Snatched

The mental health field, with its droves of women practitioners, is steeped in a desire to coddle, excuse and protect men who do harm.

Trauma practitioners keep telling us, rightly, that Connection (feeling bonded to and supported by others) is essential to recovery. It presents an essential problem for women who are being subjected to or recovering from male abuse - a type of double-bind. We are looked down upon and blamed widely in society, and are surrounded by people (men) who share common identities with our persecutors and therefore don’t want to have to think about or discuss our experiences at all. Underfunded, hard-to-access and stiflingly over-professionalized domestic violence and rape crisis agencies have made supports groups, where women might have the chance to form friendships and soul-feeding solidarity, almost non-existent for most survivors who are not living in shelters - a miniscule minority compared to the whole. We lack protective in-group spaces like the Black church tradition and VFW halls.

That’s why the attitudes and level of understanding that mainstream “helping” professional have about us become essential. Despite their lip-service to supporting survivors and being informed about abuse, the reality once the survivor starts to interact with mental health and health professionals can be completely different. The only protective in-group survivors have access to is frequently women mental health professionals who hold values, biases and therapeutic ideologies disturbingly hostile to us.

Survivors also tend to emphasize different things, different goals and aspirations than the ones mental health professionals set for us, and never think to question.

I will start with a basic example of the difference in thoughts and approaches between many survivors of violence against women and mental health professionals, with the survivor almost always bowing to the professional’s outlook. Then I’ll get into the more twisted forms that professionals’ biases have taken in my own attempt to get over severe domestic violence, and give survivors a chance to talk about what actually helps and hurts us in trying to live after abuse.

…………………

I was about 16, walking on a Saturday afternoon through a quiet city business district on the way to my job in a flower shop. The only activity in the area came from a boisterous sports bar whose patrons I had studiously ignored as I walked by - which was the was the entirety of my male-attention safety plan.

At some point as I walked further down the street, a car pulled over next to me, the door opened and a guy jumped out of it. He grabbed me and before I knew what was happening I had been pushed into the back seat. There I encountered a lot of simultaneous yelling between four White frat boys, two of whom were yelling “No!” and “Stop it, dude!” Then I was yanked back out of the car, my lost-his-nerve kidnapper jumped in, and it sped off. I stood stunned on the sidewalk for a few minutes and concluded that it had been a boy’s dare; another ephemeral data point in a world’s worth of inexplicable behavior by men, who just did as they pleased. A tree had fallen in the forest mildly bruising the already wobbly sense of autonomy of a girl who had not been gang raped, no one had seen, so nothing had actually happened.

I knew that anyone I told would inform me how lucky I was that they had let me go, so I went about my day. About thirty years later I would hear a report on the radio for the first time explaining the #MeToo movement, and I would react with a strange, irritated urge to post #OfCourse, as if it were an outrage that anyone wouldn’t already assume that physical, verbal and psychological snatching by men wasn’t a constant reality for all women. My life included a list of this type of experience, quadrupled by what I had seen done to other women, and I still believe it to be the norm, not the exception.

I present this particular story because it is simple, not so ugly as to be off-putting, and will help me make a larger point. My understanding of it has not changed at all since the minute they drove away, an understanding that was not as much narrative then as intuitive knowing. This type of knowing is essential to the target, but is incessantly second-guessed and buried by therapists, clergy, Mindfulness and New-Age gurus, the self-help industry, family and friends. It’s interesting, for example, to notice the way that modern psychology simultaneously claims that one must “integrate” an experience into the psyche to recover from it, and (with a strong infusion of self-help and New Age ideology), accuses us of weaving stories about our experiences which are inherently biased and to which we become over-attached. If only we could see through the biases and emotional baggage we give to these stories, they tell us, we can be free. This ideology robs us of the last domain of stability and self-protection: knowledge.

A lot of societal truths mixed and fought in those couple of minutes that I was snatched, but it was still straightforward:

Cause:

1. Male entitlement and ego. This can go under the umbrella of sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, but is simply the fact that physical acquisition and possession of women and girls is a status symbol for too many men - interestingly irrespective of whether the woman chooses him or not. Being chosen was expressly not part of the equation the snatcher was going for.

2. The snatcher and the driver of the car, at the very least, believed that violence towards girls was acceptable, that their right to have fun or dominate made my safety and well-being meaningless, that laws did not apply to them. Whether they thought any of these things consciously or just assumed them is inconsequential. Their actions were the same in either case, and to the target of the harm the actions are all that matter.

3. Male entitlement over women can be mixed with other entitlements to make degradation and suffering worse, or it can stand quite resolutely as a cause on its own.

This event was clearly cut short by forceful intervention by the two men who were objecting. Why?

1. It is actively illegal to kidnap someone, and those laws are enforced enough to be a deterrent for some people. Those men did not want to spend even one hour in jail.

2. The men had something to lose - college, reputation, a future they were looking forward to.

3. They were not yet drunk enough to lose their fears and inhibitions.

4. Some of the men may have identified with me enough in our common whiteness to consider me off limits for dehumanization, or may have assumed that I would be protected by the law.

5. The men who objected may have been taught humanity, compassion and decency along the way, which caused a moral reaction to the situation.

I doubt I ever told this story to anyone but a few friends, but if I had the simple truths of it would have been snatched from me in the same mindlessly arrogant manner as the boy-man who grabbed me. My small flower of sanity-saving comprehension would have been mowed down to make room for the blanket ideology of some sort of helper, who would have said:

• To understand this story we must engage in deep conjecture regarding the psychological or personal histories of the boys in the car, seeking to understand them personally as individuals.

• My goal and duty as the victim is forgiving, closure, putting it “behind me,” using the incident as an opportunity for personal growth or a reason to feel blessed. Feeling anger, resentment or desire for revenge signifies failure on my part.

• It would be paranoia for me to conclude that men are dangerous to me just because I was snatched into a car as easily and quickly as you pick up a dry leaf. I must learn that the trauma and danger are in the past, and the only thing I must fear is my fear itself.

• To understand this story, to resolve it, I must sit down with the perpetrator(s) and talk.

The ideas in the first three bullets are pushed by many therapists, psychology and social work training programs, mediators, humanists, liberal Christians, 12-steppers, New Age and Mindfulness practitioners, the Oprah and Brene Brown pop-psychology types, and so-called “anti-carceral feminists.” The fourth is held by some of the same groups, but is mostly a nod to the increasingly influential Restorative Practices crowd. Too frequently, the aim of all these groups is to use the survivor to throw a warm blanket around the shoulders of the perpetrator, and draw him back into a fold.

The mental health field, with its droves of women practitioners, is steeped in sexism and a desire to coddle, excuse and protect men who do harm. This is especially evident when you are a survivor of male violence against women, and it becomes problematic when situations are far more traumatic or hard to comprehend than my frat-boy story. During and after a domestic violence marriage I looked to professional women, reached out to them, and they pushed me farther into the quicksand. They were very concerned about my abuser’s history of childhood trauma - a fixation that only further trapped me into the societal role as his fixer and would-be savior, and put me in deeper danger. No attempt to help him changed his behavior. Despite all their talk about brain science, there are still too many in the helping professions who have been lobotomized of whatever section should light up on an MRI when recognizing societal injustice and power-based cruelty.

Here is the take on domestic violence from Brene Brown, the top “vulnerability” - booster, in her pop-psychology bestseller I Thought it was Just Me:

As a social worker, domestic violence is a very important subject to me, and one that I spend a lot of my time and energy trying to understand. In Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Connection, she tells a story about Ron, a man who punches his wife, Sharon, in the face and stomach and is forced to attend court-ordered therapy sessions. Dr. Lerner explains that Ron resists being in a group of batterers but is willing and even interested in joining a group of men who have trouble controlling their anger. Dr. Lerner writes, “Ron was resisting the notion that his crime defined him. You might argue that Ron is a batterer and that any language that softens or obscures this fact leaves him less accountable for his actions, but Ron will be more likely to accept responsibility and feel remorse if he can view himself as more than a batterer. For people to look squarely at their harmful actions and to become genuinely accountable they must have a platform of self-worth to stand on. Only from the vantage point of higher ground can people who commit harm gain perspective. Only from there can they apologize.” Dr. Lerner goes on to explain that refusing to take on an identity defined by one’s worst deeds is a healthy act of resistance. If Ron’s identity as a person is equated with his violent acts, he won’t accept responsibility or access genuine feelings of sorrow and remorse, because to do so would threaten him with feelings of worthlessness. Dr. Lerner concludes the section in her book by writing, “We cannot survive when our identity is defined by or limited to our worst behavior. Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people will wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”  p.65

One problem with this is that we have known for decades that anger is only one component of domestic abuse, and thus it's not what abuser treatment is mainly about.  Also, it is part of the cycle of abuse for almost every batterer to “apologize,” express remorse, and then do it again.  Did the punches leave the wife with bruises, and did the bruises take a month to go from dark blue, to purple, to green, the way mine did? Brown is not interested in the experience of the survivor. This is DV 101 - and someone who had really spent "a lot of time and energy thinking about" domestic violence would have at least addressed these issues, but she says nothing more. Brown’s only direct social work experience was a brief stint as a substance abuse counselor, yet she presents herself as an expert in DV. It’s like an orthopedist lecturing women and society on obstetrics practice, because he’s a doctor. And yet we regularly have the mental health equivalent of the orthopedist treating victims of violence against women (VAW) everywhere, because we are everywhere, and they just push us randomly into whatever treatment modality they happen to know. There is no requirement in most social work, psychology or medical school programs to take a course on domestic violence.

I was in both individual and couples therapy while being battered, trying desperately to comprehend the incomprehensible without being sucked under.

When I raised my sleeve to show my individual therapist (a clinical social worker using a “trauma informed” modality) the abuse-inflicted bruises and cuts on my arm, she sighed and asked if we could “do some internal work”. Writing in the 1990’s, VAW pioneer Judith Herman explained in Trauma and Recovery that safety is a prerequisite before further trauma work can be done. But this therapist made it clear to me that she found the details of the danger I was in tiresome, and that the key to the problem lay in my own psyche. Her goal with me throughout our treatment was to learn how not to trigger my husband - something that was genuinely impossible and outside of my control. She never reviewed with me the cycle of abuse or the Power and Control Wheel, never connected me to a DV agency, never did a safety plan with me - I doubt she knew how. This very basic information-sharing and discussion would have been hugely helpful to me.

The woman my husband and I saw for couples therapy started a narrative that I was inappropriately psychoanalyzing him. I thought that understanding him was my only path to safety. She asked if there was physical abuse in the relationship only while he was present, making truth impossible. When he looked at me in a certain way during a session and I ran out of the office and took off in my car, she still did not call me or investigate the possibility of abuse, but it was clear she knew. The couples therapy rule that everything in a relationship is 50/50 was more important to her than my safety, so important that she used her power to denigrate and disable my last remaining resource: my capacity to name the violence I lived under. He used her narrative against me, a common outcome of going with an abuser to couples therapy.

Both of these therapists would have considered themselves feminists, which is something I cannot reconcile. Their professional incompetence may come from something I have noticed in many women: the desire separate themselves psychologically from a battered woman, to reassure themselves that they were not and would never be me.

By expressing anger toward the mental health field, as woman with a history of abuse, I am at great risk of being labeled with Borderline Personality Disorder. I have never been told I had BPD, but I would not be surprised to find it in these therapists’ notes. Seventy-five percent of people diagnosed with BPD are women, seventy percent of those have a history of childhood sexual trauma. It is basically a diagnosis for women who are angry, emotional and distrustful due to male violence, and it is the diagnostic equivalent of being called “fat” in the mainstream - the butt of every therapist joke. Being physically attacked and told you will be killed by an intimate causes what Sarah McDugal calls the “brain fog” of active abuse, and makes you highly anxious and emotional. They had so much power and opportunity to help me, with information they could have just googled if nothing else. But it was as if their training, their career identity, had caused them to take an oath which confined them to very narrow, male-invented tools and perspectives.

Survivors of VAW, when not mowed down by social pressure, put emphasis on completely different things than your average therapist/religious counselor or person who writes or talks about us.

As explained by a woman telling the story of a brutal beating she received from a love interest and a whole posse of his friends: “I’ve come to the the conclusion that human beings have two brains, one here (points to her head) and one here (points to her gut). I had a feeling that night that something was wrong, something was off. But here I have this person smiling in my face, acting nice, like everything was OK, so I literally ignored my own intuition…because I didn’t want to think bad of people. Never ignore your intuition. It is there for a reason. It is there to save you.”

She continues:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that God and the devil aren’t separate people…they’re all within us, God is within us, the devil is within us, and we have to get up and make the choice of who we want to be, who we want to follow.”

We should be wary of “helping” ideologies that teach women to ignore our intuition, to disbelieve and second-guess our thoughts, and to make ourselves more vulnerable in a world that is statistically dangerous to us. Survivors, in contrast, concentrate on the impact of the harm, talk openly and bluntly about evil and personal responsibility in those who choose evil, and emphasize self-protection. They almost always refer to their self-protecting intuition that was overridden by societal norms and expectations - before, during and after the trauma.

One survivor of ongoing sexual assault, harassment and intimidation by her boss said after a news segment was aired about her story: “The fact that it’s out there is justice in itself. The more people who know about it is better.” There is a widespread emphasis among survivors that information, warning and truth are the elements that will lead other women to safety and justice, not any expectation of humanity or decency from the perpetrator.

Helping professionals can be essential to safety and recovery. The people who work in agencies dedicated to VAW are the best bet, but their treatment can be very hard to access due to the overwhelming need. All treatment providers should pass the same gut test our wise survivor was talking about. Do they try to override you or look through you? Are they rigidly attached to a certain procedure, way of thinking or explanations? Does their treatment ideology pressure you to minimize your experiences? Do they make you feel connected or cold? Do they make excuses for what was done to you or try to make you responsible for it? I was no more responsible for being battered by my husband than I was for being forced into the frat clown-car because I was walking to work. They are just two varieties of danger rooted in sexism which psychology doesn’t know how to address in perpetrators, so it comes after the survivors. To help us avoid this common trap, survivor Sarah McDugal created a guide: 7 Questions To Ask a New Counselor. Everything she produces - available on her website, Facebook and YouTube - is a respite and reprieve from society’s general attitudes about us.

When I went to my Johns Hopkins general practitioner and asked for a scan to review for possible traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to concussion and strangulation during DV, she shot back immediately “what you need is a therapist to figure out why you are attracted to that type of relationship, not a brain scan.” This was the first physically abusive relationship I had ever been in; the concept of the attraction to an abuser for the abuse, the assumption that I sought out being beaten and strangled and my psychology was so broken that I had forsaken the right to actual health care, all of it emanated from her own prejudices. Never mind that Harvard Medical School has published articles calling TBI in DV victims a “public health epidemic.” The doctor, like the therapists, had a professional duty to be informed about domestic violence, or to not say anything at all and refer me to someone who could handle it well.

Many people would express surprise at the poor treatment I have received as a White, middle-class professional, a front-line social worker myself. But this surprise would be expressed only after the reproof that someone like me would “let herself be” abused in the first place; that onion of widespread misconceptions about abuse can be unpeeled layer after pungent layer until my eyes sting enough to make me drop it and leave the room. One in four women in the U.S. are abused by a current or former partner, one in six experience sexual violence. The numbers are significantly higher among women of color, and so is their exposure to systems famously hostile to survivors, such as child protective services, the police and the courts. For many survivors without other options, reaching out for help from these entities is risking going from the frying pan into the fire. Mental health providers have a wholly unearned cultural power to spread their abuse-blind biases to the other supposed helping professionals on which victim-survivors have to rely.

We’ll close with the powerhouse pair Oprah and Brene Brown. During an interview on Oprah’s show SuperSoul Sunday, Brown talked about her book Rising Strong. “For me, writing this book…I’ve spent this career saying ‘be yourself, be vulnerable, be brave, stay in the arena, show up - and then I start getting emails saying ‘I got my heart broke, I lost my job,’ and so I thought it was really ethically imperative to show, what does it look like to get back up?” Was it ever ethically valid to urge women to be more vulnerable, given the statistics on rape, sexual assault/harassment and intimate partner violence? Did Brown not know, or have a responsibility to know, that half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner, and that it is in leaving or trying to leave that the target usually killed? Brown’s ideas about vulnerability are popular with women because we would so love to live in a world that allowed us to be vulnerable and still be safe. She sells the self-help version of the Prosperity Gospel. But unfortunately she’s building a fortune and a name for herself instead of reflecting practical reality, and then following the public gaze wherever it happens to land. Brown sells one blockbuster book telling us blindly to put ourselves at further risk, and then the next explaining what to do when we were harmed for following the advice of the first book, and then when #MeToo and Black Lives Matter come about she “discovers” race and resiliency. There is so much at stake when it comes to vulnerability, safety and women; we need ethical and intelligent leaders and everyday practitioners.

I wonder if I could have avoided being snatched into the frat-boy car if I had worn a placard saying “THIS IS NOT A GAME.” At least we can carry this truth to every mental health practitioner and advice-guru, when faced with being snatched by them too.