Originally written 4/1/94
When speaking of child abuse, people are normally referring to sex or beatings. When speaking of adult relationships, the cultural default definition mostly drops sex and refers just to physical blows. Over the years of reading, listening to friends speak of their childhoods, and watching various ugly relationships between adults, I've come to feel that the focus on obviously horrible extremes is an obfuscation and a copout.
Luke and I were talking about this the other night, and he made an interesting point concerning rape. He said men are motivated to define rape in limited terms so that they won't have to examine whether they have ever done it. "I've never jumped out of a bush, clubbed a woman to the ground, and fucked her, therefore I've never committed rape." When a man allows broader definitions of rape, he may have to look at a time when he was a confused young puppy and hassled a similarly confused woman into something she probably didn't want, and wonder whether she experienced it as a rape.
Similarly, I think abuse in relationships is both more subtle and more common than the extremes we usually identify as abusive. A starting point for my thoughts is this: The long term effects on a child of being abused appear to result not so much from what is done to them physically as the emotional stuff which accompanies the abuse. People who were never beaten or raped as children can have problems as an adult which are of the same type and severity as those who were. It seems the key damage is done when a child is treated as thing which exists to be used rather than as an individual with feelings and needs of their own.
Treating another human being as thing which is supposed to serve you, behaving as though it is an outrage against nature if they act like they are an independent individual, trying to punish them into "behaving" -- this seems to me the heart of abuse.
Under this definition, many acts can be called abuse. For example, for a while after Luke first moved in I chewed him out for putting the pots and pans in the wrong place. Well, what is "wrong"? He lives here now too. Doesn't he get some say in where things go? Why snarl instead of talking with him about it?
As abuse, this was pretty mild and didn't go far. He snarled back, and then we had an actual discussion of where to put things. So, this did not develop into a full-bore abusive situation.
Yet, I think the key elements of abuse were there: I reacted not from a basis that saw him as independent individual, but as though he was being bad to me because he had his own ideas about where things should go. I tried to punish him into doing it my way by crabbing at him.
I don't beat myself up a lot for occasional bursts of unreasonable crankiness, who doesn't get this way sometimes? Yet, I think it may be useful to call such behavior abuse and examine it from that stance. When we define abuse as extremes performed by obviously horrible people on helpless victims, then few of us need to examine whether we or our various partners are engaging in abusive behavior. I don't think I feel safe, from myself or from other people, in taking such a narrow view.
I recall an early boyfriend who probably would have cowered if I had been cranky about the placement of pots and pans. When a woman said to me, "You chew him out for being late and you chew him out for being early," I was shocked. I denied it. I watched for a while. It was true. I was horrified. I tried to stop doing it. I continued. I broke up with him.
Which brings me to the next stage of what I wanted to discuss. There is abusive behavior, and then there are abusive relationships. In order for the relationship to become abusive, both parties must be involved in the process. The abuser treats the other person as a thing, the abused buys into being treated that way.
When the relationship involves a child, the child has no choice about whether or not to cooperate in the abuse. They must. Their life is on the line, in their hearts and maybe literally.
In relationships between adults, choice exists, at least in theory. Due to old damage, the existence of choice can be highly theoretical. I suppose we have all tried talking to a person about abandoning an abusive relationship. The contortions that even highly intelligent and insightful people go through in order to justify remaining can be truly astounding.
I despise the homily, "To understand all is to forgive all." I think I have always found this repulsive on a visceral level, but in recent years I have come to see such thinking as the cornerstone of abuse philosophy.
Abused people often explain their compliance via compassion for the abuser. An abuser acts out of damage done to them, damage virtually any caring person can see and understand. If you define abuse narrowly, then an abuser is a fiend in human form who rips into other people. So, you will not define behavior as abuse when you can feel compassion for the person.
If you define abuse is an action or reaction which punishes another person for being an individual human, then I expect we have all been guilty of it from time to time. You don't have to identify another person, or yourself, as a fiend in order to say, "That was abuse." You can recognize what it is even in mild forms, and deal with it.
I think if someone treats you badly, the highest compassion for them might be to say exactly that. I'm grateful to the woman who told me what I was doing with that old boy friend. I'm also glad Luke snarls when I get cranky. I'm a better person for being around people who are willing and able to call me on my shit.
10/17/97
I think I'm better at being called on my bad stuff than I am at calling it properly in other people. I'm lucky, and haven't been severly victimzed as an adult, but I'm still more likely to call something I've done abusive than to label another person's action that way. Ultimately, this is just a septic to the possiblity of caring and safe intimacy on both sides.