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Post by tapati on Jun 8, 2009 5:59:48 GMT -5
I can understand your confusion about an experience that is clearly foreign to you. I understand also that you are not meaning to start an argument or blame the victims. It's difficult to generalize because there are some differences from woman to woman. It's not about personality type. It has more to do with the previous life of the woman involved, what she has come to expect of normal behavior from her family of origin, what she knows and understands about men at the time she got involved, and how smooth the abuser is at gradually drawing her in and inspiring her love and devotion before beginning the first steps in his campaign of isolation, control, and then abuse. You will recall, if you've read the blog stories, how Laura was thought of as very independent and stubborn. No one would have imagined she'd end up with Dale and stay with him. Likewise, does Vyckie strike you as a shrinking violet? (I almost have to laugh, here.) In both cases, they were involved in a belief system that submission to the husband was vital and necessary to receiving the grace of God and salvation! That's not necessarily an element in every controlling or abusive relationship, but certainly in the QF movement or the fundamentalist Mormon offshoots it is, and many other coercive religious groups. Once you already love someone, and have seen a gentle side of them, when the abuse begins you think of it as something they can overcome. They express such heartfelt remorse (if they are not sociopaths) that it is easy for a time to cling to the belief that everything can work out in the end. Some will even stop for periods of time, leaving the wife to believe that the nightmare is over. Perhaps there is a strong ethic against divorce, whether because one has survived it as a child and feels strongly about not replicating the family pattern or because of religious values. Perhaps you don't even know anyone who has a healthy relationship, have never witnessed one, and so just believe that this is the way it is for all or most people. Then there is the question of resources. If you married very young to escape a dysfunctional family, or soon after leaving one, you feel like you are between a rock and a hard place. Stay with the new abuser or return to the old, or be on the streets. These seem to be the only option. (When I left my abusive first husband, many years ago, shelters were only just being established. Even now they are often full up!) Then there is the very real threat made to "find you" and the inference that death will follow very shortly thereafter. There may seem to be no escape. (I had to flee by train across country.) No one who knew me as a teen would have imagined that I would stay with an abuser. I've always been stubborn, refused to bow to authority, and was known as a non-conformist. But I was woefully ignorant about relationships, warning signs of abuse, domestic violence in general, and dropped out of high school to leave my family. (I was so ignorant of domestic violence that when I watched a TV movie about it I decided it must not apply to me after all because I wasn't injured severely and hospitalized like the characters in the movie. No, I was merely knocked around, hit repeatedly in the head, choked, and so on, but had few visible bruises outside of my clothing. It was a very discreet abuse. I was 17--22 at the time.) Likely, at this age and stage of your development, being educated in such matters, you wouldn't fall for the early stages of an abusive relationship. I wish all young women were so educated and had robust self-esteem, supportive and healthy families, a belief that the healthy relationships they've seen modeled for them all their lives can be theirs too, and so on. That's not the case. And I have to say, I'm weary of being asked the "stay so long" question so often over the years. I wish we'd focus far more, as a society, on how young men grow up to be abusers and how we can stop this cycle of abuse. In the last 40 years it feels like we have made NO progress on reducing the amount of abusive men in our society. References (from my life): Why Don't You Just Leave That Jerk? www.labyris.com/jerk.htmlThe Mahasraya* Stories (and more): tapati.livejournal.com/393607.html*my first husband's name in the Hare Krishna movement.
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Post by tapati on Jun 8, 2009 6:35:43 GMT -5
Another good discussion on the subject of domestic violence, women leaving, Chris Brown and Rihanna, and why men batter and what we need to do to stop them. www.feministing.com/archives/014254.htmlComments come after an interview with Traci C. West.
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vana
New Member
Posts: 6
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Post by vana on Jun 8, 2009 6:49:51 GMT -5
Unfortunately, my answer to that question was a kind of “last minute” added on thing that I didn’t fully explain. If he asked me to not be alone, in a private setting, with an opposite-sex friend (which has nothing to do with ending my relationship with said friend or hanging out with a group of mixed-sex friends or even hanging out alone in the public place with that friend (movie theaters, to me, are sketchy when figuring out if they‘re “public” or “private”)) I would probably agree at first, but only in the beginning of a relationship. At that point trust is still being built (you can’t trust someone overnight) and has a shaky foundation, so some level of insecurity is almost expected. However, I would require that we work on building trust in one another and if it ever got to the point where I would trust him alone with another woman (which should happen sometime fairly early in a relationship), but he still doesn’t trust me alone with another man- that’s when it would end. Many men who turn out to be abusers never even try to work on their negative behaviors through therapy or other avenues- another huge warning sign. I do apologize for using putting “boyfriend/husband” in my original answer as I’d never marry who didn’t trust me, which is also what a request like that is about.
I do understand that, actually. I understand that many women in abusive relationships enter them with low self-esteem, which only gets worse when their boyfriend/spouse starts damaging that self-esteem further. I guess the thing I most interested in is- how does it get to that point you‘re talking about?
I have a mental picture of the progression of an abusive relationship as a literal slippery slope. At the top of the hill is the beginning of the relationship, before any warning signs of abuse appears and when either party is free to walk away without being damaged, and the bottom of the hill is where a person is “stuck” in the relationship with no financial or social support and definitely being abused (and probably has been for a while). Obviously, once you’re at the bottom of the hill, deciding to walk away is no longer as easy as taking the hand off the stove. You’re “entrenched”, for lack of a better word.
However, when you’re actually in the process of sliding down the hill, I have a hard time believing that there doesn’t come a moment when one realizes they’re falling. This is at a point before there are no options, before that self-esteem has all been whittled away, before all other social support has been stripped away. Some choose to ignore the problem and keep sliding, others hope it’ll get better and keep sliding, and others decide to leave the relationship. I think it’s important to try to learn what separates the first two kinds of people from the last kind, so that we can help every abused person to take the last option.
There’s being able to tell good men from bad men, and then there’s being able to tell what is and isn’t safe/healthy. I grew up with my biological father for the first 14 years of my life who, though he never touched my mother, was abusive to his children and had no problem hitting women. I was raised around him and his druggie friends and never had a positive male role model. In fact, it took me until my late teens, when I developed some male friends who were raised properly, to even realize that there were no instances where a woman might “deserve” to get hit by a man. But in all that time, I never developed a relationship with an abusive man because I knew what an unhealthy marriage looked like (my parents‘) and knew I wanted something (anything) that wasn’t that kind of relationship. Granted, it’s a sort of roundabout way of choosing a man (by process of elimination of character traits that I knew were bad) but can be effective, even without actually knowing the traits of a good man.
Actually, I was raised that divorce is a horrible, sinful thing. As I mentioned before, I’m agnostic now, so... that really didn’t take with me. Plus, there are plenty of non-religious women who stay in abusive relationships. However, I do think that’s a good (if it’s honest) response if someone questions “why did you stay?” I could definitely understand someone who said “I believed my religion when it taught me that divorce, for any reason, is a sin and I would go to hell” Of course, that probably opens up further questions like “So what changed your mind?” and “Then why did you choose/stay in that religion?”
.....
Vulnerable and strong, to me, aren’t mutually exclusive traits. You have to have strength not to mentally crack under abuse (especially long-term) and you have to have an amazing amount of strength to leave an abusive relationship but, by being in an abusive relationship in the first place, one has to be vulnerable in some way.
I think this is where the nature of compromise in a healthy relationship comes in. If someone prefers their partner focus on just them, and not have any other relationships, that’s not a bad thing in-and-of-itself (though it does seem like a selfish thing) However, if their partner enjoys having outside friendships, it’s not healthy (even if may not be abusive, which is arguable) to try and get them to end those just for one’s own pleasure. I don’t see a problem expressing a wish your partner would spend more time with you, if you feel that way. However, you should also want your partner to have those outside friendships because it makes them happy and you should want them to be happy. And they should want to spend more time with you (perhaps at the expense of some of the time they used to spend with those friends, but certainly not all) because that makes you happy.
Tapati, thank you so much for your very thought provoking post. There’s a lot to think about and digest in it and you did address my main point of confusion with this-
I definitely realize that the mechanics of escaping a long-term abusive relationship are not easy in the slightest, so I’ve never been confused about that part. However, your passage right there goes back to my above point of the slippery slope and what makes a woman stay after she realizes she being abused but before she’s out of options at the bottom of the hill. I’ve always assumed that signs of abuse would show up while you were in the process of falling in love, but perhaps I’m wrong about that. It does make a bit more sense to me that it would be harder to leave an abusive person you’re already in love with than to leave someone you’re only falling in love with, who shows dangerous red flags.
I agree that it seems like society hasn’t done much to reduce the number of abusers, but I think this may be a direct result of focusing more on the “resources for women escaping” side of thing. Resources are finite and it’s probably easier and more practical to build safe houses for battered women and provide food, clothing, shelter, monetary, and legal aid to abusees than to try to cut down on the number of abusers (I’m actually not even sure how that could be done) Society has always been better at the “cleaning up after the fact” stuff than “let’s proactively work to stop it from happening in the first place” initiatives. However, we do now that abuse is, in large part, learned and cyclical. Maybe by providing more resources for women with children to escape abusive homes now, we’ll cut down on the number of boys who were raised learning abuse from their fathers/stepfathers/mother’s boyfriends and there’ll be less abusers with the next generation? One can only hope.
And thanks for the links, I’ll definitely check them out.
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Post by rosa on Jun 8, 2009 9:40:13 GMT -5
linnea - it's not so much that isolating someone is abusive, that depends on the person's need for intimacy. But isolating someone makes them much more vulnerable to abuse, as does controlling their finances and having more physical power than they have. None of those things equals abuse on its own but they are major tools for abusers. It's actually totally possible for an abuser to not isolate their victims - all it takes is collusion and support from the community. Look at Grandmalou's story, or the stories imbedded in the Pink Gang article I posted - in a lot of communities, some people are designated as OK to abuse and then no isolation is needed because nobody's going to help the victim. It's when victims band together in solidarity that they get the mainstream to change that isolation becomes so important as a mark of abuse.
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aimai
Full Member
Posts: 172
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Post by aimai on Jun 8, 2009 9:59:36 GMT -5
I don't mean to get all personal and stuff but Vana's ideas about what she would do and her absolutist stand on what is or is not “abuse” or a red flag or “a hot stove” really don't say anything about what she would, or would not, do in a long term relationship that went sour with all the long term issues: property, children, friends, family, church, health, work, violence issues that can go along with that. You are all very polite to take her perspective so seriously—kisekiliea says that Vana “must have high self esteem”and assumes that its true that Vana wouldn't stand for an abusive relationship for a single minute. And I think the bank robbery example is pretty damned on point—especially if you factor in a hostage situation which is what these relationships come to be. Vana's version of reality is that she has no duties towards other people in a complex relationship, no pressures, no financial debits, no ties. That's simply not the case.
That's just really a sick joke, though. Plenty of amazing women—astounding women, highly educated, deeply loved, fully in the world have fallen first for love, then for marriage, then for the baby carriage and a spiral down into an abusive and even deadly relationship. Vana sounds terribly young, to me. As though she's a person who has never gotten past the dating stage, when (historically) women have been treated the best in their relationships. Its the time when the woman has the most power—she's not living with her abuser, she still has alternative employment or parental support, or she's still at school and planning her future, etc...etc...etc... Its easy to pick and choose the behaviors you think you want in your lover, or to reject some guy for a wide variety of things you don't want. Let alone “get out” because he starts showing the signs of maybe being an incipient abuser.
As the women on this board have testified, too, there's no universal standard for what is “abusive” or “intolerable” behavior. What is intolerable in one faith community is absolutely de rigeur in another. If my husband insisted on my ritual bathing before sex, or on having sex with me through a sheet, or on getting up every morning and thanking god he wasn't born a woman I'd find that pretty intolerable. Incredibly enough those things are standard among a certain orthodox community.
In addition Vana's arguments don't make any sense in a real world setting in which women become progressively tied down by their children and responsible for their children. Sure, if you knew that your spouse was becoming so abusive he would kill you most women might up and leave. But no one knows anything for certain in this world. And its part of the pattern within any abusive relationship that a kind of dance is set up between abuser and abusee in which the abused person is uncertain of what the outcome of certain interactions will be—their timing, duration, severity. One response is for such a person to be unwilling to try something new, like running away, because they calculate that it will escalate the usual retaliation. The old normal becomes tolerable because the projected attack is assumed to be worse. Alternatively, sometimes abused women will combat the chronic uncertainity and helplessness of their position by at least seizing control of when and how they are abused—studies of abused women sometimes reveal that they choose, within the limited range of options available to them, to “push his buttons” or force a violent situation simply in order to remove the tension of the building violent episode. Imagine an abusive man coming in the door spoiling for a fight. You know you can't prevent the fight, you can only try to get it over with quicker and get to the make up stage where he pretends to be sorry. Well, there's some agency for you if you force the fight into the open and get him to beat you first instead of waiting through hours of tension before he works himself up to do it of his own volition. But its not much agency and not much triumph.
I detest these discussions of peoples lives, mens and womens, that insist on a spurious notion of agency and free choice. People are not free to choose. And they become progressively less free as they get tied down by life, money, children. We owe it to them to help them become more free, and perhaps we may choose to emphasize agency and choice as ways of doing that. But agency and choice are cultural constructs that exist within a real world system of checks and balances in which some people (the ones who are willing to be violent, who control the religion, who control the law, who control the children, who control the finances) have more power than people who don't.
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Post by sargassosea on Jun 8, 2009 10:36:32 GMT -5
Aimai - Right On.
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Post by grandmalou on Jun 8, 2009 10:57:07 GMT -5
Thanks, Aimai, WELL SAID! And Sea and others who really GET THIS! So...how about that suggestion someone made on here about teaching our sons how to respect and cherish the women they are with??? What a novel idea! How about tenderness instead of kicking the women around like footballs? How about smothering their baby's faces with kisses? How about a return to opening doors for her? How about this example...my grandfather used to bring company home for lunch...dinner...whatever. He was a farmer, and often had crews of neighors who helped with whatever. Grandma would cook up a fine meal for them all. Grandpa would encourage them to stay, eat hearty, but they had BY GOSH better not get up, belch, wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and leave the table without a nice compliment to the LADY of the house who had provided them with that nice meal. And carry their plates to the sink. And he meant it! And so if I had a glass of something right now to raise, I would do it to fine, GENTLEMANLY grandfathers everywhere... If you know one, give him a HUG from me...OK?
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Post by tapati on Jun 8, 2009 13:29:51 GMT -5
Vana, the early signs can be quite subtle. It would be nice if the hitting and more overt signs began in the dating phase. It is much easier to leave someone then! But a savvy abuser waits until the woman is good and hooked. I wasn't abused until I was living with my abuser, far away from my family (and their dubious help). Years later I heard about the more subtle signs to watch for, but I didn't know them at 17. (Interestingly, my ex wasn't one of those who completely isolated me from friends, which was a good thing as it helped me escape.)
My mom was a single parent so I didn't observe a physically abusive relationship myself before I was in one, except for knowing one friend who was and being shocked that she would tolerate that!
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Post by arietty on Jun 8, 2009 21:22:23 GMT -5
Tapati I have just finished reading your story in your Livejournal, all the entries about your marriage, thank you for writing it. It brought back a lot of memories of my own naivety and innate idealism (I also married young).
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Post by philosophia on Jun 8, 2009 22:23:31 GMT -5
A better way (though probably not 100% accurate) to put it might be that deciding to leave an abusive relationship, I would think, should be as easy as deciding to take your hand off a hot stove. Arietty, you say it's more difficult than that, but I just don't understand why (again, the line of logic gets to a certain point and there's just a mental disconnect for me. Though I hate very much to even think it, maybe there's just an inherent difference in personality types that causes some people to be predisposed to a mindset that encourages vulnerability?) A abusive marriage injures the abusee and a hot stove injures the person touching it. End of the logic line- no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s. And what if you had been raised to believe or come to believe that DIVORCE was going to involve far more burning than the hot stove? What if you believed in Hell and thought that breaking a marriage really put that on the table as an option? Or don't even bother with Hell, just open up any Christian magazine today or any secular media 20 years ago and you will find endless articles and statistics about how divorce damages children. That meme has been a very aggressive one, hence generations of couples staying together "for the children". Many women come to believe that by leaving they are choosing the lesser of two evils. Truly, it is a hard thing to believe that you are not choosing an evil by leaving for yourself and your children, you are choosing a very good thing. (I think that went a long way to estranging me from my fellow christians, that I always stated that my divorce was 100% a good thing). Some of the women I've know who have spent years in abusive marriages are the strongest women I've known. They are bound there by ideology, fear based ideology for the most part. Sometimes they are hugely idealistic, they believe everything WILL be better even if this does not happen until Heaven. It takes a lot of strength to persevere in an abusive situation, believing this is what you are called to do by an omnipotent being. These women are not pictures of vulnerability. Sometimes they are pretty damn fierce. These are the people who usually burn out and find themselves with crumbled beliefs and wake up and smell the coffee of what this belief system and their devotion to it has done to their families. Thank you so much for that description. Vana does not understand because she does not have 9 children who love and worship their Daddy and believe that Mommy is wrong for wanting to leave the world they have always known. That is all they have ever known, and to make your own children "suffer" to save your own sanity seems selfish. And the Church tells you it is selfish and sinful. Until you finally realize that it is NECESSARY. Then you leave. The hand on the stove was WAY too simplistic.
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Post by luneargentee on Jun 18, 2009 15:41:03 GMT -5
My sister was physically abused. My cousin was physically abused. I have a coworker who does not recognize that her husband's "possessiveness" (her word), controlling behavior and isolating is abuse.
I never thought my sister or cousin would put up with abuse. They were the tough ones, the mouthy ones, the physical ones. But it still happened. I've search for contributing factors and came up with a few:
Both of them were in second marriages. They felt as though they would look like failures to have a second marriage end in divorce.
They both had more than one child. The multiple children made the ability to leave that much more difficult. Having one child while single is hard; two children raises the difficulties exponentially; having as many children as QF women do, makes the task incredible. I don't know how Vyckie does it.
Both were surprised. The abuse didn't start during the courtship or early in the marriage. The abusers both had decent jobs. There were no real financial issues. It was a gradual build-up over several years, especially for my sister. My sister only left because our nephew (our other sister's son) found her after the last incident and called our parents. Our parents went to her home, then called the police. My cousin left when her husband started threatening her child from her first marriage.
They could not immediately face the work needed right away. They had to build their staircases out of the relationships. It can be very difficult to pack a suitcase and walk away from your home.
There are a lot of questions involved in leaving the abuser:
Where do you go? If you have parents, can they take you and your children in? If they can't, do you have the money for a motel? Do you have money saved that will get you an apartment? How do you save money if he controls the finances? If you have money hidden away, can you pass a credit check to even get an apartment? Do you really want to stay in a shelter? How can you leave all your possessions behind? It can be extremely hard to walk away from a comfortable bed, the sofa you curled up on with your kids to read with them, your clothes (because you can't pack all of them), your children's toys. How do you answer your children's questions? They're scared. They may be scared if they've seen Daddy hit Mommy, but they're even more scared to be leaving home, especially if they believe they'll never go back. What do you do if you don't have a car? Most places in the U.S. do not have or only have minimal public transportation. What will you do about the children's schooling? How will you get them to school? What will they tell the other children?
That's a lot of questions, and that probably doesn't even cover half of it.
I worked in a family law office for a while. I have seen some pictures, read some reports, heard some stories that made me sick. At that point, the women were getting divorces, but few of them were ever just suddenly battered and walked out.
I also think Stockholm Syndrome kicks in. Many of these women will say, "I still love him," which most of us just can't understand. But almost every moment they are focused on the abuser. If he's not there physically, he's invading their every thought.
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Post by rosa on Jun 18, 2009 16:45:35 GMT -5
One thing that was really hard for me to understand was that emotions can be disconnected from behavior. So you can love someone who is bad for you. They can love you and still break you down. Your kids can love their other parent when living with them isn't healthy. Etc, etc. I like bell hooks definition of love as an action, not a feeling, but we're so trained to think love is the be-all end-all of a relationship, that's harder to wrap your head around. It leads to way too much energy put into analyzing the other person - did they really love me? Was it all a con? Was I stupid? Are they mentally ill? at points in time where that doesn't really matter.
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Post by coleslaw on Jun 18, 2009 16:50:15 GMT -5
I think mouthy, independent women stay with abusers because deep down it's easy for them to feel at fault for the problems in the relationship. It's easy not to fit the feminine stereotype (heck, who actually can fit it?); what's hard is feeling completely justified in not fitting the feminine stereotype. When problems develop in a relationship, there's that little voice that says, "Maybe everyone else was right about how I should act. Maybe if I hadn't stayed out late with my friends, fussed at him for coming home late from his friends, had dinner ready on time, kept the children quiet, he wouldn't have blown up at me." And in addition to that little voice, there are the big voices of friends, relatives, pastors saying "Well, what did you expect"?
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