cyborg-sevalle:

antriebsloosigkeit
replied to your post “Mainstream abuse discourse simultaneously posits that A) the most…”

Why are we concentrating on “what an abuser is” instead of “how does abuse occur”, like, id rather focus on the fact that everyone has had abusive behaviors. The act not the person sth like that.

This is something I’ve been talking about with a lot of people lately, and it’s part of what got me started talking about all this. 

I feel like people want to maintain this idea that you can spot an abuser by things like looks or mannerisms or even hobbies is born from a desire to feel safe, like, especially among victims because, I know for me, I wish that my various experiences with it provided me some sort of, like, abuser-sense, but if anything, it’s left me realizing that, like, anyone can be a potential abuser.

And this is also why I hate this idea of, like, assuming that abuse is the product of inherently toxic/abusive people, as if there just exists people who were born abusive, because experience demonstrates that, in the majority of situations, toxicity isn’t localized in the individual, but in the dynamics between individuals, with  power imbalance being a huge factor that contributes to it.

Age gaps, class/financial stability differences, health differences, racial differences, all of these things and more can contribute to an abusive dynamic forming, but I find that a lot of people, most people even, still have this sort of “love will find a way” attitude towards these things, or rather they ignore them in the pursuit of attraction/desire for friendship, and that’s what starts things down the road to toxicity.

Which is another scary thing about it is that abuse can arise just as much from ignorance as it can from intent. Lack of ability to navigate those above factors, lack of emotional intelligence, poor communication skills (on the part of both involved parties) can all turn the relationship between two people toxic and abusive without either person realizing it, and I think that is the root of a lot of abusive situations, people wanna think they just inherently know how to treat other people right, but like, that’s a learned skill that has to be partially relearned every time you enter a new relationship, and that doesn’t excuse it, like, at some base level, it’s important to be aware of how your actions are affecting other people, but the sad truth is that that idea of love or camaraderie, as something you have to learn to do right, is not what we’re taught love is, instead it’s just this thing that we’ll “know” when we feel it and everything will just fall into place.

Like, my first romantic relationship lasted about 3 years, and it was really good at first, but around year 2, they wanted to leave and didn’t know how to communicate it, so they started doing things like avoiding me, not answering my calls, and when we would meet up, acting with lowkey hostility towards me, the relationship had turned toxic. Now, my own trauma signaled that that meant I just needed to try harder or do something different, and it wasn’t until a year later that I finally worked up the courage to be like “why are you doing this?” and they finally told me that they felt trapped by our relationship and had wanted to break it off back when this started happening, but didn’t know how to communicate it.

Granted, some of their inherent traits contributed to that toxicity. They were very egotistical, ambitious, and charismatic, but with an acute lack of self awareness, but that doesn’t mean they were inherently toxic. We’ve stayed friends since then, and I’ve seen them in their other relationships, making the same sort of missteps as they did in ours, but with people who didn’t possess the vulnerabilities that I did/still do, and with time and experience, they found people they could engage with in ways that weren’t toxic.

So I think, what good would the current paradigm of handling abusive situations done either of us in that situation, or really any of the abusive situations I’ve been in? Focusing all resources on disseminating the graphic details of what happened in order to render the other person persona non grata while I’m, what, performatively coddled for the duration before being promptly forgotten? I would much rather have been able to turn to people who could have intervened and bridged the gap of communication between the two of us and, like, yes, held them accountable, but not in the form of public spectacle that accountability takes now, but in a way that meant that they were aware what they needed to be doing differently and having people keeping tabs on them and helping guide them toward better behaviors and ways of approaching relationships.

And that doesn’t even touch on situations where things become mutually toxic/abusive between people which I feel is where this entire system ruptures. Like, despite what people seem to want to think, the world isn’t split up into abusers and victims, and sometimes a dynamic forms where both parties have grown to be abusive to the other, something which frequently resolves on here as outright civil war as people suddenly treat this as an opportunity to pick sides in deciding who the “true” abuser is, with the end goal of painting the entire other side as abuse apologists, when in fact, nobodies relationship problems should be dragged into the public eye like that. It’s pure spectacle and does nothing to improve the situation.

So, by focusing on what abuse is, we open new potential for positive resolutions to these situations. When people know what to look for, they know when it’s time to seek help if they are within the relationship, or when it’s time to intervene if they are observing it from the outside. If the consequence isn’t total exile and ostracization, but like, real accountability and redirection, then denial of wrongdoing no longer becomes a matter of survival and allows them to honestly confront their actions. And once all parties are separated and safe, they can all begin healing and improving, that is the system I’d like to see, or at least something approximating it because the current way of dealing with things is more reminiscent of the Queen’s court from Alice in Wonderland than anything capable of producing legitimate justice and reconciliation. 

And yes, there are serial abusers who are fully aware of the abuse that they perpetrate and intentionally seek out situations where they can abuse others, and there are also those who abuse through physical or sexual violence, both of which demand a harsher communal response, but I feel like using those to justify the system as-it-is is akin to people who say “abolish prisons? then where will we keep people like serial killers?” like, a system which does immense harm to people who need other forms of intervention just to accommodate those edge cases is inexcusable, and like, I feel it’s not an incredibly complicated thing to identify those cases where separating and working with both parties will be insufficient.

But all of this, it takes work, it takes admitting that we all shoulder some amount of guilt for letting our communities get this way, it means no more self-righteous highs from engaging in witch hunts, it means no more superficial sense of safety by relying on cues we find in people, rather than in situations, to reveal to us where, why, and how abuse takes place, it means actually doing the work of using our interconnectedness to affect real positive change in people’s lives, enlisting each of ourselves in the social machinery that keeps people on the right path to healing and self-improvement, rather than the easier road of letting people just rot in intentional neglect. And maybe the former just isn’t possible, maybe the melange of personalities, cliques, and general beliefs that make up our communities disallow the sort of harmony something like this would take, but I refuse to participate or contribute to the latter, so pipe-dream or not, it’s what I’d advocate for.