The core of the memory is that of slow observation and comprehension, then sitting next to the bonfire and looking past the police cars and their lights at a house across the road, whose large front windows had given the inhabitants an involuntary view of a bunch of naked pseudo-hippies. I’m sure I felt embarrassed, but mostly I remember feeling sorry for the people living in the house, whose peace and decency had been trampled and discarded. I already thought of my father and his friends as overgrown adolescents. What was wrong with bathing trunks? How did this make them free? If they had just put on a little material, I might have slept outside on the beach in my sleeping bag all night, no police, which is safety and freedom enjoyed all at once without upsetting anyone. I sensed that my father didn’t want acceptance for us, that for him the bonfire had served as much to shed light on their transgressive nudism as to provide warmth or pleasure, because even an elementary school child knew that what they were doing would trigger a call to the police. As usual, he had motivations that I couldn’t fathom, and almost fifty years later, that is still the case.

Recently I visited my much younger half-brother and his wife, who were ready to enjoy a good laugh over a Facebook post our father put up in February, showing his bare legs stretched out in the snow, and extolling the virtues of “nude” winter sunbathing. Dad was living on a farm in a similarly conservate New England town, and the picture only showed an expanse of empty snow-filled fields in front of his legs. Unfortunately, to the right of the frame is a family home, at some distance, but close enough that if the preschoolers who live there and their parents looked out their windows, they might have had an involuntary sighting of my father, now near eighty, wearing nothing but boots. Wouldn’t that make him a flasher?

This is actually not a post about sexual abusiveness or even sexual transgression - I’m not talking about behavior that rises to that level. There is a common and generally accepted lower bar of social transgression meant to plant a flag of privilege, that men can and should do whatever they want. My father told me about the naked laying-out around the time of the FB post, and I responded that he must not really have been naked, because of the woman and children living in the nearby farmhouse. He openly enjoyed that conversation, playing cat-and-mouse with me, and has tried to goad me into talking about it on various occasions since, because he knows it will upset me. He does not generally have the courage of his transgressive aspirations, and it is just as likely that he was wearing shorts but just wants people to think he wasn’t. If it did not disturb me and other people, if it did not have the shadow of possible flashing behavior attached, he would do it like he goes for his daily exercise walks, without needing to constantly advertise. He could have built the beach bonfire in 1978 without everyone taking off their clothes, or they could have swum naked in the dark without anyone knowing or calling the police, but that would have been pointless to him. The demand for emotional labor on the part of those around him, that we deal with the repercussions of his need for flamboyance and attention, is a large part of the appeal.

It’s clear that many men desire access to sexual behavior without accountability, but transgression frequently takes the form of saying shocking things, or hurting the sensibility and values of others just to show that they can, or spending his partner’s money, or stealing. My highly successful, well-regarded stepfather had a penchant for stealing dress ties from the department store - so much so that he was arrested for it twice. He was also very abusive. He did not do these things because he was a tortured soul, or felt terribly about himself, or was uttering cries for help (no cries). He was demanding to live in a world that centered him, and where no boundaries could be put on his behavior or expectations. As a friend commented recently, the transgression is a signal to themselves of their own specialness, derived from performatively breaking mores they genuinely don’t care about and from which they believe they should be exempt.

This type of behavior was absolutely rampant among the fathers of my Gen X friends, from the 70’s to today, regardless of economic or educational status, completely across political beliefs, and usually without costing them the regard of their peers. One father who prided himself on moving around his very open house wearing only a loincloth, also routinely assaulted those in his company with racist, sexist and holocaust jokes, told as loudly as possible. Another told me behind the back of a Black bridesmaid that his daughter’s wedding was going to be more complicated than jumping over a broom. Another commented in detail on the size of my breasts in a crowded elevator when I was fifteen. Some made it a habit of getting drunk and violent at social gatherings, with their children present. Some refused to bathe regularly - and on and on it goes. Of course they were inherently bigoted or “flawed” people, but what they most had in common was the gleam in their eyes as they watched others squirm.

A lot of the comments under my father’s FB post were mildly incredulous, which I believe is the response he was looking for. The point is to shock, and watch himself get away with it socially. There is a dangerously appealing comment about the boots, saying “and the stock price of LL Bean plummets.” Most people are going to want to react to something like this with humor, but humor is all too often used to deflect recognition of harm, and is therefore enabling. Deflecting with humor allows men who want to broaden and soften the boundaries of those around them, for the sake of whatever type of exploitation, to do so without being challenged. Sadly, humor is an abuse-blindness tool for the perpetrator, society and the target alike. Since performative transgression can be a type of starter-drug to abusiveness, brushing it off is problematic.

There are frequently darker sides to people’s “ol’ Pop” stories, which are generally brief, humorous, and delivered together with alcohol. Mostly, the behavior I reference above was met with rolled eyes or a joke, but I really respect those who call it out, or refuse to accept or ignore it. If a relative is particularly offensive, society should support the idea of cutting contact with that person, just as anyone has the right to end a romantic relationship. There are usually great losses and difficulties that go along with this, so few would take it lightly. I have not made that choice with my father, I do not think it is warranted, but it is really helpful to have as a choice. The people who critique cutting off a family member would have said the same in regard to leaving a toxic spouse, not long ago.

Performative transgression is designed to make those around the transgressor engage in the emotional math I’ve described, and it does, inherently. That may be what I most resent. There is a lot that I like and respect about my father and many men, but none of it (including their financial resources, connections, occasional kindness, etc.) are worth sacrificing our basic understanding and expectation of decency, if we can help it. Patriarchy doesn’t take a rest, so then - neither can we.

A more sinister explanation seems to better fit the facts. When his campaign admitted last spring (before the published warnings from ex-girlfriends and the rape allegation) that Platner was sexting with many women soon after his marriage in 2023, I realized that implied exploitation of women was a feature and not a glitch of the campaign. Platner and his fan-boy acolytes are smart enough to know that sexting with others while in a committed relationship (unless entirely above-board and condoned by both parties), causes the unknowing partner to live and probably sleep with her sexting husband in a situation to which she has not consented. PTSD, the crutch-defense he used for things he had done when younger, does not cause covert sexting. But Platner survived and even thrived through the sexting scandal due to his apparent control over the means of production of what many men want from women: Sex on demand, attention, ego-feeding, caregiving. Men of every political persuasion can be inspired by the gender-based exploiter who can get his goods for free, from multiple sources, and without negative consequences. Covert sexting while married is a sort of wink-and-nod at abuser and rape culture, something the domestic abuse community has acknowledged and discussed for years - we will get to that in a minute. It is not illegal of course, but it is disgusting, and a clear sign that the person does not find consent or autonomy to be important for others.

The idea of sexting played an important role in my heavily abusive former marriage - ironically, since I never caught my ex sexting or cheating, although he constantly engaged in similar sorts of exploitative, transgressive, and ego-feeding behavior. Sometimes the actual means of dehumanization is just a technicality, and that’s how it had become in my marriage. I remember very clearly one night crouching on the floor behind our bed in order to protect myself from a possible physical or verbal assault, and screwing up the courage to state with gravity that if he was sleeping or sexting with another woman, then having sex with me would be rape. I knew in a hopeless kind of way that my husband was intent on erasing my self-concept and psychological and physical personhood; this was the stand I instinctively chose to take to prove to myself that I still existed.

If Platner believed his wife would consent to his sexting activities, he would not have done them behind her back. Manipulation of reality is an essential component in most abuse. As part of my quivering act of resistance, I had prepared a reading from Sam Harris’ book Lying (2013)1, which I kept underlined and marked in my bedside table, as if it were some sort of bible:

Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other public betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption - even murder and genocide - generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

By lying, we deny others our view of the world. And our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choice they can make - in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to. (pp. 41-42, italics mine).

I was trying to give my own politically progressive, bookish, wife-beating husband a concrete example of how his chronic good-guy/demon double life was a lie that robbed me of access to basic decency and free agency. Lying to induce anyone to be sexually intimate under circumstances that they would reject if properly informed inherently denies the partner the opportunity to give informed consent. Lying to Maine and the rest of the country about his conduct (past & present?) was an intentional decision on Platner’s part that his own access to power was more important than the voters’ access to an informed choice, which is an assault on their autonomy.

My survival past marriage to a “progressive” male supremacist has been almost entirely based on the activism of other domestic abuse survivors - many of them. One source of sanity and excellent information has been Betrayal Trauma Recovery (BTR), which explains: “Most professionals, including therapists and clergy, don’t identify lies, betrayal, infidelity, coercion, as emotional and psychological abuse. Or even if they do, they don’t know how to actually help YOU” The YOU in that sentence is capitalized because many therapeutic models and society as a whole seek to reform the toxic male who exploits women and turn him into an “arc of redemption” on the coerced backs of wives like Amy Gertner. Sexting is one of the core behaviors that the mutual-support group BTR addresses, helping women escape from the pressure to excuse abuse as a symptom of sex addiction, which wives are goaded into treating like a disease for which they have to provide care, and even intimacy. Platner leveraged PTSD as an excuse for his harm-doing; many men who are not vets invoke other abuse-enabling gambits from the psychology industry, like sex addiction. These convenient myths also make it easier for the mothers, sisters and friends of toxic men, the abused women who find it too shameful to recognize what their partners did to them, to apply an explanation other than the true one: perpetrators lie and abuse because they derive benefits from it and believe they have a right to, no matter what they say or how many times they apologize. There are various groups like BTR, made up largely of survivors who are refugees of conservative Christian communities which twisted their beloved religions into tools of oppression. They offer women online communities of intelligence, respect and decency, a refuge from misogyny-soaked theology and politics.

Platner was always a candidate with a loudly ticking time bomb under his flannel, someone with a thin enough grasp on the value of women to have likely assaults in his background. This is where the good sense of others was supposed to step in, since we Democrats are not lice in the fading flame of Trump’s top-hair. But what came next was both commonplace and arresting, far beyond scumbag Platner or my scumbag ex: The abuser-culture around Platner mushroomed. The campaign and other supporters had already been using a type of incremental boundary erosion famously utilized by abusers, to normalize the disparagement of women and Jews in Platner’s online postings and tattoos. Then they took it even further.

A key consultant working on the Platner campaign was Morris Katz, a 27-year-old who shared words of progressive-politics wisdom on why his candidate being a shithead didn’t matter. Katz “made his name working for John Fetterman, the rugged working-class outsider who won a Pennsylvania Senate seat for the Democrats in 2022. These were the archetypes Katz—who masterminded Mamdani’s viral video and social media presence to elevate him from little-known state assemblyman to mayor — had in mind when he was asked to join the Platner campaign.”

“We talk about wanting real people in our politics and real people have said f***ed-up things online 15 years ago, and we can’t have one without the other…How are we gonna win back the people Trump has taken? How are we gonna win back the young men we’ve lost online? You know what, we have someone who was one of them and found his way out the other side and who can uniquely tell that story.”

Lefty bros were looking to make disrespect of women and Jews transgressive-sexy and appealing again, since the Right is having so much fun with it. When the truth about Platner’s sexting infidelity finally became public, after the campaign had already known about it, the DSA and Democratic leaders had a further boundary-erosion ready:

“I think it’s a problem, I just don’t know if it’s an irredeemable offense,” Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said. “What is becoming increasingly clear is that people in states and communities don’t have the same outrage meter as those in Washington and in the political class. The tolerance meter has shifted in a way that the political class is catching up to.”

Because Gertner has forgiven her husband, Simmons said, “I think a lot of people will accept that.”

Democratic strategist Anthony Coley echoed that sentiment: “He’s not my cup of tea, but the voters are in charge here, and they’re sending us a signal.”

Simmons used to be a spokesperson for Kamala Harris when she was VP. Men on the Left would like us to re-accept the norm that what a potential leader with enormous power does to women close to him is not pertinent. If he has denied her the right to give or withhold consent, that’s between them, as per the ancient trope. Does anyone really think that Amy Gertner was a free actor? I would bet the farm that she was being told by her husband and his retinue that both their future and the future of American democracy rested on her saying and doing exactly as she was told. They told her that she was being brave, patriotic and anti-establishment every time she stood up for him. I have enormous sympathy for her. She should never have been put in the position of Mrs. Abuse-Excuser, or held up as the person who decided for us if we should back a con-artist for Senate. The discussion around her situation turned into an acid bath, largely because of the men defending her husband.

Ken Klippenstein, a Millenial and former correspondent for progressive outlets The Nation and The Intercept, invoked violence against women in the second paragraph of a Substack rage-bait piece defending sexting-Platner. He has tens of thousands of followers on his Substack, and I refuse to link to it. Klippenstein stated that Maine Governor Janet Mills “suspended her primary campaign in April after getting her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.” I had my clocked cleaned by my husband “so badly” that his fists pushed my teeth into the inside of my lips, causing a gash that sent blood running down my face and onto the floor. Is that what you fantasize, Klippenstein, for older women who might stand in the way of the political ambitions of righteous-aggressor men like Platner? The only reason to choose that wording (paired directly on the site with pictures of Janet Mills and Susan Collins) is the thrill-fantasy of bashing older women’s faces in. I guess I should count myself lucky that my teeth stayed rooted in my gums, and shut up.

Klippenstein goes on to say that the ideal candidates for the Democratic establishment are male “smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” This may stem from an internal Freudian conflict on the part of the former journalist relating to the having and not having of penises, or it may be an assertion that the only men who do not harm women are actually eunuchs, but his dog-whistle towards violence against women in politics is unmistakable. It is not at all unlikely that my ex-husband would follow a “progressive” rage-baiter like Klip, and wherever he is, whoever he’s targeting now, he would delight in the Janet Mills fantasy, and take it as an endorsement of violence against women. This is not what journalism, or the First Amendment, or even politics are made of - it’s worse, horrifying, and everywhere. The post got over one thousand likes. Maybe the best thing about the golden days of legacy media was that we were somewhat shielded from overt knowledge of the character and beliefs of male newspaper hacks.

On the other end of the journalism spectrum, NYT columnist and save-the-planet guy David Wallace-Wells participated in an episode of the podcast The Opinions, taped after the Platner-rape-implosion. Wallace-Wells did a tap-dance very typical of center-left Millennial and Gen-Z men right now:

They were able to make sense of the narrative in a way that made Platner look like an outsider, like a fighter, and those elements excited them about his candidacy, not just things that they could excuse, but things that drew them to Platner as against Janet Mills or any other candidates. That is one thing that applies across the country here, not just within one party, not just within one wing of one party, which is, to the extent that the county is surly...to the extent that the country is angry, there is going to be some number of voters who are going to be wanting their politicians to be expressing the same sentiments. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to turn to a monster...

Wallace-Wells is toying with the question of whether rage makes right, and if anger at the oligarchs inevitably justifies support for blatant assholes. Those who put class frustrations forward as a reason for abuse-enabling frequently mention the idea and then retreat to: “It’s not me who is sexist, it’s the voters! What the people want the people will have! Everybody mistreats their wives and their girlfriends, let’s just be real about this!” Wallace-Wells’ older co-hosts tear right into him, which may be part of the appeal of doing the tap-dance. Lefty guys don’t seem to know that the sexism of today is just a new foot in the old shoe of misogyny worn by my progressive Boomer father, and my progressive Gen-X husband. There’s nothing new or edgy about it at all, and those who fall into it or excuse it simply lack leadership, values and courage.

This is how your society winds up cowering behind a bed for protection from the male-supremacy endemic in every political party, trying to get Sam Harris to speak for you about the right to knowledge and consent and real choices, about values you had always held to be self-evident but can now only invoke as a distant ideal.

The Platner episode is a clear indication that there isn’t a political party or sub-party in the U.S. that fundamentally sees women, over half of the population, as full people. I’d like to follow the stereotypical behavior of Gen-X white women like me and start a party called NAMIMBY: No Asshole Misogynists In My Back Yard. We participate in the gross misogyny of the two main parties because it is presented to us that our future

and the future of our country depends on our doing so, and that is frequently true in our private lives as well. I have a loving and friendly relationship with my father, but I respect and like him less because he is sexist. People frequently try to trigger men’s humanity towards rape or abuse victims by asking - what if this was your daughter? But I would ask instead: Do you really want your daughters and other women closest to you to lose respect and trust for you because of the sexist, immoral things you do and say? 2 Do you want your daughter and granddaughter to coach each other on how to be selectively deaf around you, to not listen to your words, as my daughter and I do around my father - even though he is not unusually sexist, and not senile? Will that have been worth it, at the end of your life, and to what end?

Platner and his actions/lifestyle/treatment of women are vile; the abuse-excusing people around Platner have alienated me from Democratic and DSA politics and culture for the long run. Those who earned respect in all this are the survivors who spoke out (actually and genuinely amazing), and the female former campaign operative who made the sexting facts public. Many women are writing with disgust about Platnerism now, even within the DSA, but I think our demands for decency should have been louder at the sexting and before, and I include myself in that. Instead, I stewed in quiet disgust because I believe at heart that most people of all backgrounds have been successfully taught not to care about what happens to wives and girlfriends behind closed doors, or even doors thrown open for public view.

Graham Platner still believes, as do most rapists and abusers, that he’s the victim- but really he’s just an authentic husband-next-door working with his buddies to successfully keep the demeaning of women part of our universal American norm.

A beautifully attired mother holding an infant told the translator/clerk that she was from Haiti and spoke Haitian Creole and Spanish. When a Haitian gentleman arrived at the door, the translator asked her to inquire if he was looking for a lawyer. “Yes” he said, of course. “Vaya con Dios” she replied - in this context good luck with that, and the entire room laughed. Lawyers? There are no available, affordable immigration attorneys now, the government does not provide them, and even full-cost lawyers are increasingly unwilling to take removal cases because of the procedural chaos. This does not stop each and every professional from telling immigrants that if they have any sense they’ll get one.

It’s a game, the pretend-justice and pretend-services game, which as a social worker I recognize from many other areas of assistance we aggressively insist we provide, even though we all know we do not. On the many occasions when an organization cannot provide concrete, useful services to an individual in need, the staff does a Google search with the right key words and zip codes (like housing, food, abuse, etc.), and either hands or emails them a list of “referrals.” Thus starts their involuntary role as one of hundreds of referral hacky sacks organizations are kicking around at any given time. No matter that we just sent the “client” to a food pantry that only serves people who can prove they live in a neighborhood where the client doesn’t reside - it still counts as a referral, and maybe that pantry won’t give them food but will point them to one that will. No matter that the officially designated homeless-prevention agency in my county has not one dime of funding for security deposits or rental assistance, they still actively recruit referrals from other agencies, so that they can tell those in need what would allow them to obtain housing. This is considered a form of financial counseling.

The cities and counties in our wealthy Democrat-run state put advertisements on public buses saying something like ‘no one should spend a night on the street - shelter is only a phone call away.’ But the shelters are funded and overseen hyper-locally, so for anyone (including families with children) to get a shelter bed they have to call the hotline for the county where they became homeless. In essence, in order to get help as a homeless person you have to provide a recent local address. Even if you can do that, you will only be referred to the shelter that has beds available in that very moment you call. Whatever your circumstances, you are generally told to call back the next day. I took a woman and her teenaged son who were living in an abandoned trailer to a health clinic for homeless people, because her finger had been bitten by a rat in the trailer and become infected. She spent the day there and received neither health nor social service support, but they did give her a list of homeless-service agencies.

I’ve spent the last two weeks watching and participating in that service-giver hacky sack ritual while supporting Ana1, a 16-year-old immigrant girl in the US without her parents who came fleeing her father’s domestic violence2. She had also received the last-minute order to appear. There are many organizations in our area that provide or claim to provide legal services for immigrants, and with my help Ana has been personally denied representation by seven. She has done long intakes/consultations with three organizations. Most have then sent her an almost identical email, saying something like: ‘We are unable to offer you representation at this time, but we advise you to seek representation immediately. You may want to reach out to (names one or two other legal non-profits). We wish you luck and thank you for contacting us.’ For Ana, each of these emails involves the imprint of the organization’s upturned heel on her gut, and the sense of being airborne, awaiting the next impact. It is part of the enshittification of the non-profit sector which started under Reagan, and has become ingrained.3

Many people are going to find my judgement to be extraordinarily unfair in the current environment, but there are secondary benefits for organizations keeping up a charade, and that is not new. We will break the ones that comprise my local legal services agencies into categories: Do-Gooder-Lawyer (DGL), Gender-Based Violence (GBV), and Churchy.

DGL holds twice-weekly free legal “clinics” at the federal immigration building. They saw Ana without an adult caregiver, handed her an 27-page blank application for asylum, and told her to use Google Translate to fill it out herself at home and file it at the court the next day. Like the others, they spoke to her as if she were an adult with the capacity to represent herself. They had on hand a whole page of instructions in Spanish to give out with the blank asylum applications, so this is clearly something they do on a regular basis. Asylum applications should be filled out by an attorney, since if they are poorly completed the person’s best argument for needing asylum can be lost, making them more deportable. DGL knows this, they know that most of the people to whom they distribute asylum applications will feel daunted and will do nothing with them, and they certainly knew that Ana couldn’t do it. DGL carried out this charade because it boosts their number of clients served. When you go on their website they tout their stats (which include their consultation numbers), as well as numbers of immigrants supported with asylum, and the number of referrals provided. Referrals are the cheapest, most gaslighting service an agency or non-profit can provide, the equivalent of handing a hungry person without access to a kitchen a can of beans but no can opener (something done all the time by food pantries). The organization’s stats are used in fundraising and in grant applications for funding at the federal, state or local level. Ana helped DGL check three service-provision boxes - although they didn’t help her at all, or even believe that they had. After a lot of effort, someone finally took pity on us and gave us the inside scoop that none of the pro-bono or reduced cost legal organizations in our area are taking on new deportation cases.

Aside from the issue of not doing anyone any actual good, service-provision cosplay has three serious side effects: 1) It gives the public the false impression that there is help available to those who need it, and that the unfortunate could change their circumstances if they wanted to, 2) It allows governments to pretend like they are providing social safety nets or administering justice fairly, and 3) It sets up a genuinely gaslighting psychological situation for the “client,” who is mislead to believe they are about to get help, and may lose a lot of time and effort in not getting it. Now more than ever, non-profit organizations are complicit with government in pretending that there are rational and humane systems to address suffering in our society - an assumption on which many people base their opinions, including political ones.

Service-fallacy does direct harm to vulnerable people. One of the most common accusations against victims of domestic violence is that they didn’t have the basic sense to leave and go to a shelter, but in fact shelters around the US turn away approximately 6,000 victims a night. A woman living in a wealthy county in my state told me that her adult relative was raped and beaten by her partner. The police made a referral to the county’s (one and only, official) domestic violence agency, which called the survivor months later. That type of turnaround is not unusual. Once the initial intake is done, you join the purgatorial waitlist.

A gender-based violence (GBV) immigration agency did a long screening/consultation with Ana, resulting in them declaring that she did not meet their criterion as a survivor of gender-based violence. She has scars on various parts of her body from her father’s violence, which was aimed at her and her mother, but not her brother. They must understand what that type of statement of disqualification will mean to her psychologically, the straightforward emotional harm it will do to her. But the truth is that in my twenty years as a social worker in this area I have never had a client receive direct services from them, and I have heard others say the same. They are nationally known, and get quoted in the press - supposedly speaking for survivors. I think they’re full of crap, and that’s what I told Ana.

Anyone who interacts with people on the sharp edge of the sword of agency/government assistance has a moral obligation to acknowledge the system’s widespread double-speak. We are obligated to acknowledge the reality of our broken systems, out of basic respect. It does not mean that the person should stop looking for help, or that you should not accompany and advocate for them on that journey. They need to be fortified with the knowledge - counter to what they are told by society and the organizations themselves - that whether or not they receive help or can get a leg up has very little if anything to do with who they are, their worth, their strengths or weaknesses. It is our duty to condemn the farce to each other, to the public, to clients and those who finance it.

The counter-point to all of this, in my experience, is volunteer groups. Throughout demon-driven Trump2 I have called on a volunteer group that accompanies immigrants to court, and they are always reliable. I knew that I had no valid choice but to go with Ana to her hearing myself, since she is a minor and had been told by all the orgs that she needed to show up, or an immediate detention order would be issued. The lawyers told her relatives that they should not go with her, due to the risk it would pose to them. I am not at direct risk from ICE, but I had never been to immigration court before, and wanted guidance. Two nights before Ana’s hearing I got a call at ten p.m. from Jack, a lawyer volunteering with the group - not an immigration attorney, not someone who could take her case, but a retired lawyer with fire in his belly. We talked until eleven and at seven a.m. the next morning he texted me to pick up Ana because he had finagled an appointment at Churchy-immigration-org. He met us there and pestered Churchy for every piece of intel he could glean from them, then spent the rest of the day coaching Ana for her hearing and doing research. Ana had dealt with the Churchy-lawyer’s insistence on talking to her as if she were an adult colleague by playing with the office dog, as she should. But later Jack explained it all to me and I explained to her and we roleplayed - in case, as we had been told, she was not allowed to have us help her during the hearing.

Jack was standing on the courthouse steps waiting the morning of the hearing. He’s pretty churchy himself, and walks bent over, and his Spanish is absolutely painful, and I love him. I gave Ana a little stuffed dog as a good luck charm. When all fifty migrants were called into the nine a.m. mass-hearing, the judge started by telling the whole room that they were there because they were in process of removal, but he was going to give everyone a continuance of two months because they were looking for an attorney. Right on cue, he said they would be provided a list of pro-bono and low-cost legal organizations to take with them, all of whom I know are not taking new clients. Then he called Ana up, because she was the only minor there without an adult relative. She stood up, shaking, and looked at me expectantly. Stand up! Jack hissed at me. Go! So we approached, and the judge did us the favor of not speaking to Ana like she should be entirely responsible for herself, but informing me that I needed to get her a lawyer NOW, and I told him how hard we had been trying.

This judge seemed to be using the fallacy of accessible individual legal representation to buy immigrants before him more time, and clear the 100+ cases that the government had placed on his docket for one random day in June 2026. Culturally, legal representation is code for being individually seen and considered, having a voice, being given a fair shake. That is probably idealized, but it is certain that the government’s objective was to make everyone in that room invisible: make them both be and feel powerless, disposable and scared.

About a year ago, closer to the start of the Trump/MAGA ethnic cleansing campaign, a broad coalition of activist groups organized a demonstration during which we walked through an immigrant neighborhood and (in the hundreds) took a knee at spots where migrants had been detained by ICE. If we were to do that now we wouldn’t make it around the block, but it was deeply moving, and one of the most multi-racial, generally diverse, cooperative events I’ve ever attended. I heard one young man facetiming the scene excitedly to his mother, telling her emotionally in Spanish “It’s OK Mom, they’re with us, they support us!!” The sense of belonging and shared humanity he was expressing may be heady at a demonstration, but it is also something we can share with others in smaller, more personal interactions.

Success for Team Ana the day of her hearing was leaving the building together, seeing the other nine-am-ers slowly file out too, and calling her relatives to discuss next steps. Ana wanted her picture taken by the fountain and sculptures in front of the federal building, making a heart with her hands like any teenager. We will keep walking through this together, holding her humanity and individuality front and center. I burn every day with new rage and disgust at my country, which I used to love and which continually slides further into evil, but every act of resistance is an antidote. Certain countries in Africa have a practice of giving their children virtues names, and my office has made a list of names of immigrant youth we’ve run across: Rejoice, Marvelous, Gift, Faithful, Sincere, Serenity, Salvation, Song, Immaculate, Wisdom, Smiling (with twins Vivaldi and Mozart thrown in). They’re no longer arriving here - instead we’re pushing them out, expulsing the joy, values and hope that each name represents, and which our country desperately needs.

The official structures of the US have always veered between furtherance of human depravity and human dignity. What happens next is dependent on individual actioneers finding each other - like they did in the collective resistance to ICE despotism in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles - but also more quietly on volunteers willing to help fill the gaps in basic needs, on the integrity of lone judges, on people who choose not to look the other way or do the minimum and instead get personally involved, maybe stick their necks out at work. What I do to support one migrant is not justice, it will not create a humane or rational immigration policy,4 it will not help the thousands of Anas who do not have access to any real support. But it brings me into contact with the astounding bravery of immigrants and with those who are my people, with a decent and thinking core of America that refuses to pretend.

I’m haunted by what men have done to me and people I care about, many different men in different ways and circumstances, since childhood. It always could have been worse, which haunts me too. My response is not primarily political, or ideological, or about an identity. It’s about grappling with realities as I have encountered them on the ground. Not all men, of course not, but the many who use their positions in our lives to abuse. Like anyone else I wish that wasn’t true, and find it unpalatable. The haunting comes in constant anxiety, nightmares, difficulty coping. It arrives every night in my sleep as I’m chased, cornered, assaulted, and - more than anything - criticized and belittled by men. It can take shape in exposure to the daily realities of our society.

Feminism is noticing that other women have had the same experiences, and have talked and written about them truthfully and intelligently. How could that be wrong? If I were to buy some firearms and bust into a strip joint shooting, this would be considered my “manifesto.” But we all know that I won’t, because I’m female.

Instead, I take medications, go to therapy, to church, to retreats, to work, to the police, to courthouses and lawyers offices, back to medications and therapies and yoga studios and the nightmares. It is not going to end, and I am not going to hurt others because of it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem: I’m too edgy, intense, reactive, afraid, for the liking of others. Criticized for constantly apologizing and also for being too much. It’s all true, but it’s the me that I ended up with after many physical and verbal assaults. I’m not hiding a better me in the closet, though I’m responsible for the one I put out into the world.

Recently I dreamt that I was in prison and only allowed to fit my writings into a little envelope that had to be placed into a small square box and given over to yelling male guards. The men in my dreams frequently have poison spewing from their mouths. The next night I was in the attic of a museum, sifting through mementos from my childhood with my mother, when a boss came in criticizing and angry and threw it all in the trash. He lectures and my mother nods at him as I silently plot how to retrieve it. During the daytime I’ve been legally threated for writing about abuse, muzzled by courts, and told by a person with power over me not long ago that I just want to spread shit around. In opposition to the Trauma industry’s insistence that PTSD nightmares are your nervous system dragging up fears that were only valid in the past, I find many to be quite relevant to being a woman as a lifelong fact. The dreams are unpleasant, unsettling, problematic, and maybe they’re effective communicators. Another night I woke up arguing with an ex-stepfather I haven’t seen in four decades, but I’m told he’s still alive and still in need of a telling-off.

I’ve tried the techniques of Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, in which you re-script the nightmare after you wake up to give it a better outcome. At the peak of the dream scourge my brain started to engage in a self-induced lucid dreaming response: as part of the nightmare I would become an observer of it, and tell myself that it was not really happening and to wake up. The anti-nightmare drug Prazosin failed entirely. But there’s something interesting about the involuntariness of PTSD nightmares; they inhabit a category otherwise unheard of in the DV-survivor experience because I can’t be blamed for them. They’re not a sign that I am masochistic, reckless, stupid, making things up, trying to get a man’s money or children or take away his proper standing in society. Almost every dream is a variation on objective reality which I would not wish on myself, and they throw me off balance. There is no obvious secondary benefit to having nightmares, except for communication with the unconscious.

A successful female journalist talked about Lena Dunam’s memoir recently on a podcast, saying: “I thought she resisted the temptation to write in a kind of ‘here I am, the noble, Snow White heroine, who just gets, once again, mistreated by the evil man’…it was a more interesting account of a relationship breakup, being upfront about the fact that both of them did things wrong…” I have not read Dunham’s memoir and they don’t imply that the relationship they are discussing was abusive, but mainstream female journalists and commentators frequently dabble in this type of proscriptive, drive-by cultural rule-setting against straightforwardly naming male harm in intimate relationships. They present themselves as countering imbalanced or false victimhood narratives, when they are actually just reinforcing the very simplistic and smothering dominant discourse, arising out of couples therapy, that what occurs in a relationship must be 50/50, or is a blameless consequence of each person’s personal story. Public health data completely validates the existence of many heroines who get “once again, mistreated by the evil man,” even if you find that particular plot tiresome.

This type of shaming obscures the realities of domestic violence. A jury in New York just convicted a man for the 2022 murder and dismemberment of a woman, after he had been convicted, served time and been released twice for the murders of two of his partners, once in the 60’s (twenty years in jail) and again in the 80’s (sentenced to six to twelve). We don’t take even femicide in relationships to be much of an actual crime. Many will howl in unison at an obvious injustice like this one, but we should recognize the connection between routine shaming/dismissiveness towards women who describe evil and unjustified malice from their partners, and the famously abuser-indulgent mindsets of the general public and justice systems. We should also think about how the desire not to be a Snow White caricature in need of rescuing will keep many women from acknowledging, even to themselves, the uncomplicated wrongness of how their partners are treating them. Even if both parties at some point made mistakes, where there is abuse there is usually a primary abuser who has predominant control over the other, and women should not push each other to engage in false equivalencies or denial.

My dreams call out this bullshit. In actuality, over a third of women murdered are killed by current or former romantic partners, as opposed to 6% of men. That safety imbalance, also present in serious non-fatal physical abuse, works its way backwards into daily life as a conscious or unconscious factor in the power dynamics of intimate heterosexual relationships, in the way that women feel the need to manage and negotiate male moods and desires. It is much less discussed but similar to the way that the general reality of sexual assault effects women’s gender-based calculations in public places. I don’t like nightmares and would rather they stop, but they are not always irrational.

Nightmares can be analyzed and re-written, but since they are unconscious and spontaneous they can’t be criticized. Does this make them the only thing an adult survivor of male tyranny and abuse doesn’t have to publicly defend and justify? I think so. No amount of social shaming against the accusation or inference of being a man-hater has changed the way my brain is reflecting and sorting through its life experiences. It uses storytelling and images, and speaks up for itself in an unfiltered manner. Isn’t that a type of organic, involuntary art?

On April 16, former Virginia Lieutenant Governor and failed gubernatorial candidate Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife Cerina in their unfinished basement in the middle of the night, with their two teenage children in the home. Most articles about the killing call it a “murder-suicide,” and feature a picture of a smiling Justin Fairfax in a smart suit, the very picture of self-confident success. National legacy media articles list his accomplishments, and even describe an inspiring family history. Fairfax the politician knew that it would play out this way.

The New York Times immediately invoked the almost universal frame for how we are to understand this violence:

Justin Fairfax was a rising star in Virginia politics before his ascent was derailed by sexual assault allegations in 2019. As the state moved on, few people besides his family and those close to him knew just how much his mental health was unraveling in the aftermath.

The concept of mental health has assumed the very amorphous and superstition-based role that being possessed by the devil used to play in our understanding of human evil: One that blends morality, life’s frustrations, individual personalities, psychology, actual mental illness, substance abuse and structural forces into “person crossed a big line, must be crazy.” That way responsibility for fixing the problem of male violence can be shunted off to mental health professionals, agencies or pharmaceutical companies, who may be all too happy to pretend to fill that role for the dollars involved. We don’t even know what we’re referring to any more when we say “mental health;” we’re really talking about it all, which someone is magically supposed to be overseeing so tragedies like these don’t occur. It’s become just something to say, including for journalists.

Justin Fairfax called upon a common “murder-suicide” mythos: A man with great promise and qualities is dealt an unfair hand, and never given the help that would have saved him from being victimized by that exculpatory demon of the murderer who kills in his own home, mental health. As always - and I will stand by the word ALWAYS - the police called the murder a “domestic disturbance,” giving Cerina half the responsibility for what happened, or at the very least using passive language to shield the murderer from moral culpability. Is there any other context in which we would call a murder a “disturbance”? Even the Louisiana mass shooting was described that way. Like the rest of us Fairfax and Elkins were consumers of our popular culture around domestic violence (DV) homicide, and they knew, on whatever level, that their wives would be publicly implicated in their own violent deaths.

Ironically, although the coverage of both of these killers is absolutely soaked in calls for increased mental health services for men, with the completely unexamined assumption that such services would have prevented the murders, Shamar Elkins recently spent ten days in a Veteran’s Affairs (VA) psychiatric facility. He had been openly threatening to kill his wife and children if she left him for years, but the intensive mental health and medication services he got at the VA don’t seem to have disabused him of that plan. Authorities aren’t sure if Elkins killed himself or was killed when shot by police, but surely he was aware that one of those two things was going to happen - direct suicide or suicide by cop.

My former husband both spoke about and acted upon a desire to end my life; had he murdered me and then killed himself in a supposed murder-suicide, even from my place in the great beyond I would have vehemently insisted that the murder was the main event in and of itself, not to be hyphenated. Although many mass shooters kill themselves when the gig is up, those are not labeled murder-suicides1, a term reserved for domestic violence homicides and romantic death pacts. It is used for DV homicide - even officially by the police and by the mainstream media - because our culture still treats it as a type of romantic death pact. Although I don’t know for sure, it might have brought me some relief for my husband to commit suicide, even when I thought I still loved him, which is why he would never have done it without killing me first. Any DV survivor could tell you that a “murder-suicide” is actually a power/revenge killing the murderer has been fantasizing and playing at for some time, followed by an act that he knows will both bring him sympathy and allow him to avoid the consequences of his actions.

The domestic violence murderer’s psyche is centered around his own desires, ego and self-worth, which is why he decides that if he has not gotten what he deserved in life and wants to end it, his partner and sometimes his children and others need to cease to exist too. He cannot envisage a world in which they are allowed to be well without him, or a world in which going on without him is feasible for them. Either way, he believes that he is the universe - because we as a society have treated him as such or taught him he has the right to be treated as such.

As long as the word suicide is included in the titular description of what happened, half of the tragic loss belongs to the perpetrator, and mental health must be the culprit. The public also wants these husbands/partners to be empathetic victims themselves, in order to maintain our concept of men in those roles as protectors and loving caregivers. Thus non-DV murderers and mass murderers who then kill themselves are denied the sad word suicide in the oft-repeated descriptor of their actions (who cares how the scumbag school shooter died?), but we grant it to that blanket stereotype of the poor hubby who just couldn’t face life anymore, and took her with him like a woman proactively thrown on a funeral pyre.

All of these factors about the way DV homicides are discussed are important to making murder-suicide a more attractive option to the abuser, just like desired notoriety is known to motivate many mass shooters. The large amount of hand-wringing over male suicide specifically, and the supposed male mental health crisis in general, is going to augment this attraction for abusers, who are generally known to crave a victimhood identity, and create extreme and manipulated circumstances to try to appear as victims. Justin Fairfax called the police in January and said his wife had assaulted him, until the cameras that she had installed in their home proved she had not.

Entirely sidelined in the mainstream coverage of Cerina Fairfax’s murder is what actually happened to her and how glaringly predictable it was, making the whole thing easier to portray as a Shakespearian tragedy about a great but flawed man, the protagonist of all epic tragedies. From the Washington Post:

Several of his confidants said they had long feared Fairfax was nearing a breaking point. But they never envisioned that this man who wanted desperately for the public to believe he had not assaulted two women would commit an act of such violence against the woman who had stood by him during and after the scandal, and who had assumed the role of the family’s primary breadwinner and almost sole caregiver to their children…

“He was suffering depression and isolation and hurt. … There was a darkness that had descended on Justin, a depression. And we all knew it, and we wrestled with trying to get him to see somebody, to talk to somebody, to talk to the pastor, to get back into the game of living,” she said. He refused.

He refused.

Did Cerina run to her unfinished basement in the middle of the night fleeing from her husband, or did he force her down there so his kids wouldn’t hear the gunshots? Either scenario is terrifying to contemplate, evidence of execution. The details matter, because it was all part of the vortex of abuse that she was doing her best to survive, going through the courts as she was supposed to, suspecting what her husband of twenty years was capable of and unsure how to prevent it. She was a dentist with her own practice who liked to build things, and a doting parent. I wish I had known her.

He killed himself upstairs, which is a cleaner, more comfortable, less degrading way to go, and to be found. Rats and spiders are killed in basements, not former lieutenant governors. The police and media made his grievances quite clear, as he knew they would:

• Falsely (?) accused by two women of sexual assault in 2019, sunsetting his political career and starting the decline of his mental health

• Wife who filed for divorce last summer

• Wife who last week was given physical custody of their children and got the house in the divorce

Following that type of narrative, no wonder he killed her. There will be men who watch the coverage, see the pity and attention it gets him, and contemplate doing the same.

Apparently Justin Fairfax needed constant success, upward mobility and a clean reputation in order to maintain his “mental health;” have those things come to you consistently in life? Me neither, and I have failed to kill anyone because of it. Fairfax was a well-educated lawyer who would have had plenty of access to mental health and addiction treatment, but he felt himself too good for that. Clearly, he had poor coping skills and the rigid demand for privilege, power and social status that can be very hard to talk a grown man out of. He dealt with being deprived of those benefits through drinking, refusing to parent, buying a gun, refusing to work on himself.

For those who are unfamiliar with our completely dysfunctional family court system and its well-known fondness for abusive fathers, it might seem amazing that despite a mental health crisis in 2022 and through a long divorce proceeding in which his psychological state and drinking problems were acknowledged, the judge allowed Fairfax to keep his gun. That’s what facilitated these deaths, made them easy to carry out; the great majority of domestic violence murders in the U.S. involve firearms. All of these factors scream high-risk divorce for the woman. But the pertinent, societally actionable and educational issues arising from Cerina’s death (What are the red flags for domestic violence homicide? Is there a gun in the home? What can the courts do to protect women during divorce?) have only appeared in a few articles, like this one by an ABC affiliate in Virginia.

Cerina ran her dental practice, raised their kids, and tried to extricate herself and her children through the family court system, as he drank, got them into debt, and filed false police reports against her. At the very least, Fairfax had already demonstrated himself to be a financial and legal abuser who did not like to lose or lose his dominance over others, but that does not mean he was disturbed in a way that can be treated against his will. He was clearly coddled by a family court judge who wanted Fairfax to get help but did not make him do it, who wanted him to be a different parent than Fairfax himself sought to be, whose sentimentalized, abuse-enabling mishandling of this case left them all living in the same house at the point of peak psychological strife. When it became clear that Cerina and the children would get their freedom, which the judge and everyone else should have known is statistically the point at which when these men murder, Fairfax struck.

“Murder-suicides” and intimate partner homicides in general are carried out overwhelmingly by men - not because they are lonely, or not allowed to cry, or carry more trauma than women. Male aggression in the private sphere is the sharp point of the tooth felt when a man’s expectations of power and centrality, in whatever large or small pond he’s swimming, meet the shark of realistic limitations we all encounter eventually. The widespread discourse currently focusing on men’s BIG FEELINGS is only going to bolster an ideology that underlies DV homicides and other types of male violence against women, as described in this article by professors at Monash University in Australia:

Expanding boys’ emotional repertoires may change how masculinity is lived at this individual level for those who are willing to abide feminist imaginings of otherwise, but it does not, on its own, unsettle patterns of authority, entitlement, or control.

What is at risk in the current framing is a subtle reversal. Men’s psychic wounds begin to appear not as an effect of patriarchal socialisation, but as its underlying cause, as though the system is sustained because boys were first required to shut something down inside themselves…

When the focus settles on healing boys’ pain, instead of centering consequences for the underlying beliefs that both benefit men and boys and drive gendered violence, the centre of gravity shifts. Attention is drawn away from how harm is structured and distributed, including the disproportionate violence experienced by women—particularly women of colour and First Nations women. Questions of accountability, redistribution, and structural inequality recede, while empathy for men’s suffering comes to the fore. The problem begins to look less like a system of dominance that must be contested, and more like a diffuse social malaise in need of therapeutic response.

Neither therapy nor psychotropic medication are sufficient antidotes to a societally-reinforced and widespread tendency of male brutality towards and exploitation of the women around them. Imagine an army of therapeutic ground troops fighting a committed guerilla enemy, like the American soldiers in Afghanistan fighting an ideology on foreign soil. Mental health techniques may frequently be ill-equipped to address the deeply held ideology of male hegemony, which most of the locals in power don’t actually want to be talked out of.

My abuser had engaged in plenty of therapy, which only expanded his sense of being aggrieved, his belief in his own anger and having been deprived of something that I magically had to make up to him; simply because I am female and therefore a bottomless care-giver. It is generally acknowledged among survivors that their abusers either refused to go to therapy or used it manipulatively to reinforce their sense of victimhood, and their ability to weaponize therapeutic concepts to gaslight their partner. Few male abusers are willing to take psychotropic medication (although some pretend to); they actually prefer alcohol and drugs, which give them both the courage and sense of power-over they need to be more aggressively abusive, and a culturally accepted alibi for their actions.

I am not in favor of anyone committing suicide. We should ask ourselves, however, why the (hypothetical) self-termination of my violent abuser would be seen by all as a worse outcome than the years I spent fearing that he would continue to harm me or those I love, those years of dread - something that is not stopped by separation/divorce. Despite the demands put on me as a female and a survivor to engage in psychological or spiritual bypassing, I no longer see his humanity with any more sentimentality than he did mine. Under all the moral window-dressing, the expectation that I do so is based in misogyny. Society would find his suicide to be a greater tragedy than the terrorizing of those around him because of the outsized value we give to men, the male psyche, and romanticized male demons. By being a scared and victimized female I am simply living out my timeless societal role; when a man kills himself something has gone terribly wrong, for all of us. THAT is why DV homicide and family annihilation persist: abusers know it will make them appear powerful and will bring them the attention and cart-blanche sympathy they crave, no matter how much sympathy and attention they were getting before they killed anybody. It is never enough, and our media, legal and political discourse feeds right into the problem itself.

Of course we should raise boys kindly, and to be kind - which involves teaching them humility, flexibility, accountability and frustration-management. More than anything it involves teaching everyone to hold the humanity of others and their own humanity on an equally high plain, not in competition with one another. Mental health professionals are not necessary to carry this out except as part of a broader societal team of decency. Men (like everyone) should spend more time with others, less time online, stop watching porn because it is dehumanizing, and have access to groups and activities that promote belonging without being based in ideologies that denigrate others. None of this is complicated, none of it is very expensive compared what our society spends its money on, and none of it is the exclusive duty of women to create for men.

The K-12 years are the best time for civil society to help boys and girls develop both the values and skills necessary to undergird positive mental health, problem solving and relationships. As I have mentioned in previous essays, as a social worker I teach a wide-ranging curriculum called One Love to middle and high school students, in which we explicitly discuss the green and red flags of friendships and dating relationships, how to handle rejection in dating, cyber abuse, etc. Children are not expected to learn to read just by picking it up from those around them, so why are we expecting that in regards to the complicated decoding of relationships? The elementary schools in my district have social-emotional learning classes for grades 1-5 once a week for one quarter of the school year, in which they learn emotional regulation, how to measure the size of a problem, healthy emotional expression and similar topics. Preventative social-emotional education is neither hard nor expensive, and all of the tools already exist. I hope we can get away from the routine, somewhat stupid dominant discourse about “mental health” and male violence, and fight our cultural and structural tendencies toward dehumanization of others with the many grassroots venues already available to us.

One spring day in high school in the late 80’s I watched my history teacher, in a muscle shirt, shorts, and no shoes, chase a girl around in front of the school and spit water on her as part of a game. They chased each other openly for a long time right outside of the headmaster’s large office window, until both were soaked. The sexual flirtation was open, this teacher was always brazen, and I had a sinking feeling of fear for the girl. This and many other moments reinforced a lesson it had taught me years before, when administrators were told that I was being abused by one of my teachers in 6th grade: that the sexualization of girls by teachers was accepted in our country-club educational institution, which I will call Hollow Pines. I had the sensation that the modern brick facade of the building, the parked cars, and the faux-pond itself accepted that girls were for the use of older men, for their pleasure. Telling myself that I was clearly the only one disturbed by it, that I must be wrong - just incapable of understanding why it wasn’t a problem - I tried not to look.

Aqua-groomer was not the same history teacher who would later be arrested for sexual abuse of a Hollow Pines student, the one currently named in two Maryland Child Victims Act lawsuits. He was also not my abuser, who was still employed there. Each of these men was his own type of carnivore, given free rein to hunt amongst the vulnerable, startled student population.

I had also believed I must be the problem when, still in middle school, I walked past an office off the gym and saw one of my classmates sitting on a teacher’s lap. My own experience had taught me that this was a red flag, and I knew to be embarrassed - but the teacher didn’t care, it was something he did all the time. A few years later he would make inappropriate comments to me as I sat in the library trying to study, but I was one of many he harassed. This was yet another teacher - not my abuser, not the one who was arrested, not the aqua-groomer guy - a fourth. I was not surprised, nor would I have ever thought to report it to anyone. Hollow Pines had already taught me that this was normal, an expected part of being a girl around grown men, everywhere. I never felt uncomfortable around a boy in the school or who went to the school, ever, but it was always clear that some of the teachers were predatory. Their predation was accepted by other adults. Girl students were there for the picking of the staff: that was how the world worked. To think anything different was, apparently, prudish.

We had been conditioned to normalize grooming, boundary-crossing and more.

It was unreasonable to expect school to be a safe space, and completely out of the question to ask for that. If parents thought they could demand safety because they were paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for us to go to a private school in the woods, well that was just elitist. Hollow Pines taught me that too - and still is, actively.

Another teacher (we’re on our 5th, if you’re counting, at HP at the same time), asked me to drive her adult friend from the school to downtown, suggesting in all seriousness that if I found the friend attractive I should try to hook up with him. I was an offertory to their friendship. When the friend and I stopped in front of the teacher’s apartment on St Paul St. we said goodbye and he just got out; I had let a chance at statutory rape arranged by my instructor slip through my fingers. It was that 6th grade abuse, I thought, it must have messed me up permanently and I just couldn’t get with the program. What a prude.

These stories are everyday minor anecdotes from a misogynistic, exploitative, arrogant, self-justifying school culture that fostered decades of sexualization of students by staff and taught us twisted lessons that we carried with us afterwards. It would be tempting to attribute all that I saw and experienced to the ghosts of my own school-based abuse at 12, something I expect some readers will do to ease their discomfort with the broad occurrence and acceptance of child sexual abuse.

The 2023 Maryland Child Victims Act (CVA), which enables adult victims of past child sexual abuse at an institution to sue the institution without statutes of limitation, has given me knowledge of other HP survivors (at this point five, three involving my abuser), and awareness of additional witnesses. Many private schools in the area have even more survivors coming forward. Although Catholic Church child sexual abuse during the 1970’s and 80’s is well known and now very well documented, private schools all over the United States were giving the priests a quite a run for their money on a per capita basis. To the surprise of politicians who finally passed the CVA because an Attorney General’s report had made the Baltimore Archdiocese sufficiently unpopular, the State of Maryland has become the principal defendant in our CVA cases due to abuse of youth in juvenile detention centers.

Abuse is the birth child of exploitativeness and opportunity, everywhere.

The CVA has been helpful in bringing to light additional abuse. But the legal process is deeply riddled with gag orders, self-interested lawyers and the specter of possible NDAs (non-disclosure “agreements”). Civil litigation attorneys, politicians and many others in society simultaneously acknowledge that the legal system is messy, bruising, restrictive and purely adversarial, then treat it as survivors’ one chance at “truth and justice,” the only avenue through which we should be seeking to address what happened to us.

The civil legal system opens the door to a maze in which survivors are pulled by the nose by our attorneys, cattle-prodded from behind by the institution’s attorneys, blindfolded to everything but financial gain, isolated from other survivors of abuse at the same institution, gagged from speaking, and then dragged along to the other side, where our portion of a prize might await. In reality there are many avenues to our goals, and both survivors and our communities can utilize as many as we conscientiously see fit. Sexual abuse imposes enormous lifelong costs and emotional burdens on survivors, some of which may be redressed through civil court. Other objectives, such as truth-gathering, community discussion and shared healing will only be reached via other means.

There’s still so much “I don’t think he’s really an abuser,” and “that guy at my _____ wasn’t really that kind of abuser” himpathy/denial in society when talking about people we know or people at institutions we like, among progressives and conservatives equally. This attitude remains the primary barrier to safety and healing for victims and survivors. Watch what the institutions that have been historical havens for abuse are doing, not what they are saying. And watch what happens inside of you when abuse in your sphere is alleged (child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, workplace, etc.) Keep in mind that no matter who we would like to be and think we are, we have been conditioned to excuse the abuse and abusers right around us. I write about this and think about it all the time, but I still watch my reactions, and my desire to make it go away through unbelief and his right-hand men, normalizing and desensitization.

The intro to Conspirituality’s episode on Nuzzi & RFK Jr. is typical of the snarky-sniggering tone, devoid of real examination and analysis, with which most mainstream and adjacent media treated the scandal. They seem to enjoy the salaciousness of it.

How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?
Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.

Olivia Nuzzi seems to have a vulnerability in regards to older men. She’s only 32, and as an even younger woman lived off of the ancient MSNBC journalist Keith Olbermann, then hopped to fellow reporter Ryan Lizza, overlapped him with South Carolina politician Mark Sanford, and then MAHA politician RFK Jr. (Some of this information comes from her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, who is very bitter towards her; the press regurgitates Lizza’s allegations about her life and career misdeeds as truth, much of it without corroboration). With the exception of Lizza, these men got what they wanted out of her, are not considered crazy because of their affairs with her, and have not been socially canceled or lost their careers because of her. In the past year and a half, she has lost two big jobs and her engagement, put out a critic-incinerated book, and been humiliated in a way that will end her career and the majority of her friendships. According to most people who have followed the scandal, she has ended up getting what she deserved.

In spite of Nuzzi’s personal failings her story should NOT stay between her and her therapist, the place where important cultural issues go to die. I doubt I would have ever liked Nuzzi personally, since I generally do not respect people who trade in sexual attractiveness at work when they do not have to. But Nuzzi is being condemned for falling into the fire of exploitation she was hired to publicly dance around for our amusement - hired as a 24-year-old blond bombshell by New York Magazine to use her looks and glamour in gaining access to powerful, slimy politicians and make good copy out of it. Of course she fell into the fire - she could not simultaneously live within and transcend the patriarchal sexploitation culture which was making her successful. It’s like journalism wanted her to stand near enough to the pyromania of sexploitation in MAGA politicians to narrate the singeing, but shield her bosses from being burned. She wasn’t mature enough to withstand the gravitational pull towards disaster inherent in that assignment, and in my 20’s and 30’s I wouldn’t have been either.

The expectations of her were patently ridiculous, which makes all the outrage ridiculous too. The general consensus is that she didn’t take enough responsibility or divulge enough dirty details in her recent book, that she didn’t roast herself sufficiently in the bonfire of her scandal to make the meal taste good to us. Journalists and critics themselves have lost the plot - or are they afraid of seeing themselves in her fall?

Whatever Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple did to get Trump’s chief of staff Susie Whiles to over-share on the record about her boss and her co-workers, it probably wasn’t phone sex. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it involved flattery and manipulation, the construction of a pseudo-relationship and false bond. As long as he just used her and wasn’t used by her, he will be lauded and congratulated. He will not be criticized for his technique, and few would challenge his journalistic ethics, even if he leveraged exploitative emotional dynamics between the sexes to get her to divulge things she would not have said to him otherwise.

Kennedy-Nuzzi-Lizza-Gate has unwittingly exposed many of the societal and personal forces at work in romantic exploitation, but the media doesn’t appear to give a damn, as it distances itself from her genuine transgression of journalistic ethics. The morality tale of Olivia Nuzzi is easily picked from our condemnation grapevine as the parable of the slut-sellout-fool who lowers all of society with her. As I have read and heard far and wide, she is the villain, and on a surface level it is easy to understand why.

Even the Conspirituality guys get too engrossed in slut-shaming archetypes to produce the show they should have made, a show that would have analyzed and explained the mechanics of psychological abuse in this context. Instead they accuse Nuzzi repeatedly of promoting fascism. All romantic and domestic abusers are fascists in their own domain, which does not make the targets of their abuse responsible for the fascism. She did not create Kennedy or his alignment with Trump, and (despite accusations) she is not the reason children aren’t getting vaccinated. Olivia Nuzzi is one of many people, animals and substances RFK II has used to his own ends; abusers extract a variety of benefits from their target. In this case he seems to have mined her for ego gratification (the norm), sexual gratification (common), her connections (run of the mill) and her media expertise (of course - pertaining to whatever the target is good at). Olivia Nuzzi does not have to be likeable, to be a sympathetic victim, for the above to be true.

Most decency-abiding sectors of our society have advanced to the understanding that short skirts do not cause rape, rapists do. This ability to hold perpetrators responsible and resist the temptation to blame the victim has never translated to the victims of domestic or relationship abuse.

PSA: The Kennedy-Nuzzi relationship is a poster child for exploitative psychological abuse. Manipulating the target into doing things she would not otherwise do (like becoming a political operative for a journalistic subject and throwing her entire career away) is part and parcel of the abuse. It’s a syndrome. The mental and emotional confusion that comes with romance-based exploitation usually continues to affect the person’s thinking for some varied period of time after the relationship ends.

Kennedy targeted a person already known to have a history with attraction to older men (Olbermann, Lizza), using the common-as-dirt techniques of relationship abuse, cult grooming and similar con jobs:

• Love bombing and grooming. According to some combination of Lizza and Nuzzi herself, Kennedy wrote her erotic poetry, told her he loved her and couldn’t live with without her, told her they would have a life together after Trump’s election. This is done expressly to draw the target in to be used.

• Intensity, which the abuse-prevention organization One Love describes as: “When someone expresses very extreme feelings and over-the-top behavior that feels overwhelming. Things are getting too intense if you feel like someone is rushing the pace of the relationship (comes on too strong, too fast) and seems obsessive about wanting to see you and be in constant contact.” Intensity is part of love bombing.

• Hyper-bonding with the target over shared interests, feigned or imagined, through the same intuitive psychology used by other types of con artists: “The process of sizing up who someone is, what they’re made of, what they desire…one of their great skills is to discern details of a victims life without her knowledge, so that she doesn’t even know how much she’s given away-and then, to use those very details to impress the victim with their insight.” ~ Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why we fall for it every time. There was a lot of incredulity expressed in response to Nuzzi’s statement in her book that she loved Kennedy’s brain, even his brain-worm, but that’s not surprising. He acted as if he valued hers.

• Extraction of benefits: as mentioned above - attention, adulation, professional help, contacts, sexual gratification, conniving against his enemies. These are benefits that generally come with an intimate relationship, but in the case of the con artist/abuser are attained by pretending to have a real connection with the target.

• DARVO (Deny-Accuse-Reverse Victim and Offender): Kennedy has alternately denied their affair entirely, and said she harassed him with sexual pictures of her. Since very little is expected of him in regards to sexual mores and his conquest of her will be applauded by his boss Donald Trump, just a little DARVO will do.

• Humiliation and discard: As her world came down around her, Kennedy pretended to barely know Nuzzi, and discarded her. Although the stalking abuser gets more attention, serial abusers are very common.

I’m not saying that Nuzzi is not responsible for her actions, but she is not the primary abuser. She’s too close to it still to see it clearly, which is why taking her book seriously, trying to make it make sense, is in itself an exercise in abuse-blindness. It took years for me to understand what had happened to me during DV, in part because the dominant discourse is so bigoted against abuse survivors.

In order to have a better chance at surviving Covid we all needed Covid shots to bolster our immunity; The media is withholding from the public a preventative vaccine of abuse-related information in their coverage about RFK-Nuzzi-Lizza. As a school social worker who teaches the anti-abuse curriculum One Love to whole classes of raucous, profane teenagers, I find the journalistic inability to address this subject weak and professionally bankrupt. You’re needed, the issue is right there and pretty easy to research, you’re effectively gossiping about this threesome anyway, so you need to step up to the task of being socially and informationally useful. I doubt this story would have been covered correctly even in the golden age of magazines and newspapers. It is likely that with time Nuzzi will gain a clearer understanding of what happened to her and her own role in it, but not because of her fellow journalists.

The former star journalist plants the idea that he is an abuse victim, without actually making such accusations, a mere half-way into the first of his Substack essays about his ex-fiancé Olivia Nuzzi’s alleged misdeeds. (If you have not been following the Ryan Lizza-Olivia Nuzzi love-sex-journalism-politics conflagration, you can get the highlights here). He writes a straightforwardly angry and resentful account of, by his telling, very harmful and corrupt behavior by his ex-fiancé, the former New York Magazine political reporter Olivia Nuzzi. It all seems to flow downhill from sexploitative treatment of Nuzzi by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (shocker), while she was covering the 2024 Trump presidential campaign.

The RFK Jr. - Nuzzi affair has clearly had serious repercussions for Lizza. I would have felt compassion if he had not so quickly taken the opportunity to throw survivors of even more serious maltreatment in romantic relationships under the bus, and spread very problematic norms about the appropriate ways for survivors to respond to and feel about abuse.

It is tempting to…cast her as a cartoon villain. After all, she deceived me for a year and smeared me with false allegations. And not just little lies but big fantastical falsehoods - blackmail! [Lizza goes on listing Nuzzi’s alleged misdeeds towards him].

So, yes, I have reason to be annoyed, maybe even a little angry.

However, despite my many faults, I recognize the pitfalls of relying on anger as the fuel for accountability.

“Those who cling to thinking, ‘he abused me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me,’ never still their hatred,” the Buddha said. So, as I unspool this strange tale over the coming days, I’ll do my best not to let anger or pettiness guide me, and I hope you, dear readers, will hold me to that.

Domestic abuse is not a metaphor. The introduction of certain language - abused, struck, defeated, robbed - is calculated to invoke severe domestic violence, without actually making a direct allegation of such actions. Lizza casts himself as a DV victim, punches down at survivors who dare to be angry, and bastardizes the ideology of an ancient enlightenment figure from halfway across the world, all in a handful of greasy lines. He seems to know there’s no social risk for him in manipulating the reader with the real and ongoing epidemic of domestic abuse, no risk in using those words he does not really mean. Maybe he assumes those of us for whom the words are true will be too marginalized to object. But in order to ingratiate himself with his “dear readers,” he follows a very common and straightforward playbook, based in anti-survivor repression:

1. Bypassing

To be a socially acceptable DV victim, one has to make a show of bypassing. The core ingredients are forced forgiveness and empathy for abusers, sometimes combined with minimization of the abuse. Spiritual bypassing was first identified by John Welwood in the 1980’s, and described in detail by Robert Augustus Masters in his book Spiritual Bypassing: When spirituality disconnects us from what really matters:

Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion…

While not everyone who is enmeshed in spiritual bypassing is a practitioner of blind compassion, the spiritualized avoidance of pain and anger, however conscious or unconscious, does habitually run rampant in our culture…

When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show any anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle, we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us. This is reinforced by our judgment of anger, especially in its more fiery forms, as something less than spiritual; something to be equated with ill will, hostility, and aggression; something that should not be there if we were being truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression.

Bypassing is now promoted far beyond the realm of spirituality and traditional organized religion, and has become the dictate of our modern deities of clinical and popular psychology, as well as family law, humanism, and general public opinion. Lizza wastes no time in demonstrating his Bypasser credentials.

I have begun to feel genuinely sorry for the Buddha, for the way that elitist Westerners constantly invoke him to whitewash both personal and societal crap. Here, Eastern religion is being exploited for virtue signaling by a former journalist who was fired from a job at the New Yorker for sexual misconduct, who replaced his wife - mother of his children - with a woman almost two decades his junior, and who generally follows the self-serving male playbook. In other contexts Lizza would have thanked God for his mercy or made a splashy contribution to an orphanage. But the cheapest and most direct way to engage in fabricated abuse-survivor posturing on lefty Substack is via the Buddha, who hasn’t been here to defend his legacy for a few thousand years.

Lizza puts the words “abused, struck, defeated, robbed” in the mouth of the Buddha and not his own as a sleight of hand, where he garners sympathy for the idea of abuse but also distances himself from the dumb/rageful/weak stereotype of those actually subjected to such treatment by their partners. He probably also does it to avoid a defamation lawsuit. Abuse survivors are accused of being over-emotional or conflictual if we publicly resist the abuse, of being doormats if we do not, or both simultaneously. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene invoked the ‘stupid doormat’ stereotype recently, in a high-profile videotaped resignation from her position:

I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.

It’s all so absurd and completely unserious. I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.

The “battered wife” analogy was picked up from her long statement and repeated in every story about it. She used it to allude to a general understanding that battered wives are people without self-respect and dignity. Then the dominant discourse criticizes us for trying to keep the abuse a secret.

In the recently released podcast about domestic abuse called When Love Hurts, Jill Cory, survivor Karen McAndless-Davis and other DV educators explain the dominant discourse:

Dominant discourse about men’s abuse are the prevailing, the big ideas about who is responsible, who caused the problem. And they’re the ones that override or win out over women’s stories of abuse.

They dominate the conversations, but they also dominate the way that professionals think and act and respond to abuse. When we go to self-help books, when we go to counselors, it’s like there’s a frame they’re using that dominates. And we know that these dominant discourses are wrong. For 40 years in my work, we’ve always started with what we call the myths about abuse. But really, they’re more than myths. They’re these big, big ideas that control the narrative…

Really, it’s like everyone has an opinion about this. It’s that Uber driver who you pick up a conversation with, and then they all of a sudden are telling you why women return to an abuser. Or it’s being told by a child protection worker that a woman isn’t actually protecting her child by staying in a relationship. Everyone has an opinion or a thought that they want to add.

And isn’t it so interesting? Because I don’t think everyone has an opinion about how to fly a jet, right? And part of it is that kind of minimizing women’s lived experience that everybody thinks they know, and everybody thinks they know what a woman should do. And what they would do.

They think they know what they would do in that situation. But if you haven’t walked a mile in a woman’s shoes in this situation, you don’t actually know.

Every time domestic abuse is used as a metaphor, every time the targets of abuse are portrayed as twisted with anger or masochistic, another victim is pushed back into the closet of shame and secrecy. Following Trump’s second election there were a lot of posts on leftist social media comparing MAGA voters to abuser-enabling wives and girlfriends. Battered-women-bashing is bipartisan and multicultural.

There is no way to win in the public eye - except through bypassing: taking the actions of the abuser on your own shoulders, making yourself responsible for it (usually by saying you enabled it or responded in anger), and humanizing the guy-next-door monsters the public doesn’t want to think of as such.

The dominant discourse and societal prejudice about the abused helped to keep me trapped and does us extreme harm in general. The anger I feel about it starts in my chest and radiates out into my face and my arms, yet prejudice is so widespread that one takes a big risk talking about it, for fear of starting an ignorance pile-on. If you aren’t being criticized as a survivor, you aren’t speaking. Lizza is trying to siphon off sympathy from our misfortune while telling us to just turn the other cheek. He wants support without the isolation or the denigration of having been battered, through an increasingly accepted strategy of using the word “abuse” and distancing yourself from the fallout from it at the same time.

As I say in almost every post, I was strangled, beaten, knocked unconscious, verbally and psychologically abused and manipulated, love-bombed, financially exploited and legally harassed. He told me without irony he wanted to kill me, in case I had any doubts. I fought back, looked to the authorities and his family/friends for help, told him he was an abuser, begged him for decency (LOTS of begging), tried to get him help, and attended every sort of therapy and support group I could find. All any of it earned me was derision, condescension and cruelty from strangers as well as my husband. What the f*ck does society want from us? The perpetrator enjoyed every minute of his targeting of me, which continued long after we separated, and he is 100% responsible. I hate him and always will; my hatred is one thing he has truly earned in his life, a fact which is not detrimental to me at all. It is a natural instinct that helps keep me safe from him and other abusers. In the Upajjhatthana Sutta, Buddha says: “I am the owner of actions, heir to actions, born of actions, related through actions, and have actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.” Since it flies in the face of bypassing, you won’t see this concept invoked very often.

2. Thriving Not Surviving

We’re allowed about a month (three max), to recover from being the target of domestic abuse. Anything further is simply negative; proof that you were always troubled, that you were always weak, that you don’t know how to live without being abused and are incapable of happiness, that you are allowing the abuser and the years of dehumanization to ruin your life. So the very next thing Lizza presents is:

I’ve resisted writing about these events partly because the last year turned out to be one of the happiest of my life, both professionally and personally. As the media industry crumbled, I went independent with this modest endeavor, Telos News, which has been the most gratifying experience of my career. I also met the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known, someone whose beauty, inside and out, takes my breath away. Every day, I marvel at my impossible luck that she loves me back. We just celebrated our first year together.

Lizza and Nuzzi broke off their engagement in summer of 2024 - after having been together for years. He quickly became seriously involved with someone else. The new relationship, her “beauty,” are his status symbols. She’s like a new suit he’s bought on credit to prove he can still be someone. The soul-sucking, desperate way to show that one’s ex was a loser is to be instantaneously re-loved and successful. Genuine recovery is a slow, plodding and unglamorous marathon you run against trauma and the headwind of anti-survivor ignorance and bigotry. He hasn’t got that in him.

3. Bypassing + Allegation Salad

Lizza wraps up the abuse-insinuation section of the first essay with the cliché “You have one life, so find beauty and humor and wisdom even in the seemingly darkest and most embarrassing chapters.” Actually, don’t. Such advice was how I was talked at through years of domestic abuse, how it was normalized to me while I was trying to fend it off. The abuser is frequently an expert purveyor of societal pressure to take horror out of the horrific, alternated with reversing blame onto the victim. That back and forth is the basic psychological mind-f*ck of abuse.

I have not read Olivia Nuzzi’s book, which reviewers generally describe as empty, pretentious and self-serving. But I have been really taken aback by what seems to be blanket acceptance of Lizza’s professional and personal allegations against her, on a Substack controlled and fact-checked by exactly no one but him.

The biggest red flag on Lizza’s increasingly plaintive claims to victimhood is the extent to which he has won and is given blanket credence, even while showing no evidence. What he has said about her has been automatically accepted as true, and even caused her to get fired from Vanity Fair (which must have hired her in a state of delirium in the first place). Such automatic credibility is not a thing for victims of true domestic abuse even if it is severe and well-documented, at least if they are female. Just ask Amber Heard and Cassie Ventura. We are reviled, hounded, disbelieved, labeled as crazy, as wanting the abuse. Few are willing to help us, and we are ghosted by most friends and acquaintances. There has never been anything like a #metoo movement for domestic violence. It is likely this is because the male abuser who is being accused has financial or status-conferring power within the lives of those involved (even if he is not powerful outside of their circle), or people don’t want to cross him because he’s intimidating - and, of course, because people don’t want to be associated with abused women. Lizza doesn’t want to be associated with the abused either - he just wants to skim a little compassion cream off the top of the word “abuse.”

According to the fifth installment of Lizza’s anti-Nuzzi serial, many of Nuzzi’s friends spent hours talking to her on the phone in order to immediately call him up and report it all to him. He had every significant news outlet refusing to publish allegations because he refuted them, and one of her own journalistic friends broke the story about her phone-affair with RFK Jr. The fallout for Nuzzi, which may be completely warranted, is nonetheless very reminiscent of the public smearing and condemnation experienced by most female DV survivors, complete with the entirely ubiquitous label of being crazy and conniving. I hope Lizza understands that so many people played double agent and protected him because they knew he would be the exception who comes through this just fine, that he would eventually return to being a useful connection, while she will not. I just can’t relate to the privileges that come with being mistreated in a relationship while male.

If you are bleeding from the heart for Lizza because Nuzzi allegedly filed a false protective order against him - this is a very common part of the overall targeting in abuse, a legal way to engage in coercive control and a type of stalking. It was done to me repeatedly, and extended to false criminal charges filed directly with a magistrate, without any police involvement. Even if the charges are all or mostly dismissed, the victim wears the shame and suspicion that comes with them. In this case, however, Nuzzi actually withdrew her allegations - which is usually done by nervous or manipulated victims, not by perpetrators. Perpetrators usually show up to hearings just for the chance to blaspheme the target and make them more miserable, even when there is no chance of winning. They don’t shy away from a power struggle, and they win simply through the things they say and by making the victim spend money and emotional resources. Most victims could only dream of the level of social and legal support Lizza has in the face of legal abuse.

Olivia Nuzzi is suffering the backlash to her actions in part because there is so little societal reward that comes with being a female abuser, and (by Lizza’s own account), a huge amount of sympathy for the male survivor. It is ok - even healthy and true - to acknowledge the structural underpinnings of a problem. Gender power dynamics have always dictated the facts of domestic abuse, which is experienced and handled differently depending on the gender of the perpetrator and victim. Lizza is going to come out of the mess with the career and reputation he had previously damaged himself newly rehabilitated. Nuzzi seems to have tried to pull this off, but she greatly underestimated the transcendence of maleness within the abuse context.

At the root of domestic abuse is exploitation. The perpetrator uses maltreatment, manipulation and deceit of many kinds to take something they want, which the target would not give ordinarily, or not to the same degree: control, obedience, attention, sex, social status, a privileged position in family dynamics and other aspects of the target’s life, emotional support, financial support, freedom from unwanted household chores and childcare. By exploitatively applying abused, struck, defeated, robbed to his own situation and then advocating the unhealthy ideas inherent in spiritual bypassing (a known entity, if this so-called reporter had bothered to care) to a real victim who might be angry about that situation, Lizza has shown himself to be deeply untrustworthy.

Both parties here seem like people committing suicide by jumping into a bog, in the hope of being discovered and eulogized hundreds of years from now as perfectly preserved journalistic bog-bodies. In reality they will soon be forgotten, but the societal messages they and any other media figures put out about maltreatment in romantic relationships on their large platforms will last. As the Buddha (may he forgive me) is said to have said: they are heirs to the abuse-empowering ideas that they spread.

Everyday male tyranny (control, denigration, exploitation and violence) in romantic and domestic relationships is essential to both cultural and political fascism, like the baking powder in a cake. It is the form of gendered oppression that most closely mirrors fascist societies. The book includes a table which delineates the core elements of fascism, and the characteristics it shares with conservatism and authoritarianism, on a type of spectrum that can also share traits with left-wing extremism. Johnson lists the traits of fascism as being:

• A mass movement

• right-wing

• nationalist

• criticizes democracy

• revolutionary

• racist

• sexist

• believes violence is good

• doesn’t play by the rules (p.14).

Let’s see how these elements of political fascism express themselves as oppressive ideology turned behavior in the domestic/romantic arena:

Mass movement/right wing = Romance itself is a cultural mass movement, much larger, more cross-cultural and ongoing than any right-wing political trend. It is well neigh impossible to get away from - just spend one week counting the messages you receive from music, books, art, any sort of media or your interaction with other people, telling you that romance and being in a romantic relationship are essential to your happiness and very existence. The power of a heterosexual female is measured in her ability to attract and keep men - even, usually, by her - but that power really lies in the behavior of the male. In choosing a girl or woman as a wife or girlfriend, men are given kingly power to bestow desirability and stable motherhood status, which still determine the perceived “success” and insider/outsider standing of teens and adult women. Culture continues to govern domestic relationships even as romance fades, through either spoken or unspoken societal assumptions that the male is at the center of the household, that others are to bend around him and keep him happy, that his work, success, moods and well-being take precedence, and that he has the final say in decision making. Thus socially expected romance and pairing are the always-present mass movement that gives intimate partner abuse its inherent power and impetus, connecting motive (who wouldn’t want the world to revolve around them, and if socialized to expect it, be pissed off when someone falls out of line?) and opportunity.

Nationalist = Abusers very frequently claim that their behavior is normal in their culture or their family, which supposedly legitimizes it; making sexism, violence and control historical rights, and something honorable that they are carrying on because it was inherited from *good people.* Abuse-as-part-of-culture also creates one of the “they don’t understand us” or “they’re not like us” narratives used by male supremacists (whatever cultural cloak they wear) to trick women into distrusting those who tell them that the maltreatment they are experiencing is wrong. Women frequently have to choose between a treasured ‘in-group’ identity they share with the abuser, such as race, ethnicity or religion, and being treated with decency. That is a terrible choice.

Criticizes democracy = Democracy is based on the idea that everyone has a voice and a vote in group decision making. This value is explicitly (though sometimes slowly) eroded in the abusive relationship, which becomes oriented to meeting the ego/emotional/practical needs of the abuser, in an effort to keep him happy or at least peaceful. As the interpersonal inequality in the relationship or family ramps up over time, requests by women and children that their needs or wants be met are increasingly faced with hostility - ranging from resentment, sarcasm and biting comments to attacks of verbal or physical force. Throughout the years I lived trying to keep my head above the rising floodwaters of maltreatment that had become my marriage, without understanding what had happened upstream to cause it, I told my husband that he believed in free speech for everyone but me, and that he was trying to obliterate my personhood. He laughed, pleased, because the statements acknowledged his power, his genuine ability to break me down. The loss of democracy and equal rights happens in abuse like it happens in many fascist countries - one right, one shared humanistic value at a time, through the use of shame, intimidation, coercion and sometimes violence.

Revolutionary - For the target, abuse is revolutionary in the sense of turning something around or over, toppling the order of what she thought was her natural universe. She usually thought, because of love bombing or just regular affection by the abuser, that her relationship was a democracy or at least a benign dictatorship, and that she was safe and beloved. The abuse takes that sense of moral order and her place in the universe and turns it upside-down.

Racist = Women of color in the U.S. experience significantly higher rates of abuse and murder at the hands of intimate partners. There is unabashed racism and classicism in the assumptions that the public and law enforcement hold about abuse - that it is an inevitable and expected part of being a woman from a disadvantaged group, and therefore not that important. Of course racism also works in favor of White perpetrators. When I filed a complaint against the police who severely mishandled a DV call I made to 911, one of the officers called me and explained that he had not acted because my husband “didn’t look like an abuser,” i.e. he was a White professional.

Sexist = While men can be victimized as well, domestic abuse is a highly gendered syndrome, with women and trans people experiencing the most serious abuse and harms both physical and economic, at astronomically higher rates than traditional heterosexual men. In my home state of Maryland in the U.S., 100% of the perpetrators of domestic violence homicides in 2023 were men, and the men or children killed by DV were all bystanders. The targets were all women. This is reflective of general DV homicide statistics.

Believes Violence is Good - What an understatement, even if the abuser is never assaultively violent, or even if he criticizes violence. Abusers believe in their gut that aggression and dominance are good, be they physical, verbal or legal. They revel in aggression; it makes them feel powerful and brings them a dopamine hit. One example of the joy of direct violence against a woman (me) derived by my ex here, and the joy of psychological aggression by a stepfather here. In both instances, as the target who was present as they delivered the abuse, I can attest that the abuser’s adrenaline hit and dopamine rush were evident in their eyes, face and demeanor as the abuse was carried out and afterwards. Abusers frequently keep their behavior covert because of current social taboos, but in their heart, no matter what they say later and what general values they claim to have, they have an underlying belief in their right to varied forms of harmfulness, because of what they feel the world or the target owes them.

Doesn’t Play by the Rules = Probably the most impactful and confusing to the target and society in general. This piece tries to convey the depths of what it does to your psyche when you feel trapped in a kaleidoscopic, ever changing personal reality that you can’t fathom: a partner who is simultaneously not playing by any rules, insisting that you accept his daily tyrannies, lying about and justifying his lack of morality, and telling you in all sincerity that you are crazy for expecting there to be rules other than the exploitative ones he demands you adhere to. It is like living inside the Truth Social account of Donald Trump, being told that is the only reality. Except that frequently more than half of the people around you think your abuser is a decent guy. The average abuser believes he is the rules, at least within your relationship, but he will frequently adhere to external rules at work or within other contexts. A defense attorney, my ex-husband meekly withstood upbraiding by judges on a regular basis. Many perpetrators are quite able to function in society or control a temper, but they hold strong beliefs regarding what benefits and obedience they are owed by their partner, family or sometimes women in general, and use us to feel powerful and superior.

*

Although I consistently use the word ‘abuser’ to imply someone who displays certain damaging values and actions across the intimate-partner relationships in his life, I realize that relationship tyranny is something that can grow in a person who did not demonstrate it previously, triggered by usefulness. The young man in the bloom of a relationship, as yet unbothered by children, career and financial stress or the disappointments of life, will frequently show no red flags - because he may genuinely not be abusive, yet. There may be no way to tell who he is going to become when life gets stressful or doesn’t go his way, whether he will pick up the techniques of coercion or cruelty, or throw his weight around to get what he wants. Like in the case of J.D. Vance and many others, tyrannical beliefs can be adopted when they are deemed convenient, in both the personal and political arenas. Society provides and legitimizes or excuses the tools for abusiveness, and other hateful practices, whenever he wants to use them.

Johnson calls out a “Lone Wolf” myth about right-wing extremists who perpetuate violence, as if their ideology was particular to themselves and fermented in isolation.

This individualizing perspective on their violence also allows commentators to present it as a symptom of mental illness or generalized social decay, rather than as a form of political commitment…Framing their violence as a form of mental illness completely removes it from any political or intentional context that the perpetrator may have imagined for his violence…Treating their motives as the result of mental health problems rather than actual political or social commitment lets us hold it at arm’s length. Instead of trying to understand it, we can just avoid it and brush it under the rug, calling it the result of too many violent video games or of social isolation when we should be confronting it as a different belief system, a different way of thinking about the world. A monstrous way of thinking about it, a terrible one, yes, but still a coherent belief system that needs to be met head-on. Lone wolves aren’t alone. Their ideology and practice don’t come from nowhere. (p. 75 - bold is mine)

The ‘lone wolf” concept completely dominates public understanding of domestic abuse as well, and is both perpetuated and incorrect for all the same reasons. My abuser was a highly functioning individual who would have found the idea that he was unwell, or that he did not understand and could not justify his actions, highly offensive. But it is reassuring to turn a blind eye to gender-based exploitation in romance and families: even when women are most likely to be murdered by their current or former partners, one-quarter of women are physically abused by an intimate partner (the same rate of abuse applies to 15-19 year olds), and the majority of those filing for divorce are women (70%!). We don’t want to think of individual men as violent, hostile, or male supremacist in spite of clear data (and of course many are not, but too many are). Since structural inequalities are essential to preserving the status quo, the harm that comes from them is blamed on aberrant behavior and crazy individuals. But the abusive men I have known throughout my life were all generally successful political liberals who harbored deeply felt misogyny and knee-jerk expectations of male privilege. They believed in patriarchy because they benefitted from it, and acted to protect and preserve those benefits.

With political fascism growing worldwide, (just listen to Johnson’s podcast Fifteen Minutes of Fascism), there’s clearly no calvary coming to save us from the personal domestic tyranny much of society has always just taught us to accept or figure out on our own. But this might be an opportunity for women to stop hoping the government, police or men in general will stop being authoritarian, and inspire us towards action in helping each other, one step at a time. Maybe by highlighting the systemic and fascist nature of domestic abuse, we can relieve each other of the personal stigma associated with it. Women who are actually experiencing spousal/intimate partner cruelty and devaluation sometimes seem as afraid of the word abuse as of the behavior itself. For many, being an abused woman is unmentionable in our society, so filled with shame that even those who write whole books about systems of power in our society skirt around it. A woman who admits that she is being regularly mistreated by her partner in any way - verbally, financially, through infidelity and of course in sexual or physical assault - is risking the judgement that she has failed in the role we are taught throughout life determines our basic worth, and risks losing her family, her home, their friends. Even within the survivor community, post-abuse success is frequently measured in our ability to find a “good” man, who by his willingness to affiliate himself with us bestows the only gold-standard proof society will accept that we did not deserve the maltreatment rained down on us previously.

We’ve got to free ourselves from the personal failure narratives that generally surround us now. Making clear that relationship maltreatment is a mass phenomenon of exploitation just like any other tyranny, understanding will gradually spread, and bring clarity to untold numbers of women and those who should be supporting them.

I was reminded of this episode last week because Waldman’s fourth and youngest child was recently arrested and charged in New York with a serious violent crime.

Vomiting out of horror was an unusual and over-the-top reaction to an NPR talk show for me, as it would be for most American liberals, but the turn in topic caught me completely off guard. Waldman was on a book tour, building a career on being disliked by other women. Her book expanded the conversation about a controversial essay she’d published about loving her husband more than she did her four kids and having a great sex life with said husband (Pulitzer-prize winning author Michael Chabon), in spite of being a mother.

Then, always ready to get to the juicy parts, host Terry Gross brought up an essay in the book about the late-stage abortion of what would have been Waldman’s third child (Waldman uses the words child and baby throughout), and the author explained:

We went to the genetic counselor, and we found out that the baby had a genetic
abnormality that’s rare. It’s a trisomy, a triple chromosome, but not Trisomy
21, which is Down’s Syndrome, which is the most common trisomy, but a different one and a much more ambiguous defect.

On the one hand, there was a decent chance that the baby would have this
genetic defect but would be unaffected, that you would never know, that he
would lead…it was a boy…that he would lead a very normal life, that you
wouldn’t be able to tell. And there, on the other hand, there were chances that
he would be mentally retarded or be predisposed to cancers of the kidney,
things like that…

You know, in one way the decision was really, really obvious to me. I mean, I knew as soon as I heard the news what I wanted to do, what I was going to do. But the decision was, you know, there’s your decision, and then your decision as a couple, as a family. And my husband is as much of an optimist as I am a pessimist, and he heard the statistics, and he thought all right, we’re good. We’re safe.

And so we spent three days kind of trying to come together as a couple. We’d been crying pretty much for three days. And he said, you know, if you are wrong, and there’s nothing wrong with the baby, and we have this abortion, I will always love you, and our relationship will continue unaffected. But if I am wrong, and we have this baby, and he is, in fact, mentally retarded, I don’t know if we make it.

I think he meant two things. I think he meant that our family would be forever changed. But I think he also he meant that he didn’t know if I would be able to forgive him. And you know, in a way, that was a very harsh thing to say, but he was right.

In the long, probing interview neither woman questioned the assumption that one couldn’t have a child with an intellectual disability and still be “good” and “safe.” It doesn’t seem to occur to them that people with disabilities and their families would be listening, or would even have the capacity to listen. They were unconcerned about communicating to our community a shared presumption that intellectual disability was so unacceptable that people should take extraordinary measures (Waldman described the procedure in detail) to make sure it will not exist.

Some genetic conditions may cause pain and hardship on the individual or family that will be unbearable; many can be integrated into a meaningful life. This is a decision which belongs to each family, hopefully given access to as much information as possible about what the fetus’ genetic abnormality would mean for its needs and quality of life. The issue is not abortion or whether Waldman should have had the right to do what she did: mine are objections to the reasons she terminated a planned pregnancy of a child with a chance of mild neurodivergence, and her actions to both normalize her prejudices and bring pity to herself riding society’s disgust towards intellectual disability. Maybe the long trajectory of her parenthood woes is a cautionary tale regarding the foolish arrogance of following societally constructed merit systems like those based on IQ and certain types of ability.

There’s little moral difference between Waldman’s eugenics and the tendency towards abortions or infant abandonment of females in societies that prize male children, even though Waldman would abhor this practice. They are both based on parents who buy in to an ugly societal classification trend that functions like bitcoin - with nothing more to back it than a group of people temporarily deciding it has value. When those people and their imperatives turn away or change, the morally bankrupt bitcoin parent is left with only sawdust in their hands.

I have no idea whether 22-year-old Abraham Chabon did the things he’s been accused of, and even if he did his parents are not responsible for them. I do know that there is no valid amniocentesis to detect a future predilection towards violence, and that Waldman is now likely coming face to face with the sense of exile, fear and loneliness that she was avoiding by refusing any risk of having a special needs child. It turns out, as most religions have taught for millennia, that not even the combined IQs of Harvard Law educated Waldman and her spouse can engineer their way out of life’s challenges, and that lack of humility leads not to safety, but inhumanity.

In the new book The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea journalist Helen Lewis explains that eugenics started as a movement to root out the intellectually disabled, by the late 19th-Century English scientist Francis Galton:

His study of hereditary genius led him to coin the term eugenics, from the Ancient Greek for ‘good’ and ‘birth’–the improvement of the human race through selective breeding. He even wrote a novel, Kantsaywhere, about a eugenic utopia which gave out breeding licences to the most deserving. Those who failed their intelligence exams were forbidden from reproducing, and sent to labour colonies…

By the 1920’s disability and racial eugenics was widespread among European and American intellectuals, physicians and scientists, a trend that was stopped only when the Nazi’s enthusiastic use of the ideology made it unfashionable. There is a part of eugenics that lives on, a part that Lewis describes as the “secular sainthood” of high intelligence, which I recognize from some of my own family as the system of bigotry that has gradually supplanted class and race as acceptable ways to categorize and exclude people. My stepmother used the word “genius” as a weapon, to bestow unquestionable favor on some people, and devalue those who did not deserve the honor. Throughout the 20th century and into ours, intelligence - as defined by the beholder - became the elite’s proxy for humanity with merit, and applied eugenics is only getting stronger with enhanced scientific practices.

As explained by the Genetic Literacy Project:

Genetic screening has rapidly evolved, offering insights into an embryo’s genetic makeup that were once unimaginable. Prospective parents can now screen for a wide range of hereditary diseases, reducing the risk of passing on genetic disorders. However, the potential applications of this technology extend far beyond disease prevention.

The concept of ‘designer babies’ — children genetically engineered to possess specific traits — is no longer confined to science fiction. While the technology to precisely edit human genes is still in its infancy, the implications are profound. Traits such as intelligence, physical appearance, and even predisposition to certain talents could theoretically be selected, ushering in an era where human potential is sculpted by technology.

The rise of fertility technology and genetic engineering is not without its ethical dilemmas. Critics argue that the ability to select for desirable traits edges dangerously close to eugenics, the discredited movement aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population. The prospect of creating ‘superbabies’ raises concerns about a new form of inequality, where only the wealthy can afford to enhance their offspring.

The present rush to embryonic genetic engineering is fueled by IVF and concentrated in the Silicon Valley tech culture. Same bigoted hubris, different venue. The vast majority of scientists will tell you that human outcomes regarding health, personality and talents are based on a combination of factors, which include genetics, environment, and social conditions.

On the other hand, the onslaught of bigotry, rejection and isolation that I thought was signaled by that 2009 interview has mostly failed to materialize in our lives. Over my son Emmanuel’s 22 years I’ve noticed an increase in public acceptance of and positive interaction with individuals with cognitive and neurological differences. It is striking to me that the majority of people, especially young people, speak to Emmanuel directly, ask him questions and listen to him respectfully instead of trying to talk to him through me. Most treat him with dignity, and basic but non-performative kindness. He participates in special-needs bowling and baseball leagues run entirely by parents of affected offspring, parents who openly love their kids, put a lot of work into fomenting joy in their lives, and derive fulfillment and community from their relatives’ happiness. There are a lot of grassroots groups of folks with special needs and their caregivers online in our area, organizing social outings, dances, and very effective political action to protect and improve services for the disabled on a state level. Large-scale efforts to educate the public about autism acceptance have been very helpful in improving Emmanuel’s quality of life in the community, and the opportunities open to him.

Emmanuel’s 25-year-old girlfriend Daphne has Downs Syndrome (the Trisomy 21 Waldman mentions her baby not having). There has been an astounding 33% reduction of people born with Down’s Syndrome in the US, and 54% reduction in Europe, due to the availability of genetic testing. But Emmanuel is highly appreciative of Daphne’s existence, and all of the love and care her parents have poured into her; every day that includes time with Daphne is a good day for Emmanuel. It would be unrealistic and biased for me to want a neurotypical partner for Emmanuel - he has a loving and compatible match, and we should all be so lucky. They bowl, go to the movies and sing karaoke together. They recently had a serious debate about whether she should be in his phone under the title “Daphne My Love” or “Princess Daphne,” and princess won out. Although they have been dating for a little over two years they insist it has been three, which may be related to their habit of celebrating their anniversary at whim various times a year.

There are differences between them - Daphne can write by hand while Emmanuel cannot, and she is better with technology. She has a paying part-time job in a grocery store. His speech and vocabulary are clearer and wider, and he is far less challenged by emotional regulation. She is more social and makes friends more easily. Some of these traits are based in their biology and some in other factors, but they do not make either one of them “higher functioning,” as disability onlookers so often feel the need to determine. They’re unique individuals, like the rest of us.

I grew up around a lot of Waldman-types, and I would like to formally take this opportunity to ask them to stop spreading IQ (or artistic and physical ability, productivity, charisma) as the essential characteristics that give a person value. How about decency, broad lack of harmfulness towards others, a lifestyle that does its best to do right? Despite low IQs, both Emmanuel and Daphne have that. Waldman will never know if her massive bitcoin investment in intellect as a child’s human value was worth the paper it was never even printed on.

Since the presidential election we have been hearing a lot about the enthusiasm among young men for Donald Trump. Apparently many men under 30 took the unexpected and unprecedented step of putting down their video-game controls to fill out a ballot or actually go to the polls and vote for (among other things) a flag-waving misogynist. This was made quickly into an inevitable narrative about how Democrats don’t understand young men, and all the ways that we have made heterosexual males feel disconnected, caused them to give up and drop out of society. There are interesting, data-driven rebuttals to the ‘oh woe is men’ narrative, a sample here and here. A lot of male angst may come from what Katie Jgln calls “gender perception bias,” men’s deeply un-data-driven impression that they are losing their dominant status in the world.

There is a whiff of another trend that I believe may be driving young men and their dads to throw us all into totalitarianism, at this particular moment in American history. As explained succinctly by Mona Lazar:

Women want something men are not, and men want something women no longer want to be.

According to the Brookings Institute young women are becoming more politically and socially liberal, and young men feel resentful. We’ve seen a boom in pissed-off-women divorce books, and like the 4-B or Bihon movement of purposefully single women in South Korea, there are whispers of a ‘Boysober” trend in the U.S.

More than anything else, pop music is making me wonder if women have reached a genuinely new level of rejection of the expectations and demands that are part of the air we breathe: practical and emotional subservience in heterosexual relationships, living according to a hierarchy of sexual attractiveness, pressure on women to be sexually available and disposable. GenZ/Millennial artists are creating honest, aware, refreshingly bitter music about the female experience within straight relationships, which we’ll explore below. Of course these generations produce plenty of traditional love/longing songs too, but they’ve grown a noticeable branch on that enormous tree, a “to hell with this shit” branch.

Even as we have been increasingly allowed into higher education and the workplace, most women and mainstream feminists have continued to buy into centering romance, sex and family in our lives, thereby allowing the essential power dynamic between men and women to remain the same. But what if women were to really start removing themselves? Men have always expected to siphon off our joy, well-being and bodies for their own use; if that arrangement is under threat, they’ll put a match to Rome and watch her burn.

A majority of the adults I know are in romantic relationships, and in general I cheer them on, wanting their bond to succeed and continue. But I’m also floored by the almost total papering over of lopsided risks to girls and women in intimate partnerships. We still exist in a psychological corset of romance-think and the romance industry. How often do we ask if it really make sense to base one’s long-term well-being and the security of one’s children on harnessing the libido, attention and decency of one single man over decades? Even if we accept the benefits of happy - or at least sustained - marriage, are the significant risks of emotional damage, decades lost, death, violence, family court, financial ruin too high? Women are in a unique situation of co-habitating, sleeping and reproducing with, frequently depending upon, the person who is also most likely to violently murder us - our greatest predator. A lot of other power inequalities flow downhill from there. Domestic realities (those that go far beyond shared childcare responsibilities and who washes the dishes) continue to be erased from the conversation about what, within reality, provides the base of a good life for us, un-colored by romance propaganda.

Some will find this unrelentingly negative. Author Jesse Singal wrote a very sincere piece on Substack entitled Temporary Celibacy As Avoidance, in which he suggested that young women just try talking to their partners instead of quitting romance, as if we’d never thought of or done that before. His naiveté has stuck with me as an example of widespread cultural blindness to the genuine risks in navigating girl-and-womanhood in what is still a man’s world - an ignorance that women frequently adopt because we also don’t want to it to be true. To ask that question, you haven’t frequently had attempts at communication turned into a competitive intellectual debate, been ridiculed and called crazy, been shouted down, left abandoned somewhere, or of course hit. You’ve simply not had the common experiences of women, experiences women have learned to expect from being with men.

I never had dreams of a wedding or being a bride, ever. Throughout life my goals were to be a mother, attain stability, and be part of a caring community. It was taken for granted that marriage was a necessary component, a stepping-stone, to the other goals. Count, as you go through your day, how many times you are exposed to a pro-romance or sex-glorifying societal message, from any source, and think about the unquestioned assumptions, the blind imperatives these messages have created in our lives. And then, counter-balance.

Mr. Dylan

I spent the seventies the only child of a young, fun-loving, luminescent single mother who surrounded us with the music of her peers - hippie or post-hippie women like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack and Carly Simon - as they sang out their souls and loves and half-hearted stabs at freedom. Our main activity when there was no man around was to dance together in the living room, part of the fun being wrapping myself in her beautiful, loose floral skirts. Maybe this is where I got the habit of music-ing myself into wellness, and treating lyrics like poetry or cultural scripture. But the songs themselves express the Achilles Heel of their liberation movement: the freedom for women to be more sexually available to men, while working for the privilege of parenting by themselves and doing (at that point) ALL cooking, housework and ego-maintenance for whatever man was available.

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Despite the moral duality and slut-shaming that come with patriarchy, women’s sexual liberation was never really going to upset the patriarchal power dynamic, since men are the ready beneficiaries of easily available, no-ties sex. Many of the most popular songs by White leftist women of the of the 60’s and 70’s are about learning to resign themselves to domestic relationships or the lack of them, acceptance of betrayal, longing for male attention even when it was clearly not worth having, and disconnection.

Joni Mitchell, California

I met a redneck on a Grecian isle
Who did the goat dance very well
He gave me back my smile
But he kept my camera to sell
Oh the rogue the red red rogue…

California I'm coming home
Oh will you take me as I am
Strung out on another man…

I still love Mitchell’s voice so much I’d listen to her sing about folding the laundry, but too much of the music is like this:

Help me
I think I'm falling
In love again
When I get that crazy feeling
I know I'm in trouble again
I'm in trouble
'Cause you're a rambler and a gambler
And a sweet-talking ladies’ man
And you love your lovin'
But not like you love your freedom

Carly Simon is famous for the early narc-naming tune You’re So Vain, but the majority of her songs are downright pitiful, a musical how-to in adapting to disappointing romance that will inevitably define your womanhood. YOU TOO can obtain the denigration of arranging your life around romantic and sexual connection with men, she told the tiny me, if like Simon you are very thin, White and frequently half-clothed. Such good fortune - don’t fuck it up.

The Right Thing To Do

It used to be for a while
That the river flowed right to my door
Making me just a little too free
But now the river doesn't seem to stop here anymore

Hold me in your hands like a bunch of flowers
Set me movin' to your sweetest song
And I know what I think I've known all along
Lovin' you's the right thing to do (lovin' you's the right thing)
Lovin' you's the right thing-

Nothing you could ever do would turn me away
I love you now and I love you now
Even though you're ten thousand miles away
I'll love you tomorrow as I love you today
I'm in love, babe
I'm in love with you, babe

This is a demographic that revels in accusing Christianity of creating blind, mindless, self-deprecating followers, but they formed their own types of cults. The resentment I sometimes feel towards my parents’ generation is unjustified in many ways, since they were products of their own moment in patriarchy and culture just like I am, and I certainly didn’t overcome its effects. A lot was accomplished for women and the consciousness of society as a whole during those decades.

In Silver Dagger Joan Baez tried to tell me my story and show me an alternate way forward, as my parent’s young marriage imploded under the combined weight of old-world male privilege and the blooming sexual revolution. But I was three and clearly wearing the wrong tinfoil hat at the time, so the message failed to transmit.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged

Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life

Hippie men were largely pseudo-feminist, led by superstars such as the still beloved Bob Dylan, who wooed a far more talented Joan Baez in order to further his career and then threw her away like yesterday’s newspaper. Dylan, considered a genius because he’s male and “countercultural” and can’t sing at all, penned the words:

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Everybody knows that baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls

She takes just like a woman
Yes, she makes love just like a woman
Yes, she does, and she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl

I understood the threat and distain of those words, the implications of a man demeaning her because she is withholding what he thinks she owes him. With and after the song comes revenge. Dylan’s revenge music floated along with an endless river of disposability tunes like Love the One You’re With and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Listening attentively inside the folds of my mother’s soft, light skirt, I came to believe that men were a necessary and inevitable danger in our lives. Mr. Dylan did have one thing right - both as a child and an adult, when overloaded with male hostility, exploitation and selfishness, I broke just like a little girl. Over and again.

The domestic and sexual shifts that came with the 60’s and 70’s were largely a rearrangement, producing propaganda like Mitchell’s line from Carey: “Oh you’re a mean old Daddy but I like you, I like you, I like you…” She’s in the thick of women’s liberation and he’s still her “Daddy” (not the biological kind), he gets to be mean and be liked, he clearly gets to have her sexually until she drifts off somewhere else. When women resisted drinking their misogyny straight, the 70’s put it on ice or mixed it with juice and made it into a punch. But there are some young women and (scant) men who are spitting out the Cool-Aid and singing directly back to the dictates of the romance/sex/exploitation-dominated culture that infuses everything, regardless of politics, region, religion or anti-religion. The songs below may be a signal of change or just a bubble in the misogynistic tsunami bearing down on us, but they feel to me like an escape from the degrading musical messages that my sweet mother and I had been taught to believe were about feminism and freedom.

God Love The Young

When my second husband (H2) had done his worst and his malice was spent, I would sometimes engage in a small act of rebellious truth-telling, and sing the Taylor Swift song Mean to him as he snapped his fingers to the beat:

You, with your words like knives
And swords and weapons that you use against me
You have knocked me off my feet again
Got me feeling like I'm nothing
You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard
Calling me out when I'm wounded
You, picking on the weaker man

Well, you can take me down
With just one single blow
But you don't know what you don't know

Someday, I'll be living in a big old city
And all you're ever gonna be is mean
Someday, I'll be big enough so you can't hit me
And all you're ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?

You, with your switching sides
And your wildfire lies and your humiliation
You have pointed out my flaws again
As if I don't already see them

I walk with my head down
Trying to block you out, 'cause I'll never impress you
I just wanna feel okay again

I bet you got pushed around
Somebody made you cold
But the cycle ends right now
'Cause you can't lead me down that road
And you don't know what you don't know

…And I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody's listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things
Drunk and grumbling on about how I can't sing
But all you are is mean
All you are is mean
And a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life
And mean, and mean, and mean, and mean…

H2 was quiet and bookish instead of loud and he didn’t drink alcohol, but the rest holds true. It may seem strange that a battered woman would (sing) so bluntly to the abuser, but what I said to him was irrelevant: if he was in a certain frame of mind, the beating, tongue-lashing or humiliation was coming one way or another. Once his evil had been dished out he felt good; at that point what I said or sang were no more threatening than the expressions of a toddler. He would laugh and snap his fingers because he took pride in his behind-the-curtain cruelty. I sang the song for me.

To quell horror and regain a sense of groundedness during the night and every morning after DV-related nightmares, I listen to abuse-aware music by young folk. The following is a sample, and only reflects what I have been exposed to. There’s much, much more out there.

Current favorite: Lola Young - Messy

'Cause I'm too messy and then I'm too fucking clean
You told me get a job then you ask where the hell I've been
And I'm too perfect 'til I open my big mouth
I want to be me, is that not allowed?
And I'm too clever and then I'm too fucking dumb
You hate it when I cry unless it's “that time of the month”
And I'm too perfect 'til I show you that I'm not
A thousand people I could be for you and you hate the fucking lot

Carly Simon would have really benefitted from a dose of this.

Lola Young - Fake

Everybody keeps telling me about the new magazines
And everybody keeps telling me that I'd be lonely without it
And everybody keeps telling me that I'd be broke without a penny to my name
And everybody keeps telling me that I'd be heartless without it

But I swam down the river
I met the fish and the gods
And I met my mister
Right here in my heart

I'm better off without it
I'm better off alone
I'm better off without it
So leave the fake shit
Leave your fake shit at home

In part because of 70’s conditioning, I missed the memo that male attention, praise and love are not keys to worth and happiness. Even in my very progressive and educated milieu most girls had boyfriends from high school on - the holdouts lasted till college, at best. The feminism I was taught in college seemed about as helpful and practical as an agricultural course would be for someone trying to figure out how to cook. I hope songs like these, and their rising commonality, deliver a non-compliance memo right to each girl’s subconscious, like an earworm.

Paris Paloma - Drywall

He's punching walls again
Cohesive arguments evade him
Eggshell temperament
No emotional regulation

Hysterical baby, his gaze always evades me
Doesn't know that he is pavin'
The road for my escape way every time
I scratch another line

I used to think of him a caring thing, knuckles on his drywall
I've tried all of the parenting, descent into hysterically
Rippin' into ribbons, the things he knows he isn't
And severing ties

Funny rationality
What would positions in power be?
Led by feelings that seemingly change hourly
I am floored you ever got there

And when he snaps out of it
He drones in monotone, on a power trip
With telltale blood still running in his coward lips
From raising strokes that he hopes I'll cower in

“I used to think of him a caring thing,” because he once acted that way, and still does sometimes. The word thing means a lot in this context; I remember looking at H2 as he hounded me and thinking that in his dehumanization of me he had made both of us into things instead of people.

Paris Paloma - Labour

Apologies from my tongue, and never yours
Busy lapping from flowing cup and stabbing with your fork
I know you're a smart man (I know you're a smart man), and weaponise
The false incompetence, it's dominance under a guise

If we had a daughter, I'd watch and could not save her
The emotional torture, from the head of your high table
She'd do what you taught her, she'd meet the same cruel fate
So now I've gotta run, so I can undo this mistake
At least I've gotta try…

All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24∕7, baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It's not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour

I have to keep myself from staring at my young adult daughter - strong, smart, adventuresome, beautiful - marveling at the pearl that was formed in sandy grit. Will she “meet the same cruel fate?” Right now she’s sucking every drop of delicious juice out of life, involved in a myriad of fun and interesting things, dating but not getting tied down to any guy. I genuinely could have lived a second life in the time I wasted on men, starting at about her age. There’s a simultaneous urge to protect and stay away from her, as if I myself carry the illness.

Selena Gomez Lose You To Love Me

You promised the world and I fell for it
I put you first and you adored it
Set fires to my forest
And you let it burn
Sang off-key in my chorus
'Cause it wasn't yours

… I saw the signs and I ignored it
Rose-colored glasses all distorted
Set fire to my purpose
And I let it burn
You got off on the hurtin'
When it wasn't yours

…I needed to hate you to love me

“You got off on the hurtin,’ when it wasn’t yours” is the essence of toxic narcissism, no matter what actions go along with it. Hatred is still completely disallowed for any “nice” woman outside of feminism - disallowed by the industries of mindfulness, psychology, self-help, Buddhism, Christianity, romance, professionalism, etc. Censoring hatred and anger in women serves the express purpose of silencing us and making us more exploitable.

I had to live through more than five decades of male abuse and dig myself out of deep pits of ideological refuse to actively hate patriarchy and find me - to feel like a me. The echoing, almost spiritual release in this song and video resonates most if I make its “you” into everything to do with our intrinsically denigrating societal romance machine: sex appeal, objectification, the male gaze, fraudulent domestic bliss, social acceptance, porn, the myth of permanence, deceit, coercion, endless unequal labor, shame, fear, entrapment, age-based disposability. In the imaginary Selena & Me version, it closes with “I needed to lose (romance) to find me. And now that chapter is closed and done…” Blissfully closed and done, as if through an airlifting - Gomez’s gaze is suddenly direct and calm at the end of the video, her voice even.

There are too many good Jessie Reyez songs to even choose one. Gatekeeper is about the music industry, and she made a short film about the history behind the song. It is also very evocative of sex trafficking, which frequently originates in grooming, pseudo - romance and unexpected transactional demands. Gatekeeper addresses the male narcissistic expectation to control women’s access to well-being and happiness overall, how they punish us if we refuse. Reyez has no bullshit fear of confronting and depicting male violence against women in relationships, as shown here and here. If you’ve ever felt cornered by a man in a car, afraid and trapped, the Gatekeeper video can speak for you (and me).

Probably the most powerful and accurate song I’ve found about psychological manipulation in relationships is Once You Cheat by YelloPain, simply an incredible artist. He seems to have truth and relevance, humanity flowing from him in sonic waves.

I'm toxic
Lovin' me is just like poppin' narcotics
Slick talk you right in your coffin'
Be cautious
Man I wish we could be that honest
But when I see tears fallin'
I stuff the truth deep in my back pocket
“Look baby I got demons in me
That I been fightin' for a long time
I was trynna fix holes in my heart
I was thinkin' with the wrong mind
I'm still dealin' with some trauma from
Back when I was young
And I lost God…”

That shit workin' ain't it?
Victim mode
All you gotta do is switch the roles
Make them feel all the pain from when you was 10 years old
Make them feel like you always knew you had them
But you still feel alone
Make them feel like you so damaged
But you know what you did was wrong
Make them feel like God gave you a different soul
Make them feel like you differing
The strongest trait of manipulation is givin' hope
I gotta lie
'Cause I know what's at stake
If the truth get exposed
It did hurt to get caught cheatin'
It didn't hurt when I did it tho

The strongest trait of manipulation is giving hope - that line reminds me of the water thrown on the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, language that makes an illusion melt away to wisps of smoke; the abuse-blind talismans of our culture howling in outrage.

About child sexual abuse:

YelloPain - Monsters

I just wanna talk to you one time, yea
I really don't want to, but I have to, gotta ask you
Did you really have to? (Ah)
My trust wasn't even that bad and I would've put it past you
Now I don't trust shit
'Cause you wanna do that little dumb shit
Wonder if you went to sleep that night
Probably felt bad, slept it off, woke up, ate something, right?

I ain't eat nothin', way too disgusted, bitch
I was up cryin', 'pain in my stomach, bitch
Was it just tryin' to help you or control me?
I hope it helped you 'cause it broke me
I went to the pew to consult me
But it didn't change, I can never be the old me
Feeling lonely and I ain't want no one to hold me
'Cause I ain't wanna meet another you

Probably take a day, or a year, to get over for you
But for me I don't think I'm gettin' through it
When I have kids I'ma be so overprotective
Play detective 'cause I can't let
Knowing what you did to me, happen to them, not again

It’s worth listening to or reading this whole song and all his work, really.

On a lighter note, the Chappel Roan song Karma Is My Kink portrays joy inherent in watching abusive men ruin their lives. It’s not as real as I wish it was, since due to himpathy, male privilege in general and the material benefits of not having a conscience, abusers frequently land right back on their feet until old age. If you have children with a toxic narc you’re vulnerable to his falls for the rest of your lives. But the song is a wonderful hymn to righteous anger and the beauty of being free enough to keep your side of the street clean, no matter what he goes on to screw up after you break up.

People say I'm jealous, but my kink is watching
You ruin your life
You losing your mind
You dyeing your hair

People say I'm jealous, but my kink is watching
You crashing your car
You breaking your heart
You thinking I care

People say I'm jealous, but my kink is karma

Jealous is the dog-whistle used against women who object to the current mandate of sexual availability and disposability, exactly the way crazy is thrown at us when we talk about our partner’s violence.

Chappell Roan - Casual

It’s hard being casual when my favorite bra lives in your dresser

And it’s hard being casual when I’m on the phone talking to your sister

I try to be the chill girl

That holds her tongue

And gives you space

I try to be the chill girl

But honestly I’m not

…Hate that I let this go on so long, you can go to hell.

No Kidman-ing

There are alternatives to the romance/sex cult, to the vast house of mirrors in which actress Nicole Kidman celebrates her fifties by making Babygirl, a movie about a woman who auto-corrects her Girl Boss life through self-debasing dominance sex with a young male intern, to critical acclaim. Critic Sarah Ditum calls it “a film about the self-revelatory power of risky sex,” which is akin to saying “the self-revelatory power of fentanyl use.” Kidman is a modern, middle-aged marketing puppet of twisted ideas of freedom by being a hologram of a man’s sex fantasy. It’s the same freedom through depersonalization of women’s sexuality that marked the 1970’s and continues unabated. We should have sex if we want to and if it does not harm others (same goes for men), but no kind of sex is going to free us from all the other realities of our subjugation. It was never going to. Patriarchy continues to use the glorification of sex and romance, the ever-present commercialization of one human bodily function and one type of relationship, to get us to self-subjugate, to understand ourselves and our existence on the narrowest of terms.

Anyone in the mental health field who disagrees with my views on romance, intimate relationships and the politics of sexuality will say that trauma has caused me to fall into fixed aversions and simplistic, bad vs. good thinking. But that is a double bind, a scenario in which due to having certain types of experiences, I am deemed too damaged to have a clear understanding of their meaning or integrate what I have learned from them into my belief system. Apparently mental health professionals (male leaders and their female acolytes) understand the broader meaning of my experiences better than I do. It’s a way in which the mainstream can delegitimize the implications of what’s been done to us.

Ain’t No Grave

In the seven years since my separation from H2, the only place that my nervous system relaxes, where I feel an innate and effortless sense of well-being, is in church. As the child of 60’s-70’s semi-counterculturalists of course I did not grow up in church, but the PTSD nervous system has its own rules, which can cause troubles but also lead to gravity-defying changes in perspective. I’ve recently joined the church choir, my first group social activity since divorce and PTSD, and it is wonderful.

No, I have not exchanged one cult or patriarchal institution for another. I’ve simply tapped into a fount of love and community that, when accessed thoughtfully, no one can take from me. I know that’s not how many of you think of Christianity or religion, but the point is that no man, no human relationship, holds your worth or your destiny, and you are also not an island. Many of the effective, outspoken activists against domestic violence who do not treat it as a job are religious women, survivors who understand why spirituality is needed. Religious music can be just as fierce and empowering as your favorite rock anthem: (I’ve taken some liberties with this one)

Ain’t No Grave Bethel Music & Molly Skaggs

Oh, shame is a prison as cruel as a grave
Shame is a robber and he's come to take my name
God’s love is my redeemer
Lifting me up from the ground
Love Truth is the power when my freedom song is found

There ain't no grave
Gonna hold my body down
There ain't no grave man
Gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I'm gonna rise up outta the ground

If You walked out of the grave I’m walking too…

Faith was a source of great consolation for my grandmothers, those older women patriarchy has taught us to think of as foolish and flat; I suspect it is only through connection to a higher power that women (and other persecuted groups) have kept themselves sane throughout history.

His Eye is On the Sparrow, sung by Victory Boyd

I sing be­cause I’m hap­py,
I sing be­cause I’m free,
For His eye is on the spar­row,
And I know He watch­es me.

We sing because we’re thinking, we sing because we see, we sing to drain cruel power, we’ll sing past tyranny.

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Contrary to the common high-brow claim that popular culture has misappropriated the proper, scientific diagnosis of a serious mental illness and made it meaningless, in the 20th century the patriarchal and proudly misogynistic mental health industry slowly appropriated the deeply self-centered, self-dealing behaviors and beliefs exhibited by some people, and made the resulting personality into something only the patriarchs could name and diagnose. Then they insisted it was applicable to only a tiny percentage of the population. The industry of psychology stole a necessary and useful understanding of narcissism from us, and put it behind an illusory professional paywall.

If I hadn’t had the fact that I was in an extremely abusive marriage explained to me by the “narc” awareness movement online in 2018, I too would find it very annoying. Heavy use of the concept and accusation of narcissism is being met with an understandable backlash, epitomized in a TwitteX post by the popular author and UCSF psychologist Jonathan Shedler: “Social media makes it sound like every bad ex-boyfriend or bad parent is a #narcissist. But prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder, defined by the DSM, is only 1%. It just doesn't add up.”

The problem with our collective eye-rolling is the proportion of people’s exes who probably do have problematic “narcissistic” traits, because the personality and behavioral attributes that we call narcissism are learned, intentional behaviors meant to reinforce power and position over others. They enable someone to extract a whole variety of benefits, much of them meant to prop up the voracious ego-needs of the vampire. Exploitation hates a vacuum, and narcissistic attributes are simply the term many people use (in our collective post-Freud everything-is-psychology culture), to explain the set of manipulative tools used to fill that vacuum in personal spheres like romantic relationships, family and the workplace. It applies to political dynamics just as well.

As a culture we tend to really like narcissists on an individual level, especially if they’re men, which is why Trump’s craziest statements and plans only make him more popular. Narcissistic traits align with behaviors expected from men, to whom society gives a lot of permission to be boasting, selfish, domineering, threatening, egotistical and mean.

The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) diagnosis of Narcissism requires at least five of the following personality traits:

• Having a grandiose sense of self-importance, such as exaggerating achievements and talents, expecting to be recognized as superior even without commensurate achievements

• Preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and idealization

• Belief in being "special" and that they can only be understood by or associated with other high-status people (or institutions)

• Demanding excessive admiration

• Sense of entitlement

• Exploitation behaviors

• Lack of empathy

• Envy towards others or belief that others are envious of them

• Arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes [1]

I call the attributes listed above patriarchal narcissism, a common personality in men without any mental illness. It is a spectrum: from the “where's-my-medal-for-adopting-basic-decency?” intellectual narcissism of Daniel Oppenheimer’s recent spousal abuse piece in the New York Times,1 to the blindingly exploitative narcissism of Kanye West, at the Grammys fully clothed and demanding notoriety as he parades his effectively naked wife, a haunted look in her eyes. These are just two examples from one recent week of media.

Masculinity is viewed here in the sense of the self/world expectations and pressures frequently tied to belonging to a certain sex class. Patriarchal narcissism is not carried out by *all men,* just too many, and it’s highly normalized.2 As complex beings in complex societies individual men navigate their behaviors, relationships and identities differently, and are exposed to a variety of formative influences. The vast majority know right from wrong and are fully capable of choosing not to adopt narcissistic personality traits; patriarchal narcissism is a societal trend, not a biological inevitability. But men are taught and shown that they are or should be dominant, of importance, distinguished from the rest - with great appetites (be they career, competitive, acquisitive, sexual, intellectual). With that pressure comes entitlement. The norms and expectations about masculinity create a permission structure to be abusive and exploitative, for those who want to use it.

What I really care about is how patriarchal narcissism effects the quality of life of women and children, and the structure of our society overall. The popular trend that I will fondly call “narc-naming” helped me comprehend my abusive marriage even better than the beatings did, because it gave me terms to explain the entire system I was living under, and did not focus one single incident. It made sense of all the rings of domestic hell. Narcissistic abuse centers itself squarely in the exploitative intentions of the abuser, instead of the supposed deficits of the victim. Maybe that is why it has caught on.

Popular narc-naming has created colorful, evocative and user-friendly labels for specific patterns of harmfulness that flow from the sense of entitlement, exploitation behaviors, and lack of empathy of both narcissists and domestic abusers. Long before narc-naming was a thing, studies of abusers’ values found a common underlying self-concept of being “central, superior and deserving.” 3 But that is dry. The explanatory narratives and terms of the narcissism craze has made it come alive in the popular imagination.

A genuine understanding of our widespread problem of cruelty and violence towards women and children in the personal sphere requires the mental lens to zoom in and out from the individual to the societal, and back again. Usually, survivors and those around us are told to turn the camera on the victim and stay at one very small aperture, the one set by my Johns Hopkins doctor when I asked for an MRI to look for signs of brain damage from repeated DV head trauma. She curtly replied: “You don’t need an MRI, what you need is to see a therapist to find out why you are attracted to these types of relationships.” She and I had never discussed abuse before, and she knew nothing about my relationships. I have made plenty of mistakes in life, but I can say with certainty that I did not self-concuss, self-strangle, call myself or anyone else a cunt, or look for any of it. She might as well have slapped me herself.

The displacement of blame for male violence, cruelty and narcissism onto its female victims is very much alive when it comes to intimate relationships. This conversation happened post #metoo, and she would never have blamed me for getting raped because of what I was wearing, but it is still highly socially acceptable to openly blame domestic violence victims for what men do to us. I am certain that a dog who was being beaten in the same manner would have received more active intervention and support than I did from the police, medical professionals, mainstream therapists and the courts.

I first started watching free narc-naming videos by domestic abuse survivors online almost a decade ago, when they were much more fringe and New-Agey. Due to the hostile treatment survivors get from “helping” professionals, we’ve developed or adapted terminology to help us de-louse from patriarchy, to widen the lens and see the larger techniques of psychological entrapment that undergird all domestic abuse, political tyranny and so many crappy relationships.

Trump has proven with unequivocal data that people like, trust, and defer to patriarchal narcissists. Trump and Elon Musk are glaringly obvious in their narcissism; Jordan Peterson, an academic online influencer, is an interesting example of a middle-man, a person who provides the ideological connection between the individual abuser and the political tyrant, and who helps to prepare society for tyranny. Peterson and many others at his level have gained fame and vacuumed up a lot of followers through social/emotional manipulation techniques. Peterson-esque influencers may be the abuse-survivor’s answer to the sneering question so often posed to us: “How did you fall for it?” Falling for narcissistic conmen in different forms is extremely common.

All of the personality characteristics we associate with Trump are present in plenty of ordinary men on a less glaring level - men who have not been able to parlay their narcissistic tendencies into the same type of societal control because they are not billionaires, but nonetheless exert a lot of cruel, chaotic, and sometimes frightening power over those around them. Society defers across otherwise deep cultural, racial, economic and other differences to the narcissist’s belief that he is “central, superior and deserving,” responding to the individual abuser with the careful docility with which the once supposedly “liberal” tech elites like Mark Zuckerberg are sucking up to Trump. But it does not serve us to portray this is in all-or-nothing terms; patriarchal narcissism occurs on a spectrum, and recognizing that spectrum is key to understanding its creep into our societal fabric and the language we need to understand it.

Low Malice

A lot of patriarchal narcissism fits in the category of low-(ish) malice, low emotional maturity, high demand for privilege. I know one man who boasts incessantly, makes constant associations between himself and people of power or prestige, exaggerates his accomplishments, and takes extreme stances he cannot defend in order to make himself stand out from the crowd. He looks for and needlessly creates controversy, but is highly thin-skinned and cannot bear being questioned on something he has said or done, or anyone disagreeing with him. He carries out non-violent forms of punishment - cutting remarks, raised voice, silent treatment - on family members who annoy him, disagree with him, or cause him any one of a million possible narcissistic ego wounds. There is also plenty of good in him, but he’s best at long-distance relationships, held over the phone.

Some of his no-go zones are obvious, such as not allowing others to have their own opinion, but there are also many invisible lines you can walk through without even realizing, until suddenly you are being punished. This creates the famous “walking on eggshells” effect narcissists openly desire to create around themselves.

Like many narcissists he is frequently charming, kind and generous, and has some ability to turn these functions on and off as it suits him. I also believe they are often sincere. It’s highly unlikely that this person would ever be labeled clinically narcissistic, even in the unimaginable world in which it were put before a mental health practitioner and examined in full light. This is in part because it does not seem to cause HIM serious problems in any life sphere, which is a base requirement for a diagnosis. He’s had a successful career, always has many friends, always has a wife or a girlfriend. He bathes in a sea of Himpathy and men-will-be-men tolerance, bolstered by enthusiasm for any glimmers of kindness.

What distinguishes many people in the low-malice narc category is a willingness to (resentfully) adhere to boundaries set against their behavior, showing only limited pleasure in cruelty. They restrict themselves to short-term assholishness instead of profound harm. Low-malice narcs act like overgrown children because they genuinely believe in their own right to privilege and primacy. They may not be any more reformable or self-insightful than their more explicitly evil brethren, but the terms we use to understand their onerous behavior are more straightforward - like sexist, self-centered, pompous - and not the colorful terms we will soon get into.

His Mother Describes Him as Spiteful

That brings us back to Jordan Peterson, an internet-based influencer from academia. He epitomizes the next notch up: Spiteful, an angrier and meaner but still very socially popular abusive personality who uses words and social intimidation as his primary weapons. Peterson is a type of famous patriarchal narc who exists across races and cultures. They may be musicians, or actors, or religious leaders, and they require us to broaden our abuse lens using the same exploitation-sensitive camera. I first watched a video of Peterson giving a talk while he was still popular with some progressive intellectuals, and I had heard and read interesting things about him. It didn’t take long for me to physically recoil from his baldly off-kilter rhetoric and manipulative verbal style, which was instantly recognizable and chilling. I am a Christian and supposedly so is he, but he made incessant, authoritative and brazenly historically incorrect statements about Christianity, to such a degree that he must of known they weren’t true. His ideas about women are just as bizarre. Peterson’s ability to captivate clearly lies in the aggressive rhetorical style I probably first learned to recognize and fear in the womb, and he will lead us like a snarling Doberman down the path of narc-naming terms.

Throughout his celebrity Peterson has engaged in word-salad in his speeches and interviews, which for him and many narcissists is more like phrase salad. It is a term that comes from psychiatry and was first used to describe the verbal patterns of schizophrenics, who may speak with an authoritative tone but use words that are disconnected from each other and lack a consistent thread. Narcissists do this as a confusion tactic; phrases are expressed with force and anger or authority, which displace any need for truth. Peterson and his brethren combine phrase-salad with frequent shifts in topic and angry attacks on a kaleidoscope of imagined enemies. The listener is left with a sensation of pure, self-righteous, domineering hostility they’d rather be behind and not in front of, or which might tap into a feeling of anger they would usually experience without outlet - except onto those closest to them. There are many pop-culture influencers who spread and normalize tyranny to certain niches of people - some go for the Andrew Tate types, some the Kanye Wests, some the Petersons. They’re the needle and thread which pierce and join millions of pieces of popcorn-people together onto one string of brutishness.

Just like Trump flows into dog-whistle phrase-salad to whip up a crowd of resentful White people against immigrants, the individual abuser leverages the prejudices and abuse-blindness of the people around his target to do his dirty work for him. Or he simply pours salt into his target’s inherent vulnerabilities - such as motherhood.

Not all spiteful narcissists use verbal aggression as their main avenue of abuse. One Saturday in September my first husband (H1 - why get creative?) could not be roused mid-morning by our adult developmentally disabled son, who called me to come get him. Our son needed food, medicine, and to get to his beloved Special Olympics bowling activity. This is parenting time the father fought me for over years, in two long and bankrupting family/guardianship court battles, and that he now frequently skips or squanders. But his rights as a semi-neglectful, substance-infused parent have been intensely and consistently upheld by the courts and child protective services over almost two decades, and I am exhausted. I no longer fight or argue, don’t even complain, trying to keep aloof and safe through Greyrock.

Greyrock “theorizes that, when dealing with an emotionally abusive, toxic, or narcissistic person, withholding your reactions can put a stop to their behaviors. If you show no emotion they won’t get the thrill or enjoyment out of their harmful behavior.” It’s really more of a coping mechanism for the target than an effective way of influencing the Narc. A text arrived when he finally woke up at 1 pm, saying that he would not be taking our son to any of his programs anymore, ever. I was expecting this mid-level DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): a practice essential to narcissistic abuse, carried out exactly as the name implies. In this instance the emphasis was on “reverse victim and offender,” with outrage at being expected to get up in the morning and take his son to an activity.

DARVO was only the start of his revenge for an imagined ego slight. While Son was visiting with his father two weeks later, H1 suddenly refused to pick him up from a program far from home, where he had actually dropped him off in the morning. Knowing that I was out of town, he told Son and the program that he was at a bar watching the football game, and thus wasn’t going to get him. This level of public neglect is unusual even for H1, but it was done as very explicit vengeance: towards Son for having called me to get him two weeks before, and towards me for having the unspoken knowledge that he’s a drunk. H1 correctly assumed that society would quickly punish and blame me, as the mother, and he weaponized it.

Narc-naming also has a label for this, thank Jesus. He had turned the program managers into Flying Monkeys, “people who end up doing the dirty work of the narcissist,” or people who are unwittingly used as proxies by the narcissist to attack, shame or control the target. The female program managers, being people living and breathing patriarchy, took this role right up. The director immediately told me that Son was not going to be allowed to return to the program. When I bit the obligatory shame bullet and asked for another chance, pointing out that they knew he was with his father and I had not been in town, the director wrote both of us and a whole lot of other random staff members the following email:

The failure to organize transportation after the event on Sunday put me and my staff in an awkward situation that needs to be addressed. We were being bounced back and forth between both of you to resolve the transportation issue. This not only was stressful, but the failure to have reliable transportation directly impacted the time of staff who had to wait with (Son) while the issue was resolved. This past weekend was very uncomfortable for not only the staff but for (Son) as well. This cannot happen again.

If (Son) is to continue to participate in the Alumni Club (Mom) must agree to be responsible for transporting him.

In our society parental responsibility and blame are placed predominantly on the mother and then secondarily on both parents, rarely on the father alone. They checked that box. Apparently H1’s psychological abuse of me and Son had caused them a lot of inconvenience (keep that interpersonal abuse crap to yourself because somewhere along the way you must have chosen it, and thus it is your fault: check). Once they completed the irrational shame application like good Flying Monkeys and felt morally justified, they required that I be the sole point of contact - because in fact they knew all along that I am is the responsible caregiver. Public application of shame (Bad Mother!), coercion into fawning, weaponizing your care for your child against you: all done through others. The ingrained selfishness and biases of the American public have made it breathtakingly easy for MAGA to mobilize whole zoos full of animals against the vulnerable, newly equipped with wings and an inexhaustible diet of ignorant malice.

When Narcissism Is the Least of It

We’re about to wade into narc-naming right up to our chests, heart-level. My second husband (H2) and I were returning from a very nice weekend day together alone, probably hiking, and we stopped at the grocery store to pick up something he wanted. I forgot my wallet in the car, but while inside remembered that I needed nutrition shakes for my son. I asked if he could get them, and I would pay him back. Completely unexpectedly, he started to scream at me in the store. I bolted out the front door and walked the mile home in the dark, without purse or phone, afraid to get in the car with him. When I got home H2 was there, and I asked him to leave until he calmed down. Instead, he lifted me from behind and slammed me, axe-like, head-first into the floor, knocking me unconscious. When I woke up I was in bed and he was coming up the stairs with an EMT, telling them that I had fainted. I was frozen with fear, shock, physical pain and mental disorientation, so I did not contradict him. No one spoke to me outside of his presence at all, and I said almost nothing.

Once the ambulance had left, he sat at my bedside and lovingly held my hand, then explained in all sincerity that I had attacked him by jumping on his back and somehow from there had fallen onto my head. He assumed that I wouldn’t be able to remember what happened before he knocked me out. This is a classic example of both DARVO and gaslighting - possibly the most commonly known narc-naming term, and also the very base of most abusive individual and para-social relationships.

Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.

Why is it useful for Trump to tell the world that Ukraine caused its own invasion by Russia, when he and everyone else knows it’s a lie? Gaslighting always serves a dual purpose: demoralizing the target, and enhancing the abuser’s position on the societal chess board. I knew in my gut that H2 had not invented the story for me only, but also for the EMTs and any police that might show up, just as Trump gaslights for his fellow dictator, Putin.

When I told H2 I knew he was lying, he seamlessly switched gears and said pitifully: “who would want their wife to think he was capable of something like this?” It was a clumsy attempt at Trauma Bonding.

A trauma bond in a relationship involves a foundation of abuse, which may hinge on tactics such as threats of harm, manipulation, control, shaming, gaslighting, and sabotage, mixed with intermittent moments of calm and displays of affection.

The next day, when I told him my ears were still ringing and my head still pounding, he said that I had gotten what I wanted - closing the circle on the trauma bond. I was aware of it but felt trapped and completely, utterly hopeless. Sadly, it’s hard to find explanations of trauma bonding abuse online that don’t implicitly blame the target - even though the concept originated in techniques used on prisoners of war.

Trump has engaged in blatant trauma bonding with other countries: ‘I’m going to make things so scary for you, I’m going to make you feel so destabilized and powerless, that when I pull back that fear a little you’ll love me, and I’ll own you.’ He threatened to take the Panama Canal, and by not doing so got Panama to hold refugees from all over the world captive in the jungle. He threatened Mexico with tariffs and the mass dumping of millions of migrants over the border, in return he got a compliant Mexican president who constantly wants to “negotiate.” H2 made clear that he could and would kill me, but he didn’t: each manufactured crisis that ended without my house actually burning down brought a mixed flood of relief and enhanced fear. The goal becomes just to keep the tyrant happy.

H2’s aperture was always able to expand as needed from the societal (how to manipulate the police and justice system), to the individual (how to control his wife and continue to abuse her, which felt good to him). It is the aperture of society and psychology that stays stuck on me, on what the torture victim should have done. Why do we believe that tyrants exist in history and politics but do not walk among us? The regular-guy way of being a dictator is towards his regular-folk partner and family: dictatorship on the cheap.

The 1% Personality Disorder

Dr. Frank Yeomans is an expert in treating personality disorders and co-author of the 2021 book Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference - Focused Psychotherapy. He was asked in an interview: “the concept of narcissistic personality disorder has in a sense been corrupted by the now common use of the label in the general public…how do we as professionals combat this misunderstanding of what is in actuality a quite severe and relatively rare psychiatric disorder?”

Dr Yeomans responded:

Well let me start with the ‘relatively rare,’ I'm not sure it's relatively rare prevalence. Studies have found anywhere from 1% to 7% of the population having narcissistic pathology. The studies have that wide a spread because it's difficult to accurately assess Narcissism in the population, most simply because people who are narcissistic don't like to answer questions in a way that put them in a bad light…

While the rest of us like that so very much.

In the mind of the narcissistic person either you're perfect or you're nothing at all so…we (therapists) let ourselves be devalued and gradually as this work progresses that's how we establish an alliance and…the patient begins to perceive a genuine interest on our part, a curiosity and a wish to help them that is unshakable no matter how much they attack us and devalue us and criticize us. And that becomes an object of curiosity for them and kind of a new experience because the person has in their own mind a template of what relationship with another person is, and that template is anytime two people interact one's got to be superior and one's got to be inferior: one's on top one's on the bottom.

Yeomans explains that in order to work this therapy must take place at least once but preferably twice a week over 3-7 years:

The notion that people with NPD are not treatable is a pretty strongly held opinion...Our experience as a group is that people with NPD can respond successfully to treatment but it's a really long haul and a difficult treatment to engage in. The first problem of course is the patient needs to be motivated for treatment and there's two problems there: one is the nature of the narcissistic defensive system often leaves people seeing the problem outside, they always are projecting onto others…

There is no blood test or gene associated with NPD, no recommended medication. The personality disorders, like much of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), were created and identified via committees and negotiation among psychiatrists. We are left with a “clinical” narcissistic personality disorder that is sparsely treated or even diagnosed. Yeoman’s first rule for treating the narcissist is to never use the word with him. All this makes it useless as a mental health diagnosis; we have no reason to hold it sacrosanct. Take the most distasteful patriarchy, call it an illness, and then declare it vanishingly rare: this equals obfuscation by setting pseudo-medical standards - which many women will defend because they’ve been taught to believe in them, or in order to be let into the professional boy’s club.

A few years ago, when questioning my mother about her apparent lack of animosity towards the ex-husband whom she identified as her greatest abuser, she said “well, you know life in his family was ‘nasty, brutish and short.’” It was a quote from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and just an over-educated way of saying “he didn’t know any better.” He was a PhD student, and also the first man to hit me in the head hard enough to make my ears ring, when I was five. The blow made by brain vibrate for a time afterwards.4 My great-grandmother was said to have stood at the top of the stairs with a bat when her husband came home from a night out drinking, yelling at him in Gaelic that he better not touch a hair on the heads of any of their eight children. Two generations and a world of privilege, education, freedom and birth control separated these two women, but they both spent their adult lives navigating the private cruelties of men. The woman born in 19th-Century Ireland seems to have had a clearer concept of the power dynamic involved.

Abuse in my family skipped a generation not because of some mysterious latent-victimization gene, but simply because my grandfather made a clearly conscious choice not to use power in that way, to keep decency and the good of the whole family as his guiding principle. He decided to be different from his father. That is, psychology aside, a choice that men can and do make.

Education did not make my mother less vulnerable to abuse - because she was taught equally by Catholicism, secular college and Western Buddhism to respect and accommodate a religiously and scientifically white-washed version of ‘male demons’ syndrome. As Victoria Smith explained with breathtaking accuracy:

I think men who know your compliance is coerced can eventually get even angrier for it. They know you don’t mean it, and it shames them, and that shame has to be projected back onto you…At best, the man who “snaps” will be recalled as a tortured soul, his victim, a docile, simple untroubled wife who happened to get in the way. What can she know about dark nights of the soul? Perhaps there will be another discussion of men’s mental health, and why he never gets to discuss his problems.

Our Western philosophy, history, literature and religions have forever been and largely remain centered on male dark nights of the soul, teaching us to tolerate, romanticize and accommodate them, writ large or small. Soon after our separation H2 wrote me, as I struggled to define what he had done to me: “As far as evil goes, there's no such thing and you must know that. A lion that eats a baby gazelle is not evil. It just is. Evil is an unthinking term for someone looking for pat answers.” Clearly he is the lion and I am the gazelle, existing to be his natural prey. We could call him a psychopath, as a personality type and not a mental illness; he knows right from wrong, but applies that knowledge only as he sees fit. He was frequently a very nice, loving lion, except when you found your head in his mouth. In regard to evil, he is only saying what every guy and most professors at both our universities always said. I’m taken aback by the similarities between my quiet, bookish, “progressive” second husband and Donal Trump and so many others: malignant, toxic, patriarchal, common-as-a-brown-penny narcissists. I gift them to each other.

There seems to be a gap in this conversation, which would be filled by acknowledgement of the specific things that people do to make the holidays scary. The most obvious of these is assaultive and explosive behavior. Reports of domestic violence increase during the holidays. Since he continues to bray up at us from Hell, I’ve repeatedly mentioned a stepfather who flipped over a table completely set for Thanksgiving dinner, and threw the plates around my mother and me (at 7 yo) as we cowered against a wall. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. His excuse was always alcohol, and I’d like to single out the connection between the societal permission to drink, drug and otherwise “party” during the holidays, and the fear that it brings to partners and children.

The holidays create opportunities and a permission structure for adults to over-indulge in alcohol and drugs, in a similar way and to a similar end that children are rewarded with dopamine-inducing packages. My first husband (H1), my children’s father, has always used Christmas/New Year’s as an open excuse to binge, which has made this time of year scary for the past two decades, far past our divorce. While under the influence of whatever he becomes incoherent, illogical and unpredictable, simultaneously childlike and potentially aggressive. Cocaine would put his jaw on constant circular rotation. As far as I’m concerned, men on substances are either monsters or monsters in waiting, by their own choice. It goes without saying that they are also not helping out with the holiday chores.

Frequently a perfectly fine father, while on binges H1 has (accidentally) burned my son with a cigarette and then publicly humiliated him for crying, taken my children to all-night raves, paid a street prostitute to watch them in his car while he was in a strip club, left them hungry and unsupervised for a day with a table covered with guns and ammunition, and done who knows what else. Just leave, society says. I kicked him out one New Years Day when the kids were little because I found out that he had left them alone sleeping in his car in downtown Baltimore while he was in a gun shop augmenting his collection - something that I think would take a bit of time. But most of the events listed above only happened because we were divorced and I was no longer there to intervene. Yes, I’ve called Child Protective Services and spent years fighting in family court to no avail, because almost any man with two pennies to rub together and any interest in seeing his children is going to get his time with them, period. Then you are what is called the “protective parent” in abusive situations, but without the access to protect.

Male absence, be it physical, emotional or labor-related, is frequently called out as a form of exploitation when we talk about the burden of holidays on women. We also have to acknowledge that for many family members the lack of presence of certain men, or their complete passivity, can be a sad blessing - or as good as it’s going to get for now. The current dialogue about women’s woes is truthful, but a generally limited and privileged truth, as I have written about recently. That’s just not going to work; it will leave a lot of women unmoved, feeling unseen and pissed off, for good reason. When I was in my 20’s I attended a Christmas party in a private home, where the older generation - a number of middle-aged men and women - were all nodding out on heroin in an adjacent room. As a school social worker, I have been shocked by the sheer number of children who don’t have any Christmas at all, unless it is donated. People who have experienced these types of widespread realities as their own sad or scary normal need to be heard in regard to the holidays and what they mean.

If you are afraid for your own or your children’s well-being (physical or psychological) during the next two weeks, I see you. No matter what he says or does it is not your fault, it is simply happening because he’s choosing to be an ass. He knows what drinking/drugging/whatever dysfunction will make him into, and he does it anyway. He has no God-given right to “party” during the holidays in spite of the harm it causes to other people; he is an adult making choices. The same goes for bad behavior he blames on childhood trauma (a really widespread phenomenon), his life disappointments, the brilliant-man blues, the anxieties caused by his family of origin, etc. If you buck up and stay more or less on track for the children and others, so can he.

Zawn Villines, author of Liberating Motherhood on Substack, is extremely helpful on parts of this topic:

One of the most harmful and pervasive sexist myths is that the main way patriarchy harms men is by blunting their emotions. While it might be true that men think they’re not feeling emotions, it’s a complete fabrication that men in patriarchy can’t feel.

Men living in patriarchal societies do nothing but feel. That’s why they start wars and throw tantrums and parent by emotion rather than research, and kill their partners, and act as if they are being abused if anyone asks them to put away the dishes.

Men, like everyone else, have a range of emotions at the holidays. They may have valid reasons to be unhappy. Perhaps they miss a dead family member, or wish they could have done more for their kids, or have a history of family abuse around the holidays.

Women learn to keep these feelings in check, to not allow them to destroy the celebration. But men believe they can and must act how they feel. An unfortunate side effect of this belief is that, if everyone else is acting happy, many men believe that means they are happy. So your hard work and cheery good mood (that you went to therapy to maintain) are signs that you’re not struggling, do not deserve support, and should instead support him.

They want to undermine their partners

For some men, holiday bad moods are a combination of low impulse control and willful ignorance of their partners’ work. For a lot of men, though, there’s something more sinister at work.

For emotionally abusive men who don’t respect their partners, bad moods are a deliberate attempt to undermine the work. They know she’s worked hard for this. So they have to take it from her. In a lot of cases, these men will dig the knife in deeper by pointing out how the holiday sucked, so her work didn’t matter.

They’re unwilling to consider others’ emotions

Patriarchy teaches men to center themselves. So they don’t consider that their mood is one of the things that will define their kids’ childhood. They don’t weigh how their mood might affect others’ trauma, or how it can ruin the holiday.

They just react, because society teaches them not to care, then lets them get away with not caring—all the while blaming women for anything that goes even slightly wrong this season (and every other season, too).

They want all the attention for themselves

Like a toddler who will accept any form of attention their parent is willing to give, men displaying bad moods over the holidays have a very clear objective: redirecting attention to themselves.

A lot of men struggle with not being the center of attention—with seeing a woman tend to the kids, with watching family members marvel over a woman’s hard work, with having a partner who has something to do other than fuck him, fawn over him, and endlessly listen to his feelings (all while he pretends he has no emotions because he’s so logical).

His bad mood is a way of redirecting the attention away from the holidays and onto himself.

Getting drunk is also a very good way to redirect the attention onto himself, because then the family has to “manage” him, tiptoe around him, take care of him, pretend it’s not happening. Be scared of all the things that abdication of personal responsibility can bring about. It creates the excuse, the cover, for him to be belligerent, cruel, useless or aggressive, and not be held responsible for it afterwards.

My children are young adults now, although my son has special needs and a guardianship court is forcing me to continue to co-parent with his father. The kids decided to go away with me for Christmas this year - a first, and one for which he will make us pay, in some way or another. I had half expected to go away by myself, because (as you may have guessed) I have learned to dislike Christmas. But I would never leave them on a holiday if they want to be with me, and I will be quietly happy, pleasant and festive, without any major dopamine or adrenaline infusions. I am perfectly content to cook and decorate and clean, because they will pitch in to their abilities, and will not be mean or humiliating to me. Love, low-key. My father will be there but he is not generally a holiday-wrecker and if he chooses to sulk we will ignore him. It helps that he doesn’t drink.

This Christmas might be OK, God willing. The biggest gift to us would be peace, and I wish that for you and yours as well.

_______________________

In the U.S.:

Safety planning for holidays and weekends - National Domestic Violence Hotline

Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous hold around-the-clock meetings, remote and in person during the holidays, free. Of course if you are trying to make him attend or begging him to, it is not going to work. His addiction is not your job, not just on a moral level, but mostly on a practical one.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Hotline and referral to services

Adult Children of Alcoholics and Other Dysfunctional Families also holds around-the-clock, free remote meetings during the holidays. These meeting work well for family members and partners of anyone with any type of substance abuse (and, as it says, many other types of dysfunction). I personally feel that it is better than Al-Anon because it does not promote any concept of you being tied to or responsible for a partner/family member’s addiction or the person while they are using - but whatever you find helpful is good.

You are NOT co-dependent! That’s not even an actual diagnosis! Learn more here

An excellent discussion of the many ways women are roped into being responsible for their partner’s addictions, including by therapists, here

I bone-learned (not so much brain-learned) this when I was twelve because an adult involved in my school reported to the headmaster and my parents that I was being abused by my math teacher, which was true. Headmaster responded to my parents with “little girls get crushes on their teachers,” as part of an accusation that I had made it up, invented it. If you don’t know about victim-blaming, DARVO and society’s romance with Nabokov’s book Lolita, Headmaster’s explanation made no sense - since I wasn’t the one who made the accusation in the first place. When something is incomprehensible you may have no words for it; therefore you do not speak, which is mostly what I had done and continued to do in regards to the math teacher, but I had said enough to confirm the problem. Many of the actions and words of adults involved in the abuse and its aftermath were mysterious to me, imparting the permanent lesson that reality and people mix about as much as oil and water, and reaching the water you thirst for through the oily people is only going to make you feel slimy.

Headmaster slimed me by implying that I was a nymphet, defined by Merriam-Webster as a “sexually precocious girl barely in her teens.” It was a popular concept I was familiar with at the time, without needing much if any knowledge of the book. I knew implicitly that his interpretation would stand, that he would make it into truth and erase me, and that this is what happened to girls who spoke. The math teacher and I continued to encounter each other in that school building for another five years, until he apparently quit in a huff because Headmaster tried to talk to him about his ongoing “inappropriate” interaction with girls (remember that if it were all not now well documented, a part of you might be wondering if I had made this up - because we’re raised in and conditioned by the slime). I learned that if you did speak, it had to be far away from the headmasters of the world, and their innumerable, frequently well-disguised henchmen. Through a life dominated by male abuse, including domestic violence, that lesson remains completely accurate.

Only now am I slipping out of the vise of shame for not running more efficient abuse-liberation and resistance operations in my life in general, which are accepted by society only if they have a discrete ending, are entirely successful or end in tragic death, and must be modeled somewhere between Ghandi, Harriet Tubman, a heroine in a Jane Austen novel and Wonder Woman, or all four at once.

We especially celebrate escape from abuse that is done in the most dangerous of ways. There is a really thoughtful survivor named Isabelle who tells her story in segments on Substack’s Notes. Her exit from abuse happened to follow the cinematic, climactic one-and-done escapes that society rewards. She felt escalating fear of her husband one night, she ran out the door barefoot with her two small children, he assaultrd her but she managed to drive away. There are even door-cam pictures of this. She never saw the abuser again and he killed himself, about which she writes with compassion. She made a successful dash for freedom, and then he ended the abuse and danger by dying - through which he can be re-humanized, which is almost always part of the cultural demand. The way this abuse experience played out was clearly terrifying and breathtakingly dangerous for all the victims, and continuously painful for the children due to the permanent loss of their father. But on America’s terms it’s a good, satisfying escape story, which is met with approval and support by readers. The flip side of the “escape-just-this-way” edict is a post I mentioned recently by Michelle Teheux, who scathingly compared our re-election of Trump to a woman who returns to an abuser she’s been told is going to kill her - which will fittingly conclude in her death. Teheux’s readers are just as enthusiastic.

Back in reality, it is most likely that the inspiring escape happened the way it did because of the nervous system reaction of that particular survivor in that moment: we frequently react to danger instinctively with one of the 4 F’s (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), and if you are that scared you’re not really choosing - one is being chosen for you. If she had fought back hard she might have gotten arrested herself (especially since there was an unhelpful male witness there). If she had frozen or fawned (which is just trying to placate the abuser), had hidden in a closet or talked to him soothingly or done nothing at all, she might have been assaulted and lived to face it yet another day; leaving her in America’s so-stupid-she-deserved-it category. But running for your life or trying to physically force him to leave are the nuclear options, full of residual danger if you can’t pull it off. That is how I got very unglamorously knocked unconscious.

If we want to be a Safe Person in a survivor’s life - not just in helping her to physical and psychological safety, but in forming a society that accepts her - we have to take into account what she actually fears most, or equally. It may not be the assault, as horrible and terrifying as they genuinely are. My stepfather kicked my mother and I out into the streets of Boston in the middle of the night when I was about eight, which resulted in my going to live with the family of a friend for much of my 3rd grade year. It was probably the right way for my mother to keep me safe, but it meant separation from her, and the psychological sense of a certain type of homelessness, of floating adrift in the world. My stepfather watched by the door as we left, knowing we had no car or money or phone, and I got to see up close the beady gleam of hateful satisfaction in his eyes. It literally took the breath out of my little chest, and I learned that night not only that the center will not hold, but that men can smash your center to smithereens, or just remove it from you, on a malicious whim. That is probably one reason I did not flee from my home as an abused wife: I was and still would be more afraid of homelessness, and especially of being separated from my children if we were displaced. Maybe, if I had not been taught by Headmaster that girls are disbelieved, maligned and placed by helping professionals right back in the fire, I could have sought out a safe way to make my abusive husband leave sooner, and uneventfully. That is the outcome that all DV survivors deserve, the one that is a million times more positive than barefoot flight. It is a cultural expectation we should normalize: Instead of “Why doesn’t she leave right out that door with her babies to homelessness, poverty and instability? Stupid cow!” we could try “Has he been removed and what does she need?”

As it is, I have never done anything but messily ooze out of abuse. I made a desperate grab at safety by calling the police once, which turned out to be a risky move, too risky to repeat. In the months before I called the police I had asked my husband to leave the house many times, even just temporarily so he could calm down, and he had always refused. But after that police call, when he was escalating I would pick up the phone and pretend that I was going to call unless he left. At this point he believed me, and he would leave temporarily. That is how I protected myself, whether or not it is satisfying as a plot development. Eventually he found being regularly kicked out to be inconvenient, and he left permanently of his own accord. That does not mean that it was a clean break - he continued to manipulate and abuse me psychologically, verbally, through love-bombing and the court system for years. My nervous system was not at all convinced that having him living nearby but not knowing what he was up to was really safer than keeping an eye on him. A prosecutor explains this beautifully, in a talk that has formed part of my post-abuse psychological life raft:

A mistake I made was substituting my own perspective for that of the domestic violence victim, because like I said from my perspective her choices, her actions made no sense, but when I thought about it from her perspective it changed everything. So let's look at that question of “why doesn't she just leave?” but not from our own perspective in the cheap seats as people who are not in abusive relationships, but from the perspective of a woman who is in an abusive relationship. And I say “woman” and “she” and her because statistically the vast majority of domestic violence victims are women and the vast majority of perpetrators are men…

Consider first what would she be walking away from, violence maybe but what else: love, her home, many times her family. And consider not only what is she walking away from, consider what is she walking towards: uncertainty, poverty potentially - how is she gonna pay the mortgage or provide for her children? And fear is a big one: the most statistically dangerous thing that a victim can do is leave an abusive relationship. Women are 70 times more likely to be murdered by an abusive partner immediately after leaving an abusive relationship than at any other time in that relationship, because domestic violence is all about control and if she leaves what is the abuser losing: control. It's dangerous and victims understand that better than the rest of us. They understand that by leaving it's dangerous for them and anyone around them. Twenty percent - one in five victims of domestic violence homicide are people other than the abused partner: they are children, they are other family members, they're police officers. Victims get it, it and so from a victim's perspective many times the safest choice she can make is to stay right where she is.

A victim described it to me this way once, she said it's like when you see a shark's fin in the water you know it's dangerous but as long as you can see it you feel reasonably safe because at least you know where the danger is, but if that fin dips below the water that's the really scary thing because now you don't know when or where the attack is going to come, and that's what it feels like to leave an abuser.

Without this explanation and an understanding of the nervous system, my actions post-separation make absolutely no sense, even to me. I simultaneously begged my husband to come back and begged him to move far away. I was willing to pay him to move away. As the prosecutor said, I was completely convinced that by involving any friends or family I would just drag them into the line of fire, so I didn’t ask for help they would have given me. Instead I told him he had an obligation to the marriage, that I no longer loved him and that he was a habitual abuser and had an obligation to society to fix himself, all in the same sentence. I would check that his car was at work in the morning and at his home in the evening, because if it was, my constant, acute, unbearable sense of panic would be reduced by at least 50%. I was hypervigilant to an extent that would have looked to outsiders like obsession. I warned his roommates that he was dangerous, which he very easily painted as my being crazy. But I was no more crazy as a DV victim, within what I knew and had experienced, than I was a teacher-trolling nymphet at twelve. My psyche cycled continuously through all of the 4 F’s as I tried desperately to get help and stabilize in a world that had become so much more hostile towards me, objectively so, since I became a talking domestic violence victim.

He and all the systems and people around him treated basic decency and sanity like luxuries to which I had no right, because my societal vagrancy as a battered woman meant I could never pay the price in status and respect demanded for them. Even when no longer being physically assaulted in my home, the abuse simply morphed into coercion through court and professional victim-response systems that in my area are frequently continuations of the boot-heel treatment, ugly and broken.

I’d like to ask Ms. Teheux and her simultaneously anti-Trump and survivor-demeaning friends if they have moved to Canada yet, now that they are just months from being under the dominion of a tyrant. If not, what’s the holdup? Do they have a home, friends or a life they’ve built and don’t want to give up? Do they not have a job in Canada, or a support system? Does it feel risky to run out into the complete unknown? Do they have children whom the courts might order to stay here with their Trump-loving ex (because the courts don’t see Trump or most other abusers as a real-time threat to your children), or are they afraid of not being present to protect them? What a quandary.

Most of us are co-existing with some type of oppression, varying vastly in degree. The way that one escapes or resists that oppression (without hurting the vulnerable) is the right way, until the next best step can be taken.

The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins.

Joan Chittister, The Story of Ruth, 2000

That’s a lot, and many of us will never get there. I would say that the resurrection of the world happens continuously with each anti-oppression action taken by every individual. Many times, within abuse as within our political, work and financial lives, those actions are small but meaningful, undramatic.

Please feel free to share with me your uninspiring stories of escape.

Intimate partner abuse is inherently multifaceted, using a combination of tactics to degrade the flavors, textures and colors of your life, and extract whatever the abuser wants to take from you. It should always be seen as a web of interlocking behaviors, some of which have been so normalized by society that they are very hard for even the victim-survivor or others to see. But in correcting misconceptions of domestic abuse as being only about assault, advocates for awareness of what they frequently call “covert abuse” (which can include coercive control, psychological/emotional/verbal abuse, narcissistic abuse and betrayal trauma), are increasingly using language that is irrationally dismissive of the harms of bodily harm. It is a trend that threatens to create a painful and completely unnecessary schism in our already weak movement against domestic abuse, and leave the most vulnerable behind.

I) No Matter How Much a Woman is Physically Assaulted

To illustrate the problem I will highlight a recent interview with Sarah Manguso, the author of Liars, one amongst the trend of women’s divorce books. She says a lot in the interview that I believe to be true and significant, and through much of it I am totally on board to read her book.

I grew up having been sold a bill of goods for a new type of progressive heterosexual partnership that, for most of us, never materialized. I got married because I believed the hype; I didn’t know how deeply patriarchy had already poisoned the men of my generation, how most of them, even if they didn’t say it out loud, wanted traditional wives. I think the average progressive Gen X hetero woman went into marriage expecting a utopian partnership, and the average “progressive” Gen X man went into marriage expecting a cool wife.

Yes! And then comes the inevitable:

People who work with battered women frequently say that no matter how much a woman is physically assaulted, the deepest abuses are psychological.

No matter how much a woman is physically assaulted. That is an enormous statement; enormity based in lack of veracity and a dismissiveness of the bodies of other women. Manguso is only riding a growing, disturbing wave. I first ran into these “psychological abuse is worse than physical abuse,” “I wish I had bruises,” and “if only he had hit me” memes in 2021, after getting out of an extremely physically, verbally, psychologically, financially, legally abusive second marriage1. Jess Hill, an excellent anti-DV author and activist, tweeted a survivor quote from an Australian article: “especially with emotional abuse - I’ve said many times, I’d prefer to be hit in the face, because you can see that, and [people take you more seriously].” This didn’t even make sense in context, since the survivor being quoted had been picked up by the emotional abuser while fleeing in unaided panic from an assaultive abuser. But no mind; the point has morphed from educating the public and survivors about different varieties of abuse, into simply making cultural waves.

Shocked and caught off guard by seeing violence-minimization from a supposed ally for the first time, I felt a searing pain through my gut and up into my chest - reminiscent of the physical recoil that I used to get when my second husband called me a cunt, or asinine, or began to yell at me in public. Sharp emotional pain, yes. But not the absolute dehumanizing terror of his strangulations, beatings, being knocked unconscious. Since then, abuse-comparisons by feminists dismissive of the effects of violence have been ballooning and become mainstream (a few examples here, here, here.)

Manguso is a protege of Tracy Schorn, an infidelity guru with 20K followers on Facebook, described on her website:

Award-winning blogger and cartoonist known as “Chump Lady.” She’s the author of “Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life – The Chump Lady’s Survival Guide” …, which has been an Amazon #1 seller in divorce. Her work has helped hundreds of thousands of people leave abusive relationships.

My first husband, the father of my children, was in retrospect always unfaithful. Our marriage ended when my kids were quite small, amidst highly public levels of his infidelity, alcohol and drug use, as I worked a full-time job and parented a toddler and a preschooler with autism and epilepsy. Husband #1 became scary from drug use, disconnected from reality and very unpredictable. I finally kicked him out because he told me we didn’t have enough money to buy the kids shoes, then went out the next day and secretly bought two handguns. (Two? Why two? So they wouldn’t get lonely? For a Bonnie and Clyde shoot-out?). He moved right from our marital home into the house of his mistress (a friend of ours), which I learned because I received a notice in the mail about an order of protection he had taken out for our residence due to threats by her ex-husband (also a friend of ours). I’ve been a Chump-extraordinaire, and like many others his behavior only got worse post-separation. But it made a significant psychological and practical difference that Husband #1 was never assaultive. He could have killed me with a flick of his pinky finger - or with either of those two handguns. In a recent blog post entitled Your Experience of Infidelity as Abuse, the Chump Lady proclaims in her signature lingo:

In my book, I give the example of being thrown down a flight of stairs (as the cheater claims they “still love you!”). Would you rather topple head-over-ass down a staircase, or lose years of your life to a FW (Fuckwit)? Most of us would prefer the stairs.

As for me - I’d very much prefer to be cheated on than thrown down a flight of stairs by a grown man, because I feel a primal affection for my neck, spinal column, and all my limbs; much greater than any regard I ever had for his dick or even his love. There’s a sense that if I keep on reading these blog posts she’s going to tell me that I’d rather be abducted by aliens than be married to a cheater, and the parallel sense in reading them that I’ve entered an alien and disturbing land.

The bruises that resulted from my very assaultive second marriage proved to me that he was absolutely capable of killing me and possibly my family members, that I needed to spend every minute convincing him not to, and they filled me with the deepest of shame and dread. To see supposed anti-abuse activists endorsing the concept of WANTING bruises just demonstrated that what I had believed to be my own corner of the world didn’t care enough about women’s bodies either. I am fond of my body and the way it connects me to the outside; my well-being is inseparable from its safety, integrity, and functionality in processing air and operating without the effects of concussions. I am particularly partial to my head, which I covered with my hands and arms as he dragged me around my house, stopping periodically to punch me with his fists as I screamed pointlessly “stop - it’s me - I’m your wife!” There is nothing rare about my experience.

II) What Are the Benefits of Getting Beat Up?

Manguso and I could have really bonded around the importance of illustrating, to a willfully abuse-blind world, the inner workings of patriarchal cruelty in a marriage or other intimate partner relationship. “It was so important for me to pack this book with details,” she says. “I needed to tell the story of this marriage — to show what covert abuse really looks like — in painstaking detail. Because it’s the critical mass of details that makes John’s abuse impossible to deny.” Maybe a critical mass of details would convince her and other violence-minimizers that their words devalue the importance of women’s bodies in a way that is inexplicable. For every National Hockey League Player who suffers a concussion, 7,000 Canadian women are concussed by an intimate partner. The Family Justice Center says of strangulation (often called choking in common parlance):

• People who have been strangled are 7 times more likely to be killed by their intimate partner (past or present). 

• Ten percent of intimate partner violence victims have experienced attempted strangulation.

• often minimized or undetected because there may be no visible injuries.

• a powerful tactic of control for abusers.

• a tactic often used as part of sexual assault.

• generally committed by compressing the neck using a body part such as fingers, hands, forearms, elbows, shoulders, legs, knees or feet; or by using an object.

Since 1 in 4 American and Canadian women suffer violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetimes, and 10% of those are strangled - that’s a lot of women. I would add that manual strangulation is a very effective way to neutralize the victim and make her head vulnerable to further blows against the floor, concrete and other hard objects. Both blows to the head and strangulation can cause permanent brain damage, neurological and cognitive problems. Eighty percent of women killed by current or former intimate partners experienced known domestic assault previously - which makes non-fatal assault a really big risk factor for homicide. And there are prevalence realities which push “emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse” from the misguided category into the ugly.

Even though IPV affects women across racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic status, historically marginalized women are at greatest risk: 56.6% of multiracial women, 45.1% of Black women, 47.5% of Native women,⁶ and 54% of disabled women⁷ experience IPV in their lifetimes. In addition, IPV disproportionately affects LGBTQ+ people, whose experiences are often invisible and whose safety is often ignored by the legal and healthcare systems.⁸

Citation

Intimate partner homicide is still the leading cause of the murder of women, and almost every group of non-white women have a significantly higher rate of DV homicide than White women. I have tried, over the past five years, to refrain from criticizing frequently excessive statements by advocates of psychological abuse awareness, because their basic message is so important. But I have come to recognize a modern version of the White, generally privileged movement-takeover and ideology-twisting also carried out in earlier waves of feminism, which were guilty of “othering” and dismissiveness of experiences more common to marginalized groups.

Some of the current advocates around non-assaultive abuse awareness seem to want to separate themselves from the racial, class and “weakness” stigmas of assaultive abuse, while still claiming the supposedly weighty word abuse. In our putrid patriarchy the absence of assaultive violence is a form of good fortune, for everyone. It does not mean that you are not a victim of injustice, or that misogyny isn’t making your life crap. But harm of one’s body does matter, and does have long-term consequences of many kinds. None of these feminists would make light of lack of access to abortion or of sexual assault, so why be dismissive of a woman being thrown down a flight of stairs? Maybe it is based in their biases about the victim.

Imagine if I said “if only he had raped me,” because sexual assault generally has longer statues of limitations and longer prison sentences than other types of assault. I would be roundly condemned, and for good reason.

Even the use of the term “covert abuse” to define abuse which is non-assaultive is based in misleading assumptions: assaultive abuse is mostly covert as well, to all but the people living in the household. It is maintained secret on point of further violence, and frequently made cognitively confusing to the victim-survivor because the assailant and much of society are telling her that she caused it, or must have wanted it: that it is, in itself, a sign of her weakness and stupidity. I made sure that the assaults I endured were secret because of these factors, and because I was certain that if he was not kept happy he was capable of doing anything - to me, anyone I loved or anyone who helped me. Like most abusers, he made concessions to covert-ness by only attacking me at home or in the car, though he would verbally abuse me in anonymous public spaces. I believed that in keeping the assaults covert I was protecting a variety of people. Many women try to maintain the secrecy of their “beatings” because, as reality-based fact, making them public might cause the woman and her children to become homeless, fall into poverty, risk separation (frequently through child protective services) or fear deportation.

A friend of mine treated a woman in an ER here in Baltimore, who’s abuser had slashed the tendons in the back of her feet to show her that she couldn’t walk away from him. That would really f*ck with my head, long-term. Assaultive abuse is one extreme form of psychological abuse, meant to shame, control and inflict fear and powerlessness by demonstrating concretely that your body is without value and he can destroy it on a whim. It is inseparable from psychological abuse, and the psychological symptoms suffered by victim-survivors. In a bizarre twist, it is now the police, courts, abusers themselves and monetized abuse influencers who are downplaying the seriousness of violence against women.

Because when talking about repeated and serious violence, the vast majority of victims are women. “Women experience higher rates of repeated victimisation and are much more likely to be seriously hurt or killed than male victims of domestic abuse.” I believe that this is downplayed by the “covert abuse” activists because of a combination of elitism, desire for marketing appeal, and sheltered ignorance. Part and parcel of some covert abuse ideology is to dodge the universally dreaded “why did you stay?” question/accusation by saying that since they were not hit they were unaware they were being abused, and if they had only known they could have acted on it. The phenomenon of frequent “return” to the abuser is now partially understood through the lens of Trauma Bonding, a specific psychological manipulation technique that makes leaving more difficult, and exists in all types of abuse. Assaulted women stay in abusive relationships too, for a lot of reasons. This is an inconvenient detail for the elitist trend that we might now call the “Un-Battered Women’s Movement,” driven by picture-perfect influencers who clearly are selling themselves as much as they are abuse awareness.

The Un-Battered Women’s Movement also frequently bemoans the lack of help offered to victims of non-physical violence - but this is a problem for everybody. DV shelters in the US turn away 6,000 survivors and children on a given day.

Let’s look thoughtfully at the widespread assumption that bruises lead to help from the authorities and others. I apologize for the photo above - I know it’s hard to look at. Just as concerning are the words written over it, and posted on social media, starting with: “See these marks? They are visible, proof of abuse? Right?” It leaves the questions there, with the assumption that everyone knows the answer is “yes.” But most assaultive abusers know enough to deny or make a counter-claim of assault - which, depending on the police jurisdiction, may mean that both parties are arrested, or that it is classified into “mutual abuse” and thrown into the no-real-victim dustbin. That is what happened when I called the police after one strangulation. My bruises from strangulation didn’t show up until the next day, but if you go to the police the next day you will frequently get: “Can you prove these bruises are from your husband? Can you prove what day you got them? Do you have any witnesses?” Since DV is almost always a covert crime done at home, of course you don’t have witnesses. Even if you did, they’re too scared or too young to talk. Most who heard or saw things won’t want to “get involved.”

A few years ago I assisted a woman being openly and publicly beaten by her very large husband at a gas station on one of the busiest intersections in North Baltimore. There were people everywhere, especially men - at least a dozen men of every race within 100 feet of her, and they were all looking intently at the tops of their shoes. So much for the glory of witnesses. “SHE’S MY WIFE!” he screamed at me in rageful justification for what he was doing, and while his back was turned to argue with me, she got away. Then she jumped in my car and we drove off. The police, by the way, had already come and gone from that situation, annoyed that she was too scared to come out of the locked gas-station bathroom. She had to come out eventually, and the perpetrator was there waiting.

If arrested the perpetrator is most likely to be released the next day - and where does that leave his target? While protection orders are frequently helpful, about 20% of abusers ignore them. A lot depends on whether the police in any given jurisdiction enforce them. The help any survivor gets really depends completely on the policies, funding, competence and attitudes of the helping professionals around her - and private helpers are not necessarily better than public. It is a crapshoot (see advice on this in the notes below).

The author quote that was posted with this photo (on a FB page with 471K followers) was 12 paragraphs long, each ending with some version of the sentence “He won’t hit me, but if he did, I would leave him.” Her certainty of this starts to waiver as his psychological torment intensifies, but she re-centers the idea of un-“hit”-victimhood in the last sentence, “Well, they say, it doesn’t sound great, but at least he didn’t hit you.” There is some form of incomprehension awaiting any talking domestic abuse survivor. I am almost always challenged as to why I stayed, followed by a statement indicating that I must have been in the relationship, “chosen” an abuser, because of psychological problems. The dismissiveness of bystanders is based in patriarchy and wanting the world to be predictable, not in lack of bruises. By focusing so much on not being hit you’re playing their game - and you’re using the physical assault of women as literary device to sell your book. An awful lot of us are that “other” who was hit. If we stopped comparing and siloing ourselves, we might actually be able to create coherent, effective cultural messaging against abuse.

III) But STUDIES SHOW…

Zawn Villines is a feminism-for-regular-people writer, who fearlessly talks about the way patriarchy and sexism effects the daily lives of mothers and other women in heterosexual relationships. She has 45K followers on FB, a website called Liberating Motherhood, a podcast, etc. I recommend her writing to women all the time. A 2023 article she published in Medical News Today opens with:

Articles about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often focus on physical violence. But emotional abuse can also cause PTSD. Some research suggests it may be as harmful as, or even more harmful than, physical violence.

Even more harmful than: once again that strange need they have to one-up, which she repeated in a Substack post with the subtitle “Why emotional abuse is so effective as a tool of control--and is often even more damaging than physical abuse.” Villines only sites one article to back up this claim in regard to adult victims, a 2022 study of women in Catalan, Spain, which concluded:

The participants of the study experienced many psychological symptoms and a high level of interference with all aspects of their daily lives. These consequences were of similar magnitude amongst victims of emotional abuse compared to those who suffered physical violence.

The instrument used by this study to measure and differentiate physical vs. emotional abuse is called the Index of Spousal Abuse (ISA), which was developed in the US in the 1970’s. It consists of 30 questions, answered by the potential survivor. The 1981 academic article which presented initial findings on the ISA starts out wonderfully with “Wife abuse is an old phenomenon (A CITATION!) but only recently, and with the advent of the women’s rights movement, has much public attention been given to this form of family violence.” To the modern eye, the content and scoring of the ISA seem to fall somewhere between illogical and shocking2. It classifies “my partner becomes surly and angry if I tell him he is drinking too much” as physical assault, but “my partner demands sex whether I want it or not” as NP, or Not Physical. Only 6 of the 30 questions relate clearly to physical (including sexual) assault. A full 7 questions could go either way (“my partner acts like a bully to me”), and the authors of the paper acknowledge this ambiguity. In short, it is a tool that justifies the use of apples and pineapples to measure oranges, applied 40 years later and in a different country - which could cause a lot of inconsistencies in the way that the questions and answers are understood and thus quantified. In some ways it is a quaint time-capsule: for example, it shows a strong interest in drunkenness, but not in other kinds of substance use; my husband’s cocaine use made him very scary. They are supposed to be measuring abusive behavior - not its supposed fuel. But this out-of-date tool was used and interpreted by the authors of the 2022 Spanish study that Villines sites as if all the questions and their cultural meaning were straightforward, contemporaneous and global. It was then then turned into a link to prove something it doesn’t prove at all.

Another frequently sited study conducted in 2005 concludes:

The degree of psychological abuse appears to be a stronger predictor of fear within violent relationships than the severity of physical abuse [31]. Fear of possible further episodes of physical, psychological and sexual abuse represents a chronic emotional stressor that can persist for a long time [2], [14]. Therefore, we suggest that this emotional state is a relevant component of psychological abuse impacting women’s psychological functioning."

All of the women in the study had suffered physical abuse, but the fear they carried of being abused again was considered psychological abuse, and was measured as such. Doesn't that mean that part of the origin of the fear was physical/sexual abuse? Why are we tying ourselves in logic knots? Social science studies are famously unreliable and unreplicable, driven by the need to proclaim a novel outcome - so we should never accept their statements, or link to them, without looking closely at how they came to their conclusions.

IV) How Have Anti-Abuse Activists Ended Up Minimizing Violence Against Women?

The desire to be believed and helped, the desire for someone to care is universal, and has generally eluded the targets of all gender-based abuse. One of the first things that astounded me as a battered woman was that assaults that would be considered crimes if done by a stranger, were still seen in a completely different light when done in my home by my husband. As we read above, “wife-beating” became a public concern less than a generation ago. It took women from the beginning of time to the 1970’s to make “private” violence other than murder a crime at all (in the US, Canada, Australia and western Europe). An unintended side-effect of the emphasis on criminalization of DV and the prevention of severe violence/homicide has been an incidence-based, legalistic, let’s-see-what-you-can-prove concept of domestic abuse.

This is somewhat like doing a physical exam by looking only at a person’s feet. The rest of the body will hold clues to symptoms of overall health - and overall abusiveness in a relationship - that the podiatrists will completely ignore; or declare, based on their foot-expertise, to be unimportant. Take your heart attack somewhere else - we’re not interested as long as you still have all your toes. The heart attack, in this analogy, is the enormous amount of non-assaultive cruelty, oppression, and coercive control that many women and children still experience in the romantic or domestic sphere. The covert abuse movement, on the other hand, instead of advocating for a whole-body exam maintains that the cardiologist must be the only doctor to examine the patient, even if the abuser is slowly and methodically chopping off each of the victim’s toes.

Much that is not assaultive is still violent. I learned this from fellow survivors online in my newly abuse-aware phase after separating from Husband #2, when I was not “emancipated” from abuse (that has never really happened), but the scales had fallen from my eyes and I was beginning to see it clearly. There is violence in causing rational fear of harm to oneself or a loved one. Take the following examples, from my own life or people I know:

• Cutting open a young boy’s favorite teddy bear, and hanging it above his bed

• Putting a mother and child out onto the street at night

• Threatening to harm or disappear a pet

• Leaving a survivor stranded on the side of the road far from home, without money or belongings

• Not allowing a mother to interact with/care for her children at home, as the abuser taunts and demeans them all. (This sort of thing is generally lost on Child Protective Services in the US, which sees it as a “dispute” between equals, and not their concern.)

All of these examples are violent and terrifying but not illegal in the US (the UK has Coercive Control laws that might address them). It shows why advocates have had to shout from the rooftops to try to get society to see the bigger picture of what domestic life is actually like for too many people - to point out the dehumanization that we’ve continued to normalize.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s exquisite book about intimate-partner psychological abuse, In The Dream House, she explains exactly where the wish to have bruises comes from:

Afterward - when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House - you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face covered in a pulsing star. This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly… (p.224)

What Machado describes is understandable, but based on fiction - a fiction that in itself promotes abuse-blindness. I had those bruises, I went to the cops, and none of it got me anything but humiliation. Getting knocked unconscious did not bring on some sort of epiphany, but only made me more fearful, gave me a days-long headache, and caused a ringing sound in my ears (signs of concussion). The saddest part of assault-minimization by feminists is that they make themselves complicit in the acceptance of brutality towards women’s bodies - our own and those of other women; complicit in the destruction of the matter we are made of, just to get some recognition and acceptance from a patriarchal system that doesn’t give a sh*t about any of us anyway. If that’s not internalized oppression, call me Brazilian bikini-wax.

We are fighting the same oppressor. I heard a survivor say yesterday than when she went to a support group at a DV agency, the participants noted that it seemed they all had the same husband. The men consider themselves and their needs to be “central, superior and deserving3,” even if they don’t present that way. They’ll just as frequently present as insecure, wounded and needy, and then the attention, resources and moment-to-moment decisions of the relationship and the family come to revolve around making him feel better. Slowly, when that doesn’t happen or his demons become more insatiable, the cost to those around him becomes more intense. The difference among these men is only the extremes they’re willing to go to in order to maintain their centrality.

Maybe the growth in assault-minimization among feminists is coming from the same place many bizarre statements are born: the internet-driven desire to shock, go bigger, push against the perceived grain in order to draw attention - be it to one’s public Facebook page, or Substack, or book. Psychological abuse has been commodified. The problem lies in needing to downplay the seriousness of assaultive abuse, when it’s still very much alive and kicking the shit out of us. We are precisely as post-battering as we were post-racial the day after Barack Obama was elected, and look where that cultural head-trip fantasy left us.

The most amazing people minimize assaultive violence against women. In 2022 I watched a female Public Defender testify against a bill in the Maryland State Legislature that made strangulation a felony. Before that, any non-fatal assault that did not involve a weapon was effectively a misdemeanor. You might say she was just doing her job, but she went the extra mile. In arguing that strangulation should not be made a felony she compared it to a slap or a kick, curly blonde hair gleaming against her black pantsuit. She was actually part of a mini-movement of “anti-carceral feminists,” featuring a lot of public defenders, a segment of BIPOC intellectuals and activists, as well as White academics like Leigh Goodmark, a much-lauded law professor specializing in domestic violence at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Hiding behind a socially acceptable career of “twenty-five years of representing people abused by their partners and incarcerated survivors of violence abused by the state,” Goodmark’s current goal is total termination of the prison system; she has written that men should not be put in jail even for killing their partners. Because, well, putting people in prison is mean - men suffer there. Like many female “prison abolitionists” she uses her gender as cynical leverage to advocate for the protection of men who hurt women - even if it goes against the express wishes of victims for their tormentors to be incarcerated.

It’s just a leftist version of the culturally widespread banality of brutality against women philosophy.

While he was strangling me the first time, which was also the first time he assaulted me seriously, Husband #2 said: “I want to kill you, but you’re not worth it.” By “worth it” he meant the time he might spend in jail, a very clear and stated deterrent for him, and likely the reason I am still alive. Should I have asked what would make me worth killing? Should I have tested his murderous tendencies by leaving? What would a strong woman have done, since my abuse no longer fit into activists’ definition of “covert abuse” and thus I should have known better? Was my main debt to society as he threw me by the neck against the wall making sure he did or didn’t go to jail? Was that experience verbal, psychological or physical abuse? Why do I need to divide it into categories to know which has hurt me more - the lack of air, the full belief that I was about to die, or his words that confirmed what his actions were already demonstrating? Breaking it down into discrete and siloed boxes of data without context, so I can be defined and define myself by them, is the opposite of reality. Abusers want to harm and exploit our psyches, our spirits, our skin, our brains, the insides of our body, everything that is sacred to our existence. Instead of dividing the scraps of misery they’ve thrown us, we could call ourselves one - women affected by intense manifestations of patriarchy and misogyny in the most private sphere - and actually work together for change. Please.

Stalker was - is - an artist, an employed and working artist, and my mother had broken up with him. She tried to withdraw from what he saw as her designated role as his unconditional source of things he wanted, and he wasn’t having it. So he came up the hill to wreak havoc, over and over again. “My friend said I should have waited for you,” he told me when he caught me playing outside alone at dusk, “maybe I will.” But that’s really the least of what he did.

We like to categorize and group so I’ll call him Stalker, but he was also an attacker, a home-intruder and a con artist; that is what would have been said if his actions had been against a stranger and not a woman trying to leave him. He was a respected member of society. Just a man doing what interpersonally violent men do to women and children: Using the victim’s shame and fear, the almost certain disregard by the police in the early 1980’s for “private” and sexual violence by a former intimate partner, to get on with his revenge for her ego-betrayal. He started by damaging our car and stalking us both, then broke in through the lovely French doors and assaulted her at knifepoint, and stalked and stalked and stalked.

Forty years later, my mother dead, he’s come back to stalk my father. We’ll get to that.

After he broke in she bought a very early version of a taser gun, the size of a police walkie-talkie, with two small metal poles sticking out from the top and a switch that ignited a blue electrical current between the poles. She had me practice turning it on and off, explaining that it wouldn’t kill the intruder but would freeze him so I could get away. I’d had enough experience with angry grown men to know that me and that little blue current wouldn’t have a prayer against him, and the butcher knives she had also hidden all over the apartment would just end up being used against us in an attack. I hope I didn’t say that to her.

We moved over and over, taser guns and butcher knives in tow, and he always showed up outside, a freakish shadow on the pavement with a shape and odor of malice. As is common for abusers he invented a ruse to continue to interact with my grandfather, then did work for him, and parlayed that into more work and status for himself; status which was certainly part of the package of services he had always believed my mother owed him. My last stalking encounter with him was when I was seventeen, a full six years after my mother broke up with him, when I opened our front door on the other side of town from the old mansion, and there he was right in front of me. I was alone and heading out, but he shocked me and I started screaming. Neighbors came out and he ran away. No matter what he had done it wouldn’t have occurred to me to get the taser gun.

Of course my mother never stopped being afraid of him, so I kept tabs. He married, moved to an expensive suburb and had kids. His sister said he had found God. He kept up the fraud with my grandfather and his associates for a long time, and got press coverage for it, all of which he features now on his Linked In page. Just one abuser among millions.

Criminologists claim that the anti-social and harmful among us lose their mojo as they get old. They’re supposed to grow out of it, at least the parts that are actually illegal. But my father forwarded an email to me the other day from Stalker, who forty years later has tracked him down, many states away, and is using the ruse of being old colleagues to try to insist that they get together and “chew the fat” (that’s an actual quote). My father was never much involved in our lives and didn’t know who he was, but in one of the five ‘when can we get together’ emails he’s sent in the past year Stalker dropped a likeness of my maternal grandfather, so my father asked me if I knew him.

I’ve had the Paul Simon song Still Crazy After All These Years playing in my head ever since, but this fossilized creep isn’t crazy - he’s a dust particle of the very demanding, egocentric, vengeful patriarchy which will never let us find peace. He’s the elements in our society who are so victim blaming they’d say my deceased mother was at fault, still. I will be equally at fault if he shows up at my door and I do anything, or don’t do anything. I gave my father very rational and informed advice on how to deal with Stalker, but since I’m female and have lived experience in this arena, he is unlikely to follow it. As Stalker is old, doesn’t have an official criminal record and has not yet approached me, my societal duty is to not act like a scared, reactive middle-aged woman. I’m supposed to be post-stalking, a “thriver not a survivor” now. Maybe I’ll get a taser.

I seem to have known about the concept of amends all my life, through longtime family involvement in 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both sides of my family wove a progressive Catholicism and AA together into one basket of getting through. The following is an excerpt from testimony my paternal grandfather gave at an Al-Anon meeting in the mid-1960’s about my grandmother’s journey to sobriety (Al-Anon is a support group for relatives of alcoholics). I have changed my grandmother’s name to Grace:

“Grace tried her best to lick her problem. She first went to a priest who was a close friend of the family. He was kind to her and said he would see her soon again. I met him several weeks later…He told me that he believed that nothing could be done for one who was as badly off as Grace. Fortunately I did not agree with him. With the help of our family doctor we found a priest who really did understand the problem. He was able to help both of us. But the best thing he did was to guide Grace to AA….

We found ourselves enjoying the happiest time of our married years. She continued very active in AA, enjoying the wonderful friendships she had made there, doing a lot of wonderful twelve step work for which she seemed to have a special talent.

But this was not to last long. Less than a year after she had won her sobriety, she died of an operation which is not considered dangerous. I am more than ever grateful to AA. There is no ghost in the closet. Grace died sober.”

My father was 14 when his mother died so unexpectedly, and 22 when his father passed away. Part of the “twelve step work” my grandmother discovered right before her death at 49 would have been the process of making amends to those she had harmed - a process that should include dramatic belief system change, acting on that change to right wrongs from your past, and a radical alteration in future behavior. Steps 4-10 From the Twelve Steps of AA are all part of the transformation in consciousness and responsibility involved with amends:

4. (We) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

People get hung up on whether or not they buy into the God part of 12-step programs, but depending on the meeting one attends and one’s own convictions, God is frequently translated into “higher power,” (my mother and uncle referred to their higher power as HP, like he was the wise family grandpa), or Good, or “Good, Orderly Decision-making,” or the Universe, and there are many others. There are plenty of female AA deities, if you ask the right alcoholics.

When my father was summoned as a young teen to the kitchen to talk to his mother for the first time about her drinking and receive her amend, he found her and the housekeeper Mrs. Minetti on their knees praying. An amend is sacred.

You don’t have to be an addict of any kind to do a full and thorough inventory of yourself, use this process to change something damaging in your life, and take responsibility if it actually makes sense. When my violently abusive husband menaced me under his breath in a public place I pushed him away from me twice, and soon found myself sitting on the ground in handcuffs as a female police officer with the size and demeanor of a grizzly bear growled at the top of my head that she was going to throw me in jail no matter what.1 Devoid of any feeling other than despair, a clear thought came into my head: “I need a program,” meaning a 12-step program. I was not addicted to abuse, but I had hit bottom in the sense that I recognized that I was powerless to MANAGE the abusive marriage, or my lifelong history of abuse by men, on my own.

The next week I found Adult Children of Acoholics or Other Family Dysfunctions (ACA), which opened the first crack of light onto my dark situation. ACA is not for addicts per se, but people raised around addiction and other significant family dysfunctions. It was within the safety and support of my ACA group that I first admitted that I was living in domestic violence, and it had made my life unmanageable, incomprehensible and unbearable. Eventually, I took the ACA 12-steps and revised them to fit victims of domestic abuse:

1. We admitted we were powerless over the effects of domestic abuse and other family dysfunction, that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could help us restore sanity to our lives.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God, and give up on the abuser.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our history of abuse victimization.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of the abuse we have experienced.

6. Were entirely ready to have God lift the shame of abuse from our shoulders.

7. Asked God’s help in removing abusers from our lives.

8. Made a list of all persons we ourselves had participated in harming and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and take the next best step towards living a life free of abuse.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand God, praying for peace and well-being and the power to live them out.

12. Having had an awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others who still suffer, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Freedom from abuse is not usually just freedom from one individual person, but from a whole system and lifestyle. Many women, due to children or life circumstances, can’t simply break free and be liberated from contact with the abuser, as well as systems, people and places that are connected with the abuse. Healing thus becomes more about adopting an abuse-aware and abuse-resistant lifestyle than breaking through a finish line. There really ought to be a free, peer-to-peer 12-step program for DV victims, which does not cast the problem in terms of false addiction to abuse or outdated concepts of “Co-dependency.” (As explained in the linked video, Co-dependency is a non-diagnosis that was invented by male alcoholics and drug users in AA and NA to shift some of the responsibility for their addiction onto their partners.) Domestic violence agencies simply do not have the bandwidth, funding, or sometimes the ideology needed to emotionally support survivors to the degree necessary, and we can form peer-to-peer groups of support without any funding, without asking anyone’s permission at all.

The primary aggressor in a relationship is not due an amend, even if they may have been wronged on occasion, since that in itself would play into a toxic and possibly dangerous power dynamic. Although many in 12-step programs will insist on the need to make amends for any unhealthy behavior, to keep their own “side of the street clean,” I think that ideology disrespects the reason and sanity that are the basis of the Steps, and makes the process empty and performative.

I give amends to people who deserve them; in part I am seeking through the amend to re-align myself with the Good in those people. It is so much harder than it sounds, which is why my grandmother asked for help from a higher power while kneeling on her kitchen floor before facing her third son. This was not her normal M.O. An amend makes you face what most dismays you about yourself, or you might as well skip it. The amend recipient owes you absolutely nothing in return, including forgiveness, but if a positive connection does not result you may feel bereft no matter how well you have prepared.

My amends for the chaos caused by a life dominated by male abuse have been mostly to my children, and friends that I lied to or disconnected from during times of acute turmoil. I am acknowledging and expressing regret for how I was part of the harm they experienced due to that situation. I do not take responsibility for the abuse itself, or anything I did not do. Every day has been an enactment of amends towards my children, which does not diminish the need for verbal discussion as well. It does make the conversation more meaningful, and allows the process to be taken in small sips, instead of one big gulp, and it can be the basis for interruption of inter-generational patterns of abuse. I’ll be honored to carry out that amend for the rest of my life.

The hardest amends to make may be those to people with whom you have lost contact, or last saw in conflict. I held off on the amend to a former boyfriend I’ll call Damian, with whom I spent the summer when we were eighteen. Both of us on the lamb from parental homes we couldn’t live in, he gave me safe haven, love, humor, gentleness and companionship. On my way out of town to college I broke up with him with particular and completely undeserved cruelty: we can blame it on youth and immaturity, on poor relationship skills, on the circumstances - but none of that belongs in the amend, because none of it belongs on his shoulders. My actions were my own, and the injustice of the harm done to him is all I am addressing. I need him to know that I know he deserved better.

Decades later, he could either hate me or barely remember me. But when I googled him and saw his picture I was flooded with memories - good memories. Some Christians consider sin to be whatever is distancing you from feeling the love of God; that which is causing you to make an amend has similarly alienated you from the Good in yourself and the other person. Damian gave me care and kindness decades ago and at the time I disregarded the weight of the gift - a gift even if it was always destined to be temporary. I wrote to him with a keening regret emanating from my brainstem, humbled as usual by the difficulty of forgiving myself for blindness to the sacred well-being of those that I loved. That is an amend.

I’m so sorry.

—

I very sincerely told my husband, as we drove somewhere on a sunny weekend day, that he was trying to obliterate me as a person. I don’t remember anything surrounding that moment, only the snapshot of it. As usual I was right on target but appealing to the wrong person. When I made that statement I was in the fog of immediate survival, the long-term victim of a husband with childhood-based trauma (also known as Complex Post-Traumatic Disorder, C-PTSD). Over an extended period of time he very purposefully drop-kicked my former self right out of me, and I have been living in acute PTSD for a number of years. These three things are simultaneously true: 1) he had plenty of fodder for a claim to childhood hardship and C-PTSD, 2) he was a card-carrying abuser, 3) he was not abusive because he was suffering from trauma.

Abusers used to be portrayed as passionate, ultra-masculine, misunderstood and romantically lost men, such as Marlon Brando’s character Stanley Kowalski in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire; more recently and up to the present society has spoken of men who simply had anger management problems they needed to learn how to express differently. The anger management trope was advanced by the pop psychology megastar Brene Brown in her book I Thought It Was Just Me, even though the domestic violence field has known differently for many decades. In effect she slightly psychologized the Stanley-type from Streetcar, and clucked at us not to shame a real man who had punched his wife in the face and stomach (p.65). As the awareness of trauma has grown, it is taking its place in the line of “he just needs some love” abuse-excuses.

In a recent episode of the podcast Partnered With a Survivor, internationally known anti-DV trainers David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel discussed the role of abusers’ past trauma. Partnered with a Survivor is the best domestic violence podcast in the English-speaking world (not that this is a crowded field - picture rolling tumbleweed in a deserted mining town), but on this topic they seemed to waver a bit. Then they asked for input: I have been waiting a long time for that invitation. David Mandel recently published a book called Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe From Domestic Violence, which has an amazing chapter on the difference between trauma-informed practice and domestic-violence informed practice. The two are frequently assumed to be the same, but Mandel details the ways that our increased societal embrace of the idea of trauma can both improve our understanding of domestic violence, and get in the way of helpful intervention. I am going to focus specifically on the concept that childhood trauma causes men to abuse their partners as adults.

The American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 5 defines Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as stemming from:

A. Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one or more of the following ways:

1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).

2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.

3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.

4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse).

I like the UK Trauma Council definition that Mandel quotes: “Some distressing events are so extreme or intense that they overwhelm a person’s ability to cope, resulting in lasting negative impact.” (P.235)

The inabilities to cope listed in the DSM - 5 include severe, overwhelming symptoms such as recurrent and intrusive memories of traumatic events, incessant nightmares, intense avoidance of anything reminiscent of the trauma, memory problems related to trauma, a constant sense of horror or dread, concentration problems, and “irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation).”

C-PTSD is not included in the DSM-5. The Cleveland Clinic explains that:

Experts across the field of psychology disagree on if CPTSD is a distinct condition and diagnosis…The main differences between PTSD and CPTSD are the length of trauma and the symptoms.

Traditionally, experts thought PTSD generally developed from short-term trauma, such as a vehicle accident or a natural disaster. With research, they realized that people who experience long-term, repeated trauma tend to have other symptoms in addition to the symptoms of PTSD.

Both CPTSD and PTSD involve symptoms of psychological and behavioral stress responses, such as flashbacks, hypervigilance and efforts to avoid distressing reminders of the traumatic event(s).

People with CPTSD typically have additional symptoms, including chronic and extensive issues with:

• Emotion regulation.

• Identity and sense of self.

• Relationships.

There are a few characteristics of relationship abuse that argue against the idea that the Trauma reactions of PTSD or C-PTSD are responsible for most domestic or relationship violence in people who suffer from these conditions. The PTSD symptoms listed above are supported by accepted science detailing chemical reactions in the brain that cause the frontal lobe - our planning and reasoning center - to go offline during trauma responses, and explain fear-based nervous-system responses such as the 4 F’s: fight, flight freeze and fawn (Porges & Porges). Trauma is characterized by disorganized thinking and behaviors; alternatively, DV is characterized by a complex and highly organized web of manipulations and techniques. Far from being chiefly reactive, there is a dominant element of planfulness and strategic deception in intimate partner abuse.

In addition to the wisdom of domestic violence and trauma professionals, I will use my own experience as a survivor of DV by a man with C-PTSD to illustrate my points. Along with other types of data I believe in the expertise of lived experience. This has become a culture wars issue, hand in hand with a heavy dose of ‘stop playing the victim’ antipathy, our accomplishment-driven love of credentialed experts, and the desire to avert our eyes from some types of ugly truths. Journalists frequently turn themselves into lauded lived-experience authors, but they are imbued with a cultural authority that survivors generally lack. I would ask you to think of lived experience accounts this way: Matthew 18:20 says: “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (yes, The Bible). Likewise, when you and another two or three contemplate the meaning of a survivor story, you join the narrator in an experience that the perpetrator meant to be secret, or at least so shameful as to be socially isolating. In this one simple act you take power away from cruelty, and disconnect truth from status.

Looking closely is also important because there tend to be details that disrupt the most common-sensical of ideas, like ‘trauma breeds abuse,’ details that you are likely not to see as clearly if you have not lived the phenomenon yourself. Consider the following:

1. Abuse usually develops slowly. Most abusive relationships start with “love bombing,” a period of intense warmth, attention, charm and creation of a connection with the target. This is very intentional, and will last as long as needed to bond the victim with the perpetrator and build her belief that he is a good and thoughtful person. Much more than just an outpouring of affection or gifts onto the target, this period is used to create an impression that the abuser is unusually emotionally available or vulnerable himself, and that he is paying attention because he really wants to get to know and understand the victim. He gets her to open up to him and trust him.

   If my abuser, whom I will call Ned, had been in the constant state of hyper-arousal and irritability associated with C-PTSD, he would not have been able to sustain the love-bombing stage long enough to disguise his problems or draw me in. In reality, this stage lasted about a year, and the love-bombing technique was re-used whenever necessary. Next came verbal and psychological cruelty, which tend to start with a barb and under-cutting comment here or there, followed by pressure to laugh it off, and may continue in that vein long enough for the perpetrator to both test and build up the target’s tolerance for abuse. At this stage, the relationship is still mostly wonderful. Ned engaged in low-level psychological abuse for at least another year.

   Many women say that abusiveness started or escalated after marriage or during a pregnancy. I was first assaulted almost a year into marriage, three years after meeting him, but once it started it was like the violence of a rabid animal had been unleashed upon me. Ned did not change his level of childhood or present trauma that much from one year or one day to the next - he changed his conscious power and control tactics. The repeat DV perpetrator is not being buffeted by internal trauma-based nervous-system or psychological triggers beyond his control, but rather building a logical and calculated structure around the target, judging at each stage of construction the exact weight the beams will hold. That is based on the same calculations of any con, any program of exploitation and extraction of benefits that depends on the fooling of the target and others.

2. Deception is a base component of abuse and the development of an abusive relationship, as a review of any survivor chat forum can show you. Three months into our relationship, on Thanksgiving day, Ned emailed me a photo of him and his sister in her back yard, many hours drive from where we lived. It had a Thanksgiving date and time stamp on it, and I thought it was sweet. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned that the stamp was doctored, and that he had made and sent it to cover up the fact that he was spending the holiday with his ex-wife and her family. If I had known he was doing that I would have stopped dating him, so he took the power of decision and ability to keep myself safe in the long-term out of my hands. A simple, calculated, planful act, present in some form in all relationship abuse.

3. Financial abuse is said to be one of the most common elements of coercive control. Professionals usually define this as not letting the woman work or controlling her access to money, which may be the traditional way and still the most widespread, along with running up debt that the victim is then responsible for. Ned did not pay his agreed portion of mortgage, gas and electric, or other household costs for the entire two years and three months we were married and he lived with me, although he had a good job and earned more than I did. At first there were excuses, and then there were beatings, which kept the issue from coming up. But there was never a reason other than greed. I learned later that he had put his first wife through years of financial abuse and exploitation. During the marriage there were many mysterious misuses of my credit cards as well, which I had to cancel so many times my bank finally refused to replace them. Once we separated, this problem just stopped. As women’s earning power increases, the male refusal to contribute to household bills - moving in and then living off of her without her consent - becomes a more essential component of abuse. It’s just pre-meditated, bullied thievery.

4. Most men who experience maltreatment during childhood do not turn into violent adult abusers! I use the exclamation point because this reality gets entirely lost in the widespread ‘childhood abuse leads to adult perpetration/victimhood’ narrative. Exposure to violence in the home during childhood does correlate with higher rates of violence perpetration and victimhood as an adult, but the vast majority of men (never mind women, for whom the numbers are far lower) who are child victims or witnesses do not go on to be physically abusive towards their partners during adulthood. Examples of studies and meta-analysis are here and here. My first husband had a childhood every bit as violence-exposed as Ned did, and he was a rotten husband and a jerk, but his cruelty output was about one-fifth of Ned’s. That was his choice.

5. There is a breathtaking difference between men and women in rates of the most violent abusive behavior. Over 90% of intimate partner homicides are carried out by men, and the number of women seen in emergency rooms for DV-related injuries is a mirror image of that same statistic. Physical violence is far from the only way to instill fear but it is a very effective one, and the level of intimidation taking place in our relationships can be directly inferred from the basic facts about death and severe injury. Since women or people who identify as female experience a much greater level of Trauma at the hands of their male partners than vice versa (agonizingly so for women of color), and since we suffer from lifetime sexual violence at a much greater rate than males, our PTSD and C-PTSD reactivity and outbursts should have us shooting and maiming them with some frequency. But that’s rare, and has gotten even more so since the shelter movement started and divorce became easier to access (read more about this history in Evan Stark’s Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life). Most women try to resolve the problem of abuse by getting out of the relationship, even though we suffer from high rates of childhood and adult Trauma, which points to other things as the motivation for abusiveness.

6. Listen to the wisdom of those who have worked in the “male behavior change” field. Lundy Bancroft, author of the iconic Why Does He Do That? and long-time counselor of abusive men, says that “Abusiveness is not a product of a man’s emotional injuries or deficits in his skills.  In reality, abuse springs from a man’s early cultural training, his key male role models, and his peer influences.  In other words, abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology… An abuser tries to keep everybody – his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives – focused on how he feels, so that they won’t focus on how he thinks,” (p.75). And: “If abusiveness were the product of childhood emotional injury, abusers could overcome their problem through psychotherapy. But it is virtually unheard of for an abusive man to make substantial and lasting change in his patterns of abusiveness as a result of therapy. He may work through other emotional difficulties, he may gain some insight into himself, but his behavior continues…abusive men are sometimes masters of the hard-luck story, and may find that accounts of childhood abuse are the best way to pull heartstrings (p.25).  Ned had been in extensive therapy and he used it to elicit a nurturing and pitying response from the (female) therapist, not as a venue for change. David Mandel lists five techniques that abusers use just to leverage mental health or substance abuse problems against victims (p.265). This is not the portrait of someone trapped in panic.

Our ‘its-all-psych’ or ‘it’s all conditioning’ friends will likely attribute the behaviors described above to childhood trauma as well, through various mechanisms of insecurity and low self-esteem. There is no doubt that Ned and hordes of fellow abusers, who use such strikingly similar tactics, are engaging in anti-social and ultimately unproductive coping behaviors. But these are values and habits learned from fathers, other men, and from society as a whole. By the time they are implementing these lessons, abusers believe fully in their right to be abusive, and either defend that right vigorously, or place the blame on the victim - usually a very flagrant combination of both. On many occasions - after strangling me, after splitting my lip so I bled on the floor, after abandoning me on the streets of Baltimore at midnight, the day after he knocked me unconscious, Ned told me with complete calm and satisfaction that I had “wanted it.” What I wanted was peace and safety but my genuinely destroyed nervous system, disorganized by acute and immediate Trauma, no longer knew how to get there.

You may be wondering why I am sometimes spelling trauma with a capitol T. I think it would be useful for society to differentiate between Trauma, which is the nervous-system hyper-arousal experienced in PTSD, and the small-t trauma which has become the cultural equivalent of ‘he had a hard childhood’ or XYZ bad thing happened to him. The PTSD type of Trauma response is so frightening to the sufferer it has you running towards every therapy, medication and hidey-hole you can find; even when your resources are few you will do just about anything not to be that person. It is the cause of many committing suicide, using substances, or living homeless on the street. Ned’s childhood traumas were real, but they were long in the past, and his life had been made easy by women for decades by the time I met him. Women had kept him comfortable and made him professionally successful. He treated us the way his father had - learned conduct and values which he fully bought into, but disguised as long as necessary because he knew abuse had gotten less culturally acceptable, and more illegal. Like a lot of ideas that become popular in the mainstream, trauma is now invoked so frequently that its meaning has been watered down to any negative experience.

The death of my mother, for example, was deeply sad and life-changing for me but not Traumatic - even though her cancer was quite physically gruesome sometimes. It did not induce a Trauma reaction because it was within the realm of things I knew were possible and even likely, and although I could not save her I was able to help and care for her - I did not feel undone or helpless. Society showed compassion for what we were going through, and I did not have to go through it alone. It did not change my concept of who I was at base, nor the character of the world in which I lived. Depression and sadness can follow Trauma, but they can exist from other causes too - including life circumstances that are hard, unjust or feel unbearable.

Some childhood Trauma, some consistently dangerous or horrifying life circumstances will cause PTSD-based responses throughout life, replete with inescapable nightmares and a nervous system that over-functions so intensely the person is never out of the 4 F’s. The horror of growing up in a very violent neighborhood, a war zone, or with a child molester can do that to some people. But if (not when) a person deals with that nervous-system state through violence, he will only be able to maintain any relationship very briefly, and will show aggressive behavior at work and everywhere he goes. That’s why he’ll frequently end up addicted to drugs and alcohol, in jail for things other than domestic violence, or living on the streets. This describes only one segment of domestic abusers, and should not be invoked as the universal stereotype it is now.

I’ve experienced the difference between childhood trauma and PTSD in myself. The feeling of reverberation in my head and ringing in my ears I had in the days after Ned knocked me unconscious were familiar from a blow to the head I received from a stepfather at five years old. In that childhood moment I had an instinctual nervous system reaction to fight back, and in complete irrationality I assaulted this grown man, trying to hit, scratch, kick and bite him as he conveyed me by my ear my room. I was never going to win that fight and my actions put me in greater danger, but Trauma-based nervous system responses are completely instinctual and take the conscious, rational functioning of the frontal lobe offline, biologically. Due to various childhood circumstances I am a likely candidate for C-PTSD, which showed itself at times in behavioral and learning problems, but faded with time. It never caused me to abuse anyone; nor, contrary to popular opinion, did it cause me to seek out abuse in adulthood.

Both social scientists and the public rejoice in suggesting that correlations prove causation. But if there is any connection between my stepfather and my ex-husband that is not related to the generally common problem of male violence against women and children, it would come from things I normalized about men in my youth - that most were mercurial and selfish, that they were unable to be otherwise, and that a woman’s access to financial, family and social stability/success was based on her ability to manage his temperament. Again, I LEARNED those lessons and concretely believed them, based on the vast majority of societal cues around me: from the media, adult talk and example much more than from any traumatic experience. It should at least be considered that I sustained at least two separate head traumas from two different assaults decades apart because I have a head and heads are obvious and attractive targets to assailants; there is your primary correlation. I was also given a concussion and black eye by a very aggressive girl in a sports activity middle school; should that count towards the destined-for-relational-masochism narrative society would apply to me without asking? The common risk factor in my one-person study of head trauma was being a head-bearer in a violent world, me and the thousands of women who suffer concussions every year due to domestic violence.

Ned did not plan to pick me up from behind as I ran from him and swing me, axe-like, headfirst into the floor and knock me out, but his actions during and afterwards were chosen and rational in the self-interested, calculated and manipulative sense. If he hadn’t believed in violence as a mechanism of control and degradation he would not have used it in such a concentrated fashion, during the last quarter of our relationship only. After he knocked me out the next thing I remember is being in bed and hearing him tell the paramedics that I had fainted, and as he stood right next to the bed I told them the same thing. Once they left he tried to convince me that I had attacked him first, thinking I couldn’t remember - because of the damage he knew he had done to my brain. It’s all circular, with a very obvious root cause, if you have the courage to name it.

Such behavior is completely devoid of the mindless, fear-based Trauma outbursts most people are misguidedly invoking when they blame abuse on trauma, because they look similar and it seems like such a good explanation. As The Safe and Together Institute helps people do with its Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool, look closer - look for his patterns, his actions in the long term and in different spheres of the relationship, and you will see a different picture.

Why does society accept greed and dehumanization as the motivations of corporations, governments and armies, but not individuals? We simply prefer that it not be true, on a familial level, and we most specifically do not want it to be true of the abusive men we know. So we come up with explanations: his mother was smothering or she was cold, he comes from a macho culture or he felt emasculated, he was disadvantaged or over-privileged - all back stories can be made to fit. And really, we all know it was mutual and she’s “off” herself. Don’t judge him - the poor man is carrying so much trauma. Give that word a tip, a gold coin in the hand, since it’s doing so much work for you. What a good Progressive you are (or Christian, or Intellectual, or Psychologist, or Men’s Rights Advocate, depending on your abuse-excuse ideology). The abusiveness of most men who experienced childhood victimization can be best understood as an outgrowth of defensive identification, the very understandable desire that vulnerable people (especially children) develop to be aligned with the most powerful asshole in the room in order to keep themselves safe. Then they grow up wanting to be the most powerful asshole in the room - this not a psychological mystery, nor a response to Trauma - induced biological responses, but a function of the logic, planning and organizing performed by the frontal lobe.

Ned suffered from childhood realities that still caused him pain - his abusive behavior can be rationally related to pain, but mostly to extremely dysfunctional behavior he had learned in the same way he was taught to pee standing up. He knew what he was doing was wrong, which is why he lied about it to paramedics and later to police. If he had been in the throes of Trauma, he would have told the police everything, and then taken responsibility for things he didn’t even do, out of panic (remember Gaby Petito?).

I once hid from Ned by lying underneath my car. I do not fit well under your average car, and this was not effective - except in the fact that he found it completely delightful. He had me exactly as scared, infantilized and trapped as he wanted me, and decided to act magnanimously and be kind. That series of events makes sense only within the machinations of power that the Psychology industry so completely ignores it could be charged with neglect. Ned was not being driven by childhood demons, or by any heightened nervous-system response at all - he was calm and happy. A physically and emotionally violent marriage had pushed me so deeply into Trauma response that I had become the perfect prey. Abusers make you crazy in order to be able to call you crazy, so no one will believe you when you say you’re being abused. And it is almost always effective.

This all might be a matter of semantics if it were not for the way that our societal dialogue about mental health shapes belief and action in the modern world. Justifications for abuse-excusing and abuse-blindness are like the carcinogens from cleaning products that can now be found in the body fat of each one of us; that is true of too many over-simplified ideas spread by the social sciences and pop psychology. These ideas are then actively used by the abuser and others to gaslight survivors into believing there is a justifiable reason for the abuse, and therefore a solution just over the next horizon. In other words, myths or misunderstandings about abuse have very concrete negative outcomes for us. There is only one data point that I rely on: Ned did obliterate parts of me, parts of a well-functioning nervous system that I had been able to rebuild after childhood abuses, but he did not succeed in obliterating me at my core. I know that because I’m here talking to you.

_____________

Advice I don’t remember being given:

Safety plans can be very helpful to those living in abuse, or wondering if their relationship might be abusive. Unless you are in immediate danger and need to call 911, a local domestic violence agency should be able to help you develop a safety plan. They may also help with legal issues such as child support, child custody and protective orders. Some DV agencies have access to a shelter or can put victims up in a hotel, and some may be a pathway to long-term housing. The quality of agencies & help for those experiencing intimate partner violence varies greatly from place to place, and there are plenty of agencies that are overwhelmed and unhelpful. That does not mean you don’t deserve help or need it. The abuse should not have to be physical for an agency to give you some level of support and guidance, and you don’t have to be ready to end the relationship to ask for help. A good place to start in the U.S. is the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1.800.799.SAFE (7233), or by texting START to 88788.

Also:

Find Domestic Violence and Abuse Help, Information and Stats (U.S.) domesticshelters.org

Survivor-lead resources and information. Look for their excellent free resources - on FB, Instagram, YouTube, and BTR has a great podcast.

Home | Stand Up Survivor

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Betrayal Trauma Recovery (BTR.org)

U.S. Suicide Crisis Lifeline: Text 988

I

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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.

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.

__________

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.