love, again

i finished reading the first half of Endgame. i was folding down the page-corners each time he wrote something relevant to this blog, and now the whole damn thing is folded. my 'jensen' tag stands to get embarassingly large, but what can you do? this guy is doing all my work for me - so much of the stuff i wanted to do with this blog about linking up abuses and oppressions and looking for the universal truths and functions of it, reading this book has saved me years. *and* in volume two, my friend who is half a book ahead of me tells me, he talks to lundy bancroft!! like, i was getting all ready to tie jensen in with bancroft on this blog and then dreaming of emailing jensen to tell him how he's so nearly there but just needs to talk to this perpetrators-expert dude bancroft, but they're way ahead of me. oh to be a geeking-out fly on the wall. sigh.

anyhow, what was playing on my mind, as i read the last few pages, was to do with love. i've written before a bit about how love and passion are policed, pathologised, occasionally criminalised, including by 'well meaning' social workers and the like (do i need to keep on with the well-meaning disclaimer? can i start saying something less polite soon?). the weight of this was brought back to me as i was finishing up volume one and came across paragraphs like this:

"...Everything the culture taught me: how to submit, how not to make waves, how to fear authority, how to fear perceiving my submission as submission, how to fear my feelings, how to fear perceiving the killing of those I love [he's not just talking about people] as the killing of those I love (or perhaps I should say the killing of those I would love had I not been taught to fear love too), how to fear stopping by any means necessary those who are killing those I love..."

this all struck home with me, hard, how much i fear taking action against abuse, oppression, destruction, how the state of fear is infinitely more comfortable, and how i deal with that by loving less. numbing, depression, caring less, shutting down my love to only those closest to me, or only those things and people i can immediately see. and then - what does it mean? how can i love those closest to me without loving the other people, the other things?

"we are only free, when we are supporting the freedom of others"

(my biggest internet crush of the moment is all for Mai'a)

which is one side of things. but also, how hard is it to love in the face of that policing and pathologising? i was thinking - the women i work with often love with their all (others are numb and shut-down, but that's a different story, and a reason why there can't be a one-size fits all approach to DV work right). but the social workers - they can't afford to love, and empathise. they can't really know what it is, or how could they do that work? i wonder what their definition of love must be, and what it's got to do with (their own) 'good' families and ownership and 'security' and hoarding. they are probably really having no fun. i mean, i don't have a lot of time for the oppressors-as-wounded worldview but then sometimes -. what can you say?

i was also thinking about how i have to hide from my colleagues and people 'in the sector' (!) just how much i love my job, or rather, my work. it's not ok to be passionate about it. the management could pathologise me as 'driven' and starting looking for 'boundary issues' i might have. i was too driven when i was twenty, but i work damn hard on my boundaries and have figured them out over the years, at least within the framework of the voluntary sector (if i ever start doing the grassroots work i dream of, i think those must be somehow different boundaries to figure out).

i made some personal mistakes along the way, though i'm pretty sure my 'clients' were not impacted. like for example she didn't know it, but i did fall in love with one woman, not in that way, but in the example she showed me of mothering and of courage and awesomeness. when things went wrong for her i cried and cried - but of course she doesn't know this. then she made things right for herself. i 'should' have had stronger boundaries and not empathised so much. i got in a mess for a weekend. my managers never found out either, thank god. and.. well, what's wrong with caring that much, once in a while?

well, it was agonising... when you (allow yourself to) love something, pain is going to be part of it. so - i allow myself to love some things - a certain amount, and then draw lines, and exclude some things, and love some things abstractly. like the gulf of mexico. women i work who are eligible for benefits in the uk or who have enough income have more choices and options open to them if they are being abused. it's safe enough to empathise with their troubles, to try and figure it out with them. the gulf of mexico, on the other hand... and women with no recourse to public funds. many agencies switch off on hearing those words. it's too much, a stretch of empathy too far. i won't switch off. but i know there is something happening to my heart as the situation becomes bleaker for my longest-term 'client' with no recourse. i can feel myself starting to shut down as i can't bear to think of all the implications of her lack of options. it's safer not to love or care 'too much', to be A Professional. which, of course, entails not fighting as hard for what she needs. which is why we have all been professionalised - offered privileges in return for leaving behind the people we were trying to work with. at risk of losing these privileges, we then fear caring, loving and fighting.

No. it's becoming so clear how much it being not-ok-to-love is so much a part of how oppression functions. this kind of work has to be driven by love, and feeling and acknowledging pain has to be part of it. as supporters, we have to find ways of supporting each other in this. 

i love the groups, the women's support groups, i love the many moments every week where i can see amazing change happening, i love the women i work with. i want the crushing structures that make people feel mental for feeling highs and lows, or who lock people away and/or take away their children for loving, to end. and even more, i want the systems to end that make it impossible, too frightening, to love people (and places, and seabirds). and, jensen would say, what am i going to do about it?

on big love

you can't talk about domestic violence without talking about relationships ending. you can't support people in the throes of considering ending an abusive relationship without having some idea of your own feelings about relationships: what are they, in your life? what are they for? what works for you and what doesn't? what will you compromise on? what would cause you to end the relationship immediately and walk away with nothing and never look back? if your partner hit you? today, for the first time? really? i don't believe you.

hmm i have so so much to say about all this but i think it will have to be split into several posts rather than an epic coffee-fuelled mess of a rant.

i just wanted to reflect on sitting around tables in child protection meetings, or on the phone with (fucking) social workers (spit)* and other beige professionals, looking/sounding appalled not so much by the actual physical violence as by the undignified intensity of the relationship being discussed. as if these people have never really loved, you know? i mean these are people who apparently can sleep soundly in their beds having taken children away from their mothers who want to leave the violence (see previous post), so there is definitely something missing from their hearts. but yeah, anyway - it does seem like there are lots of people who don't love with their all, who just look baffled, accusing and scared when confronted with a woman who loves in that all-consuming way and don't give me all that 'it's not love it's need' bollocks. yes it is need, and i am very anti need, anti dependency in relationships. but it is love too. it really is.

it maddens me that these women are made to feel wrong and/or crazy in terms of the intensity of their feelings. there's nothing wrong with loving with everything you have - as much as i fervently believe we should all figure out ways of being interdependent rather than dependent - we are not born with the knowledge of how to do this and our culture does not support or even suggest that. our culture pressurises us to find The One and if you're someone with an open heart who loves with their all, you can end up in a mess if that one then manipulates and controls you. but it doesn't mean you're wrong to love!

i think part of supporting, and what you're not going to hear on a 'how to do DV work' training course, is acknowledging the depth of that love, the passion, and slowly starting to unpick how the need is woven through it, how the need was created, and what else the person has in their lives - people, resources, and strengths, to lessen the need on the One. if you approach the whole thing by invalidating the real love, you aren't going to get anywhere, in fact you're very likely to leave the survivor with the (possibly correct) idea that the perpetrator is the only person who understands.

*possibly had too much coffee this morning

you are not what you build

my wise friend said this to me last night as i was facing the potential end of one of the most important relationships of my life. i was talking about the pride i've felt in this long long friendship, how it's a fundamental part of my identity to be able to say i've loved this person this long, we've known each other since we were children, we know everything about each other, we are sisters. and that we've maintained this friendship, up until a year ago, effortlessly. i was so proud, too, of our year of working so hard on our friendship, of the fact we've never given up. i was saying how if i lose this friendship i'm also losing a huge chunk of pride and a huge chunk of my identity, i lose all the things i used to get from claiming that.

and my friend said, "you are not what you build". you continue to change within whatever structures you create and sometimes it doesn't fit any more, sometimes you have to escape it. within friendships and partnerships and groups and communities and institutions, they are bigger than us and sometimes we have to crawl out from under them, no matter how much we love them and how proud we are, how hard we've tried, how much we want them to flourish.

and yet i have never even questioned that i am what i build. i can't even figure out right now if it's from society or family or both, but i have a clear sense of "you better have something to show for yourself" and a huge part of that is lasting relationships as a marker of success. i have believed that i am my lasting relationships, and if they fail then i've failed. and yet some time ago, mainly through work, i became aware of how much more important people are than relationships. and i don't mean this in a hideous individualist way! i have seen so very many people subsume or destroy themselves for the sake of their relationships, often for a lack of wider community that meant their only source of love and support was that one-to-one relationship. so i don't see the solution, at all, as people prioritising our own personal needs above all else, but in people feeling that we can have different needs met by different people and different parts of our communities. and if one particular relationship or structure within those communities becomes unhealthy for us, or we otherwise somehow find it needs to end, we can move on without feeling like our whole world is crashing down and we have nothing to love or be proud of anymore.

so that we are building lots of things at once, maybe. and no one of those things is us.

bottom line

isn't it about knowing your bottom line? i mean staying safe, as an adult, from controlling people. easier said than done, but isn't that what it comes down to?

like my colleague and her new partner, like me and relationship and friendship situations which i haven't figured out how to write about in this public forum..

i don't think any of us are safe from being controlled until we know ourselves and like ourselves enough to defend ourselves. til we know how far we will compromise in a relationship (and i include friendships here), and where the immovable line is where we'll stand and defend ourselves, bottom line. and by that i simply mean telling someone i don't want to see them for a while, recognising my need for mental space. being able to stand on my own two feet and state my boundaries, even at the risk of that person fucking off as a result.

even if we achieve this it's difficult to maintain in the face of all the things that can get us down. and it's so difficult to find a balance where connection, communication, love, negotiation, is happening but where control and domination is avoided. after bad experiences it feels best just not to get too close to anyone - and of course a healing, defensive period is always necessary but i want to find ways to describe how to connect again, in safer ways.

it's about resources too, of course. having the material and psychological resources to be able to cope on one's own if you find you need to extricate yourself from a partnership situation. having the resources to have the strength to fight to defend ourselves. far, far easier said than done. but this involves communities too, right. communities that are able to support someone materially and emotionally while they sort out a situation of crossed boundaries. communities that make it possible for someone to leave a controlling or abusive situation by sharing resources.

i have thought i was strong enough to avoid the bad end of compromise (or is all compromise bad anyway, while negotiation is the good version? i don't chuffing know!) but it turned out again that i didn't know or like who i was enough and let it slide. i feel pretty strong again these days but who knows. that's part of why i'm writing about it, "learning to leave a paper trail": being accountable to my own words can make me safer and perhaps what i write is useful to other people too.

and also i mean to say that control is normal. i just hope for other things, hope for other ways of relating. i need to find other ways of relating.