Friday, July 3, 2015

Abuse & Redemption

One of the chief pieces of advice we tell abuse victims today is that abusers don't change. This is great advice for abuse victims. If someone is abusing you, sticking around in the hopes they will change is a terrible idea.  Of course, it is naive to think that all abuse victims really have the ability to leave - some fear if they leave, they will be murdered or become homeless or leave their children alone with the abuser, and sometimes that can indeed be the consequences, so we should not judge abuse victims who are forced to stay and assume it is always a choice. But generally, if someone is abusing you, and you are able to leave them, you should leave.
However the narrative that abusers do not and can not change is simply not true, and it is harmful to abuse victims, in another way, to cement this narrative so forcefully; people who abuse others are making a choice, a choice that may well be compulsive and difficult to resist, but a choice that can be changed. Many people who abuse do not have the reason and empathy necessary to change - but some abusers CAN CHANGE, and they should be pressured to change, we should expect and insist that abusers take responsibility for their choices and not feel helplessly compelled to hurt others.
I say this based on personal experience. Now, personal (anecedotal) experience is not in any way scientifically valid for several reasons; one, becausre there are billions of humans and my personal experience involves just two of those humans, which is a pathetically small sample size; two, because my personal experience is obviously heavily biased. So you shouldn't take it as Gospel (well that's an ironic phrase, given the Gospels are made up), and I'm not offering it up as such; it is simply my own limited personal experience which has caused me to question the absolutism of condemning abusers as monsters.
I grew up with abusive parents. The abuse didn't fully start, to my recollection, until I was around 11 years old. At this time, my mother lost her damn mind and I became a target, an outlet of her inner turmoil. The abuse ranged from private interrogations in which she would accuse me of thinking terrible things about her that I did not think, that were in fact her own worse fears, to hitting and smothering me. There were times where I feared for, and was in danger of, my life - smothering someone can, after all, kill them, and this was a frequent tactic of hers. In her mind, I think she thought I was out of control and she was calming me down, but in reality, she was losing her temper and physically attacking me, I was resisting, and then she would smother me to feel she had gained total control over me.  By gaining control of me, she could feel she was gaining control over her own life - after all, she had given over her life to Motherhood at a young age, so if she could control her children, she could feel in control of her life. 
However, this did not solve her problem, because her real problem was her own out of control irrational emotions and thoughts. She was filled with high levels of anxiety and anger, and in her mind this became self hate, hatred towards others, fear, and paranoia. 
She lashed out at her husband as well.  I bore the brunt of the abuse - in fact, when I would hear her getting angry at my younger siblings (I am going to be vague about myself on this blog precisely because stories like this are private - as you can tell from the introduction, there has been some reconcillation in my family for one thing, and I do not wish this to be traced back to my true identity, in part because I fear internet harassers like those who attacked Anita & Zoe as I mentioned on two previous posts) - when I heard her attacking my younger siblings, I would run into their room to deliberately put my own body in the way of the abuse and force her to re-focus her anger on me.  She treated my siblings differently, and until recently, some siblings denied the abuse altogether, while others had different experiences with it.
My father was also abusive, allowing himself to lose his temper and screaming mean things at people or hitting them.
The physical aspect, aside from the terrifying and dangerous smothering, was never the worse part. As a young teen who desperately needed my parents to prioritize love for me in their lives, the worst thing was feeling like my parents hated me. I became bulimic and self-injured by age 14.  It was at this time - a few years later, actually -that I first saw that my mother was not really entirely a monster, because it was at this time that my mother first saw the monster she had become for what it was.  When she saw the scars and fresh wounds on my body, she finally stopped seeing me as if I were her enemy and started seeing me as the child in pain that I was.  
No one should injure themselves; at worst it can kill you, at best it is a terrible thing to do to yourself. It hurt me in many ways and I still carry the scars with me.  However just as the narrative that abusers can't change is a good thing to say to people but not necessarily true, saying that self-injury can get you attention and help is a terrible thing for people vulnerable to that self-destructive compulsion to hear but it is actually the truth, and it is one reason why people self-injure.  Not that I wanted people to know I did it - I hid it for years, terrified people would know I was fucking crazy. but I am sure a part of me also did it because no one would recognize my emotional pain, the self-hate that I had been taught, the real fear for my life that I lived with, the fear most abusive victims feel that someday their abusers will seriously injure or kill them, the fear that I would commit suicide due to my misery and self hatred. 
People often don't recognize emotional injury as a real problem or a real danger. People like to pretend our emtions arent real or dont matter.  But that isn't reality; our emotional lives in most ways ARE our life, our quality of life, and if you are miserable in your life, it is a real pain that makes your life genuinely difficult to endure.  For me, the worst part of my abuse was how it made me feel about myself. I hurt myself because I turned my anger at my abusers inward. I was angry at myself for doing and saying the things that would cause them to be angry at me. All I wanted was for my parents to love me.

So when my parents found out that I hurt myself like that, they put me in therapy, and they started really looking at their own behavior and trying to change it.

The abuse did not stop altogether. The abusive behaviors still have not completely stopped. My parents still have that terrible combination of selfish choices and mental illness that cause them to fight with other people and be mean to loved ones for really bad reasons.

But my parents are not monsters.  They behaved as monsters for a time, and sometimes they still do. But they are people, complex people capable of empathy and capable of change.

My mother fought herself from that moment on, she started trying to force herself to become a bettter person. The monster fought back. Sometimes the mother won, sometimes the monster won. And gradually, over time, with medication and therapy and a lot of hard work, the monster started to weaken.

It took time, and it went back and forth in phases, and she will never be fully cured. I expect someday when she is old and her mind starts to go that it could come back again. But I do not hate her. She is still in my life. Because she fought for me. I forgave her, for no other reason than that she made it clear to me over and over again that she did not want to be a monster anymore, that she was truly remorseful, and she put that emotion into action in her life and maintains vigilance over herself.

At 18, I left my mother's house (almost) for good - she kept hitting me, and I kept getting up, refusing to fight back, and then I left. I barely spoke to her for many years. This was one of the best things I did for myself and for her.  If you are abused, and reading this, and hoping that your abuser can change too, first know that you should not expect that to happen and what you should do is get out as soon as you can and don't look back.  The best thing you can do for yourself, and for your abuser, is to walk out and lock the door behind you.  Not that your abuser deserves anything from you, but the only way they will learn to stop abusing you is if they truly lose you, especially lose control over you. They need to know that trying to control others is not going to help them control their own out of control emotions and thoughts. They need to understand that people have a right to their own lives and are not tools for the abuser to use. They need to see that when you hurt people like that, you will lose them forever.

Unfortunately, this was not the last time I would be under my mother's control.  In my late 20s, I was at risk of homelessness. With few options, I returned to my parent's house.

But this time, things were different.  I would have slept under a bridge first if I didn't feel they would be different. Which is not to say things were perfect. There were still fights. My parents still do not know how to control their anger. But the anger now is limited to real problems, not imaginary ones, and there are now limits and accountability where before there were no holds barred.  There is also a lot of love and support where before there was primarily abuse. We are all adults, and what happens is not abuse, it is fighting - which isn't great, but there is a difference between an adult raising her voice to another to say "I am mad and this is why" and an adult telling a child that the child is worthless, or smothering the child.  If you seperated their behavior today from the past, you would not call it an abusive relationship, you would just say they had bad tempers and could be assholes sometimes; and in all honestly, after enduring that terrible dynamic, I could now be the shit-starter and finisher myself, and there were times when I imitated the abuse towards them and they took it. I'm deeply ashamed of that, and did my best to control it and get my shit together, and it has never played out with anyone else, but the truth is that when you grow up in an abusive dynamic like that one thing that can happen is that you can learn to imitate that behavior. The point is, even at my worst, my parents now showed a new restraint. They learned and changed, something I once thought impossible. 
I have learned and changed as well. I am stronger now, I am peaceful, I control my anger and keep my mental health under control with treatment.
I still need boundaries with my parents, and none of us are perfect or ever will be, but we can now really spend time together in a loving way. I have forgiven them for the past because they have truly shown remorse and self-improvement. I have my parents back and my family now feels like a normal, loving, fun family. That is precious to me. While I would never tell an abuse victim to hold out for that hope, the reality is that redemption and forgiveness can happen, and did in my life, and I am happy to have my parents back. & I only have that because they truly made the choice to change and put the hard work in. We can and should demand that from anyone with a history of abusing others, because it is their duty and within their power. I am grateful to my parents for being the rare ones to do what they needed to do to be better people, and help me be a better person.

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