As I sit here, there is a student in my office. This seventeen-year-old boy is under my supervision until I can send him home. He beat his girlfriend with a metal belt buckle last night. Today, he insists that they were just "playing around." His girlfriend was in the hospital last night, having stitches put into her scalp. She is angry at me for sending him away. She insists that they had a misunderstanding, that it was actually all her fault, that he didn't mean to actually hurt her. I have heard this so many times that I don't have energy left to argue with it. I just tell her I'm sorry, and I send him away. I try not to glare at him as he sits there. I try not to look at him at all. She is sixteen years old, and she is carrying his baby, and he beat her with a metal belt buckle. And I am tired, so very tired of this same story.

How does abuse start? With great subtlety. It's really not all that different from any other form of mindgame, such as that used by religious cults. It is brainwashing. A person who falls into the patterns of abuse usually [but not always] had some prepwork in the form of a dysfunctional upbringing, so when they meet an abuser they usually feel a core compatibility with them that is difficult to explain. The relationship may be stormy and full of pain, but they sense this interconnectedness, this magical tie between them that compels them to try, to stay and make it work. They mistake this for some sort of mystical bond, and they often assume they have found their "soulmate". What they are really recognizing is a similarity in dysfunctional culture. They recognize the patterns unconsciously, and they respond without understanding what they are responding to. 

Everyone understands that relationships are hard work, but an abused person loses the ability to distinguish between constructive work on a viable relationship and allowing themselves to be decimated in exchange for occasional moments of feeling loved. Besides, when it all starts, the loving feelings far outweigh the pain. As the relationship degrades, there is a desperate hope that the love that was there in the beginning can be felt again. The scraps tossed in here and there are just enough to keep that hope alive.

I was talking about abuse with my mother-in-law this past weekend. We have discussed this before; she just doesn't understand how a perfectly nice, beautiful, intelligent, capable person can allow herself to be sucked into that sort of thing. I explained to her some of the things that have happened to me in the past, when I have come close to being consumed by the cycle. After all, I had the emotional pre-programming while I was growing up; I was primed to become the next generation in the cycle. I tried to explain how addictive poisonous love can be - how it feels so tremendously good even as it is killing you. How you try to ignore the pain of your own self-destruction while waiting for the next blissful "fix". I tried to explain to her how, in the beginning, it is not obvious what is going to happen.

It starts out with little things that set off small alarms in your head. A double-edged compliment; a teasing joke that smarts too much. You are in the middle of feeling blissfully, magically in love and you don't want to put on the air brakes over something that seems small or insignificant. You don't want to ruin the soft glow of the moment. You brush it aside, decide it's too small to make waves over. 

As you get to know one another more, maybe you discover that there is a poor relationship with a parent or a sibling. Perhaps you notice that they have nothing but sheer hatred for all of their exes. They describe the breakups as entirely the other person's fault. The reasons given are usually some heinous and unforgivable cruelty, the final straw in a relationship full of abuses. They often describe themselves as the ones who were abused. They stress how crazy and sluttish and stupid and ugly all of these other people were. You want to believe that they have good reasons for feeling this way. After all, they are still treating you like gold, and they seem perfectly reasonable and rational about things on the whole. Can't it be possible that they just have had a long string of bad luck with relationships?

Eventually, you have your first fight over something. No matter how much you want things to stay happy and glowing and gentle, no matter how adept you become at brushing away small issues that feel like warnings, eventually something will happen that you cannot avoid. You will probably be stunned by the force of their emotional response. They will say cruel things, some of which probably aren't even true. They will bring up sensitive secrets that you never expected to have thrown in your face. You will be terribly hurt, and you will not recognize the person who has done this to you because it is such a different face from the one you have always seen before. You retreat in shock, and it doesn't take long before they come to you, full of contrition and apologies, clearly wracked with emotional anguish over the things they have said and terrified at the thought of losing you. You want to retreat but their pain is so great that they makes you fear they will die if you end the relationship. They might even make suicidal attempts. I had a boyfriend who literally starved himself to a skeleton to scare me into staying. One of my mother's estranged husbands called her on the phone so she could listen to the clicks while he played Russian Roulette. Dramatic goodbye I Love You letters are delivered in advance of pill taking. It's all the same thing with different trimwork to make it seem like This Time Is Different.

You are in love with this person, and terribly shaken by the notion that they might self-harm if you don't stay and work things out. So you try. You try damned hard. You work at it so long that the fights become old hat. You become acclimated to a high level of stress and discord. Situations that would seem outrageous to you before are now just another circus for another day. If this goes on long enough, you cease to even notice that it isn't normal or healthy. You completely lose track of what "healthy" is. Eventually, "healthy" looks like a bunch of Pollyanna bullshit lies to you. The hurtful things eat at you until you start to believe them. You feel like the most damaged, faulty, broken, defective wretch on the planet, and you're just grateful that this beautiful, fragile human being with the intense emotions loves you enough to keep you in spite of all your problems. You develop a tender protectiveness toward their volatile temper. You view it as a double-edged sword – it cuts, but when that intensity is put to the task of demonstrating love, it is just as powerful. You try to figure out ways to work around the temper flares and encourage the tenderness flares instead. If all else fails, you just try to tiptoe past the temper and are grateful when the occasional tenderness happens.

The abuser probably isn't completely or rationally aware of what it is that they are doing. I think the majority of them probably feel some pangs, and they probably feel pretty shitty about themselves. But when it comes to nailing down just what is wrong with their picture of reality, they just don't have the tools. And if they get the tools, they're too terrified of ending up alone to ever use them. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for them, even though I understand that they are another face on the same basic dysfunction. I understand that they are losers in this cycle too. But when you bear the scars, it's awful hard to acknowledge the wounds of the ones who have scarred you.

Melanie Teegarden
September, 2003

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