out in such a way today that I didn’t make it to class until it was ending. I made it just in time to turn in my midterm – a take home – talk to my very kind professor for a few moments, and leave.
So the universe conspired against me today to see to it I didn’t make it to class.
Damn universe.
Except I’m not sure it was the universe. I think I did it on purpose. I didn’t have this thought until I was driving to class, so late, and now I’m certain it’s true.
A lot of people have a hard time believing people can intentionally do things without being aware of their intention, but I think people do it all the time. Think about the things for which you’ve been late or the things you’ve missed…did you want to be there? As I type this, I realize I’m not offering up a new and brilliant insight into human behavior. It strikes me that this is often called passive-aggressive behavior.
But today I was being neither passive nor aggressive. I think I was trying to save my sanity.
I love this class. It’s called Family Interactions, and we are learning about the concept of family, the working parts of a family, how the players interact, what family means in different cultures. We’ve discussed dating and cohabitation and marriage and divorce, accompanied by a forest full of trees worth of studies dissecting every aspect of human relationships and the family.
It’s fascinating. It’s engaging. The class is full of smart and passionate people who argue and debate and sort and tease. It's guided by a man who knows his stuff and loves to teach it. He loves to lead us into a discussion and watch us figure out for ourselves what we think it all means. It is the intellectual equivalent of breakfast, lunch, dinner and a healthy snack, if you’re me and just enthralled by this stuff.
It’s also real, revealing, and for me, it’s getting dangerous.
Today we were to discuss family functioning. Next week it’s intimate abuse and violence. I am in full flight mode. These classes scare the hell out of me.
All of this is exacerbated by the fact that since my health insurance lapsed, I have not filled a single prescription. First my anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications ran out. I was ok with that. I felt emotionally healthy enough to test these med-free waters. I did really well, for awhile. Then, the Dexamethasone ran out. This helps regulate my adrenal (fight or flight) hormones. Then the Levoxyl. Thyroid meds. Your thyroid function has a very direct impact on your mood and mood stability. Then the Metformin. I’m not sure what that does for me lol, but it regulates my cycles, so it must be important.
Add to this my hospitalized dad, my imprisoned brother, my absent (whether he’s in the room with you or a million miles away) brother, my dead mother and sister, my mercurial boyfriend, my mental-illness-poster-boy-ex-husband, my delightful but labor-intensive four year old, my precarious money situation that makes my life with my daughter a house of cards, and now full-blown insomnia…and you have me, in alternating states of barely restrained panic or untethered from myself in full-on depersonalization, both of which – in me – do a fairly spot-on impression of mania. I’m very afraid the people I speak with will think I’m on crack, actually.
But I’m not on crack. I’m not on anything. That’s the problem.
----------
Part two of today’s post, Ditching Class, begins now. I filled my Dex, Levoxyl and Metformin scrips tonight. I took them. I’m not racing so much. I feel tired and like my blood pressure has dropped. I don’t know if it was actually high lol, but it feels like it has dropped. I have a headache.
So that’s something.
But before I completely lose this stream of thought, I want to explain why I think my class may be terrorizing me.
In January, 2004, this was published on Salon. It was a response to the online magazine’s request for tales regarding “The state of your unions.”
Baptism by fire
My live-in boyfriend had cheated on me. It was a public embarrassment -- everyone knew. During the struggle that culminated in infidelity, he hit me for the first time and said horrible things to me. He came and went as he pleased. He was cold. Hostile. Brutal. Defiant. I was pleading, resentful, enraged and exposed. My response to this emotional sinkhole? Let's get married. And we did.
My marriage was to be a baptism. A sacred ceremony to save me from my sinking shame.
For me and my husband marriage became proof to the world that we were indeed lovable and able to love. Normal. Acceptable. The actual ceremony took place -- after just two days of planning -- on Halloween. Appropriate.
Our tentative partnership was born from mutual need. Aren't most? But our individual needs were more desperate and choking than most. Union didn't ease the terror, but twisted it. We didn't fill each other up. We went about bashing the vessels.
Not too long after the wedding, we were back where we began. You cannot (I hope) imagine the verbal bludgeons that one person can use on another. Fat. Disgusting. Loser. My mother is critically ill and he hopes she dies. My brother is in jail and he hopes he gets raped. My sister committed suicide and he's glad. Physical violence ranges from kicks and punches to litter boxes dumped on my head and his ass wiped on my face. I am not joking.
This is my husband. He's supposed to protect me. I am full of screams that don't come. Sorrow and loss and rage and recrimination. I allow it. I'm still here. The shame from which this unholy union was born is the shame that keeps me here.
Here's the kicker. No one suspects it. I'm a rising star in my industry. Strong-willed and outspoken. I'm an independent feminist. I kept my name. He is amiable and considerate. The picture of the liberal 30-something man. We appear united to all, while our home is a burning bunker.
To be fair, there have been splashes of sweetness. He is childlike sometimes, and I want to protect him. His vulnerability and need seem accessible then. I feel like I glimpse his humanity. I feel like I can reach him. But they're only splashes.
Now I crave kindness. I long for loyalty. I dream of a steadfast man who will love me completely. Someone I can love without fear. That's still what marriage means to me. But marriage won't wash you clean, and it won't save you. If you're looking for salvation, look somewhere else.
-- Anonymous
Of course, I wrote that. It was, as Emily Dickinson wrote from her rural Northeastern town,
my letter to the world, That never wrote to me. I still feel as though I should ask you to judge my ex kindly, because he once was an infant someone hurt, horribly, before he was an often cruel and always confused man.
Until tonight, only four people have read this who knew I was the author. My ex-husband, who had nothing to say. My mercurial boyfriend, who has a deep and abiding hatred for my ex. My friend Linda, who gently and lovingly supported me as I made a series of controversial decisions several years later, and my brother, who took my tentative attempt at connection as an opportunity to critique my writing.
Of course, talking about this kind of violence is not something my brother is capable of, except to joke, “If dad taught us anything, it was how to take a punch.”
Family functioning. Intimate abuse and violence.
My family of origin and my family of “choice” simply did not function. Intimate abuse and violence was the primary language in both.
So I ditched class tonight. I think I did it on purpose. I don’t want to do it next week.
Now I have my meds. Not the ones my mind likes, but the ones my body needs. I hope by writing this, and acknowledging what I think was my intention tonight, I can push through it next week. I think it’s important I’m there to "represent." I think I have a responsibility to "represent," because not only am I gaining the knowledge I hope will end with me proudly walking across a stage to accept a Masters of Science in Educational Psychology: Human Development and Family Studies, thereby achieving the first goal in my life I actually chose for myself, but I think I am teaching some of my classmates, as well. They wonder who these people are, who marry men who hit them, humiliate them and cheat on them. They wonder who these people are, who stay with these men for years, even though they know they may not survive. Many don't.
I can say to them “I am one of these people. What would you like to know?”
I almost remembered something the other day. It's something about yellow.
I was driving to class. I'm almost always driving these days, it seems. I've learned short cuts and work arounds and new routes to keep boredom at bay. Most days I ease into a zone that is all thought skittering to thought with no presence in the here.
But this day, the other day, a color caused me to careen into the present then lurch toward the past, where I raced toward this memory that was racing toward me.
The color was yellow. Butter yellow. Bleached gold on an old pickup. It was ahead of me and off to the right. It was suddenly the only shade of anything on a highway of grey. I was entranced as I raced toward this memory racing toward me. It was this specific hue of yellow that did it...
We almost met. We almost touched. I almost knew. But suddenly, as sudden as only yellow can be, this piece of me reached the end of it's tether and snapped back into its safe for safe keeping.
I haven't remembered this memory, but now I know it's there, waiting for me to retrieve it. I don't think I want it and I think I wish it would go away. Because there's one thing I know for sure...
I hate yellow.
