Those of us who have experienced the manipulative nature of controlling individuals can become experts in our own self care, can regain control over our lives, and can be responsible for our own individual journey of recovery.
It started for me in the prime of my youth. At first I could not name it. It came like a thief in the night and robbed me of my youth, my dreams, my aspirations and my future. It came upon me like a terrifying nightmare that we could not awaken from. But when morning came I raged.
However, I had such courage - my youthful optimism waved like triumphant flags at a homecoming parade. When I first spoke with others about abusive situations I was experiencing with people I trusted (i.e. an uncle, a father-figure, boyfriends), I quickly found that nothing was the same anymore. My friends became strangely absent, sometimes even siding with the abusive person. They were overly careful when near me. My family grew distraught and torn by guilt...the topic felt taboo. I felt ashamed...guilty.
And I swear, with all the courage I could muster I tried to return to work and to school, I tried to pick up the pieces, and I prayed for the strength and perseverance to keep trying. But it seemed that a deaf ear had turned to my prayers. The terrible distress came back, relationship after relationship, in different forms, and my life became shattered once again. Was this a matter of me making poor choices in relationships? Was it me not asserting myself? Was I asserting myself too much? Was any of this related to growing up in a single-parent household with no father to role model a relationship after? Or did the other person just change? Did they already have that abusive tendency in them? The questions plagued me...I had no answer. It seemed that these men tried to break my spirit and were more intent on gaining, even coercing my compliance, than respecting me.
Over time, I found myself undergoing that dehumanizing transformation from being a person to being worthless...a person deemed by society's blind eye not even worth saving. Each relationship repeated this dehumanizing litany, my sense of being a person was diminished as "worthless" loomed as an all powerful personal summary, an "initself" that I was taught I was powerless over. The self I had been seemed to fade farther and farther away, like a dream that belonged to somebody else. The future seemed bleak and empty and promised nothing but more suffering. And the present became an endless succession of moments marked by the next beration and the next.
So much of what I was suffering was overlooked. The context of my life was largely ignored. I continually fought not to lose my innocence, my values, my humanism; to give up was to give in and let them win. Yet much of what I was going through were simply human experiences - experiences such as loss and grief, shock and fear, and loneliness. One by one friends left and it became too difficult to trust anyone. I feared losing everything. I felt abandoned in my ever-deepening winter.
Aging was no longer marked by the milestones of a year's accomplishments but rather by the numbing pain of successive failures. I tried and failed and tried and failed until it hurt too much
to try anymore. In a last, desperate attempt to protect myself, I gave up trying to fight the seemingly inevitable. I gave up trying to get counselling, trying to find someone to talk to, someone to understand, perhaps someone to save me. Giving up was a solution for me at the time. It numbed the pain. There was a point where I was willing to sacrifice enormous parts of myself in order to say "I don't care." Giving up numbed the pain because I stopped asking "why and how can I make things get better?" Even the simplest of tasks is overwhelming at this time. I learned to be helpless because that was safer than being completely hopeless.
My temperment continued to atrophy through this adaptive strategy of not caring anymore, and my immediate family suffered through rage-filled outbursts of invalidation. I have described what it feels like on the inside as it is being lived. But friends, relatives, and others merely see the anguish and indifference from the outside. From the outside it appears that the person just isn't trying anymore, is psychologically weak, or is making poor choices. Many will say that I was suffering the natural consequences of bad decisions, of not asserting myself, or letting others take control over my life.
I did not want to abandon myself as a "hopeless case," victim to the ebb and tide of abusive relationships and harassing behaviours. I decided that only I could save myself, so I waited for my environment to change so that the real person within me could emerge and grow. I use the word environment to include, not just the physical environment, but also the human interactive
environment that we call relationship. Waiting only worked to the point of allowing me to assess situations, to try to predict causes and outcomes, to "play the game" to assure my safety until I could muster the courage and strength to act. It became a lengthy process that only provided me with the illusion of regaining control over my abusive situation. The control was not real, but I didn't recognize that. I was inevitably prolonging the point at which I needed to act...to leave...to assert myself...to do something healthy for me.
The truth is that at some point every single person who has experienced domestic violence passes through this time of anguish and apathy, even if only for a short while. Remember that giving up is a solution that is easy to fall back on. Giving up is a way of surviving in environments which are desolate, oppressive places and which fail to nurture and support us. The task that faced me was to move from just surviving, to recovering. But in order to do this, the environments in which I was spending my time needed to change.
Marie Balter expressed this hope when asked, "Do you think that everybody can get better?" she responded: "It's not up to us to decide if they can or can't. Just give everybody the chance to get better and then let them go at their own pace. And we have to be positive - supporting their desire to live better and not always insisting on their productivity as a measure of their success". (Balter 1987, p.153). Who's job is it to pass judgment on who will and will not recover from the damaging effects of abuse and the spirit breaking effects of abandonment, neglect, stigma, dehumanization, degradation and learned helplessness? We must commit ourselves to removing environmental barriers which block people's efforts towards recovery and which keep us locked in a mode of just trying to survive.
Real change can be quite uncomfortable for those in recovery, whether it's from addiction, mental illness, or domestic violence. It is important that victims of abuse become responsible agents in our own recovery process. Recovery does not refer to an end product or result. It does not mean that one is "cured" nor does not mean that one won't experience abuse again. Recovery involves a transformation of the self wherein one both accepts ones limitation and discovers a new world of possibility. This is the paradox of recovery i.e., that in accepting what we cannot do or be, we begin to discover who we can be and what we can do. Thus, recovery is a process. It is a way of life. It is an attitude and a way of approaching the day's challenges. It is not a perfectly linear process. Like a seedling, recovery has its seasons, its time of downward growth into the darkness to secure new roots and then the times of breaking out into the sunlight. But most of all recovery is a slow, deliberate process that occurs by poking through one little grain of sand at a time. The work of personal growth is slow and difficult but the result is beautiful and wondrous.
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