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| 20.11.2006 The effects of domestic abuse... The Effects of Domestic Abuse Peter Jakob Address at ‘Conference on Domestic Violence’ 19th September 2006 Thanet Domestic Violence Forum Margate I would like to thank … and the Thanet Domestic Violence Forum for inviting me to deliver today’s keynote address. ‘The effects of domestic abuse’ is such a global, wide-ranging topic, that I needed to find a particular angle, a perspective which may be useful to yourselves as delegates, and especially to those, who have suffered domestic violence and other forms of abuse, and who receive professional services in Thanet. At the same time, it is a topic I am passionate about. I am passionate about making a small contribution to the understanding of this so thoroughly misunderstood group of people, survivors of domestic violence. But how to further that understanding? Throwing psychological and mental health jargon at you would be easy. But what would it achieve? For one, it would assist you and me in distancing ourselves from the raw experience of abuse, by withdrawing into the pseudo-objective realm of professionalism. It would also turn the people we have come together to speak about today, and whom we are to serve, into objects; it could de-humanise them. My presentation, I hope, will bear this out. Nonetheless, my perspective will be a psychological one, informed by research, and years of clinical experience with trauma survivors. However, I would like to invite you to join me for a walk on the inside – bearing in mind, we need only go for a walk, and not the whole journey. This walk will allow us a few glimpses of life in the experience of a trauma survivor – or at least something approximating that experience. Let’s call her Helen. Most of you have met Helen in your work. Quite a few of you know her as a friend or relative. And some of you can find Helen in yourselves. Last weekend at the Association for Family Therapy Conference, I attended a workshop by the renowned family therapist Brian Cade. He spoke about a client who had been abused by her boy friend when she was 16. This young woman came to see herself in the very same way that her boyfriend had described her: ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘stupid’, and ‘slutty’. Feeling unable to gain satisfaction from everyday living, she would go on eating binges. Deeply unhappy with her body, she would then purge the food she had eaten. In mental health terminology, this young woman developed bulimia. Therapy with Brian Cade helped her distance herself from being defined by the person who had been abusive to her, and she started getting on with her life again, among other things enrolling in a university course. Several months later, her therapist received an email from her. The young woman felt unable to go ahead with it; the email sounded confused and deeply unhappy; she was lashing out against herself. He felt he should call, rather than reply by email. On the phone, he heard himself saying: “I would like to speak to a … fat … stupid … ugly … slut.” At first, there was silence at the other end. Suddenly, she burst out in explosive laughter. Of course this woman knew that her therapist didn’t think of her in this way. The rest of the conversation centred around the way she wasn’t going to let her former boyfriend get her down any longer. She did go on to the university course - in gender studies. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of any kind of abuse for a long enough period is familiar with how we internalise the way, in which the person who has perpetrated the abuse defines us. Let’s come back to Helen. Helen, of course has been defined by others in this abusive way ever since she can remember. And not only has she herself been defined in this abusive way; she has also internalised what her abusive step-father has told her about women in general, when he beat her mother, again and again, for years, and told her that he had to hit her, because of what a ‘stupid slut (she) is’. However, Helen has not only been defined as a person – as a woman – by her abusive stepfather, and by subsequent abusive partners. Let’s follow Helen to her mental health assessment many years later. Join me in seeing the assessment through Helen’s eyes, as you step into the examination room, and see the suit opposite you. Another suit. You have seen many suits, they have pried into you and asked you question over question. Never mind you squeamed at their questions; none of the suits have ever asked you how the questions feel – not that they’d know anyway. As you see the suit, scanning the face briefly before looking away again, to see how bad it would be this time, you become acutely aware of how shabby the green dress is, which you had thought looked rather pretty, because, of course, you are poor, living on income support. The suit doesn’t know how scared you are. You tell yourself to hide it. You don’t want to lose this child to care or adoption. Not this time, not again. So you subject yourself to the prying questions, feed him intimate information about your life – you have no choice. He wouldn’t understand how desperate you are to keep this child, so you don’t even bother to show him. He asks you why you want this child, in a clinical sort of way. Somehow, it suddenly feels wrong to want the baby. Just like everything else is wrong about you, always has been wrong. At the same moment, your resentment, that he made you feel this way, grows into hostility. Of course, you mustn’t show your anger, mustn’t explode at him, or else you’ll get a bad report, and they’ll certainly take the baby away. They’re all in it together, all the same, these suits and all the others who take your children away from you, and who make you feel that everything is wrong about you. You know they’ll talk to each other about you, but they don’t know how utterly helpless you feel, how scared, how resentful and angry, how shabby, stupid and how slutty (especially when the suit in front of you asks you about all the different boyfriends you’ve had, and how long you’d been with the last one before you got pregnant, again? Does he know what it’s like to feel like a stupid bitch who’s never got it together in her life, and then someone is nice to you, and for a little while you feel great, you feel loved and cared for, you’re someone special…). The last report said something about ‘Emotionally Dependent Disorder’, so that’s what they think you’ve got. While one emotion after the other washes through you, and the confusion that comes with these feelings settles in, you continue to subject yourself to your psyche being weighed, measured and labelled, in much the same way your mother subjected herself to your step-father’s blows, and in the way you subjected yourself to him fingering you when he was drunk, in the way you’ve subjected yourself to your different boyfriends’ beatings and rape (only, that you don’t see it as rape, it’s simply normal that they take sex from you when they want it, that’s what life is like). You subject yourself because you have no choice in the matter, and it is normal to succumb to their power. So you just go on answering his questions, with a very quiet, monotonous tone of voice, avoiding his gaze, while he detects many signs of Emotionally Dependent Personality Disorder and a disposition for Clinical Depression. You are stripped naked in spite of your shame. While the suit asks you about the last time you had Post-natal Depression, you become aware again of how necessary it is to hide from him how crazy, how sick you really are. So you don’t tell him that you can’t go shopping on your own, that you even get panic attacks when your mate comes along. You don’t tell him about the flashbacks that frighten the living daylights out of you. You don’t tell him you need a spliff at night to calm down, in order to go to sleep (so he also doesn’t find out you’ve laid off the cider since you’ve been pregnant). You certainly don’t tell him about the time Joe was kicking Georgina and you didn’t do anything, you didn’t try to stop it, because, somehow, you weren’t really there, and now you’re so ashamed about it. But he probably knows about that one. That old childhood feeling comes back, that they’ll find out what you’ve done anyway, and they talk about all this at their meetings, the Social Workers, the Health Visitors, the Nurses and Psychologists and Psychiatrists and all the others. They’ll find out you’ve been a stupid bad girl. So you feel real little and weak, and you feel angry and resentful for feeling little and weak. And so on, and so on. I am certain the expert witness in Helen’s case means well. He is unaware, however, of how the professional system around Helen replicates the experience of her abusive childhood and the abuse she has survived since. When systems replicate experience, they replicate behaviour. The expert witness in Helen’s baby’s care proceedings may predict behaviours that prevent her from parenting well enough, because he believes they stem from her internal psychological structure – unaware, that, at least to a significant degree, her behaviour, emotions and thought processes are also the result of the interactional structure within the professional system. And the replicated behaviour is, of course, what is of concern to us as professionals – the self-medication with drugs, the depressed passive inactivity, the vulnerability to being subjected to violence, the avoidance of activities or situations that could cause fear and anxiety, and isolating herself from others. This is the system of which you, and I, are a part. Not only is Helen being defined from the outside, by others who have the power to do so, and who are largely unaware of what she feels and thinks; not only is her behaviour influenced by this interactional process in such a way, that it keeps repeating itself: the disconnection between Helen and the professionals parallels something that has gone on all her life. Relationships with others, who have not offended against her, have become fragmented; just as Helen and her mother feel distant and misunderstood by one another, the gap between Helen and the professionals around her leaves both sides without real connection – and adds to Helen’s isolation. What kind of professional response does Helen need, if she is to lead a more fulfilling life, rather than drifting on in the shadow of her abuse? What kind of professional response may help her become able to parent her child in ways that are both physically and emotionally safe, so that the little girl is spared her mother’s suffering? Let us reflect for a moment on what we would like Helen to be able to achieve: we would like her to lose her intrusive post-traumatic fear, so she doesn’t need to medicate against fear by using drugs. We would like her to become able to protect herself and her child from violence instead of becoming dissociative. We would like Helen to ‘hear’ her own voice, and the friendly voices of supportive others in her thoughts about who she is, so she can develop confidence in herself. This way, she will not need to rely on men who make her feel great for a moment. We would like her to develop a sense of what she can achieve, perhaps get more education and have a better income. We would like Helen to be able to re-connect with important other people in her life, so that she, and her daughter, will have an experience of family. We would like Helen’s daughter to be able to grow up with fundamental trust in her mother, and in life. What can professionals do to achieve this? Helen needs professionals, who can open themselves for her suffering, for her thoughts and feelings that have arisen from years and years of abuse. These professionals also need to be able to open themselves for her suffering within the professional system, so that Helen can start trusting them, tentatively and ambivalent at first, and then more and more. Such an opening of the self is what I believe Carl Rogers meant when he spoke about empathy in Client-centred Counselling. It is in itself a tall order. However, the professionals who wish to really help Helen need to go much further. They need to be able to recognise her effort to succeed – can they recognise she has laid off the alcohol for her child, or do they focus on the fact she has misused alcohol in the past? Have they been curious, and wondered why she has stopped drinking for her baby? Have they asked Helen how she has been able to do this, and to sustain her abstinence? The professionals need to recognise connection, where connection exists: how much do they focus on her anxiety attacks, and how much do they focus on the interpersonal resource Helen has in her friend, who goes out shopping with her? Do the professionals give Helen the message they are sceptical she will change, or do they recognise she is already changing? Are they ready to utilise Helen’s inner and interpersonal resources, in their efforts to help her change? Helen needs professionals who can go even further, professionals who can reach far beyond her anger, her fear, her shame, her confusion, her self-loathing and her sense of helplessness. They need to reach beyond her victimhood. Helen needs to see in their eyes, that they can see her as a young woman full of promise, with strengths, resources, passion, energy, vitality and beauty that are as of yet untapped, but that can, once actualised, mean she can live a life of her own, not the life designated by her perpetrators. This, I believe, is what the philosopher Martin Buber called the genuine encounter. My own workshop at last weekend’s family therapy conference - ‘Bringing Non Violent Resistance to Britain’ reminded me that I do not think of overcoming the effects of abuse in mental health terms. Alan Wade has written about ‘small acts of resistance in everyday living’ – things people do, which we generally do not recognise as resistance against abuse and violence. Turning your head away, when you are being humiliated, can be an act of resistance. Recovering from the effects of abuse can be an act of resistance. Taking steps to overcome being controlled by your violent child can be an act of resistance against a lifetime of abuse. Feminism has taught us that the personal is political. Rather than seeing recovery from abuse as a mental health issue, I would like to see it as a political issue. Changing the professional system around survivors of abuse is a political issue. Thank you. |
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