Call off the dogs is the phrase that my ex-partner/abuser suggested that I say to him when he was becoming aggressive. I took this suggestion very seriously as a survival tip, and in the concrete, short-sighted thinking of immediate safety, missed the real meaning and irony of his advice completely. The term is derived from the very White, male sport of foxhunting, in which dogs were used to help men on horseback find and chase foxes, that they shot. The dogs were also trained to retrieve dead foxes and bring them to their owners, like prizes, without further damaging them. Clearly I was the fox. The phrase acknowledged that he had control all along over the “dogs” that he set after me, and that that his verbally and physically ferocious canines were used to capture and control. He had a well-thought-out system backed by long tradition that he put in place to trap me, simple only because the means of entrapment are so common and baked into our cultural beliefs.
Professional and popular psychology have mostly responded to domestic abuse by training and donating their own hunting dogs to the abuser’s pack. From Freudian concepts of the masochistic victim, to Hysteria, Stockholm Syndrome, Co-Dependence, Learned Helplessness, Trauma Bonding and more, scientifically unsupported psychological theories that posit the problem of domestic violence as pertaining to the victim have become such a part of the cultural fabric that they are tools consistently used by abusers against us. Then they are applied in individual - and most especially - couples therapy.
In these essays and blog posts, the author and other survivors will explain what it is like to live surrounded by negative and distorted messages about you and your experiences, trying to stand against the hunter and his foxes of cultural bias. Survivor-life starts when you become the target of an abuser, who no matter what his original or conscious intention will use many of the tactics of the grooming con artist to draw you in, then extract what he wants from the relationship. Abusers use coercion, manipulation and violence to get their partner to give them or tolerate what we would not give or tolerate by choice. This can include obedience, constant attention and prioritization, sex, money, reproduction, childcare, housework, housing, social status, the acceptance of infidelity, someone to yell at - whatever the abuser wants to extract from the partner. Usually it is a combination of things. The techniques the abuser uses, stretching from false kindness to strangulation, are all equally in service to exploitation. This is usually a long-con, and continues on an extended but in some ways predictable path. Statistically, the survivor comes out the other side of the relationship in high physical danger, distrustful and afraid, to be smeared as a walking unsolvable social problem or psychological disorder.
In spite of our culture’s belief in “experts,” survivors with some time out of the abuse are the best art authenticators of the relationship realm; people who can reliably look at a painting, classify the fraud vs the genuine, and explain how the con artist created an image that looked so real that most people were fooled. It is a talent born of lived experience, a rapid-evolution third eye of sorts, that is widely dismissed or ignored by many professionals but not among ourselves. Part of what allows the con artist/a
buser to thrive is the “everything about them without them” way that society and the field of domestic abuse still largely operate toward victim-survivors in the United States.
In the past decade, survivor-leaders have emerged online that combine with closed mutual-support communities to create real, constantly available sources of information and counter-narratives to the overwhelming myths about domestic abuse. The only way for society to extricate itself from collusion with perpetrators, and from the grips of individual abusers, is to tune into the knowledge of survivors and our genuine allies, and work out what one mark alone cannot comprehend. This is help, clarity and sanity not dependent on government funding, the direction of political winds, wealth (with the not-insignificant assumption of access to the internet), or begging our persecutors to be kind to us. Since all that is needed for a survivor-resistance movement to flourish online is free speech, that is what individual abusers and “men’s rights” activists have been targeting, with increasing levels of anti-survivor harassment and legal abuse through civil, criminal and family-law courts.
In case you were wondering, I used the phrase to try to deter his abuse many times but it never worked, not once.