What can we do to stop abuse?
CW: childhood, racial, gender trauma
For a long time…
I didn’t like to say the word “abuse.”
In my work as a therapist, I empathized deeply with clients—session by session—as we processed together the devastating ripples left behind by trauma and mistreatment they had suffered. I resonated with their stories of injury, humiliation, and abandonment. I used the word “abuse” if they did; at times, I might have suggested the word if it seemed helpful to someone.
So why did I find it difficult to speak that word when telling my own story?
“What am I not seeing?”
To me, the word “abuse” seemed to be suggesting something about the intentions of the perpetrator.
And I thought to myself, I just don’t know. A child can feel mistreated… a spouse can feel mistreated… a woman can feel mistreated by church politics… and yet that doesn’t mean the intention was to abuse.
In my mind, that ambiguity was enough to render the term less-than-so helpful when it came to my own experiences.
Then something happened.
I suffered a sudden, devastating loss.
And because it was so unexpected, I wondered what else was lurking in the shadows.
“What am I not seeing?”
I became obsessed that question; I wore my friends out with it. I wasn’t very concerned what I might find in my blindspots, but I was deathly concerned about not seeing what was really there.
That quest launched within me a slowly growing awareness of patterns of mistreatment I had tolerated in some of my adult relationships, to a degree that surprised myself.
Why had I done that?
What kind of example had that given my children?
Where had I first learned my lot as a woman is to sacrifice my own wellbeing to “make other things work?”
Those questions led me to take a hard look at patterns of mistreatment of women and queer individuals in my religious circles. A few years ago I had woken up to the ways in which our theology and teachings in the church were not serving our queer community and were doing harm to their wellbeing. I was much slower—like molasses—to look at how those same root teachings about gender also locked women into impossible binds.
Why had I not questioned those binds more directly?
Who taught me to suffer in silence?
Where did I first sponge up the message there was no benefit to speaking?
That’s when I started remembering.
When you suffer mistreatment growing up, your childbrain makes it intelligible in different ways. You might tell yourself “it was normal, everyone’s family was like that.” If you know that isn’t true because you spent time at other people’s homes, you might tell yourself, “it wasn’t so bad, there were good times too.”
When a parent mistreats you, your childbrain can turn it around on you. You might tell yourself, “there’s something wrong with me.” If you know other loving people who challenge that, you might tell yourself, “well, they don’t really know me, if they did they would realize there’s something wrong with me.”
One of the ways my childbrain adapted to mistreatment was by obsessively trying to understand the intentions of the person who had mistreated me. Perhaps if I could unravel him, understand what motivated him, I could decipher what the mistreatment was saying about me.
But I don’t know his intentions; I can’t say that his intention was to abuse.
And that’s when it dawned on me: it doesn’t matter.
“The unnamed experience is harder to face.”
When our brain perceives someone to be a threat to our wellbeing, that perception activates our brainstem. When the threat continue over time, this severely erodes trust between us.
And our bodies don’t lie; they’re truth-tellers about how we’re perceiving a person or situation. That doesn’t mean we’re always perceiving the person or situation accurately. Sometimes we may misperceive someone as a threat, when really they are quite safe. Other times we may be experiencing mistreatment, and receiving love and care at the same time, making it doubly confusing what to call it.
The important question is not what’s happening inside the other person.
The important question is, what’s happening inside us? And do we free to speak about it?
Because the unnamed experience is harder—sometimes impossible—to face.
But once we name our experience, we can begin asking, what do I need?
So the word “abuse” is important to have in our vocabulary.
And I suggest for your consideration, if it feels abusive, it is abusive.
And perpetrators of mistreatment need to be helped to listen and acknowledge the feelings they—intentionally or unintentionally—have surfaced in the body of another human.
“See, feel, speak everything.”
It has been widely recognized that abusive systems tend to share three unspoken rules: “don’t see, don’t feel, don’t speak.”
In Matthew 10, Jesus undoes these rules:
Make known all the secrets
Bring them into the light
Speak about them from the rooftops.
So how do we interrupt mistreatment and abuse?
See it, feel it, and speak about it.
Practicing using the right word. “We are only as sick as our secrets,” as recovery wisdom tells us.
In the scriptures we are offered the image of the church as a body (1 Corinthians 12) and keeping abusive patterns secret will sicken the body of Christ.
Privacy should be respected, unless abuse is suspected.
That’s the deal breaker.
Whenever there is a person sharing a story that sounds as if abuse has taken place, or there is a pattern that appears as if it makes covering-up of mistreatment easier, our message must be clear, direct, and unconditional:
See
Feel
— and for the love of God —
Speak
about your feelings and needs.
Our whole body–brain and spirit–will be better for it.
∞
Many of us—particularly women, LGBTQ+ persons, persons of color; White male survivors of poverty, trauma, and other demoralizing conditions—are unaccustomed to trusting ourselves. Growing up, we learned to question, are we perceiving accurately what’s really happening? Let’s learn to trust that our bodies are telling us the truth. And let’s help one another engage the difficult inner work of building our own sense of trust in ourselves and in God. Together, may we learn to trust what we are seeing and feeling, and to speak about it boldly–for the sake of the body, of which we are all members.
Listening with you,
Questions for reflection:
What messages have you sponged up from parents, church, or others that keep you from seeing, feeling, or speaking?
What secrets are you protecting for others, at the expense of your own wellbeing?
How might reflecting on God’s trustworthiness help you trust yourself more fully?
Further reading:
Matthew 10:26–27; 1 Corinthians 12: 12–26
A Grief Ritual in Four Movements
The Brain & the Spirit, Chapter 2, A Trustworthy Compass, “The Brain on Trust,” pp. 29–31.
