As a children’s counselor specializing in traumatic stress, I worked with children even younger than you were, and explained to them why adults did all the crazy things they do. After 15 years, my conclusion is that intimate partner violence (IPV) is a disease. As you’re reading this, I’m probably either still writing it or you’ll never get to see it.. So much noise in the world.. But I didn’t want to sum my thoughts up in 280 characters.
I’m not going to speak to Kim Kardashian, Kanye and how they go about their show promotions. I don’t get that world. What I can speak about is the truth of violence. What it teaches kids, how it changes our body and brain. And what we can do to actually create change in the world to stop it all.
The problem with our response to intimate partner violence of all types: among gays, lesbians, dating couples, married couples, sugar daddies and mommas, office relationships… All the different combinations where there’s a significant power difference and a sexual /romantic relationship is that we look at it as a criminal problem when it’s really a health disorder. A part of the brain goes offline in the perpetrators and they no longer are able to make rational choices. We see this in brain images, we see it in longitudinal studies about childhood experiences of perpetrators.
In the same way, that sense of “walking on egg shells” feeling, that “constant fear of a violent explosion” turns off the same part in the brains of survivors. They end up reacting to Life and a flood of emotions without any ability to sit down and think “what am I doing and why”. I’ve seen families fall into poverty, become homeless because of this disease. Women killed their babies to protect themselves from their abuser, and I even had a young woman, a victim of a child survivor I had seen years ago… He grew up and hurt the people he loved just like his father had done years ago. It’s a “Cycle of Violence” because the disease is contagious. #ViolenceIsAContagiousDisease
Prisons are built to traumatize, to “put the fear in” prisoners. That’s the whole concept of “punishment”. And when the source of the disease is fear, or trauma as we label it in the field of mental healthcare, putting more fear into the person doesn’t help solve anything.
I think what you were wondering was the amount of cultural bias we have against female survivors:
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“You don’t leave so you must like it”… Or “You must have deserved it”… which comes almost instinctually with “spare the rod, spoil the wife” type of thinking that puts the husband in “charge” of disciplining his wife…Often the argument we come up with is “It’s your private business”… And sometimes we say “Nothing to do, he’s like that”…
Reality is, violence and fear learning it leads to is a terrible teacher. Using Fear to discipline is like injecting AIDS virus into someone. You infect them. Once infected, what he becomes is not who he really is, it’s not who she really is. I know for a fact, that good people who truly love their partners and their children end up hurting them because of the physiological changes Fear creates in everyone chronically exposed to it. So, our response to the problem is pure ignorance.
What to do? There are neurological treatments that help people who are violent in an irrational way. Some people choose to be violent because they believe it is necessary. That’s different. We need to change the conversation, like you’ve done with the Kim&Kanye post…
We need to teach the impact of violence to couples thinking of having sex so they can get treatment BEFORE they get violent in front of kids. We need to actually support survivors, male, female, young, old, addict, straight, kinky, married, coworker … No questions asked. Why are we so afraid of helping someone who doesn’t fit into our “help criteria”?
And let’s start talking about what all this is doing to the kids… There’s the mother’s rights movement, the father’s rights movement… They argue about who gets custody, how often the abuser gets to see the child and under what conditions… But no one talks about the children’s rights to live a NORMAL childhood…
Every kid deserves a life where they can rely on a mother AND a father to be there for them, interested, nurturing, adoring, protecting, guiding, disciplining and helping them push the limits of their capacity as human beings… If due to an illness, which is how I see IPV, then they need protection from it.
This is a societal disease…We are the creators of the systems and the cultures that make this disease possible… We are all responsible for your dad’s behaviors, Kanye’s behaviors and Pete (what’s his name?) behaviors. Calling a man to announce he’s having sex with his wife is emotional violence… I don’t blame Kanye for feeling the urge to reciprocate to it… How Kim continues to be with a man who does that? What happens to the kids when all this is going on? We don’t know.
So, we need to rethink and talk in schools about what true Love is. How do you show true Love? What makes a “good enough” parent and how do you grow to be a “FANTASTIC parent?”… Teens need to understand these so they struggle less as bigger decisions of parenthood and intimacy hits them.
And we need to heal the mass “Loveless-ness” that allows us to listen to stories like the one Kanye & Kim are sharing, and instead of sadness, feel magnetized by it…
