No One Wants to be a Perpetrator (Part 1)
An Exploration of How I Let Myself Be Emotionally Abused
Claude’s Exploration #7
Vous pouvez lire cet article en français ici.
I let myself be emotionally abused.
I fell for someone, and it hurt like hell to realize that I was fooling myself.
The situation started when that person showed interest towards me. At that point, I believed that that person had feelings for me, and I let my feelings for that person grow.
Then, as I was trying to be in touch, and make room for that relationship, that person reacted with less and less eagerness, to the point of telling me that they were feeling pressure from my « demands ».
This is where I should have let it go.
If someone is not making space for me to spend time together and interact, then I shouldn’t believe that this person has feelings for me. Or better said, I should realize that they are not emotionally available to show up in this relationship, and not expect them to change and behave accordingly to their initial manifestation of interest.
But somehow I was convinced that if only I would find the right thing to do, then the situation would get better. As I had met that person in a context where a deep connection was possible, I believed it was only a matter of time that the initial connection would be restored.
I felt it was my fault that things were not working out.
So instead of letting go, I kind of « lost it » there. I kept on trying, at least once and again, way longer than was healthy for me.
And the initial pattern played out several times, as that person would sometimes come back and manifest a renewed interest for being in contact, and we would go for one more tour of the merry-go-round.
This has been a huge question for me : why did I not let go sooner ?
The answer is complex.
My first angle is that I can find explanations for my behavior in my individual trauma (and most probably for that person too, but that is not my place to go there).
Complex Trauma and Survival Strategies
I trained last year in Complex Trauma, and that has given me a deep well of insights on what might be going on inside myself.
Most people have heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as it is now a widely recognized medical diagnostic, that applies usually to soldiers coming from war situations, or for people having experienced a traumatic episode such as a car accident or a robbery attack.
As I learned during the 4 month-long training I attended with NARM Institute last fall, Complex Trauma refers to the repeated traumatic situations we encounter as young children that can produce Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder we suffer from as adults.
As a very young child, we all have needs that we depend on our caretakers to fulfill, so we can grow and develop as “functional” adults. They range from basic physical safety to emotional connection and trust. To grow up and unfold our full potential, we need to feel loved fully and unconditionally.
Many times, our caregivers, namely our parents, are not in the capacity to fully attend to these needs, usually due to having themselves suffered from trauma in the past.
When our needs cannot be met by our caregivers, we try and protest with our limited baby or children means to get them fulfilled. And at some point, we learn that if we keep trying, what we get is instead a loss of connection from our caregivers when we most need them.
For example, we can learn that manifesting anger is not “allowed” in our family, or that our needs rank lower than other people’s needs, and learn to take care of others instead of ourselves.
As a young child, to survive, we need to believe we can trust our caregivers. If we cannot trust them to take care of us, we risk dying. It is as simple as that.
So, in order to survive, when something goes wrong, we will choose to believe that we are the cause of the problem, not the caregiver, so we can keep loving and trusting them.
This self shaming reflex becomes a survival strategy. In our body and nervous system, reacting like that becomes wired as “the way to survive”. We believe that we are wrong, and thus feel responsible for situations where we should not, and we can get very confused about where our responsibility starts and ends.
That makes it very hard, as adults, to not react that way, even when this kind of behavior is no longer required or useful, because we are now autonomous and able to take care of ourselves, no longer dependent on the other for survival.
In my case, I think what happened in that emotional abuse situation takes its root in my experience with my father.
I definitely know that, even as an adult and until the day he died, however badly he was behaving towards me and others, a part of me kept hoping that he could change and get to show me the proper love I was “dying for”.
Letting go of the hope of being loved felt unbearable.
In a disproportionate way, I ‘ll grant you that. But you tell that to my nervous system !
It is Bigger than Us
Taking another lens to look at the situation, I feel that it wouldn’t be wise to ignore the general cultural context that this situation played in, and the fact that I am a woman.
First thing, it strikes me that I am far from the only one that would choose to stay in such an unhealthy situation. Literature, movies and songs are filled with people crying over someone that is obviously not available.
Even more interesting than that is that we would let abuse happen in cases where there is no reason for it.
I actually had trouble calling the situation I experienced a true case of emotional abuse. I felt abused in the sense that the person did not own up to their initial interest and thus acted like my consequent reactions were inappropriate, and as I accepted this treatment, repeated the cycle with me instead of clarifying the situation and walking out of the relationship.
But to happen, abuse needs that one person has power over the other, and, literally, abuses it.
For example, when you’re a child and you depend on your parents and you cannot leave or defend yourself, or in a work situation that comes with hierarchical power where you risk losing financial and social safety if you walk out of the job.
In that case, that person had no other power over me than the one I granted them.
Then here I feel there is a larger pattern playing out on top of my individual personal history. A pattern that takes its root into the long dependency that women have suffered over men. Yes, I mean Patriarchy.
« Partners that will conform to the letter to their respective gender scripts will most likely end up making themselves very unhappy. These scripts produce on the one hand a dependent and sentimental creature of tyrannical demands, that over invest the emotional and love sphere, and on the other hand, a somehow mute and rough beanpole, barricaded inside the illusion of a fierce autonomy, that seems to be endlessly asking himself under which dramatic lack of alertness he could let himself fall into this trap.”
Mona Chollet - Excerpt from “Comment le patriarcat sabote les relations hétérosexuelles” - freely translated by myself
In France, it is only since 1965 that a law was voted that enables a married woman to have a separate bank account from her husband. Less than 50 years.
It was not so long ago, and it lasted for eons, that to exist in society a woman needed to “belong” to a man, either to her father or her spouse, and had hardly any way of thriving as an independent person.
We have a word in French for a woman who would behave like that person did with me, she would be called “une allumeuse”, a tease (literally, a fire lighter).
On the contrary, there is no word to describe a man that acts in that way. Most probably because we consider in our culture that a man is entitled to that kind of behavior, as an attribute of the unbalanced relationship between men and women.
So maybe it’s no wonder that as a woman, I would unconsciously give a man power over me in a relationship.
I guess it takes us women some time to learn to truly live our new freedom, and especially to unlearn ancient behaviors that have been passed over to us through family and culture.
We have to unlearn habits that we learn unconsciously, such as doing the emotional work for our partner, and feeling responsible for the quality of the relationship, to name but one.
Or more largely, the habit of feeling dependant on the other one, and preserving the relationship to the cost of our emotional (and often physical) safety. It is probably deeply rooted, and I wonder what it takes, apart form laws and structural changes, that we don’t act the part when it’s no longer necessary.
And of course, men also will find themselves in that kind of situation, not just women. I am just saying here that in our culture the structure of relationships is unbalanced as a given, and that would be the unconscious reference for most of us.
But maybe I am only trying to get myself off the hook here, explaining my individual behavior from a cultural and historic perspective. Who knows ?
To be Continued
I have so much to say on this topic, that when I first asked some people to check it for me before publishing, they all said “It’s very long.”
So I decided to cut it in half. In this first part, I have been covering the concepts that have helped me make sense of what was happening to me, or better said, in me.
I have found that understanding things with my mind is usually not enough to make me change my behavior, although it is very helpful, and often indispensable (at least in my case, as I love making sense of things !).
But it takes more than that to actually become free to experience a situation differently, and be able to try a new reaction, one that won’t make the same scenario repeat itself.
In the second part of this article, I tell more about what the path has been for me to try and move out of this unhealthy and stuck situation, as well as why I titled it “No One Wants to be a Perpetrator”.
Helpful Books to Understand the Impact of Trauma on Relationships
The Power of Attachment - Diane Poole Heller
An excellent read to understand how we have different ways of relating to others that have been shaped by our experience of relationships in our early childhood. A very good entry into attachment theory.
Healing Developmental Trauma (NARM) - Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre
This book covers the principles of Complex Trauma in depth, and introduces the NARM approach (NeuroAffective Relational Model). I find it very powerful, and though it is intended for therapeutic context, I believe that approach would gain to be more known in a broader social context.