No One Wants to be a Perpetrator (Part 2)
An Exploration of How I Walked out of Emotional Abuse
Claude’s Exploration #8
Vous pouvez lire cet article en français ICI.
What is rooted is easy to nourish.
What is recent is easy to correct.
What is brittle is easy to break.
What is small is easy to scatter.Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet.Tao Te Ching #64 - translation by Stephen Mitchell
In Part 1 of this article, I shared how I got entangled in an unhealthy relationship with someone, and how learning about complex trauma and systemic patriarchy helped me make sense of why I was letting myself stay in such a dysfunctional arrangement.
So, how did I manage to get out of this situation ?
Allowing myself to fell anger
The big step that really made a difference was allowing myself to feel anger.
Of course, I had realized long ago that the situation wasn’t working, and wasn’t making me very happy, to say the least.
At some point I took time to look back on the interactions I had with that person, and realized that I couldn’t remember when one of those interactions had actually really felt good.
What had felt good were the moments when we were able to share at a deeper level what was really happening inside of us.
When that happened, it gave me a feeling of expansion, and hope that everything would go well eventually, and we would be able to maintain that powerful connection.
But it never lasted. And I also noticed that that kind of connection happened mostly asynchronously. That is to say, not in a live conversation, but through message exchanges.
Then I started to reflect on how things had been in the rare moments when we actually met in person.
And what struck me was to realize a posteriori that in those moments I actually was frozen.
Something would happen in the conversation that overwhelmed me, disabling me to really feel what was going on inside me, and certainly preventing me from reacting on the spot to the event. Instead I would keep along with the conversation, in the fear that I would otherwise lose the connection.
Needless to say, it did not work out very well.
So I allowed time to feel inside me what was there that I could not feel in real time during these conversations, applying what I have been practicing in the Timeless Wisdom Training, the two years program with Thomas Hübl I am part of with 400 more people in the world.
First I felt a lot of confusion in me.
Then beneath that I could feel a huge anger, and an equally huge fear, that were neutralizing each other inside me, generating the confusion and frozenness.
And I allowed myself to feel the anger, without letting the fear block it away. It was actually a dance, feeling anger, feeling a lot of fear again, navigating back and forth between both emotions.
I felt a lot of anger at not being treated well.
Anger that this person was not being there for me after implying it.
I think I bought into the picture that that person was projecting towards the outer world : someone powerful, capable of facing hard truths and making things happen in the world.
And when I showed up with expectations and demands, that person was not able to say clearly : “No, I am not interested, I am not who you think I am. Leave me alone.”
Apparently, I was not able to let go of the illusion that that person could be how I expected them to be, how I had seen them in the first place.
It felt like dealing with a powerful man, and the moment you exert a little pressure, the adult is gone and you are left with a younger version of that person that hasn’t learnt to express clearly their needs, and is extraordinarily scared of you getting close to them.
If I had been able to show compassion there, maybe things would have been different.
But I felt hurt that somehow that person was putting the blame on me, for not respecting their needs, needs that they hadn’t expressed clearly, and making me feel that my behavior wasn’t appropriate (which obviously, I was a good candidate for, being myself so prone to self shaming due to my own personal trauma history).
Instead of compassion, their reaction of fear, that made them clumsily push me away, only triggered my anger more and more. And as my anger apparently triggered that person’s fear, we were locked into a painful loop.
To this day I am not sure why the anger couldn’t give way to compassion there.
Probably because the anger was here to protect me.
Factually, the situation was not “safe” for me, as the other person was so caught up in their own inner reaction that they were not aware of me anymore, and of how they were hurting me.
Although anger is commonly deemed a “negative” emotion, especially when it produces violent behaviors, it is actually a very healthy emotion, and a necessary one. It is anger that gives us the energy and the drive we need to act and defend ourselves when our boundaries are crossed.
The fear is another story. Until now, writing these lines and reliving the anger, I feel the fear rising up in me and making it hard for me, so that writing is not an easy process.
I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that fear.
I am guessing, again, it has its source in this original fear of abandonment from my parents, that I covered in the first part of this article. What is clear is that I might need more time and experience to fully integrate it.
Then, if I take a larger perspective, it’s not surprising that I would feel fear at acknowledging my anger. I am cumulating being a woman, and descending form a lineage of black slaves from the French West Indies (as I shared in one of my previous articles). In the past, women or black slaves expressing anger could get physically hurt, or killed for it.
So it’s no wonder it would be buried deep in my DNA that “anger is dangerous”, even though it doesn’t apply anymore as strongly in the society I live in.
Allowing myself to feel the anger though, and to express it, is what made it possible for me to move away from the situation.
Someone I knew referred to Gaslighting when I was telling about my experience. I didn’t know what the term really meant, and when I looked it up in wikipedia, I was shocked. I could see how what was playing there could actually be named “emotional abuse”, and this step helped me to fully accept how unhealthy the situation was for me.
Writing this article is part of that movement in me, working towards its completion.
But in doing so, I realize I am also creating a gap, a separation with the other person.
When I name the situation “emotional abuse”, I am pointing at that person, designing them as a Perpetrator, and myself as a Victim.
Getting out of the Perpetrator - Victim Paradigm
I can now name that the anger I felt towards this person was somehow directed at my father, not loving me as he should have. I was kind of reliving my own inner drama in that situation, of having a father that didn’t behave like a responsible adult in charge, and that instead of protecting me as his child, hurt me.
And yet, the question haunts me : it doesn’t feel fair that, as I do the inner work and see how my reaction might have been disproportionate, taking its roots in my past rather than in the present situation, I should be considered the only responsible for those unhealthy interactions.
It is true that, if it hadn’t been for my inner drama playing again live, I would probably simply never have gotten entangled in that mess. I would have walked out the moment it was clear that the person in front of me was not acting in alignment with their words, or I would at least have set healthy boundaries, and more importantly, held to those boundaries (I did set my boundaries once and again. And then I would cave in and start interacting again.)
And if I allow myself one more meandering on that long and winding road that this exploration is turning out to be, I can add that setting boundaries in that situation was a confusing matter.
Basically, setting boundaries is embodying a clear No to other’s behaviors that are hurtful to you. Not just saying it has to stop, but physically not letting it happen to you. It’s like the difference between telling a two years toddler that they shouldn’t go into the kitchen, compared to taking them out of the room and closing the door, which makes it a lot clearer !
In this case, the hurtful behavior I needed to end was that other person saying nice things, things that they didn’t act upon afterwards.
It still feels confusing to me that I should not believe the nice words that were exactly what I wanted I hear, and that I actually should not create the occasion for these words to be uttered to me.
Indeed, it doesn’t feel fair that the other person would not be held accountable for their own behavior.
I told a friend about this story, and we have a safe and deep enough relationship that he could acknowledge that it triggered him when I said I considered I had been emotionally abused.
He could voice that indeed, as a man, he was scared to be called a perpetrator.
As I looked inside myself, I saw my reaction was that, if I could not consider the other person a perpetrator of some kind, it left me feeling that it had happened only in my head, and that I was crazy. And in turn I shared that with him.
And we could both stay there and accept how the other was feeling, making space for both at the same time, in the complexity of life and relationships.
It felt like healing was possible. And that exact moment is what gave me the impulse to write this article.
We are all someone else’s perpetrator.
We all do some unethical things at some point.
We all fail sometimes.
Can we own up to it?
“Prevent trouble before it arises”
This quote from the Tao Te Ching deeply resonates with me.
In this story, there was no “real” harm done. Nothing serious happened, as in, example given, I didn’t get married there nor spent years suffering afterwards.
It actually was a deep lesson and growth opportunity for me.
Still, it took me what felt like an unnecessary long time to walk out.
I hear a lesson here for myself, a need in me, to detect the unhealthy patterns before real harm happens, and to act to set things right before the situation escalates.
When I feel something is askew, even slightly, I have come to learn the hard way that, if I don’t pay attention to it, hoping it will dissolve by itself, it often becomes a huge problem that paralyzes me. And it gets harder and harder to disentangle from it as time goes by.
So, here I am, wishing for myself to learn to take care of trouble before it arises.
Claude, once again you've left me stunned with your level of precision and transparency in your process, and your courage in sharing it in such depth to serve others. There's so much to explore here, and I resonate very much with the male fear of being seen as a perpetrator. In my experience, this can evoke almost intolerable feelings, and certainly cause me to withdraw. I also love how you have integrated this with mystical science through the quote from the Tao Te Ching. Such powerful work you are doing on behalf of the collective. I salute you.