Not My Demons

The yoke of emotional labor we force on abuse survivors

An actual miracle happened in my Catholic church recently, one that even the understandably post-religious or secular ‘Catholic-Cringe’ among you might find remarkable. This story involves nightmares, abuse, bankruptcy, endless pondering, and a miracle that does not involve religious statues crying tears of blood, all with one throughline.

Since the end of my abusive marriage, I have had PTSD nightmares most nights. The night before this story I dreamt I was dead, on a slab, and my abuser was dressing me up in the clothes he wanted me buried in (clothes not mine), then trying to shove his wedding rings back onto my embalming-bloated fingers. I was inside my dead body, experiencing all of this, but of course I couldn’t speak or act. When the dream reached a horror-climax I woke up, with the usual nightmare hangover - a headache, unable to actually move for a good while, even as my mind told me to do things that I knew might help, then finally moving through slow rituals of re-entry into reality.

The nether-world disorientation of a really disturbing nightmare stays with you for at least half a day, and since it was Sunday I found myself crying through Mass, roiling in confusion and guilt. In the face of hundreds of lawsuits caused by sexual abuse of children by priests, the Archdiocese of Baltimore has declared bankruptcy and is closing two-thirds of its churches, including ours. St. Vincent’s is in downtown Baltimore, in a heavily populated neighborhood with almost no formal housing, but a lot of highway-bridges, government-owned hotels, tents, tarps, and sidewalks that are the living spaces of those who stay there, long-term or temporarily. The church is dedicated to serving these residents, and it also has an ordination of women committee and an LGBTQ ministry. The first time I attended St. Vincent’s I arrived early, and found Father Ray sweeping the front steps in his full vestments, as he calmly mediated an angry dispute between two community members on either side of him. This is Father Ray’s day-to-day. Since surviving domestic violence I have been a peregrine, or wanderer, among the many factions of Christianity and their hugely varied places of worship. There is a lot in Christianity (and other organized religions) that can help abuse victims heal; church can be trauma responsive if we choose to make it so. But even in “liberal” non-Catholic churches where the ministers wear Pride flag shawls and are just as likely to be women, I have not seen one of them so much as pick up a feather duster unless it was for a performative charity event. St. Vincent’s is radical and radically different, beautiful in building and spirit and congregation.

I was abused at another institution in Baltimore as a child, a school, and I actively supported the legislation that is allowing former child victims to sue. Had I supported the demise of something beautiful in St. Vincent’s? Should I not even show my face here? Were we permitting retribution to make us all permanently blind? Whatever mental health professionals may believe to be the function of nightmares in PTSD, I know them to be the purgatorial ghosts of extreme dehumanization that was never corrected. The Catholic Church has experienced decades of PTSD nightmares, from the sexual abuse scandal alone. I could all but see the ghoul of that crushing harm walking among us at Mass, unresolved, not even clearly repentant, and then it curled up on my chest with the wracking dread-filled guilt commonly felt by abuse survivors. It was you - the ghoul told me - you did it, and now this true haven will vanish.

Then I felt a line from a survivor book called Reckless Years, in which Heather Chaplin turns and faces the guilts as they scream at her:

And suddenly I had the most extraordinary clarity and a simple series of thoughts presented themselves. These are not my demons. Why should I have demons? I didn’t do anything wrong. (p.286)

In the Bible, a demon refuses to name himself, because naming will give Jesus control over him - but the demon clawing at me in church does have a name, one as obvious as Joe or Mark: Misogyny. Only days before, I had been introduced to a concept that I have always known in my bones, but is explained in a paper by philosopher Ellie Anderson:

A pervasive form of care labor that falls largely upon women in contemporary American society should be described as “hermeneutic labor.” Related to emotional labor but distinct from it, hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of a) understanding one’s own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations, and presenting them in an intelligible fashion to others when deemed appropriate; b) discerning others’ feelings, desires, intentions and motivations, by interpreting their verbal and non-verbal cues, including cases when these are minimally communicative or outright avoidant, and c) comparing and contrasting these multiple sets of competing feelings, desires, intentions and motivations for the purposes of conflict resolution. (p.177)

Put more simply, hermeneutic labor is the mental work of being aware of your own emotional state and needs, the emotional states and needs of others around you, and “inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions.” This is largely invisible to those who are being served by it, because it takes place within the mind of the laborer. Hermeneutic is an annoying word that means ‘related to interpretation,’ and is frequently used in the context of interpretation of religious texts. Anderson explains that “scholars have argued that social expectations place an undue burden on women to manage both their own feelings and those of others,” especially romantic partners. All that time and brain-work spent ruminating on how to keep men happy, interpreting their emotional and mental state, making sure that we adapt to them and trying to make reality adapt around them, is a situation which may be “considered misogynistic in Kate Manne’s sense, where misogyny is a property of social environments rather than a world view.” (Anderson, p.176). Society organizes itself in the broad and more private sense by centralizing men, even down to the constant unconscious musings of women, who often engage in such labor unknowingly, as if it was inevitable.

This is more than an extension of the Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus understanding of male and female roles in relationships: it is the wavelength on which I have functioned from my earliest memory, and watched my mother perform as well. Without explanation, through example, I was taught to undertake hermeneutic labor as the essence of good manners, successful marriages, fruitful careers championed by men you could win over - except it never seemed to work out that way. The myth that humans only use 10 % of their brains would have been quite applicable to me, since the other 90 % was occupied with constant deliberation about what men and the “man’s world” was thinking and why, what it wanted from me, and what it could be up to next. I was never good at this, constantly missing the ephemeral mark. No wonder we are foolish, or spacey, or forgetful, or — we’re distracted by gauging the strength and direction of the undertow.

The dominant ideology views intimate relationships as “projects” that require burdensome activity for the purposes of both maintaining and deepening intimacy. Such projects are generally undertaken because intimate relationships are seen to meet core needs, such as the need for close emotional ties and self-development. Maintaining such intimate relationships requires complex interpretations and negotiations of feelings…women are taught that these activities are their job. (Anderson, p182)

My mother and everyone around us assumed that romantic connection with a man would determine her well-being, and thus I remember trying to see through my stepfather’s reflecting sunglasses at about 7 years old, to judge by his eyes whether his sarcasm prefaced humor or harm. Which may be why, as I sat in church feeling conflicted about abuse and justice, convinced that everyone around me thought I was responsible for the loss of their beloved church community, it occurred to me that there’s another extension: the hermeneutic labor placed on abuse survivors.

When drinking orange juice, it is more practical to pour it into a glass already designed for that purpose instead of onto the floor and lapping it up; for that reason I am going to pour my concept of abuse-related hermeneutic labor into Anderson’s glass of reasoning-words and take it from there:

A pervasive form of care labor that falls largely upon women in contemporary American society should be described as “abuse-related hermeneutic labor.” Similar to straightforward hermeneutic labor but distinct from it, abuse-related hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of a) understanding what actually happened to you and that it was harmful, dehumanizing and unjust, while constantly calibrating when it might be safe or appropriate to present this information in an intelligible fashion to others; b) encountering, via interpretation of verbal and non-verbal cues, the strength of societal bias, disgust, and avoidance regarding abuse and the motivations of others to engage in dismissal, victim-blaming and victim-isolation, and c) mentally comparing and contrasting these multiple sets of competing feelings, intentions, and motivations for the purposes of staying safe and sane.

This 24/7 rumination activity pierces your sleep-consciousness, causing nightmares. Maintaining composure when your reality is declared unreal, or when you are required to take responsibility for things which you did not do, requires complex psychological control, cognitive interpretations and negotiation of feelings…women are taught that assuming responsibility for all types of abuse and violations is their job.

For child abuse or DV survivors, the actual interaction between abuser and target creates hermeneutic labor on steroids, since there is so much at stake in trying to regulate (his) emotional state. Then, I would posit, abuse-related hermeneutic labor is the secondary struggle to interpret the meaning of the abuse, how to disclose it to others, look for help, process the ways that society reacts (or doesn’t react) to that disclosure, and then try to reconcile societal attitudes with the severity of what happened and its effects. For most survivors, the greatest amount of abuse-related hermeneutic labor comes in trying to figure out why the perpetrator chose to abuse them in the first place, why they are not believed, why many people don’t seem to care, why so much concern and understanding is given to the abuser, why people criticize her for speaking out or not having spoken out sooner, and why she is blamed for her own abuse. This can lead to such a crippling level of incomprehension, cognitive dissonance, sense of isolation and grinding rumination that it can preoccupy the survivor for years or decades.

Before I’m told to buck up, meditate, let go, forgive, think positive thoughts, recite affirmations, and practice gratitude, let me just mention that post-abuse hermeneutic labor is not something you plan or buy into. It just happens, it creeps up on you, because you have been conditioned by your abuser to take responsibility for everything, and to be responsible for taking care of everyone else by society. “Why are you so mean to me?” the pedophile math - teacher said to me when I was 12 and trying to get away from him; “he thinks I’m his girlfriend” was my hermeneutic thought, about as far into interpretation as I could get as a child who did not know why a 40-something man would be doing this to me, or that it had ever happened to any other girl. Forty years later, the perpetrator’s manipulative leveraging of guilt for my attempts to reject my female role as his needs-meeter has me feeling like I am responsible for the downfall of the Catholic Church in Baltimore.

As Chaplin’s quote about demons occurred to me, I asked myself if there was a demon that held all this together, and the answer was pretty obvious: misogyny - once again, of the societal more than individual kind, related to patriarchy. While many of the child victims of sexual abuse by priests were boys, and the discussion around this problem has included the possibility that forced celibacy for priests is a bad idea, the base reality is that all of the priests involved (an Attorney General’s reports cites 600 victims in the Archdiocese of Baltimore alone), centralized their “needs,” as they saw them, over the well-being of the children they abused, even though they knew what they were doing was wrong and societally unacceptable. The Archdiocese, ignoring the problem or moving priests around, and never reporting them to the authorities even when it was legally required, upheld the patriarchal importance of those men and their male-dominated institution as well. “Girls get crushes on their teachers” was the dismissive response of my school’s headmaster when he was told I was being abused, and then he quietly moved all the girls out of the predator’s homeroom class, because he knew it was actually true. The headmaster had no reason to keep that teacher on staff, except that he believed that men and their sexual proclivities were supreme, the natural organizing principal of society.

Male arrogance, male cruelty, and the institutions built around them are the reason St. Vincent’s may close, the reason I am still in conflict with my school, and the general throughline for calamities and instability throughout my life. Misogyny, patriarchy, and the soul-sucking demons of individual men are, and always have been, completely outside of my control.

I’ve been walking around with someone else’s demons my whole life. These are my father’s demons. He has demons because he’s done terrible things and he hates himself for it. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why should I have demons?

And then, very simply, something that had never occurred to me before: It’s not my fault.

And again, It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. IT’S NOT MY FAULT.

…All I know is a battle ensued. The demons began to howl and shake and then they descended, but not on me - on my father. And then they were gone, taking him with them. (Chaplin, p.286)

Only fundamentalist Christians and the too-smart-for-religion types will have a hard time with the concept of demons we’re using here, because both groups are equal in taking the idea too literally.

Unfortunately, there’s another element of Chaplin’s narrative that we are going to have to address, in order to get off the post-abuse hermeneutic labor gerbil wheel. That’s the assertion “It’s not my fault.” Although it’s a hard truth for almost all abuse survivors to accept completely, Chaplin is writing about childhood abuse, and thus her post-abuse hermeneutic labor will be concentrated more in the toil of ‘being believed’ and ‘are you sure?’, and less in facing our societal admonition to ‘take responsibility!’ for anything that happens to you. For many adult victims, no matter what the circumstances, this last societal dictum becomes an internal hermeneutic cage. And it’s everywhere.

The biases of others, if that is what they are, I would love to gift back to them. This is easier said than done. Many of my nightmares are about exile, being rejected or made homeless by people who were once friends. The combination of societal victim-blaming and post abuse trying to figure it out may be the root of those nightmares. But the harm many do in promoting over-simplified, intellectually one-dimensional stereotypes about abuse goes way beyond my nightmares. One in four women experience abuse by an intimate partner in their lifetimes (which includes stalking, verbal abuse sexual assault, intense control, and a variety of other behaviors), and I’d ask society to stop adding to that problem by promoting the widespread anti-victim cliches already entrenched in the minds of many police, judges, therapists and the general public.

I used to feel that intelligent discussion of relationship abuse was about as hard to find as a liberal Catholic church, especially as #MeToo concentrated on strictly sexual abuse and harassment, but it is not actually that bad and may be getting better. Victim-survivors and those who are genuinely interested in understanding this phenomenon can draw on the words and work of fellow survivors who have dedicated themselves to peer-education, and the more forward-looking anti-abuse organizations or professionals.

Sarah McDugal is one such survivor-leader, from a burgeoning group of women escaping abuse in the religious right. Exiles from fundamentalist Christianity are doing some of the strongest, bravest and most practical feminism in the U.S. today, partly because their religious communities taught them the skills of organizing, cooperation, and textual analysis, and they believe in justice and good without snark. McDugal speaks directly to survivors as her audience, and in this video she talks about the complicated and frequently confused ways in which we navigate responding to the abuse, in helpful terms:

I want you to know that you can recognize the truth of the situation. You don’t have to wallow in self-blame and self-recrimination. You don’t have to take on the blame for someone else’s poor choices, or abusive and exploitative and betraying choices…You are going to handle this as safely and wisely as you possibly can, given the dynamics of your particular situation.

Given the dynamics of your particular situation. She sees that we are individuals in a web of competing material, social and physical high-risk calculations simultaneously weighing a lot of bad options, which will all result in relative levels of poor outcomes. Why are you shaming someone with their leg caught in a bear trap, or trying to hobble on what is left of the leg afterwards? Look at who set the trap, and why. The motto of Safe and Together, one of the most internationally recognized anti-DV trainers for social service agencies, is simply “pivot to the perpetrator.”

This is where I have to stop, because the mental secondary abuse-labor tortures me, and there are so many circles to slide down. As my first job-action against abuse-related hermeneutic labor I will tell the cliches to (as my collegiate daughter would say) “low-key go and fuck themselves,” and move on. My therapist is a former Presbyterian minister and DV survivor, and she taught me an acronym that she uses to ward off intrusive thoughts, including societal bigotry: I think it starts with a P and I know it involves telling the Enemy - a concept of devil, demon or evil which intrudes in your life or thoughts and wants to take you down - to leave you alone. I wouldn’t normally associate mild-mannered Presbyterianism with direct confrontation with the Enemy, a wonderfully Baptist concept, but since she’s a survivor, she knows. I can’t ever remember the acronym when I need it, so I hold the tortuous rumination or bigotry up in my mind and say, with great ferocity: Pluff! The thought is returned, in that action, to the demon who brought it.

Maybe I should try psychedelics therapy, or the yoga and meditation I did throughout the abuse to push it out of my mind, or abuse re-experiencing to de-condition myself. But instead I think I’ll Pluff my way past this. In the midst of the crying and the demon-naming and all my own personal drama in church that day, an actual miracle happened: a gay male couple came to the dais, and they and their love for each other were blessed by Father Ray and the whole congregation (video below). This was not a spiritual or religious miracle, but a cultural one - an actual punching-up against the Patriarchy in its own belly. It was exactly what justice-driven, anti-trauma Christianity and feminism is supposed to be, and it lifted the yoke of ignorance right off of us. Pluff.

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St. Vincent’s Sunday Mass April 21, 2024, with emphasis on what happens at the 1:41 time mark.

* A section of this post as it was originally published has been removed, and will be included in the next post.