Talk Past the Chattering Classes

Deliverance from the masochistic stereotype of abuse victims

Note: Some content originally published in the previous post, Not My Demons, has been moved to this piece.

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My stalker is actively back…he contacts me by email but I never respond. Strangers think it’s my fault. I have managed to start life over and built a support system since I left him. But being afraid he’s going to find me and finish what he started just sucks. I feel like no one believes you until it’s too late.

This is a post from an online forum for survivors of intimate partner violence. It is both gut-punching and generic, in that it follows patterns visible in many survivors’ social media postings. For most of us, online peer-to-peer forums are the safest place to speak out, get a reasonable reaction, and be understood. In the U.S., “1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.” Stalking by wanna-be, current or former intimate partners can take many forms: 1) in person - at home, in the community or at work, 2) online, by phone or through other forms of technology. Frequently, perpetrators do both. There is increasing recognition of the problem of stalking and harassment through the courts; filing of repeated frivolous legal actions or threats of legal action, which gives the perpetrator legal cover to contact, frighten and control the target. Most victims are stalked by people known to them on some level, but there is also stranger stalking, and stalking by a family member. In a 2019 study by The U. S. Department of Justice, 67% of stalking victims knew their stalker beforehand, 38% of stalkers were a friend or acquaintance, and 25% were a current or former romantic partner. Women were twice as likely to be stalked as men. Eighteen percent were strangers, and 9% were someone the victim knew from work. To be someone’s intrusive fixation, especially over time, is likely to be frightening and disruptive.

There is a haiku element to the survivor’s post - all of the common emotional and cultural elements are there, in order and in briefest form. It says much more than it should for its length. It illustrates a pattern I discussed in the post Not My Demons, a pattern indicative of the internal emotional labor which abuse victim-survivors carry out in response to society’s opinions about and reactions to their abuse. Survivors engage in constant mental interpretation of society’s messages about abuse and try to fit that with what happened to them, ending up with a puzzle whose pieces don’t match. The emotional labor of trying to gauge and manage the abuser’s state of mind for the sake of safety will consume the victim (including during stalking); both then and later (she) has to engage in a similar process with regards to the attitudes society has towards her as an abuse victim. I call this process Hermeneutic Abuse-Labor, or societal abuse-labor, derived from the work of Ellie Anderson on Hermeneutic Labor. It is played out in three stages¹, which we can see through the lens of the post quoted above, in which the victim-survivor:

1. Takes stock of what is happening or has happened to her, and recognizes it as abuse: My stalker is actively back…he contacts me by email but I never respond.

2. Evaluates and tries to make sense of the way that society views her and her abuse experience, which is an essential part of measuring safety and safety options: Strangers think it’s my fault.

3. Draws conclusions about herself, her place in the world and her options based on the difference between what happened to her, how she feels she has handled it, and how society views or treats her. The sense of incomprehensible dissonance and isolation that frequently results is ongoing and has long-term effects, both cognitively and emotionally. I have managed to start life over and built a support system since I left him. But being afraid he’s going to find me and finish what he started just sucks. I feel like no one believes you until it’s too late.

The beneficiaries of this type of internal emotional labor are society at large and individual abusers equally, since it generally results in the survivor serving as a bomb shield from the fact of abuse: she becomes the person who will hold the secret, try to contain the damage to herself, and assume blame. Self-censorship and the hounding mental processes necessary to maintain such silence only last due to the application of a considerable amount of cultural pressure, usually in the form of shame. One effective shaming mechanism is the societal dictum that victims take accountability for anything that happened to them: as a performative sign of character (even when ridiculous), and sometimes a cultural dog-whistle against “woke” ideology.

My interest in societal abuse-labor lies mostly in the 2nd and 3rd stages, where victim-survivors involuntarily analyze the seemingly bizarre attitudes towards us, and then figure out how we are going to live within those prejudices and blame, permanently. There’s always a good example of this bias at hand, even when you actively try to avoid it, and I give the following illustrations because they are recent and produced by seasoned feminists, where the average reader might not expect to encounter them.

While reviewing the stalking-themed series Baby Reindeer two Bristish feminist-commentator-critics put their fingers right on the abuse-blame scale, seemingly believing they were going against the grain in doing so, maybe calling on a gut conviction they were taught so long ago they don’t even realize it’s the mainstream narrative. According to Helen Lewis, a staff writer for The Atlantic (among many other credentials):

I think (Baby Reindeer) could only exist and get commissioned as a first-person true story, because it’s incredibly honest about our potential to be complicit in our own abuse—Donny is both a victim of stalking and someone who turned to his stalker for attention, like an alcoholic turns to the bottle, to push away negative emotions…Donny is failed by the people around him—the laddish workmates, the police—but he also fails himself.

All of that may be entirely true of the main character in the show, but she takes it farther and makes it a general truism about abuse, which is trite. It’s the default attitude everywhere but a small, online activist bubble which doesn’t really affect public opinion. She also ghosts so much we know about the psychological manipulation in power-based abuse, which includes many strategies for one person to control, harass and sometimes harm another over a period of time, “no matter what the relationship.”

Author Sarah Ditum wrote a longer but thematically identical article for the online magazine Unheard about Baby Reindeer and her own experience of stranger stalking. Ditum implies that she is responsible for encouraging her stalker because she followed the woman on Twitter, which is a pretty low bar. She says about the Baby Reindeer stalking victim: “he helped to create the conditions for his abuse. Not every victim will recognize themselves in this, but there’s an important truth to it,” and after listing some of the details of the stalking involved in this supposedly *based on true life* story, she states: “If that was all Baby Reindeer was about, though, it wouldn’t be a very interesting show.” Is that really the message we want to send to, for example, the 3.4 million people stalked in the U.S. just in 2019? What does it say about the demands, prejudices and predilections of the viewers - or, more likely - those who make and critique media?

It seems from her article that Ditum got help from the police, her stalker was convicted for stalking her and others, a friend went to the hearing for her which meant she had good social support - all of which makes her an exception. Talking about Richard Gadd’s autobiographical character in Baby Reindeer, Ditum tells us: “the officer on duty asks him why he didn’t do anything earlier. The twist is that the officer’s question is actually a good one.” Except that in a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Gadd related:

I was getting told off for harassing the police about being harassed… I’ve been through two police investigations in my life…and they’ve both been hilarious, fly-on-the-wall terrible. Honestly my advice to someone who ever thought of pressing charges would be: it’s a fucking nightmare process, and it takes years.²

Most interesting about Ditum’s commentary is that she cites a book called The Gift of Fear, which she describes as telling people to pay attention to their fears in order to protect themselves. That is a worthy concept, but the reality is more complicated. Real fear, fear caused by many types of abuse including stalking, does not necessarily make us think more clearly. Trauma practitioners have long identified the 4 F’s of acute stress responses to danger, two of which are freeze (do nothing) and fawn (try to please or comply with the perpetrator to reduce or deflect conflict). A person responding to danger by freezing or fawning is not being complicit, even though it might look like it from the outside - or even to themselves. This is a source of misinterpretation of survivor responses to all types of abuse. Usually, those experiencing prolonged fear from power-based abuse will exhibit all four of these responses at different times.

There is thoughtful science to be had - to be researched and read before making public comment - on people’s biologically-based response to threats. Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. is “Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. He served as president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences.” In other words, not a fringe kook. Dr. Porges studies the connection between the autonomic nervous system and social behavior. In Our Polyvagal World, a 2023 book he wrote with his son Seth Porges, they explain:

When faced with a threat, we sometimes fight or flee. Other times we freeze or shut down. But for some of us, the nervous system tries to navigate the treacherous journey from danger to safety with yet another strategy: an attempt to support, and even soothe, a perpetrator who means us harm…These seemingly supportive behaviors are often observed as “fawning” or “appeasement,” two terms that are frequently used on social media to describe the seemingly paradoxical behaviors of survivors who appear to exhibit caring behaviors towards a perpetrator. Fawning is an attempt to please a perpetrator through compliance, with the pragmatic expectation that such compliance will diminish aggression and reduce the threat. Appeasement, on the other hand, can be viewed as attempt to convince the perpetrator’s nervous system that the victim is actually on their side. When people freeze or shut down in the face of a threat, they are actually met with a lack of understanding as to how or why they responded the way they did. The same sense of disbelief and dismissal often meets those who demonstrate fawning or appeasement behavior. (p.42)

Our experiences with helping systems, the strength of our personal network, combined with the level of danger we perceive ourselves to be facing, can determine how far we fall into the 4 F’s. The concept of fight, flight, freeze or fawn is very widespread and accepted fear-response psychology, but I have not seen any mention of it in all of the repetitive reviews that congratulate Gadd for being so publicly responsible for people doing bad things to him. As social psychology has been teaching for half a century through the Just World Hypothesis, people want to believe that the world has order and justice and that other people earned their misfortunes, which, as the psychologists Melvin Learner and Dale Miller said elegantly: “affects their reactions to the innocent sufferings of others.” Gadd and Netflix are scratching our sweet spot; if the victim deals with the stalking like a “naif,” as one newspaper says, or is “co-dependent” with his stalker (as various tell us), if he was psychologically fragile - well, then none of this could happen to us. Class A entertainment. With a heaping dose of creepy, a middle-aged obese woman as the perpetrator (our favorite villain second only to Hannibal Lecter), and some abuse scenes, of course Baby Reindeer is a hit.

Lewis, Ditum and Gadd’s portrayal of power-based abuse as something victims frequently invite due to our own masochistic psychological problems fits squarely into misogyny’s world view as well. The men who write in the comments section of Ditum’s Unheard piece are faced with a conundrum, since they really like what she has to say about who is to blame for abuse, but don’t want to compliment her based on her past feminist writings. The majority opinion is encapsulated in this comment from Rob N:

I thought this was a very good, honest and interesting article.

It should make us all think more about our own role in being a victim. If I walk down the street juggling my gold bars and shouting about it I can hardly be surprised if I am beaten up and robbed. That does not mean I was not the victim of a crime or that the thieves should not be punished, in fact just as much as a ‘normal’ robbery. Clearly they should but my stupidity was just that.

Similarly women should be able to walk down the street in provocative clothes and not be sexually assaulted. But we have to acknowledge that, living as we do in a real world, it was stupid. Maybe they should be ashamed of their stupidity.

Except, of course, that women are sexually assaulted whatever they are wearing. It’s ironic that one of the traits that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) lists for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is “Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others,” but it may just be an accurate reading of the situation.

As a 12-year-old girl I was severely stalked and harassed by my 6th grade math teacher; he followed me around with his mouth open and staring, tried to entice me into his room with treats, and when there entrapped me. When teachers and other people’s parents complained to the school administration about what they had witnessed him doing to me, the principal painted me as a vixen, a Lolita. Around the same time period a stalker started targeting my mother. Over a span of five or six years he showed up at our house constantly (moving didn’t help), physically broke in, and harassed our relatives, to the point that my very pacifist mother bought taser guns, taught me how to use them, and hid those and butcher knives all around the house. Such is stalking, and I know from these experiences that anyone could choose me as their stalking target at any time without my having anything to do with it, and that is true of all of us.

I give classes for youth ages 11-21 about positive and negative relationships, including red flags, emotional regulation, how to find help, etc. (for anyone interested, I highly recommend a curriculum called One Love, it’s free.) Although I agree with Ditum that education is key to prevention, it is likely that the number of people these classes will prevent from becoming targets or perpetrators will be greatly eclipsed by the number we can influence to be helpful allies or interrupters when it happens around them. In creating a less prejudiced atmosphere, I can genuinely reduce the cacophony of hostility that survivors experience in Stage 2, and the overwhelming sensation most of us have that this is the abusers’ world and we’re just barely living in it. The largest gain lies in reducing the stigmatization and shame of those who are being victimized, which will help expand social systems of support for survivors, reducing the overwhelm and loss of planning capacities involved in the 4 F’s.

There are belief-pivot spaces that I go back to again and again to calm my nervous system and feel a connection with safety, in the form of intelligent reflection on a shared experience which blew my personal sense of sanity and competence to smithereens. One of these is the Betrayal Trauma podcast by survivor Anne Blythe. Many survivor-leaders concentrate on emotional abuse and betrayal in intimate partner relationships, even though it is quite evident that they endured assaultive abuse - but talking about that can get you sued. So in a combination of direct speech, forced innuendo and creative bravery they work to transform the societal mirror pointed at survivors, and give us a learning and interpretive Step 2 that is in sync with the reality of what we’ve been through.

In a YouTube/podcast episode entitled Stages of Deliverance From Abuse: Emotional and Psychological, Blythe and a coach from her program (also a survivor), start with talking about post-separation harassment and control. Blythe relates that “even after eight years, it felt like he was hunting us almost daily. He constantly messaged me, undermined my parenting, canceled my kids’ medical appointments, and manipulated situations to prevent my kids from taking up sports, just so he wouldn’t have to pay for it. I was constantly stressed and traumatized. I got really angry because I thought I was great at setting boundaries. I had blocked him on my phone and email for years, yet I couldn’t figure out how to escape him.”

Then Blythe mixes this very modern, practical dilemma with the Biblical story of the Israelites’ struggle to follow Moses out of enslavement in Egypt, as the Pharoh Ramses toyed with them:

They most likely didn’t want to be oppressed anymore, but maybe they were thinking, “Can’t he just be nicer to us? Maybe we can work it out so we only have to work 10 hours a day instead of 16.” I wonder if they were trying to negotiate with Ramses in their minds, like, “Moses, why are we going? Maybe we can work this out.” 

They had to go through those plagues too. And I think for all abuse victims, there’s a stage where things get so bad that they know they have to do something.

I’d call that the first phase of deliverance from abuse where they don’t want to do something; they’re hoping something will work out, but maybe they feel like they have to…How many of your clients have tried some kind of recovery program or couples therapy or something like that?

Coach Janet: I can’t think of one client that the spouse hasn’t tried something either anger management, sex addiction, CSAT, couples therapy or all of the above.

Anne: And why do they do that? Because they don’t know anything else. Because they’re afraid. They want Ramses to be a little nicer. Maybe they want to work fewer hours, or they want better food. Maybe they think with a few concessions, we can live together in peace.

Coach Janet: The land holds goodness. This is the man they’ve built a family with; they love him. He isn’t horrible all the time because they’re still in the fog of abuse. They haven’t even had the chance to feel enough relief to realize the extent of the abuse.

Anne: And they also think there’s some good, rather than realizing the good is also bad...Finally, Ramses says, “Okay, I’ll let you go.” Then, they have to pack up all their stuff. This, I think, represents separation. 

They have to pack their entire lives into carts. They’ve never been anywhere else, they don’t know anything else, and they have to load it onto carts and such. And when you think about Ramses, he’s like, “Wait, no, no, no, you can’t take all those animals and you can’t take this cart, but maybe you can take this…”

And it keeps going, delightfully full of compassion and comprehension and even humor, along with a Message Workshop on how to handle court-ordered parental communication during post-separation abuse (which, you may have picked up from Blythe’s commentary, is frequently weaponized for stalking).

Maybe this wouldn’t be deemed “worth watching” on Netflix, maybe it’s too healthy and practical for mass consumption or blockbuster status. But when you’ve been living among Rob N’s dust and plagues, trying to choose between fawning and flight, some Anne Blythe is manna from heaven.

1. My full definition of Hermeneutic Abuse-Labor, an offshoot of the description of Hermeneutic Labor by Ellie Anderson: 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.

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.

2. Gadd’s 2019 statement about the difficulty of dealing with the police and courts, which reflects the experience of the majority of survivors of power-based interpersonal crime, may shed light on what could become the most fascinating twist in the Baby Reindeer saga. In both the theater and Netflix versions of the show the stalker Martha is convicted of some version of stalking and goes to jail. Gadd and Netflix have claimed that it was a true story in all important elements, but it is increasingly looking like the real Martha was not convicted or jailed, which would be genuinely defamatory. In our post-Depp v. Heard world, could Gadd have thought that no one would notice? Many survivors are out here being sued by their abusers for telling the truth, and here this guy may think he’s going to be impervious to lawsuits when he’s lying about something pretty verifiable? If that’s the case, my gut tells me he had a white male “rules, what rules? None of that applies to me” assumption going on, but on the other hand I can understand. The idea that his stalker was held criminally responsible to the full extent of the law would give what happened to him legitimacy and weight, which is what every survivor craves. The non-Gadd among us are forced to stay anonymous.