The Political As Personal
In the post “Psychological Harm is Physical Harm” Nora Samaran writes about her hope that the discomfort occasioned by the words and behaviors of the current administration will serve to make people more aware of what abuse looks like. Imagine all the things Trump is doing -- the distortion of reality, the repeated avoidance of accountability, the reframing of calls for him to check his bad behavior as a crusade against him from opponents, the media, his own party -- happening to you behind closed doors without anyone beside you to tell you that no, you're not crazy, he's not actually answering your questions, he's not actually reflecting reality with his words, and yes, he is actually responsible for the harm he does and he is actively trying to evade responsibility. His apologies are not apologies and his answers aren't answers.
That's what gaslighting looks like. That's what distorting realty looks like. Do it long enough with a person you've isolated and you will cause severe damage. This is what abuse looks like.
It's very easy to think that we can spot those lies a mile away, that we can see what he's doing. But remember: we have the advantage of space. We have the advantage of many people -- some of them quite prominent -- echoing our nagging feelings that the current situation isn’t normal. Victims of abuse rarely have that.
For them, Trump's behaviors happen in private, with no support at all, with no one to affirm their gut feelings that what they're hearing doesn't tally.
Samaran writes:
We live in a world where empathy for survivors needs to be consciously cultivated. Our world, in so many ways, is backwards. When friends first asked how it had happened, some wanted me to show them a metaphorical cup of abuse on a kitchen table, when the trouble was that the abuse and the bystander dynamics are the whole house. It took time and deep listening for them to understand what I had been through. How can I explain that the harm is so large that we are inside it, that only once you bear the brunt of it do you see how it was around us all along?
Abusers have two main features that distort their perceptions, according to the helpful book Why Does He Do That? They have an inappropriately large sense of their own entitlement and an inappropriately shrunken sense of the rights of others; and they perpetually center themselves, which leads them to systematically disregard the feelings, needs, and experiences of other people, typically while denying they are doing so.
They will depict normal expectations that we all have of one another – such as ordinary family responsibilities or acting with emotional reliability for our loved ones – as distressing encroachments on their (inappropriately expanded) sphere of entitlement, and will depict the normal interdependence and mutuality of intimate relationships as an excessive imposition on their presumed right to center themselves at all times.
They will story themselves, for instance, as having ‘given and given and given’ when the things they are ‘giving’ are below even the ordinary normal expectations of basic interpersonal obligation to those one is intimate with. (Like describing ‘not lying’ as a gift, or ‘going to see a psychologist when she begins to believe I’m abusing her’ as some sort of extreme generosity, when these are just the basic things one does to be a decent human being.)
Any attempt to name harm (such as to ask them to stop) is received as criticism, and criticism threatens to call their self-story into question, and this self-story is all they have for a self (until they get sufficiently motivated to stop, and to recover the lost part of themselves that would do moral consistency and emotional connection). That is why they use words to try to control reality, and attack or isolate anyone who tries to bring a bit of reality back into the equation. (“I have all the best words,” he says, his face beaming into the living rooms of the nation.)
The author of Why Does He Do That, Lundy Bancroft, has worked with thousands of abusive men over the years. He writes that the only way to get a clear picture of what is happening with men who abuse is to check what they say against information provided by their exes and partners. There is no other way to get a clear picture, because abusers are not accurate sources of information about themselves or others. (“I never supported the war in Iraq,” Trump says, while audio clips that show he’s lying are readily available). As Bancroft’s research tells us, the only way to counter gaslighting is with powerful, repeated doses of reality.
This is why when an abuser gaslights a partner or former partner, he also seeks to talk one-on-one (and preemptively) to those a survivor might go to for help, to convince them of a narrative that would lead bystanders to refuse to even speak to the survivor, to cut off attempts to check the abuser’s story against any external reality.
Deeply listening to survivors, fact checking the partial-ommission stories that those who abuse use to deflect and avoid accountability, takes energy and empathy and time, and may take acting against the current of socially “polite" behavior. It is so much easier to toss up barriers to seeing gendered violence especially when, without cross-checking, the abuser’s narrative feels so truthy, and when even seeing the abuse might mean recognizing that we may have inadvertently become part of it.
A mistake we make as bystanders is to attempt to use our own Rolodex of emotional experiences to empathize with the survivor – or to try to figure out the abuser. But empathizing with abuse survivors takes a different set of skills. Empathizing with survivors means stretching out of experiences we have already had, and into deep listening to the experience they have just had, or are still having, which may be completely outside our lived experience. Our own Rolodex may just not provide the information we need to comprehend what they are telling us has just happened to them.
Meanwhile, empathizing with abusers can lead us to endlessly derail the centering of survivors, which is exactly what the abuser wants. It can also lead us to project our own ethical impulses onto the abuser’s actions, which would make sense if this were a reasonable person acting – but the whole point is that no matter how nice he may be to his friends or colleagues, the abuser’s actions in the context of intimacy typically do not make that kind of sense. Imagine trying to imagine why Trump keeps saying “I did not support the war in Iraq,” or how he can say phrases like “no, I’m not racist against Mexicans. I’m building a wall. A wall between here and Mexico. I have no problem with Mexico. I’m building a wall.” You could imagine an empathetic reason for this incoherence that comes out of your own Rolodex of experience, and it would just let him evade accountability, because he does not make that kind of sense. Abusers’ actions make another kind of sense: an abusive, entitled one. But they do not make ordinary empathic sense, so trying to empathize with an abuser who is evading accountability often just means throwing the survivor under the bus.
Bystanders may not comprehend the full depth of the harm, because of a mistaken idea that physical violence is somehow ‘worse’ than psychological violence. Well, if he didn’t hit her, we think, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I mean, we all have bad days, right? We seem to have this mistaken assumption that abuse just means coming home a little grouchy and having a bad day. We think only of our own range of experiences, and may find it hard to really hear what the survivor is telling us.
The core of all the different forms of abuse is typically the inability to take accountability for one’s actions, the inability to hear when we are harming another, the inability to own our mistakes or grow from them in a way that actually does repair. While we do need a culture that can foster accountability without ostracizing, we first need a culture that actually does believe and center survivors of gendered violence (in all its forms: rape, assault, gaslighting, control of family funds, threats to leave if the abuser’s whims are not catered to, etc.). We need a culture that can do accountability at all.
