Seastorm's thread, and Mo2s mention of Gavin de Becker, and a couple recent shows I've watched (horrifying consequences when victims of Npaths aren't believed by others) add up to the starting point for this thread.
I'm a thinking that justice delayed is justice denied. Always worth pursuing still, if a legal or criminal consequence is possible. But there was another thing, on a CNN hero, that amazed me last night.
A woman who lived in a rural area and was abused by her father, raped and beaten, as were her siblings...grew up. She survived. She became a lawyer. What she does is go to rural areas to be an advocate, legal advocate, for victims of domestic violence. She travels down thousands of miles of roads where women and children are trapped without cars, money, or any resources for escape--and are being abused. She finds them in various ways but she doesn't abandon them until they're out and safe. She has literally helped over 10,000 rural poor women escape severe abuse. It was an astonishing story of victim turned hero.
And that got me thinking about de Becker's thesis. And how THAT could also raise the numbers of those who escape abuse before it begins. What if THAT were taught in every preschool? True, a child is trapped. But even if they were taught there is some way or will be very soon some way, for them to protect themselves? Surely, teaching this instinct stuff with great intensity would change some outcomes.
De Becker broke down and analysed every single step that led so many women to the final point of being murdered. (This can be extrapolated back to simply being in a destructive relationship that's harming you, even if there's no physical violence.) One woman, who'd been beaten with a baseball bat and left for dead upside down in a trash can with snow in it, inside a freezing storage unit, left there to finish dying while he dropped the kids at daycare and went back to work....somehow, she got a cell phone call to 911 and she played dead and was found in time. So De Becker told her, I analyse so many murders, but not often someone who has "been killed" (and survives).
What his studies show, and what the hundreds of stories of women who survive told him, is:
--you have an inner instinct ("This feels odd. I am uncomfortable with him. Why is he doing this? He wants me to go into his house. I don't really want to be here/alone with him/going there, etc. Something isn't feeling good about this...") WE ALL HAVE IT. And it's not a shout. But it is real. We all have it because we are animals. IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE RESPECTED AND ACTED ON.
--you are taught by this culture in a thousand ways to violate your own instinct. You THINK your way into ignoring your own whisper of warning. (OUR culture teaches us to become crazy. Like an antelope who hears a rustle in the brush and tells itself, I think I'll go closer to that sound and find out more about it. That does not happen. The antelope respects its instinct. The antelope doesn't tell itself, he's a poor misunderstood lion and I can be the one who shows him how to be nice to antelopes. Or, I'm really lonely and I'm the only antelope who isn't married. Maybe getting married to a lion is a good idea.)
--the way to become safe is to UN-teach the cultural/religious programming that girls and women are swarmed with. To be kind, find consensus, reasonable, cooperative, submissive, vulnerable in heeled shoes they can't run in, more focused on their sexuality power to attract than their instinctive power or intellectual power to build a safe and creative life, more concerned about what the neighbors or the town might think of "am I being a proper/sexy/"successful" female?" than almost anything else.
--you can UNlearn that denial and repression of your instincts.
My personal example is that when my 2nd husband, a pathological person (not violent but had the potential--shoved me hard once--and definitely a liar and manipulator and very unhealthy person who harmed me and my daughter emotionally very much, and whom I should never have married -- anyway, what happened (that fits some De Becker things) is:
--he wooed me like crazy, delightful, funny. But was in a HURRY to marry. Literally chased me around making me laugh even though deep inside, I was also feeling pressured, rushed, badgered. (I let my eagerness to be back in the culture's "safe place" for a woman, married, and my loneliness which I hadn't learned how to heal in a healthy way, overrule my instinct.)
--I still was trying to be intact, hear my own voice. I went to a marriage counselor on my own, we did a premarital test with him together. I liked the counselor, kept seeing him on my own, though we were very different. (He was a conservative Christian. I didn't care about that difference between us because I wasn't "superior", and he was a good human being and because of my own huge investment in TOLERANCE and LOVE whether I think like another or not). But I should have been intelligent enough to see that having this person helping me heal my own psyche was not a wise choice...because there are "RULES"--some but not all of them misunderstood ones--taken from the Bible that really, really harm women and girls. And ... everyone.
--I told the counselor in so many words one day: "J. is really really pressuring me to get married and I feel as though I need more time. My inner voice is telling me this is too fast. He is so delightful and I am sure I love him but this is just so fast and I don't know what to do about him pressuring me to set a date. What do you think I should do?"
--The counselor said, "Oh I think you should go ahead and set that date right now, get married. Then you'll get all this stress behind you." Fatally, I decided HE knew better than I did. I AGREED WITH HIM TO OVERRULE MY OWN INNER VOICE. And within a week, got engaged. We married a few months later.
--J. was abusive --verbally and emotionally, calling me his F**ing wife, roaring and yelling, on our wedding night. I spent the night sobbing in the bathroom. I have never since been so hurt. I'd never seen him drink more than one glass of anything, he'd had a lot of champagne, and it was, Hello, Mr. Hyde. I should have gone to the courthouse and gotten an anullment the next day. But I felt SHAME. And confusion. So instead, thinking it was all so spiritual of me, I recommitted with him in the woods the next day (he was also so contrite). I forgave everything, wanted to keep the vows I'd made because I made them in my CHURCH (get the connection?). Felt that love should fix everything and maybe he'd abused me because "he needed more love and had a stressful day"? Honeymoon was a nightmare of tension and feeling unsafe and unloved. I knew I was in deep trouble. But...I talked myself out of getting a annulment (I would feel SHAME because of the CHURCH and so many PEOPLE had come to the wedding). 7 years of hell. (I still didn't listen. I persuaded myself over and over that having made a promise in front of the culture, and in front of an altar, was more important than how I felt. What my inner voice was saying, iow.)
--After the honeymoon I went back to the counselor and told him what had happened. I was angry. Why had he pushed me to marry? Why had he advised me so forcefully when I'd told him what my inner voice was saying? Why had he done that? He told me the truth: his unmarried sister was kind of promiscuous and in some ways, I reminded him of her. Because of his beliefs, he was really uneasy with me being unmarried.
--Later he sent me a bill. I wrote him that not only did I not owe him a red cent but he was lucky I wasn't going to sue.
And I'm okay now. But all of these things just came together in my head this morning and I really really wanted to start a thread that is about this INSTINCT. The self-protective instinct we all do have that tells us right off the bat whether this person is a predator or unwholesome or unsafe person. WE all know it because we are animals and we have animal selves and we need to respect ourselves more than we respect the culture, the TV, fashion, pressure to be "sweet and understanding", or pressure to feel powerful only when we're beautiful and sexually attractive.
I'm still a compassionate person. (Even for abusive people, at a safe boundary). I'm still affectionate. I do a lot of loving in my life.
But I'm less "sweet". Less compliant. And I wish I had respected, and been taught to respect, my own inner voice a hell of a lot sooner in life.
Anybody want to talk about that gift, that instinct? Hindsight...the signs are always always there. We ARE smart enough (cancel that, "smart" gets us in trouble, I mean instinctive enough) to have safer healthier lives, and to teach our children, boys and girls, to have that greater safety too.
Sometimes deconstructing is the only way to do it. Justice delayed. But to deconstruct a piece of your past back to the point that you remember your first whispering instinct (and don't punish yourself for not having respected it, you did as you were programmed and it's nothing to be ashamed of)...but to deconstruct to that moment in a relationship where you REMEMBER your instinct, that whisper...
It's empowering. Or it is for me. That's the excavation that takes me back to before I was harmed. And she, listening, alert, quick and nimble and able to make a rapid lifesaving course correction...she is still there, in me. With all of the grief and regrets, after a long time, I find it something to celebrate. That's why I believe inside every single one of us no matter how hurt, confused, damaged, struggling, recovering, is that wholly alive and beautiful and wise and instinctive animal. We have her too. We all do.
She is in every one of us. I'd love to hear stories about her. And tell them to children, for future generations' sake. (Instead of stuffing their heads with gore stories, letting the media culture groom them...for more of the same.)
love,
Hops
