as small as a world and as large as alone

10:08am June 23, 2014

sexxxisbeautiful:

selfcareafterrape:

For the purpose of this piece, please understand that I am using relationship to mean ‘prolonged human coexistence’ it could be an abusive friendship, an abusive parent, an abusive member of your community.

1. Abusive relationships almost always have honeymoon periods.

Which means some, maybe even a lot, of your memories of said abuser may be good memories.

And you may miss those parts of them.

Missing the ‘good’ parts of them, loving the good parts of them even, does not excuse the bad things they did to you.

It doesn’t make it better, or not as bad, since sometimes you laughed and had fun. It doesn’t change the fact that they were, or still are, abusive.

2. Abusers are, by nature, manipulative.

They’ll gaslight you- make you feel as if you’re the one who abused them. Abusers know that when they make their victims feel as if they’re the ones who did wrong- the person usually feels guilty. And in feeling guilty they usually double up on the ‘If I loved you enough/behaved enough this wouldn’t bother me/you wouldn’t do this’ mantra that a lot of survivors have.

They make you feel like you deserve what they did to you. That they’re the good guys really, in the whole situation. They were punishing you so that you could learn- and thus become a better person.

All of these things are wrong though. It isn’t true. They were not the good guys. But the fact that you sometimes, you have conflicted feelings- because you began to believe them- believe that you deserved those things…. it doesn’t change the terrible reality of what abuse is.

and it doesn’t make what happened to you less significant.

3. Stockholm Syndrome/Traumatic Bonding

Traumatic bonding is “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” 

In abuse- especially in those who went through traumatic bonding or suffer from Stockholm syndrome… there is a lot of denial that the bad things are going on. 

When going through these things… people cling to whatever small ‘kindness’ that they can find. They often truly care for their abusers, partially in an attempt to make the bad things not as bad, or happen less.

Bonds like that can be hard to break. It is not your fault for struggling.

4. You feel like you owe(d) them.

A lot of abusive relationships start off with abusers doing really nice things. And then calling in ‘debts’. This kind of goes along with the honey moon phase stuff- but not always. This may be more extreme than just a honeymoon phase.

These are people who step in and ‘fix’ situations (some legitimate- some not) in order to call on it later and be like, “well, I mean.. I did do soandso for you.”

Looking back on these events, you may still feel a lot of gratitude. That doesn’t change the rest of what happened.

5. You were made to believe that it was as good as it gets.

This is usually done in a combination. First, they insult you. Try to ruin your concept of self-worth as much as possible. Remind you that no one will ever love you.

and then they step in and say that its okay because they’ll always be there. That no one will ever love you like they loved you.

It can be very hard to change these thoughts. They work very hard to make us believe them. It is not your fault that you are struggling to fix the wreckage they left.

6. You were young.

Children do not always realize that sexual touch is wrong. Especially when abusers tell them that its okay. That its their special secret. That its a prize for good behavior.

You are not at fault for having believed those things- and for occasionally slipping back into that mindset. It is not your fault that felt special as a child, and thus your memories are ‘positive’. 

You are not broken.

———

Having positive memories of your abuser, missing parts of what they were to you, even loving them…

does not mean you are wrong. it doesn’t make what they did okay.

You are trying to heal from a terrible thing, and no one can fault you for where you are at on your journey.

Having conflicted feelings does not make you wrong, it just makes you human.

Wow yea I needed to read this tonight. Thank you.

There are other reasons than this, though.  All of these presume that there is something wrong with loving your abuser.  And that the only way you could love your abuser is because they have done something wrong, possibly through subterfuge, or that there is something wrong with you, like Stockholm syndrome.

The reality is that relationships and human beings are complicated.  People like to think of abusive relationships as if abuse is this thing that overshadows everything else about the relationship and renders the entire relationship invalid in some way.  But it doesn’t work like that, and I think presenting it like that does a disservice to abuse victims (as well as to perpetrators, but for obvious reasons I care more about the victims here).

The man who molested me is a close relative.  I loved him then.  I continue to love him now.  This is not because something is wrong with me.  This is not because of something he did to mess with my mind.  This is because he is family and, while I have a perfect right not to love him if I don’t want to, I also have a perfect right to love him.  

Mind you, we are not as close as we were before the abuse.  And I do not see it as my duty to protect him (although I do avoid naming him, most of the time, I see it as my right to name him and his specific relationship to me as often as I damn well please, because he was the abuser, I was the victim, and it’s not my obligation to protect him from the consequences of his actions.

The molestation, the threats of death, and the other things he did to me?  Those things seriously marred our relationship.  But they did not erase our relationship entirely.  Which is a family relationship.  I would be totally justified in saying I never wanted to see or hear from him again.  But instead we went through therapy, he was reintegrated into our family life, and we enjoy a somewhat distant but friendly relationship.  It’s not what it once was, but it’s not gone either.  And I love him.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I was also in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend.  While I can’t say I love him (I discovered early in the relationship that I didn’t love him, but was afraid to tell him… at least according to my diary), I can say I like him.  He was a confused teenager with an angry streak.  I was an equally confused teenager who did not make things easy in the relationship myself.  I’m not saying I blame myself for what happened, I’m just saying it was a complex situation and I can identify with his position.  These days, he has a girlfriend, and I’m a lesbian, so I don’t love him, but we are on friendly terms and enjoy emailing with each other.

A key element in both of those relationships is that the person who abused me, showed the ability to look into their conscience and change their behavior, with or without the help of therapy.  This means that I now trust them not to hurt me, and that goes a long way.

My relationship with my parents was also sometimes abusive growing up.  Some of that is stuff that was dealt with, through therapy and otherwise.  Some of it was never dealt with.  But I love them.  They’re my parents.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me, or them, for having a loving relationship in spite of its imperfections.  They have apologized to me many times over for many of the things they did to me when I was younger.  Other things, I’m not totally sure they understand or remember clearly.  But either way, I love them, and they love me, and nothing anyone tells me is going to get in the way of that.  They tell me now that they simply didn’t know how to handle certain things, so they made mistakes.  

People make mistakes.

Abuse can be one of them.

Abusive behavior does not turn a person into a permanent monster called an abuser, who can never be truly loved, and never show any human feeling or sentiment.

Abusive behavior is a bad thing that human beings do to other human beings.  All human beings are capable of it to differing degrees.  By putting abusive people into a category of their own, synonymous with monster, we make it impossible to actually teach people to watch out for abusive behavior in themselves, recognize it in others, and assess what the situation really warrants.

The reality is that abusive people are people.  The vast majority of abusive people are more than just abusers.  Much abusive behavior is a matter of degree, with the kind of abusive behavior that requires totally cutting a person off and stopping loving them really depending on the situation.  It's not wrong not to love an abuser.  But it’s also not necessarily wrong, or a sign something’s wrong with you or that you’ve been manipulated, if you do love an abuser.  

And the whole idea of what “an abuser” is can vary greatly, they aren’t just one type of person, and there isn’t just one type, or degree, of abuse.  Everyone can (and does) behave abusively under the wrong circumstances.  But even habitual abusers vary a good deal in terms of what type of abuse is going on, how bad it is, what their reasons are, and whether they’ll be able to change, given time and effort.

Some abusers will manipulate you into loving them.  But other abusers are going to be people that you love anyway.  And if you haven’t been manipulated into loving someone, then it’s your choice whether to continue to love them.  And whatever you choose, your choice doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, or bad, or weak, or that you’ve been brainwashed.  It means that “abuser” is another word for “person who’s done something very wrong”, which is another word for “person”, which means a person can be loved for all kinds of valid reasons.  Including that they are, for real, your friend, or your family, or your significant other.

Whether this means they are worth sticking around with is another story.  I broke up with my abusive ex once it became clear to me that what was happening was abuse.  I haven’t regretted it.  We’re now friends, but we’re never going to date again for a variety of reasons including gender incompatibility.  With him and with the man who molested me, I did spend a period of time apart from them before I reconciled with them again, and I needed that time apart to work through the abuse and to see whether they were going to really change.  And it’s always fine to love someone and decide that you never want to see them again, ever.

With my parents, there was no time apart, and I had to work through a lot of what happened on my own because the conversations we could have had, were simply too painful.  I came to accept what they had done, not as the optimal thing that absolutely ideal parents should have done, but as the best they knew how to do at the time.  Absolutely ideal parents don’t exist.  Maybe there are parents who would have known not to hurt me in some of the ways my parents hurt me, but those weren’t my parents, and in the end, I feel like they did the best they could with what they knew.  They certainly did far better than their own parents did – something my father learned in anger management therapy was that what his own father did to him was abuse.  And my mother’s father was a piece of work, so was my father’s mother.

I also know that I have behaved abusively at times, partly in fact because of the culture of abuse victims that I ran across at one point.  It taught us that if you are an abuse victim, then anything you do to anyone in the course of a flashback or other response to abuse is okay.  This means that I’ve done a lot of shameful things, including finding myself on the floor hitting my best friend over and over, who had done nothing wrong except startle me in the middle of a flashback.  This happened many times.  This is now what I would call abusive behavior.  So is the way I took out my anger on people online sometimes.  

And I see this happening all the time in online communities that deal with abuse and oppression:  Abuse victims and victims of oppression are taught that if we are responding to abuse or oppression, we can do no wrong.  That if we aim our rage and hate at someone, then it is justified, no matter how out of proportion our response is to the situation, no matter whether the person we are aiming it at has done something wrong or not.  Often, this escalates into abusive behavior.  Which creates quite a conundrum in communities where “abusers” are supposed to be permanently shunned and unloved, rather than treated like real people who have done something wrong.

And certainly, there are people who should be shunned from these communities.  But if we shunned everyone who behaved abusively, there would be practically nobody left.  In my book, the types of people who should be shunned are people who are deliberately abusive, who get off on it, who enjoy hurting people and use these communities as cover to do exactly that, as much as they want, for as long as they want.  Because there’s a difference between an abusive person and a predator.  Predators need to be shunned, abusive people need to be dealt with on a case by case basis.  And we need to acknowledge that abuse exists on such a continuum that it’s a rare person alive who has never behaved abusively.

So if you love your abuser, there may be nothing wrong at all.  It may just be that your abuser is a person, and you love them because they are a friend, or a family member, or a lover, and that’s how people feel about friends, family, and lovers.  Or it may be more than that.  Certainly examine how you feel.  But I spent years in therapy with people trying hard to get me to stop liking my abusive ex, because they thought that I must be “trapped in the cycle of abuse”.  And I wasn’t trapped in the cycle of abuse, I was just aware that my ex wasn’t the hardened criminal everyone was treating him as.  Certainly make absolutely sure that you’re not falling for any abuser’s tricks to keep you involved when you shouldn’t be.  But at the end of the day, you may just love them, and that’s okay too, just as okay as if you were roped into it somehow.  Make your own choices.

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