in/ter/dependence and safety

I don't really know how to write about these emerging thoughts. I'm questionning so much of what i've spent my entire young-adult life doing, the work that has driven me all this time. Writing here for six months has helped sift through a lot of old habits and beliefs and to note down the new ideas that are coming into my life. Things have been becoming gradually clearer.

Most recently, as i'm reading/hearing/realising/admitting so much about the culture in which i live and how what i know about abuse and violence translates from personal relationships to a political scale, i'm acutely aware of the work i do that encourages ('empowers') women to emerge from the isolation of an abusive relationship into the 'freedom of wider society'. Freedom and independence in the wider society.

Basically, my work-role 'expects' women to leave a situation that may be secure, albeit very controlled. This could be co-dependence, but that is at least more secure than independence, no? Yet i'm 'expecting', and encouraging, her to give all that up to move into a society where it is very hard to be independent and be secure, even more so as a woman. Any 'independence' is at best temporary, right? As we will all need help from other people as we get older. And can you achieve independence in a way that doesn't oppress others? The more i think about independence the more false and illusory it seems, and the more i begin to understand why the women i work with find it terrifying.

I'm almost always not supporting women into a place of interdependence. I can only think of a handful of examples over the years of women i've worked with who moved into a community on escaping the abuse: all South Asian women who had families who supported and nurtured them and took them in on leaving the relationship.

I don't want to be independent, thanks all the same: that sounds near-impossible, precarious and lonely. I want to live in a community, a network, giving and taking care and work and nurture and sustenance. When i'm supporting women to leave abusive situations i want to be able to offer them more than this dream that i don't even believe in, of this 'independent, successful woman who doesn't need anyone'. Narratives of Independent Women involve finding a marker of success or ambition to work towards. Ok so i would always discuss this with women i work with in terms of 'finding success on your own terms', but how hard is it for all of us to escape mainstream, capitalist, definitions of success? Success as an Independent Woman involves 'not needing anyone'. How can we not need anyone? If we manage it then how long will it last? And what then?

This post at Enough had a big effect on me when i read it some months ago. It resonated enormously with how my class background has led me to understand Safety, described some of the pain, contradictions and compromise within my family  and was one of the first places i'd encountered the idea of interdependence. I want to quote it here now to link it to these ideas of safety and in/ter/dependence of women leaving abuse:

"Safety is something we are told we can achieve by isolating ourselves and hoarding lots of resources. POOR calls this the cult of independence, and more than anything it is what comes to mind when I try to describe how I think capitalism hurts all of us, even if we’re profiting from it. [...]

I think about a friend, raised professional middle class with the solid safety net of well-off parents, and about the fear that creeps into her voice when she talks about saving for retirement – the unwillingness to consider that anyone will help her, the certainty that she is a failure if anyone does, the feeling that no matter how much money she saves from her large professional salary, it can never be enough. [...]

I think about this book I read called Invisible Privilege, by Paula Rothenberg. It’s a memoir about growing up wealthy [...] Rothenberg describes her aging father, no longer able to care for himself, isolated from community but able to afford constant professional care, watched over at the end of his life by a rotating crew of nurses rather than by people who love him.

I think about my own dad, an introvert like me, living alone in a fancy condo with all his physical needs met, needing nothing from anyone, taking care of himself, for now – and I think of my grandmother, who now lives in an assisted-living facility hundreds of miles from her home. When she moved there, away from the house she loved [...] I wanted to organize my aunts and uncles and cousins, all her children and grandchildren, to go there to help them move and offer love and support – but it came too close to touching my grandmother’s worst fear, which is to feel that she is a burden.

We’ve learned the lessons of capitalism, and on some level we believe them: if you can’t take care of yourself, if you’re poor or disabled or targeted by the state, it’s because you’re weak, because you somehow failed. If you can’t take care of yourself you will be let go, you will be alone, you are no longer valuable, you no longer exist [...] 

What does it look like to make that leap, if it is a leap, to defining security as interdependence, and to put our resources into creating that rather than into a retirement fund?"

What does it look like to make the leap from defining safety as a woman living alone, working productively, bringing up her children, with panic buttons installed by the police, to finding ways to provide safety in community for someone who is coming out of abuse and isolation?

years of your life

speaking of burnout, what's really dragging on me at the moment is the gradual realisation of the real slowness of this work. i know that it takes women on average seven years to leave an abusive relationship and i've not even (quite) done this job for that long. and i have seen so many successes and amazing new starts and people finding their choices and options and confidence and starting to live life on their own terms, not those of their ex/partner. and i'm fully, acutely aware that whether i'm doing my job well has sod all to do with whether women i'm supporting 'leave', and i'm happy with that:

"One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner... A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman's right to run her own life - which the abusive man does not do - and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety."

Lundy Bancroft.

but.

there are now a fair few people that i've been supporting for two, three years or more. a few of them have started recently for the first time to extricate themselves from abusive situations. others, of course, haven't. and, just very recently, i've started to feel frustrated. i was shocked to find myself irritated one week, while supporting a couple of people. i was a bit grossed out at myself: it's such a fundamental principle of the work, the 'unconditional positive regard' and not something i'd ever even had to think about before. but i found myself preoccupied with the phrase wasting years of your life. speaking with someone who, after two years of contact with the service, will not admit to herself that her partner has any kind of agenda to control or trap her and thus will not take any action to pre-empt him or protect herself. i'm pretty ashamed to admit i felt irritated with her.

within a couple of days i realised that i'm not irritated with the women i support, that was just my brain's defence against something harder. and as soon as i realised this my irritation (rage, actually) started being turned where it belonged. i can't stand that women i speak to every week, who are working so hard and so consciously, fighting every day to build their self-esteem and strength, are knocked back and re-trapped by all the other, stronger messages coming at them: give it up, you're not worth it, you can't do it, you'll end up alone, know your place, it's not safe, no one else will protect you. the culture colludes with what the perpetrator has told her. the perpetrator will have studied which social messages weigh heaviest on his partner and used these as his most powerful lever to make leaving him seem too scary - perhaps it's you're not beautiful enough for anyone to care, perhaps it's single motherhood is harmful to children, perhaps it's uppity women get killed. these messages play on all of us and take so very much energy to fight in our own minds for those of us who are not in an abusive relationship. how do you fight all this at the same time as practical obstacles to leaving and the fact that leaving massively increases the likelihood of you being seriously injured or killed?

yeah, so i'm not mad at the women, at all. i'm just almost unbearably sad and angry that these individuals who i've come to know and care about, and millions like them, are trapped not only by their controlling, abusive partners, but moreso and worse, by their controlling, abusive and neglectful culture.