relapse and rewards

i have been very skeptical about ideas that say abuse is an addiction. you can find a lot of 'science' that will tell you that abused women are 'addicted' to the violent relationship, to the abuser, even to endorphins or something, that are released after a beating. this is all, in my opinion, total bience (my friend's term for the application of bollocks to science). not least because domestic violence has precious little to do with beatings anyway, for goodness sake, physical violence being an optional extra following psychological abuse and control that form the basis.

there are also lots of ideas to do with an abuser being 'addicted' to his own endorphin rush, or to the thrill of power, or to his negative behaviours in some other way. i am very suspicious of these explanations as they serve to take away responsibility for his actions. most explanations of domestic abuse are desperate to look for any reason to avoid making men responsible for their own actions.

however, recently i was describing a case that i found particularly upsetting to a counsellor. in this case a perpetrator had gone further towards 'Changing' than anyone else i've ever known through work. he said all the right things and was on best behaviour for months. then it got too hard and he gave it up. for some reason i'd got emotionally involved in this case and felt devastated, as, of course, did his partner. anyhow the counsellor said something about how his abusive behaviour was like an addiction and his return to it was like a relapse.

at first i cringed, thinking stop talking in cliches, DV is not addiction. but then that started to make a bit of sense. how we are 'addicted' to behaviours that we know are bad for us, they can be comforting when we start to feel too much out on a limb.

there's no point pretending that giving up abusive behaviour, its rewards and its habits, is not an intensely challenging and scary thing to do. you are also going against a culture that supports and rewards male entitlement and that denies and minimises abuse. i do not for one minute condone or excuse his return to abuse. he had all the resources this culture can throw at a perpetrator who is trying to change, supporting him in his effort. but in some ways, he was on his own. i watched him challenge social workers who placed blame on other factors, saying "no, no, you have to remember, i chose to abuse her, it wasn't the fault of anything else".

and at some point it felt too hard. he gave up, 'relapsed', perhaps. i'm sure there are loads of theories around this in terms of substance use, i don't know much about it. he retreated into behaviours that he knew were bad for him and those around him because it felt easier, familiar, comforting.

i retreat to certain behaviours that i know are bad for me: smoking, drinking, overeating, when i can't face the hard work of dealing responsibly with my feelings. it feels comforting and familiar. it makes sense to me that if you are used to being in control and abusing then this behaviour will feel good to retreat to when not-doing it gets too hard.

but. in the past those behaviours were not bad for him. they used to get him exactly what he wanted, at the expense of his partner. and it was worth seeing if that could happen again. there are so many more rewards to abusing than to purely self-destructive bad behaviours. my misuse of alcohol, cigarettes and food only makes me ill. if i was prepared to bully other people instead or as well when i was feeling rubbish then i might get some results that i experience as positive. such as people doing what i want and not challenging me because they're scared to. so part of the decision to 'relapse' into abusive behaviour involves wanting to see whether you can get away with that old behaviour - maybe it might get some of the same results as before. i wish i had been able to articulate to the counsellor how abuse is functional to the perpetrator, how oppressing others makes your life easier. there are short and long-term gains far exceeding, for example, the relief of having a cigarette.

right? i'm aware that i'm rambling away with next to no knowledge of substance use and models used to explain it. if anyone knows that stuff i'd be really interested to hear.

abuse, oppression, addiction and community responsibility

Meanwhile, a psychiatrist type who actually has wise, caring, link-making words to say: talking about abuse and addiction on Democracy Now:

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, but according to all studies in the States, as well, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

[...]

Unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families... And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

[...]

If people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused.

And...this incredible post by BFP at Flip Flopping Joy, more to the point:

As I’ve worked through this [sugar] addiction, I’ve kept asking myself over and over again. Why do we expect individual responses to what are ultimately the vestiges of (slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteroviolence, etc)?

What is addiction, but a reaction to racism, to sexism, to heteroviolence, etc?

[...]

Is it possible to take better care of yourself when living under such extraordinary violence? Is it possible to survive alone under the burden of structural violence?

~The personal is political~

...and so much more, in that post...

I want to write lots more about addiction, forms of "self-harm", responses to abuse and oppression... Today though I only seem to be able to scrap-book other people's thoughts here.

passages a l'acte

i got excited and ordered Violence by Slavoj Zizek. yeah! i tried to read another book by him once before that made absolutely no sense to me but this is much more accessible and compelling. fascinating, fascinating. i really should be taking it slowly and digesting but i'm itching to blog again while i still have a brain (post xmas break), before work sucks it out of me again. it was published in 2008 and it's really good to read analysis of events as recent as 2005, including hurricane katrina and the riots in france, which is the subject of the chapter i've found myself skipping to.

"If May '68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was just an outburst with no pretence to vision. If the oft-repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense, it is here... What kind of universe is it that we inhabit, which can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only option available to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out? ... The protesters' violence was almost exclusively directed against their own ... More than a form of protest, [the riots] are what Lacan called a passage a l'acte - an impulsive moment into action which can't be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration. This bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what cultural analyst Frederick Jameson has called 'cognitive mapping,' an inability to locate their experience of their situation within a meaningful whole... Perhaps it is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: although it... encompasses the whole world, it ...depriv[es] the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping."

This passage by Zizek articulates so much that i've been struggling to say. passages a l'acte. in the groups sometimes we talk about what women have done to cope, to resist and to survive "an intolerable weight of frustration". i wrote before about the woman who momentarily drowned her partner, knowing his retaliation would be worse, fueled by the self-justification he'd gain from having been 'wronged'. and women drink, scream, cut, talk back, fight back, 'provoke' inevitable violence to get it over with, whatever, some of these things are self-destructive, and often come from the impossibility, at that time, "to locate their experience of their situation within a meaningful whole". if in that moment a woman living with abuse could see the whole pattern of control, and had a realistic escape route and some uncrushed self-belief, she'd be out of there.

So what is happening to our culture that we can't understand what's happening, can't see the patterns that control us? Judith Herman says: "Like traumatized people, we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past." We only feel this confusion and hopelessness and have some folk memory of resistance that involves smashing, breaking, hurting, a plea for some acknowledgement, to be seen, or to feel something. any knowledge of how and why, of coherent political action has been erased as the papers describe anarchists as unhinged people who would break shop windows for no reason. how has popular political analysis been suppressed and eradicated, reducing us to people who blindly act out? i'd like to know whether Mai '68 is taught in french schools and if so, how. in the uk it's easy to avoid history lessons, and even if you sign up, you are taught that facism and totalitarianism in europe are History, all defeated by the greater good by 1945 and 1990 respectively (so 20th century!). how impotent do we feel, with no popular language to articulate that impotence. and we turn that rage in on ourselves, hurt ourselves, and 'provoke' further 'justified' retaliation, repression against ourselves.