Disbelief to strangulation
I have some things to say about domestic abuse. And I’ll start with these quotes:
“I think about how easy it is for humans to make judgments when we’re standing on the outside of a situation. It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person.
Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us
“Most people have no clue hidden abuse is taking place right under their noses. It is being perpetrated by individuals who would never be suspected of being abusers. The concealed nature of this harm is what leaves its targets devastated….Normal people have a hard time comprehending that abusers go to such lengths, but they do.”
Shannon Thomas, Healing From Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse
“Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide.”
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (67)
I lost count of how many times his hands were on my neck. God only knows how many more times they were on my mother’s neck….
The first tool – construct the “sick” family system
And if anyone should ask again – why didn’t she leave? Snyder hints at part of the reason:
“Levels of dangerousness operated on a specific timeline. Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped only slightly for the next nine months…”
Certainly there were many more factors involved. And I will get into what happened in our house to show just how complicated domestic abuse is and how it is possible for anyone to be controlled in this way. So many women find themselves trapped, not just out of fear, not just by mind control, but by love – to me, the most powerful of the forces used against them.
Think it’s only a few weak women who can’t leave? Think it’s only certain women who are not strong or smart enough to fight back? Trust me when I say, like the book with the same title: It can happen to anyone. And it has, from stay-at-home moms to corporate CEOs.
The first tool is the family system – a sick one – that is constructed slowly by a masterful manipulator. That person selects and grooms victims carefully over time, then insidiously leads them into a trap of mind control where their identity and ability to even know what is true or real anymore is demolished.
And that’s my quote. I don’t need a research study to tell me those things. We lived it. I watched my mother be its victim. But I do need all the help I can get to understand how it happened, and why. I NEED that. So it does help when I read another’s explanation that validates our reality.
Finding validation
In her book See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, Jess Hill notes:
“…one thing stands out about abusers: it’s as if they’ve studied some kind of domestic abuse handbook. ‘They all have the same tactics.’…And eventually women go it’s just too hard, because they don’t want the fight. So that’s how it starts over time… And then your world gets smaller. And then if the perpetrator becomes your main frame of reference…it’s very much like a cult…’ It’s like you go to abuse school…’”
Hill goes on to note that:
“Speak to anyone who’s worked with survivors or perpetrators and they’ll tell you the same thing: domestic abuse almost always follows the same script…how is it that men from vastly different cultures know to use the same basic techniques of oppression…”
So it seems that domestic violence can happen anywhere. To anyone. If researchers are spotting such a wide-ranging and consistent set of patterns used by abusers, then that means those methods are successful, or they would have been abandoned long ago.
And if they are successful, that means the number of victims is larger than we may want to admit. And those victims can be anyone who is human…anyone who allows themselves to love and be vulnerable with another human being…but sometimes, anyone who simply opened their heart to the wrong human being.
What I can also say is that domestic violence catches you unawares, and its danger is real. Its tools are FORMIDABLE and many. In my case, because it started in infancy, those tools were like an almost unassailable fortress. But even if it starts later, those tools build a system that can take anyone, break their minds, and convince them that the abuse IS love. And again, that doesn’t come from anybody else’s quote or research. That was our life in that house, and that is what I am going to explore in this section.
Taking it slowly
In this section, I am going to break my search for answers into small pieces. I will go through it slowly, step-by step, so I can finally understand it all. And so anyone else who might be living in it can also understand and see they aren’t alone.
I also need to go slowly because even now, decades later, as I write about this, every fiber in my gut recoils, and the remembering turns my stomach in fear. Such is the power of even the memory of those years. So…slowly.
Flipping the question
To get started, let’s flip the question from the survivors to the abusers. And just to clarify something here, while I am speaking of women as the targets of abuse, which it was in my house, certainly the roles can be, and are, reversed – men can be the victims and women can be the abusers; or one of the partners in a same-sex relationship is the abuser and the other the victim. It can happen to anyone. But for ease of my telling about my experience, I’ll refer to how it was in my house. Just know…abuse is NOT gender-specific.
Flipping the question around:
“People spend so much time wondering why the women don’t leave. Where are all the people who wonder why the men are even abusive? Isn’t that where the only blame should be placed?”
Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us
And to me, that IS the question. But not the only one. I also want to know who ARE these men/people who would abuse, what IS this script that they use, and WHY?
The Korean War
“In the early 1980s, researchers noticed something else extraordinary: not only were the stories of victims uncannily alike, they also resembled the accounts of a seemingly unrelated group of survivors: returned prisoners of war…”
Jell Hill, See What You Made Me Do
So on that note, my next piece will talk about a “script” that came out of the 1950s North Korean Prisoner of War Camps…and how that relates now to domestic abuse.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Tags: abuse, domestic-violence, love, mental-health, writing
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