I will discuss why complex trauma survivors are often encouraged NOT to forgive their abusers, and how forgiveness can negatively impact trauma therapy.
Anyway, hopefully, you can see right away what the problem is when it comes to pressuring a victim into forgiving abusers. It's just another way to shame victims for what they endured and for what they are continuing to endure in the way of trauma, trauma symptoms, of losing a piece of their lives, or still being threatened and/or stalked by their abusers.
It's also a form of telling victims what to do, what to think and what to feel, something their abusers do plenty of, sometimes multiple times a day with rage in their hearts, so to hear how they should be relating to someone who hurt them, is just so triggering and short-sighted.
The other thing it does is to normalize abuse in society. If abuse is always forgivable then it will always be acceptable to some degree. Some folks want it to be acceptable because they are abusive themselves, and if they can get away with abuse by putting fault on their victims for not being forgiving, then they can keep doing it.
I mean, really; why is there so much focus on victims and how they behave? And how much they are forgiving, or not forgiving, as if that should be the main focus in any violent or abusive situation.
So here is where this attitude probably started: it is done to make sure that people keep their marriage vows? To make sure the family unit stays together as a whole? But if there is a person being abused in either of these situations, the unity is a sham: there is no empathy inside it and most victims can't starve themselves of empathy for the agenda of getting along with an abuser forever. In other words, the unit isn't really a unit, though it may look like one from outside to strangers. And that's the issue: it becomes about presenting a false image to outsiders which is disgusting to any member enduring abuse, and to many in the society at large once they find out what is really going on.
And this is one reason why scapegoating of victims happen. They discard the victim for complaining and making the rest of the family members and the family unit "look bad". To the victim they say, "You are at fault for not forgiving (insert name here - the abuser)!" And a lot of victims are rejected for not forgiving the family abuser. To the outside they tell others that their victim is crazy, unstable, evil, addicted, a whore, and abusive, or anything they want to say that vilifies the victim instead of vilifying the problem of abuse.
It is often why scapegoats are no longer part of the family. Normalizing abuse inside the family is somehow easier than throwing a victim away. Many of these "normalize the abuse" type families even try to falsify evidence or characteristics, or give one side of a story to make the victim look bad. The whole family can be arm-twisted to go along with false narratives, and they do try hard.
All of this is highly unethical and immoral, and the one thing that victims can keep track of is how far certain family members go, and are willing to go, in the ethics and morality department to blame and disparage victims of abuse. In my mind that should be the deciding factor in whether victims should be part of the family, or forgive the abuser(s) or leave the family behind.
While it is true that victims get angry about the way they are treated, the family tries to use the victim's reactions to abuse to paint the victim as a perpetrator of abuse just because the victim got angry. So that means there is pressure on the victim to take the abuse lying down, and not to say a word about it. Highly unethical too.
It is hard to just leave without saying things like "But you don't understand!", "No, I didn't do that!", "No, that act belongs to so-and-so (the abuser)!"
Or let us say that one parent is trying to protect a child from the abuse of the other parent. The parent who is trying to force the child into forgiving, divorces the spouse (the protector) so that the child is forced to forgive the family abuser. What this means is that one member is willing to divorce over "forgiveness shaming".
Or an older brother is trying to protect his younger sister from abuse in the family. Because forgiveness is expected of the victim, they punish him for trying to protect the scapegoat by ostracizing him from the family. They may even try to cover the reason for the ostracism and "act the part" that they are "super nice to the victim after all" by being as kind as they think they have to be for awhile. But abuse tends to be cyclical, going from a honeymoon period, to devaluing the victim, to rage and abuse of the victim. This is highly immoral too.
Eventually, most families realize their scapegoat isn't so fawning any more when the scapegoat gets enough of these cycles, which most scapegoats do get exhausted from, and also find themselves sick and unable to cope.
Just about any other situation in life is preferable to being stuck in a cycle of abuse, so scapegoats start dreaming of a way to escape. So then the scapegoat is confiding in others (because after all, most people have empathy even if the family does not), which makes the family really uncomfortable. "Oh, no! We are being exposed for who we are! We must STOP this behavior in our scapegoat before we are shamed by the world! What will our friends think of us!? Maybe other family members will think badly of us and not support us or visit us if they think we are bad people!" So then they must punish the victim and throw them out of the family. As you can see, they keep going lower and lower in the ethics department just to save their sorry asses and to keep up an image that they are upstanding people ... Maybe they go to church as a way to help with their image (other people won't suspect church-going people to be abusive, will they?) ... Or they flaunt their successes and money ... ("Other people won't suspect successful wealthy people are abusive, will they?" Actually, yes. Abuse tends to happen most in poor families and in wealthy families). Or perhaps they are college professors ("People don't expect college professors to be unethical, do they? Well, we're so smart, we can talk our way out of anything!"). Or maybe they are politicians ("People don't suspect politicians because we are working on behalf of other people, our constituents, day in and day out! No one would ever suspect a politician of being abusive and of trying to cover anything up!"). Or they just try to grab any old "holier-than-thou" role that looks convenient in terms of keeping shame at bay.
These kinds of situations are very common in abusive narcissistic families. Image comes first, always. End of story.
And this is also an ignorant and unenlightened way to handle abuse in a family. Most families do not do that. They know a victim and a perpetrator should not be in the same room, the same house, the same vicinity. They know they have to separate them.
Not alcoholic families. And definitely not narcissistic families.
While they may not need the scapegoated family member to be a part of the family, they are probably paranoid enough to keep false narratives circulating about the scapegoat. If they feel their image might be getting a hit, they graduate to manufacturing evermore false narratives, especially if they see a scapegoat in a role they don't want or like, that is making them feel uncomfortable (note: most families who scapegoat want their scapegoats suffering, being addicted, getting in trouble with the law, and becoming homeless can be on that list too for what they want ... and why do they want it? So they will not be seen as "at fault"). Then they try to tell outsiders that their scapegoat is trying to manufacture things about them instead (the DARVO tactic). What they really want is to keep the scapegoat in a perpetual role of being abused and blamed within the family secrecies and delegate certain family members to hide the evidence and to scheme more ways to keep the shame at bay.
Again, the more they have to manufacture, the more unethical they are.
I personally think it is very unhealthy for scapegoats to give into the pressure of forgiving family abusers. If you forgive an abuser, the abuse against the victim usually escalates. It doesn't just go away because that's the nature of abuse: it always escalates. This is especially true when family members truly believe they are not accountable at all for the scapegoat's fate, which most likely they won't be, even if the scapegoat is murdered by one of their own, or dies by suicide. If they are always going in the direction of false narratives and false gossip, there is your proof that they would rather make their scapegoat out to be a monster instead of risking their own image.
Once they start going down the rabbit hole of escalating immoral behavior, they usually don't stop. And you can see from the paragraphs above that they get much worse. They get to a point where they can't stop: being immoral is a run-away train where they have to keep it up just because they have told so many lies and it becomes a situation where they have to live in their own lies (like living in their own sh*t). "Got an image problem? Just p##p out some more sh*t about the victim."
Anyway, let's get real here as to why it is so hard to get on this forgiveness path that other people want for us or for themselves, especially when there is still a significant amount of danger for that member, or partner, and especially as it can make victims vulnerable to more abuse. I hope I can explain why further in the post.
Let's just say that you are living in Ukraine in the current Russia-Ukraine war. Some atrocities have happened to your family members; your house has been bombed and is uninhabitable; in the process, your beloved cats died and you lost all of your worldly possessions except for a few items you stored in a water-tight safe underground, and you are now trying to flee to Kiev to live with a sister. The overwhelming emotions you are most likely to feel are anger, trauma, and fear. Right now you probably hate the Russians for what they have done to your life and to your entire country.
It's easy for someone in another country to say, "You need to forgive the Russians for what they've done to you!" And some people who might insist on you making the first gesture of forgiveness, rather than the perpetrator making the first move of being accountable for the war they committed, might even say things like, "Maybe Ukraine just needs to give away some land to Russia to stop the violence."
What?! That's just not realistic because once you've given invaders a prize for their aggression, they are going to keep invading. Escalation of abuse, of atrocities, of invasiveness, of bombing citizens is actually more likely to happen than that it will stop (unless they get a new leader or there is no army left). Hopefully my underlined links to the post on escalation will help you see that it is more likely than less likely.
And just as aggressive nations keep pushing forward with their aggressions, so too does a domestic abuse offender or domestic violence offender, usually. They overwhelmingly do not give up on trying to hurt their victims. If anything, they want to prove to themselves that they can keep hurting their victims, over and over again, and that they have the power to keep making their victims absorb it. Many of them are making plans to have even more control over their victims than they had before. If it seems too gnarly for them to try to keep up their aggressive behavior (like too much danger in being caught), they search for new victims instead, people who don't have as much inner strength, confidence, and intelligence to discern what the perpetrator's main motivations are.
What is more likely to happen is that Ukrainian citizens will probably avoid Russians (unless they are in the army with full combat gear) just as a domestic violence victims will eventually try to avoid a domestic violence perpetrator.
Not only that, but relationships will switch and change. Ukrainians are pretty likely not to want to see their Russian relatives. Likewise, limited contact with the closest people to the perpetrator will probably be a part of what happens to victims of domestic violence as well.
While it may be a tenet of Christianity to forgive all kinds of criminals, murderers, aggressors, sex offenders and invasive types of individuals, it doesn't feel all that natural to forgive when you are in the middle of it, does it? So maybe the founders of Christianity meant that forgiveness can come at any time, when the perpetrator has died, or when the Russians have retreated, or maybe even for generations down the road.
We know Jesus forgave the people who tortured him because "they know not what they do."
In other words, his torturers had a lot of blind spots. Most abusive people have an incredible number of blind spots, even if they willingly do. For instance: they think they know their victims, but if you talk to survivors, most of the abusers either did not spend enough time with them to get to know them, or tried to impose their negative views about them constantly. It's one thing to criticize a person a few times over your life, but the constant criticism usually points to abuse and abusers, and to narcissism especially. This is especially true if they can't handle any criticism themselves.
Most of them do not know their victims, especially the inner strength of their victims. Most of them make huge blunders on how victims will react to abuse, as one example. That is because they are too focused on being torturers or robbers or what ever crime or unethical act they are trying to commit to see or care what is really happening in the situation they are in, or who their victims really are - most have wild fantasies about their victims; that is why they practice perspecticide so much. If they had empathy, they'd be able to tell more of who their victims were, but if they had empathy, they wouldn't be able to torture either. This is their double-bind: no empathy, no knowledge, but want to torture anyway, but they want enough knowledge to understand what the outcome will be for them, which will put them in the position of having to have empathy to get to the bottom of what their victims are about, which will make them feel and understand the pain of their victims way too much for their comfort (they are dying of shame inside for adding to the victim's pain), and they can't have that much of an understanding, so they go back to stabbing at their victims in the dark again. ... (that sentence is kind of like a logic question on a law school entrance exam - hope you can follow it).
In other words, they live in the squalor of their own unethical behaviors, the poverty of not having the "authentic" respect and grandiosity that they crave (they have to create more lies and postures to get there, they think). In discarding victims, they discard their own ethics and morality as well. Which of course, will create more shame in them, and down they go into a more paranoid mindset, needing to seek other sources of narcissistic supply or another victim, which creates a more criminal mindset, totally obsessed with revenge fantasies, which when realized will create even more shame about their ethics, more paranoia, more need to hide many, many more dirty deeds, down, down, down.
When scapegoats can see that, it actually boosts their healing journey. They stop thinking about their abusers altogether because they are immoral people, especially if they can be outside of the terrible abusive family matrix. When the abuser(s) show no empathy and have a criminal mindset it does not exactly motivate a victim to want to go back.
I do think many victims eventually come to a place of contentment, joy and happiness in their lives, but I don't think forgiving is part of that equation unless you are in a good part of your life where you are healed and not weighed down by trauma symptoms. You can let me know in the comments section if you feel this way too.
I think victims actually experience more "radical acceptance" than forgiveness, which I explain in the next chapter in more detail. Radical acceptance is like forgiveness in that it sets you free, but it doesn't leave you as vulnerable to continued abuse as "forgiving". From everything I have gleaned from forums, when forgiveness is pushed upon survivors by oneself or others it can create more trauma, more feelings of helplessness, and more feelings of grief and isolation. Victims need to get over their perpetrators in their own time, and the acceleration of the healing process comes from not having to forgive their perpetrators until they are ready to do so, if ever. In other words, it should come naturally, because like any emotion, it is either genuinely felt or not. It cannot be pushed or expected. And if it is expected, ask the question why. Is it because they want to get off the hook when they abuse? Is it because they want to control you and how you react? Is it because they have to believe in a certain dogma, and if you aren't aligned in your thinking with theirs, they can't accept it?
Even then, when people expect victims to forgive their abusers, many people think the victim should take the abuser back. It is defeating the purpose of healing from them in the first place. Abusive people trigger survivors. It just sends the survivor back into traumatic reactions they have to recover from again. So forgiving does not mean taking an abuser back into your life.
Trying to forget they were abused is even worse in terms of healing. Repressing memories has terrible effects on the mind. This is even true when the only thing abusers can do is to keep spiraling down and out of control into more lies, more false narratives, more crimes, more hiding their dirty deeds, more revenge fantasies, more and more unethical behavior, more desires to hurt others, It is just not wise to stuff memories and compartmentalize them. You'll usually have lots of nightmares and lack sleep instead.
Once an abuser hurts you, that's who they are: they hurt other people because they get something out of it. It is purposeful to them. In all likelihood, if they never apologize for hurting you, they get enjoyment out of it too (unless it's a totally compulsive unaware thing they are doing - but if they are trying to hide it, and explain it away, and blame-shift, it is not compulsive: they are doing it with full awareness). As long as they continue to be abusive, and continue to spiral down into unethical behaviors, they will continue to escalate the abuse if you are still communicating with them. There is no getting around it for a victim of abuse.
But I do think it is possible to forgive abusers, but not necessary, especially if the victim is not called upon to take the perpetrator(s) back. In the act of forgiving, however, we usually do not forget the abuse (it's important to remember what happened to us so that it doesn't happen again, of course, or continue to happen). It's okay to forget about them as people, in the same way that Ukrainians who are living in another country forget about Russians in their day-to-day lives.
intro
I think it is always good to tell personal stories of how we get to the point of forgiving our abusers, what we are capable of when it comes to forgiveness and what we are not capable of, and what this actually means.
So I started out this project by writing
this blog post from 2013. I talked about why I wanted to study alcoholism (which I still haven't done adequately enough) and narcissistic abuse. Largely the latter research was more compelling, and is done except for some minor new developments. I haven't posted everything yet because posts still need editing.
But one of the new developments I wrote about in the last post is that
narcissists prefer other narcissists; however I always sensed that to be true anyway ... It just now means there is research to back it up.
I mean how can you bully someone unless you are in a gang and delegating different types of bullying to others so that you don't take the full rap? And we know that narcissists do not like to bully on their own, and they definitely do not like being held accountable for anything, and that they will pass the buck to anyone, even their co-bullies! ... And since they are in a gang, and most likely it's only a single person or two they are bullying, they probably don't care whose fault is whose, unless one of them commits a crime, and even there they cover up for one another or make excuses.
We know the bully gang mentality especially if we attended public schools before the 2000s. We've seen this at work on playgrounds, in hallways and in classrooms despite the adult monitors.
And that's the thing ... to be a full adult means monitoring the bullying, making sure it doesn't happen, not being a
join-in-on-the-perpetrators kind of person. But a child-like entitled narcissistic adult
will join in on the bullying. If they bully a lot or if it is on-going or severe, they are likely to be very high in narcissistic traits (listed in the right column of this blog
and continuing to another page).
So narcissism is a disorder that starts in childhood. The person hasn't grown out of six year old narcissism. Most children who are six years old are naturally narcissistic; they have to emit emotions and care about their own well-being first and foremost to let their caretakers know that they need emotional comforting and responses, or food, or their clothes washed. Babies and small children emote a lot to get their caretakers attention. The more helpless they are to supply their own needs, the more narcissistic they will act in early childhood. However, if they rarely get their needs met, or the parent is turning away from the emoting of the child, the child tends to shut down emotionally, realizing that no one will come to take care of their needs. They also become flat emotionally (have trouble emitting emotions or understanding the emotions of others) and the brain development isn't happening at a normal pace either. This was
studied where babies and children were abandoned in orphanages, and where there weren't enough caretakers in the facility (
another link). So narcissistic adults either grew up this way, unattended, their emotions never mirrored and rarely addressed in a compassionate way.
Or they were over-coddled, put on a pedestal, taught they were better than others, that they were never accountable for any hurtful actions they took against other individuals. Both are drastically different, but both adverse childhood situations can build a path to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Covert narcissism is probably a result of the former (like in the paragraph above), and overt grandiose narcissism is probably a result of being the latter (the
golden child).
Covert narcissists tend to express their abuse by abandoning you, giving you the silent treatment, neglecting you in all kinds of ways, ignoring what you have to say, and other passive aggressive forms of abuse, just like they experienced at some level when they were a child. However if they are malignant covert narcissists, that adds another element where they have little to no remorse for how they treat or abuse others. These narcissists actually get pleasure out of abandoning their victims, even their own children, whereas run-of-the-mill narcissists cannot do it without remorse (they still do it, but they aren't as willing to take as many chances at sullying their own reputation the way a malignant narcissist is; sadism comes first, in other words ... malignant narcissists spend a lot of time scheming ways to keep hurting their victims too). For victims, they wonder why the abuser can't just leave them alone once the narcissist has abandoned them. Why the need for smear campaigns and so many false narratives if the narcissist simply does not want the victim, and does not care about the victim? Isn't leaving you alone what abandonment is all about? The answer is that these kinds of narcissists often give you double messages: that they are better off without you, but why didn't you come back? It's confusing, and most victims feel they can't do anything right because covert narcissists use
double binds like this all of the time. In this instance, you are a terrible person if you don't come back, and you are a terrible person for not getting the message that they wanted you to go away.
Covert narcissists try to either destroy you from the inside out, or get you to be a mind-slave. They mostly target your self esteem, continually, and gaslight you like crazy (in almost every conversation). If they feel confident enough that they've gaslighted you enough, they can turn you into their mind slave (if they sense that you listen to their constant advice). They will be trying to force you to believe you are totally inept at running any of your own affairs, and that you need their help to run your life, which is another form of gaslighting. They will try to break your self esteem too. If you are resisting being a mind slave and insist that you have a right to make some or all of your own adult decisions, they ramp up more attacks on your self esteem, abandon you and use other passive aggressive types of abuse, and keep up the attacks with made up stories about you that make you look bad to others (
smear campaigns).
Overt grandiose narcissists tend to express their abuse in arrogant ways by interrupting you when you are speaking, not listening to what you have to say (and making themselves the authority on speech and who should be listened to), telling you what to do and how to do it even when you are trying to tell them that you are a free autonomous adult - they will insist on lecturing you and
infantilizing you instead. Overt narcissists are more overt in their abuse too: raging at you in your face, hitting, pushing or pulling you around, throwing things at you, spitting at you. They feel entitled to be waited on, to come first in almost every situation they are in, to be heard at the expense of others, to get what ever they want at the expense of others too, and they expect "followers" and admirers,
just as they were treated in childhood. Talking things out is never really possible. They feel they have to dominate every conversation so that things go their way. When they are malignant overt narcissists, they will get pleasure out of denying you the same rights, justice, and privileges they give themselves. These narcissists often like to steal, and plan out ways of taking from others that are highly immoral and criminal. The lack of empathy that they have is also very overt, which means that it is a great deal more obvious than the way covert narcissists
try to fake empathy. These narcissists even brag about hurting others, and taking from others.
The goals of both kinds of narcissists are totally different. In the covert narcissist the goal is to make you believe they have empathy for you, and to take over your mind and decisions, and therefor your actions.
With the overt narcissist, it isn't so much about taking over your mind and decisions, but to get you to do what they tell you to do with brute force, intimidation, threats, violence, and extremely loud raging. If they can't get you to do what they tell you to do, they work on other people they believe are completely loyal to them, to side up with them, so that they feel fully backed in raging at you without consequence.
Overt narcissists try to destroy you from the outside in. They are invested in being frightening enough that if you don't do what they tell you to do, they will smash up things you love, steal from you, divide you from loved ones, frighten you with their temper, give you bruises or kill you. They do make threats of murder: "I'll kill you unless you do x, y and z!" You aren't supposed to believe they would ever go that far, but from all I have seen, some really
do go that far.
Normal people won't talk about killing you, or your murder, or even hoping something bad will happen to you. They will simply leave you alone in peace without complaint if they don't like you. And they won't be on the attack. Starting or continuing with attacks once you have separated is a huge sign of narcissism.
Whether they were abandoned a lot or whether they were spoiled too much in childhood is not anything you can heal or do anything about. They took the adverse situations of their childhood and decided to go in a certain direction with it. They either took the road of trying to control other people's minds, or control what they did by constantly being a tyrant who gives orders, and if you aren't doing things the way they want, to lecture and threaten you. It was their decision to be an abuser, and in the overwhelming majority, it is
a totally conscious decision, otherwise they would never try to hide it from public view, the police, or lie about it, or try to do a
DARVO.
For those very few who do show the abusive side of themselves in public, and where other people can hear what they say and see what they are doing, and who grew up in situations where abuse was so normalized that they are brainwashed into thinking that it is always acceptable, even in public, then it is obviously not conscious. They think they have a right to hurt other people when they aren't getting what they want in all kinds of situations,
public and private. So to some extent, victims can probably get around to forgiving abusers who really don't understand that legally, culturally, and ethically, abuse is not condoned, and the perpetrator could get arrested for it at some point.
The immediate consequence is that the victim might not trust them again. As for forgiving, it can depend upon a lot of factors: whether a perpetrator is willing to go to therapy for an overhaul. Most abusers are not; they keep justifying abuse and keep making excuses for their motives.
In terms of victims forgiving "the child part of these perpetrators", that they weren't raised the right way, I've seen that victims, by and large, overwhelmingly forgive that part of their abusers. You don't have a choice in the parenting styles of your early caretakers. Obviously a child who is ignored, not picked up and soothed when they are crying, where the caretaker is at most, minimally invested in care-giving, is adverse parenting. Obviously a child who is over-valued at the expense of other children in the family is bad parenting too. These actions are not a direct wounding to victims, and they can forgive the bad parenting.
However, most abusers use their parents' mistakes to advantage too, to get more attention, to excuse their own behaviors, to get people to pity them and try to fix them by waiting on them, and most of all for entitlements: "I had a bad childhood, and you need to take care of me and forgive all of the abuses I've done to you, and you need to do all of the work in fixing this because I'm still a helpless little child who never knew how to take care of relationships because my caretaker was a terrible, terrible role model!" They've got a point except it's just another excuse, and
except abuse escalates. For most survivors, taking care of abusers never works, even when the bad childhood keeps coming up, because of that one fact: the escalation process.
So it can be a "forgiveness trap", where you keep trying to help them while they keep abusing you. Not a good trap to be in.
how forgiveness works and doesn't work
(my own story, part one)
In this part I discuss my own situation, and what I went through as far as forgiveness is concerned.
I decided to use my own situation because I couldn't find others that were as extensive as mine and where feelings are talked about along the way. I did look through a lot of domestic violence survivor stories too.
So I decided to settle on my own, so that I could tell you what my thoughts, actions and feelings were at each stage. Hopefully, readers who wonder why victims have such a hard time with forgiving can see why - and my examples show why I had a hard time with it.
Anyway, in
my first post I wrote about Johnny (a made up name). It's a typical domestic violence story. I explain a little more about what happened in this post to give you a clearer picture of how domestic abuse starts out and how it graduates to domestic violence. I don't think it got to the point where my life was in definite danger (?), but I think you could tell how it could get there easily. I also tell what domestic violence counselors were warning along the way, and what they were advising.
In the second section, I talk about "Ellen" (another made up name). She eventually became part of what I went through with Johnny. That story tells how other people got involved in the domestic violence situations, and the decisions they made. However, that particular part of my story is not typical, but it is not unheard of in the realm of domestic violence situations either. I tell a little bit about how people generally react to domestic violence (note: most people who know both parties minimize it, but also accept a victim's decisions).
The way I wrote both stories is that I stop and talk about whether I forgave, and if I didn't forgive, what did I do. Those parts are in
green. I think you'll find that my reactions are pretty standard survivor reactions, especially for the types of survivors who are getting help from domestic violence counselors or social workers trained in domestic violence, and therapists trained in healing trauma.
But to get to part one. It's been a decade since I saw Johnny. And did I forgive him?
Here's how it went for me:
Johnny grew up as a super pampered spoiled golden child, very obviously favored. It was well known in his extended family. He also grew up in a family where a lot daughters were often derided and ostracized, and where women in general were denigrated, sometimes insulted and gossiped about.
His mother was neglectful of the girl, especially throughout childhood (couldn't tell she was being abused outside the family; couldn't tell that she was being abused inside the family either; couldn't tell that she was awake for long hours most every night; couldn't tell that she was traumatized; and a host of other issues). And where did this come from? Johnny's grandmother also put her boy in the golden child role and neglected her daughters. So it was a family theme and tradition. Not his fault. That's easy enough to forgive because he didn't choose that role; the parent did.
However, he didn't decide to do altruistic or even ethical things with that role. He terrorized his sister. As an adult, he became a domestic violence offender as well as a victim/offender (typically referred to as
bully victim in professional articles). He grew cocky and became an alcoholic and a rage-a-holic. He became obsessed with getting rich. He grew to despise most women (nice to their faces, cruel behind their backs).
I'm a woman, so that already put me in a bad position with him.
When we got reacquainted many years ago, right off the bat, he was bossy. Note: he was not my boss. At first I took it in stride. This was my first mistake. I should have put a boundary up right away, made it ironclad that I am in charge of what I do, how I do things, and I'm an adult. I should have said "no" the first time I was being treated as a child, as a slave, as someone to be delegated to jobs he didn't want to do. In other words, I should have made it plain that "I'm fine with who I am; I am not looking for a boss; I am not a child and I don't need lectures; I am not looking for input at all unless I directly ask for it."
Because once he got the idea that he could be bossy, he ran with it and fast. Note: if I even asked him for some small thing, he would go into a rage. So it was totally hypocritical and lopsided.
From being a boss he graduated into a tyrant who micromanaged my every little move. He had constant comments and irate lectures for everything I did, every micro-move I made minute to minute and hour to hour. For all intents and purposes, this was insane, something out of the movie, "Sleeping With the Enemy" except it was a whole lot more than just cans and towels.
In retrospect, I should have walked out every time he opened his mouth. So my fault was
not putting up really strong boundaries right away so that the relationship would not devolve into this. My soft boundaries also has something to do with my childhood too, but I don't make excuses for it. I have actually tried really hard after that experience to make my boundaries much stronger and when situations devolve, to get out of them right away.
So when someone with soft boundaries meets a tyrant, the tyrant is going rage and try to get his own way.
I wasn't the only one who was the target of his rage. My husband became a target too. A poet was also a target. Then a sixteen year old girl. And workers of all kinds. And even some family members. His wife was sending him baked sweet goods, and he turned up his nose at them, and threw most of them away. Which prompted me to ask him how his wife dealt with him and his rages, and he answered, yelling, "She does what I tell her to do!"
In fact, he was either raging about people all day long, or denigrating them: workers, all kinds of people, he was critical of just about everyone (this or that was not good enough for him). Almost every sentence had the "F" word in it too. When people showed up, his vocabulary and his rage instantly went away, and he was so friendly, too friendly. And then they'd go away and he'd dismiss them, denigrate them again. Just awful to be around.
The combination of the on-going verbal abuse, the very obvious signs that he was trying to control me, and the expectation that I would follow all orders from him, seemed to seal the tone of all of our transactions afterwards.
I began to be disgusted and kept quiet, and just dealt with the job at hand. My husband kept telling him to leave me alone and to "stop picking on her!" meaning stop delegating, stop reprimanding about every little thing I did or didn't do. "Just leave her alone!" my husband shouted.
So then Johnny tried another tack:
triangulating. He was denigrating me to my own husband a lot (to put doubts in his head about me - and it didn't work). Johnny and I lived too far from each other and we weren't close; we talked briefly via phone calls every 6 months or so, and it was either chit-chat, or he was irate about something in his life when I called, and in those times I got off the phone rather quickly. So he didn't understand me - that is what was clear to my husband.
Then Johnny tried to denigrate my husband to get me to side up with him (Johnny): "What the Hell is wrong with him anyway?" he'd ask me about my own husband, trying to break through where the loyalty lines were and weren't. That didn't work either.
Then he called one of my father's friends on the phone. I was waiting by Johnny's side to talk to that same friend because I had something important to say to that friend. When I was finished with my part of the phone call, Johnny started yelling at me and telling everyone in the room that I was constantly grabbing at the phone, and then threw chairs around the room. The way he told it was very dramatic, and he took a chair to dramatize a total fiction about how I threw it.
"Bulls&^t! She doesn't act that way!" my husband yelled back at him. "I know her better than anyone, and that's not how she acts!"
Then they had a competition of who knew me better.
Johnny's story didn't really work that time either, even with two other people in the room (two people who he had to gain something from, of course). But it showed me how far he'd go. The one problem with his story is that the room where the phone had been taken did not have any chairs. It had two stools, and one was quite heavy and would have made a big thud had I thrown it. The other stool was far away from where the phone call was taking place.
He seemed quite frustrated that he didn't have an ally in terms of being bossy, so then he'd spend hours on the phone with his wife complaining about my husband and me.
So do I feel forgiving of all of this? I didn't feel forgiving. Forgiveness seems to be more of a non-issue than "the real issue" that was going on. As far as I'm concerned, the "real issue" is that Johnny and I don't get along at all. He wants to complain about, and dominate most people 24/7, unless they have the potential to offer him a great deal. I don't want to be dominated, especially by someone like that. That's the natural feeling. Being pressured to feel something else (like forgiving) is not occurring "naturally". I feel free to experience my authentic feelings just as they are, and not wanting to be dominated by Johnny was the main "authentic feeling" at the time.
My attitude has changed a tiny bit since then, but not in a significant way that would add up to forgiveness and renewing the relationship. The change has gone from "I don't want to be dominated" to "I'm not dominated by him and I feel much better." But the story gets worse.
There were several times I overheard him talking to his wife. At that time, I was trying to get away from him as much as possible, so I was unusually quiet, often for the entire day. I might say, "Pass the salt", or "I'm going out for a walk". If he raged I'd just find a way out: "I have to go to the bathroom", "I have to make a phone call", "I need some exercise", "I don't feel well", and I didn't feel well. I was actually sick, but I didn't tell him because I sensed he'd be even worse, knowing I was vulnerable in that way too. I knew enough about bullying to know that bullies pick on people who they deem to be weak in some way.
Also, when my husband had surgery he was under strict doctor's orders not to lift anything over five pounds and not to stretch. Johnny wanted some things moved and expected my husband to be the one to lift things and help out. Even when he said, "I'm under doctor's orders not to lift. Sorry about that." Johnny got enraged about that too, and told anyone who would listen that my husband was lazy and "useless". So much for empathy - Johnny didn't show any concern about my husband's state.
Anyway, several times he was on the phone, I heard him talking to his wife. And in every one of those calls he was fabricating things I was saying, even making up conversations, using tones I never used. And this was going on during the days I was silent. He was even making up entire scenes to turn her against me. Not only that but he said, "She's just like (my ex)!"
I was shocked. Of course, I had been led to believe certain things about his ex. Now I was wondering, "Who is she actually?" Maybe stories had been made up about her too.
As for the made up stories I felt nauseous. It also frightened me. The most awful thing about it was I couldn't tell if he was delusional, or if he was simply manipulative to get his wife's total unwavering support. I knew enough to know that truly delusional people who are aggressive to the extent that Johnny was, can act on impulse and on what ever delusions they are experiencing. Manipulative behavior (enlisting co-bullies) and delusional states are both dangerous, but delusions are much more of a critical issue because perpetrators can act on the delusions without notice. There is not necessarily an escalation at play to see where you are are in the process. If they are manipulative, the escalation process can be seen, and you can make plans based on that. With delusionary abusers, you can't do that.
Both of them are safety concerns. I had trouble sleeping, and entered into a kind of hypervigilant state where all of the symptoms of trauma started emerging.
What would he do next to me?
The story he liked to tell about his ex was that she was this horrifically insane woman who perpetrated all kinds of violence towards him, and that she would do anything, even hurt her own children to get close to him enough that she would abuse him. And a lot of people believed him when he told stories about her. He would tell people to hang up on her, and they did. So he had a lot of power to get people to do things against other people.
My husband was urging me to get out of the situation at this time, but there are actually good reasons why I felt I couldn't. I don't feel comfortable about telling what they were because it would expose who the people are in my story, and at this point the only thing I want is to be safe and to be left alone by him.
Anyway, I decided I wanted to call up his ex considering this new development. But I didn't know if it was the right thing to do at the right time because it seemed like it could be a safety issue. It might inflame him even more, and he was already in so many crazy-making all-day rages over the smallest issues, and drinking every day too, all day. I knew enough to know that violence is more of a possibility when someone who is prone to rage is drinking to the extent that he was, and calling her would be just one more excuse to terrorize.
Anyway, I called up a domestic violence counselor and asked what he thought of the idea (or he thought of the idea - I don't remember). But I do remember him saying, "In my opinion, it should be done" he answered. "But ask her to keep the calls confidential. What happened to her might be helpful in discerning what he is capable of in terms of getting the kind of safety that you need, so you should call and ask for confidentiality in my opinion," he said.
He also thought, from everything that was going on, that I needed to get out of the situation or call other people in for help. The more people were around, the less likely he would commit violence.
I got on the phone with the ex, and just said one thing: "Okay, I'm ready to hear your story. What was the issue between you when you broke up?"
And her first words were, "If you don't do exactly what he tells you to do in exactly the way he wants it done, he terrorizes you!" I thought, "This is incredible. It's describing my situation. And we haven't even begun to talk about anything else."
"So was it like the movie, 'Sleeping with the Enemy'?" I asked her.
"Yes, but worse. I needed to put an ocean between us."
And then she told me about the physical violence she endured from him. It didn't surprise me.
Shortly afterward, he got violent with me, and not because he found out about the phone call I made to her. His excuse for getting violent was something else altogether. While it didn't take me by surprise (after talking to her), I told a lot of influential people what had happened immediately afterward, including two social workers, and they knew why it was difficult for me to just abandon the situation, so they sent over people constantly so that I would rarely be alone with him. It also worked in keeping it from escalating.
Close to that time, there was another witness at the scene who knew both Johnny and me, and she told me to bring my husband back into the situation, especially when she heard that Johnny's wife was arriving. "These two gang up on you like a couple of bullies!" she said. Apparently she had gone through that herself.
So, to break away from my story ... Would I feel healed and would the relationship heal if I forgave him for all of this? What do you think? It keeps escalating, right? The only thing holding it at bay is bringing other people in.
So my own thought at the time was "Why do people expect you to forgive in situations like this? It seems like it would give him a green light to escalate."
My lack of boundaries (trying to figure out what was going on when he did not show politeness or respect, helped to create this situation surely, but from my perspective, forgiveness would have made it so much worse). My other thoughts: He's not going to change into a moral person just because I'm forgiving. I don't believe he is capable of change and I haven't heard anything to the effect that he has changed at all. And this goes for ten years later. I'm pretty sure he has the attitude that other people have to change to suit him, but he doesn't have to change, not even in a direction of authentic politeness. Another hypocrisy. He's not much different in his relationship with me than he was with his ex, and he was with his ex decades ago. If he can't change over decades, and even get worse, he is simply not capable of change.
People who change also have to have empathy. He doesn't have any. While I saw two faced empathy of other people (fake overly "sweet drippy" empathy followed by derision, disgust, and hatred of the other person shortly afterward), that is hardly anything to put faith in, or even admire. Insincerity is pretty disgusting in my book. Around me, he was Mr. Hyde all of the time unless there were workers, professionals, helpers coming into the situation. A lot of abusers give you a break, and are nice to you for a spell (the cycle of abuse), but he was Mr. Hyde all day long, day after day. And I caught him in the act of being two-faced too many times over too many people, and he knew that I knew. A woman told me once that he didn't like anyone. Until this situation happened, I wasn't sure I believed her.
He would say to my husband and me that he wished this woman who said this was dead, but then act like he valued her greatly to her face. My husband and I were even more disgusted at seeing this, and I think Johnny sensed my husband's shift in respect for him.
Many years later, I became interested in
the Gabby Petito case (a beautiful woman killed by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie). The stand-out quality that he had was allegedly raging about and to others (the Mary Piglets Restaurant incident where Laundrie was rumored to have raged at some waitresses will be forever ingrained in the minds of people who became interested in this case). He was also allegedly raging at Gabby quite a bit. It was clear that the verbal abuse seemed "over-the-top" as well.
In that situation, a woman police officer tried to get Petito to understand that she was in a dangerous situation, mainly based on the verbal abuse and that he had attacked her face with his hands as he was trying to drive off with her van without her, digging his fingernails into her face as he tried to get away.
The "Johnny situation" had almost the same elements. The one difference is that he wasn't attacking my face. But when he raged at me, he was no farther away than two feet from my face, his spit often landing on my face, and if I stepped back from him, he moved forward - very aggressive, in other words. That sent up red flags to counselors and social workers I was contacting. I tended to diminish it (I figured if he wasn't slugging me, it wasn't serious). But they assured me that it was. So, here's the warning to other people who are going through it: don't think he won't be violent just because he's raging without touching you (yet).
Another warning sign: he was also aggressively touching my head - when I was sitting, he would sometimes go by, put his considerably large hand over the top of my head and squeeze rather hard. He did it to my husband once too. At the time, I thought it was a bizarre act, like why would he be doing that? It's not exactly an act of affection. It had some aggression behind it, otherwise why the hard squeeze. However, I learned around that time that it was a sign of danger too (
any aggressive touch to the face, head and neck is a danger sign that has to be taken seriously), especially in light of the fact that he is exceptionally controlling, rageful, and verbally abusive.
Okay, so would I feel better if I forgave him in the privacy of my own mind or at home, and not have any contact with him again? The thing is, again, I don't think we can force ourselves to feel anything. We either feel something or we don't. So what I went through is more like the stages of grief: shock, followed by disbelief, followed by sorrow, etc, and ending up with acceptance. Not acceptance of him as a part of my life, but acceptance that was who he was. My grief was over the fact that he wasn't who I thought he was.
Besides not seeing integrity, "real empathy", respect for others, or authentic conviviality, there were other things that pointed to unethical behavior. He was scheming. He was always pretty focused on winning at something (a lot of it was about "getting more" than another person). He schemes ways to make things happen for himself to the point of entering into criminal thought and activity.
Violence against others is criminal, so it is not a big leap to go into criminal activity about material things too. And I learned at that time that it is pretty common with abusers.
In other words, controlling other people is about taking more than you are giving back in terms of demands (I didn't make demands on him, but he did constantly). Likewise stealing, or insisting on taking more than you deserve is in the same ballpark.
Do I forgive him for the crimes he commits? Absolutely not. I don't care what he learned in childhood or how he justifies this behavior. The fact is that he likes to steal. And not only that, but he accuses others of committing crimes against him. A car window was busted out in the place he lived the year that he and I separated, and he blamed it on someone who was visiting him at the time. Again, no investigation, a belief taking over.
Abusers project, and they get paranoid that they will be stolen from or that someone is out to get them because they are that way. It is one reason they do a DARVO. But the other reason they like the DARVO tactic is to get out of crimes they commit.
So, when his wife showed up, was she co-bullying?
Note: I didn't know her. I have spent less than 48 hours in her company over my lifetime. So any kind of bullying of someone you don't know is completely unethical in my book.
Anyway, she was not bullying right away. And that let my guard down. And Johnny made it known early on that she was more ethical than he was, another reason I let my guard down. At first I felt relieved that she was there because I doubted that he would get violent with her around (he wanted to make an impression) and with all of the other people coming and going.
One of the ways he made an impression is that I wanted something and he told me I could have it. Before then, he was fighting me tooth and nail on nearly everything.
I made a few mistakes in the beginning, thinking that she was "one of us", that she was bullied the same way that I was, and that Johnny's ex was, and I confided in her in ways that I shouldn't have. Big mistake. I should have tried to figure out her intentions towards me first. Because it was clear that she didn't have the same experience that I had and the ex had with Johnny. After many years, I also understood that many people had drastically different relationships with Johnny. I also heard later that this is typical of abusive men, that their treatment of others has everything to do with what other people do for them, or what other people have the potential to do for them. It is also based on the fact that they need people who can vouch for them when they are accused of abuse, violence or crimes.
So the "She does what I tell her to do!" statement is probably true, and it may very well be how they keep the peace in their relationship.
It's not a marriage I would ever want, and my marriage is very peaceful without that, but I understand some women are perfectly happy and willing to be submissive at all times to male authority. Even to the point of bullying others they barely know for their man.
Anyway, the way she co-bullied was to state that Johnny's intentions were to get me and another person Johnny and I both knew separated (the "Ellen" person I bring up in the next section). She also made it clear that she was going to be instrumental in helping him to make that happen. She said it the day before my birthday. I thought 1. that it was cruel, and 2. that this wouldn't work, that people would not just "automatically" side with Johnny.
I was practically in tears at the thought of it, and also in denial, and didn't say anything. I was at a dinner table eating. On my birthday, they were planning an overnight in the north, but Johnny came down with a headache. His wife made me a birthday dinner which I appreciated. However, it didn't stop her from supporting Johnny while he tried to divide all of my relationships, just as he had with my husband and me.
So, do I forgive a co-bully? Again, I didn't feel forgiving naturally, and she had no part in my life. When you don't know someone, even if you wanted to forgive, you don't know what you are forgiving. Was she a good person or a bad person? She both cooked me a birthday dinner and told me they were going to influence Ellen enough to separate us, but did she really mean that? Why would she cook me a dinner when she was hostile? This is the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing.
Was she always a co-bully? Or just when he wanted her to bully someone?
Was she just a co-bully in this situation? Would she really go through with it?
When I talked to others, no, she bullied others too. It was the main complaint when there were issues: they would brow-beat a lone person. But I didn't know that at the time. And allegedly she said that she would kill a person for not behaving. Anyway, I got the overall sense that she may have been more ethical than Johnny, but not ethical when he called upon her to break her ethics ... I learned this much later.
The main thing I felt was that the situation she wanted to enact against me was hostile, unethical, blindly loyal, and off the wall. Do you forgive someone who is acting blindly on the will of someone else, like the Russians do on Putin's behalf?
Is bullying other people a good thing to do when you haven't shown any sign of aggression yourself?
Are going through with the intentions and demands of another person forgivable? And again, the fact that he had this co-bully, even if she was his wife, put me in more danger. Do you forgive someone who puts you in more danger just so that they can prove that they are a loyal servant to their husband? (my own story, part two)
The person they wanted to separate me from I'll call "Ellen". The main takeaway that readers may want to know about Ellen is that she was always much closer to Johnny than to me. They spent a great deal more time together, had a closer relationship, shared a lot more experiences and had many more conversations than I had with her. I was under the impression that I was close to her for about a decade, but not anything close to what they had. By then I had also been told that for safety reasons that I needed to separate from Johnny (i.e. to never be in the same room with him again alone, to avoid meeting with him in private, and so on).
So my main intention after Johnny left was to tell Ellen that I needed to separate from Johnny. But she seemed to be in denial that I told her that. She thought the rift was temporary, that I didn't really mean it; that with a little bit of time and talking things out, I wouldn't take such a hard line "against him". She thought of it as an act of aggression on my part. She was acting like a lot of people in these situations act: that abuse is a "relationship problem" that can be worked out by talking. Not when the perpetrator is never talking things out (and is always lecturing and interrupting instead), not when he is constantly dominating, raging, never in "a respectful listening position", etc.
So is the fact that she is naïve and ignorant about how abusive relationships go, forgivable? I mean, she really doesn't understand that abusive relationships can't be "worked out". It's a blind spot, right?
And then she wanted to know why. I didn't want to get into it with her, but she insisted. And even after hearing my story, she took the tack that things could be worked out. I disagreed. I told her that I was listening to domestic violence counselors when it came to this situation because they knew a lot more than she did.
One of the counselors who was "visiting" at the place Johnny and I were, told me that Ellen and I should go to therapy together, so that she would understand a little more about why a domestic violence counselor would want Johnny and me separated, and what was going on.
Then it finally became clear to Ellen that when I sent a registered letter to Johnny, my intention was to separate from him. She couldn't be in denial about it any longer, or expect a make-up between us. She wasn't going to influence my decision just because she had a very different experience with him than I did.
I'm sure she didn't like this very much (probably thought it was too harsh), but to my mind, it was my adult decision to make, and I was scared. While it was heavily based on what counselors were saying, it still wasn't her decision to make. And I'm glad I made that decision, then and now. My life is much, much better without Johnny in it. As is clear, he was a meddler, and not just between my husband and me, and Ellen and me: nearly everyone we both knew. Not seeing him any more meant that the meddling would go away. He could meddle and try to divide me from people we both knew, and they would go one way or another, or just see each of us separately, but I knew an awful lot of people he would never meet and I intended to keep it that way.
For all intents and purposes, what existed between Johnny and me was never a relationship to begin with. It was just experiences of "endurance" for me until I could get away, and for him someone he found frustrating to control and dominate in the way he wanted to, and was used to. There was little else between us except that. We didn't see eye to eye on anything, and real relationships have at least a little of that.
I was aware that my decision about Johnny might cause some issues between Ellen and me, and at the very least that my relationship with Ellen might be uncomfortable for me (and maybe for her too), and not be as close as it had been. Of course, she would have to see us separately, and at separate times, and there was a whole lot of that going on anyway. Beyond a dinner here and there, and with the distance Johnny lived, I didn't think it was much of an issue.
But to her it was, apparently. She refused to go to therapy with me. The overall message was: "I don't want to understand at all why the break with him was necessary." Instead of the separate relationships with both of us, she decided to side with Johnny completely. She parroted back all of his perspectives, all of his words, all of the false narratives he liked to spout.
So, again, I'll break away from this story. Let's just say that she was brainwashed. It could have been any reason she went for Johnny's perspectives, but for the purpose of this discussion, we'll explore brainwashing.
Wouldn't brainwashing be an automatic forgivable offense?
Here's the problem. Usually when you are brainwashed, you are loyal to someone's perspectives. It's engaging in a pretty drastic form of confirmation bias too. You aren't researching anything. You just believe in what you are being told by a perpetrator. And she believed pretty quickly.
This isn't uncommon for people who only see the nicer Dr. Jekyll side. She's probably never witnessed him swearing like a sailor, or acting like a slave owner. So she believes that what she sees is who he is.
Now is that innocent?
So let me explain two situations:
The first is about Ukraine. So we know that Putin is on a campaign to brainwash Russians that Ukrainians are Nazis (Nazis from Germany invaded Russia in World War II, so it stirs up fear when Russians are told that the neighboring country of Ukraine is Nazi too). It helps Putin's countrymen get into a fighting spirit even though it's a lie that Ukrainians are Nazis.
Ukrainians also have a Jewish president, but it is lost on many Russians.
As in domestic violence situations, the brainwashing has to do with dividing a hitherto peaceful relationship between two countries. It galvanizes Russian soldiers to want to torture Ukrainians since Nazis tortured them at one point in history.
Anyway, the brainwashed soldiers are the ones throwing the bombs, missiles, and landmines into Ukraine. The leader is telling them to do it, but the army is the one who is actively doing it.
Are Ukrainians forgiving Russians for being brainwashed? Are they saying, "Oh, you're brainwashed, so we'll excuse you for doing this to our lives and our country"?
Pretty doubtful. It may happen at some future date if there is some kind recompense eventually, some sort of awareness that Ukrainians weren't the Nazis they were made out to be, that Ukraine should never have been invaded, but that forgiveness might come generations down the road. Right now, torture is not excusable.
Also, forgiveness is not what Ukrainians are thinking about. They want these brainwashed bearers of death out of their country.
Here's another situation:
You are on the road and there are two cars in back of you. The one directly in back of you wants to pass, but he passes you on a double line and when he sees another car coming, he swerves into you and your car goes off the road and lands in a ditch.
The car behind the passing car is occupied by a family who are friends with the occupants who hit your car. So you've got the one car you are in, and two other cars whose occupants are really good friends with one another.
The cops show up, trying to determine whose fault the accident is. To you, it is obvious that the car who swerved into you caused the accident.
But the occupants of the two other cars say it is your fault, even totally your fault. You swerved into him (the passing car) and didn't look to see that he was passing you.
Again, they are loyal to one another because they are such good friends. We should understand loyalty right? And is loyalty always supposed to come before ethics and justice?
Because if it does, you can see why Ukraine was invaded. You are just as much of a mind-slave to loyalty as the Russians are.
These days, police can tell who hit who by the markings on the cars. The car swerving into you would have left streaks that were running up towards the front end of the car. But let's say that the police made judgements on biases alone. They just want to believe that you caused the accident, and so they give you a ticket.
It would allow aggressive driving to go unchecked, right? You could get away with sending any old car off the road on any double lined highway. There would be no such thing as vehicular manslaughter.
Likewise, when we give free passes and side up with domestic violence offenders, we are making it possible for him to continue with his actions, either with the victim he has been torturing in the present, or another one down the road, no pun intended.
In fact, he can get away with just about any form of violence or dividing up people that he wants to, right?
So do we forgive any of this?
Maybe when there is this much injustice, the best we can do eventually is radical acceptance that this is how it played out, and we are moving beyond it, the kind of acceptance that comes after grief.
Here's another thing I know about Ellen. One hot day with all the windows open in a neighborhood I was visiting (a place where buildings were mostly all joined together) and before people adopted air conditioners en masse, I heard a couple fighting, and I could hear a woman screaming and crying, lots of thumping, and things breaking, lots of swearing, lots of insults. I was really concerned by what was happening. When I told the story to Ellen, she immediately responded, "Don't get involved."
Don't get involved?
I was no more than 18 years old. So I took her advice, even though I wanted to call the police. And guess what? The woman was murdered the next night in that same apartment by that same guy.
So obviously I felt, and still feel really, really guilty about not intervening and calling the police. I don't blame Ellen for this; I blame myself for taking the advice of others too readily.
I have not made that mistake again. I called in other situations where I saw domestic violence. If someone hadn't called in to report what Brian Laundrie was doing to Gabby Petito's face, then police might not have stopped them on their road trip and warned Gabby that she was in a dangerous situation. In that situation, she didn't heed the advice, and was murdered. But calls do save lives.
It also comes down to: What if I was that woman and no one called?
So let's just surmise that Ellen's real reason for why she sided with Johnny was: non-involvement.
Do we forgive people who don't want to get involved, at least as involved in making a call to police? Do we just let murders happen because you have to talk to police, even when it can be an anonymous phone call?
Do we forgive people who run away when they know that a crime was committed?
Do we forgive when we hear a woman getting beaten and either we don't do anything, or no one does anything?
Do we forgive people who side up with perpetrators of domestic violence?
Do we forgive a person who doesn't want to hear what we went through, because they wanted to be like Switzerland and not get involved? Except she sided up with Johnny, so the "non-involvement" argument does not hold water.
Is forgiveness more important than changing your ways, and calling the cops? Or getting involved enough so that your relationships aren't ripped to shreds by other people who want to isolate you and call you theirs?
So here's another possible reason for why Ellen might have sided up with Johnny. Let's say she sided up with him because she didn't want to be bullied, and felt safer on Johnny's side than on my side. A lot of people do this too. They have to pledge loyalty to an abuser, so that they aren't abused too.
Maybe she didn't want her relationships tampered with by Johnny the way he was tampering with mine. Maybe she couldn't handle the opposition and rage he might launch if she went against him. Maybe he was just more valuable to her, so she went along with what he demanded. Maybe he was so insistent that she give me up that it frightened her, and she gave into him under some kind of tremendous pressure that he launched. Maybe he threatened her: "If you keep her in your life, or contact her in any way, don't expect any contact from me ever again! Choose!"
So do we forgive people who give up their relationships with us because they think that is the safest thing they can do?
Do we forgive people who cave into someone else under pressure? Or do we just think of them as turncoats, as people without backbones, as wimps?
Do we forgive people who decide to save their own ass at the expense of ours?
Do we forgive them enough to break bread with us again, or do we take the stance that we can't trust them again because they sacrificed us to be in an exclusive relationship with our abuser?
Certainly, if you wanted to forgive, these excuses by Ellen might have gotten you there more quickly if that is all she did, but they may not be healthy reasons to be in an actual relationship because of all of the reasons I have brought up.
But still, that's not all there was to it.
I received e-mails and letters from Ellen's husband, a man who I don't have a relationship with outside of dinners and events with Ellen. There were rarely any significant conversations between us either except for the usual dinner conversations like gardening, traveling, cooking, healthy eating, books, photography, etc. He was never respectful, however, about my vegetarianism, and constantly needled me about it. But mostly, the topics were usual dinnertime topics.
However, he always seemed irritated when I visited Ellen, as though talking to her was impinging on his time with her. I got the sense he did not want me around, and I was always uncomfortable in their house. But, I didn't think our superficial relationship was on shaky ground until I received his e-mails and letters.
Anyway the e-mails and letters he sent me were full of insults and threats. One of the threats was the same as Johnny's threats: to break Ellen and me apart, another Johnny-type move. It was as though he was parroting Johnny every step of the way, and by then I had had enough, and needed to put up the kind of boundaries I should have put up with Johnny at the very beginning. I wasn't going right into another Johnny type-situation after Johnny left, and I told Ellen's husband to stop contacting me. He wouldn't stop. So I called the police to intervene. By the way, when a person keeps contacting you when you ask them to stop, it is called harassment (which is illegal). It's also an aggressive move, and like all aggression, it tends to escalate. It was necessary to put an end to the aggression right away.
Then he contacted police himself and asked how he could get me to stop talking to him (a DARVO move), trying to paint me as the aggressor. The police knew that it was a DARVO move too, and so did counselors, and pegged him through his own writing, and with that tactic, as someone whose writings and tactic were typical of someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder.
I have no idea why he did it, except to parrot Johnny, deciding that separating Ellen and me was a cool idea from Johnny. It's like he thought, "Great idea, Johnny! I think I'll try that too! I don't like her either in my wife's life! And I hate that she's a vegetarian! So let's both get rid of her!"
Then he sent me a message through someone else that he wanted me to apologize to Johnny.
He was also a professor - it's depressing to think of someone like that in that position. What are schools thinking?!
And also, he was estranged from a daughter. And divorced. I don't know if he has the same attitudes that Johnny has about women, but I suspect he might.
Also, like Johnny, he owned guns and he was a drinker, and may be an alcoholic. And most people know if you put verbal and emotional abuse together with drinking and guns, the prognosis for safety is pretty dire.
As for my relationship with Ellen, it ended (probably loyalty to husband and Johnny). I tried to talk to her, but she shut me down. I sent Ellen birthday cards for a couple of years, and while she didn't send them back to me unopened or tell me not to send them any more, she never responded, not even to thank me, and I gave up. She was the one who believed things could always be worked out, but apparently not this time.
Johnny did some more meddling to divide.
My husband and I were invited to a wedding. Johnny and his wife were invited to the wedding too. And so were Ellen and her husband. I contacted a counselor and asked how I could go to the wedding, and be supportive to the couple, without being attacked by Johnny. He said to bring a video camera and to make sure that my husband was always with me. We had a good video camera then, and I liked the idea of being the videographer. I am an artist, and I knew I could edit a good and fun synopsis of what went on. "What a perfect idea!" I thought. So we both RSVP'd that we would be there.
Then, Johnny, his wife, and Ellen's husband intervened to get my husband and me dis-invited. Again, the people who invited us to their wedding really did not know us that well. But we were always on good terms and I took care of the groom at one time in his life. So, now Johnny had succeeded in splitting that relationship apart, with even more help than he had before.
Then Johnny and his wife sent out a letter to a bunch of people about what bad people my husband and I were - it was filled with denigrations and insults about us. Some people reacted to it by saying, "Work out your own relationships! Don't bother us!" and some people reacted to it by siding up with him based on loyalty.
Obviously there was a campaign against us, with Johnny and his wife determined to split as many of our relationships with others apart. This is how prejudice gets rolling.
There wasn't anything I could do about any of it. If people believe things without looking into anything, that's who they are; they are belief-oriented, the end. People who are belief oriented are even more tethered to confirmation bias than others, meaning that you can't convince them of anything other than their own beliefs.
So, I let a lot of people go based on that. I went through a considerable amount of grief, but I was also made aware that this happens a lot when there is domestic violence going on: people take sides. I had been warned of this ahead of time. And I also had been warned never to be around Johnny again in anything but a very large group ("and take your video camera with you if you have to go somewhere - even to the bathroom").
When counselors are that concerned about your life, you don't just ignore it.
But not everyone drops away, no matter how hard they are worked on by the aggressors, no matter how much brainwashing, threats, pleas for loyalty there are. People of integrity seem to be the ones who resist these things, and those are the people you want around you anyway.
However, it's not always easy. Where it got really sticky is that I had to work with a mother-daughter team on a kind of "business project" I'll call it. In the process, I had to let Johnny know what was happening by reporting to him. It was part of the "contract", so to speak. It was obvious he was meddling in this situation too, trying to get as much out of the situation as he could, and again, trying to prejudice the team against me so that the outcome would go in his favor: that he would get the advantage over me. But that's not the way it worked out.
This mother-daughter team took advantage of it, and were doing things for their benefit, knowing that Johnny and I were not aligned or a team ourselves. I tried to tell him what was going on, but he was more interested and determined to drive a wedge between me and the mother-daughter team, and risk losing some of what he was entitled to get. He was also flattering them a great deal which I knew was not at all sincere. It never had been.
In my frustration at this next triangulation he was mounting, I showed some e-mails I had received from Johnny's wife that they were not so enamored with the mother-daughter team after all, that the sweetness and flatteries were about pretending, and that the motive was about being preferred over us so that they would get more out of the deal than we would.
Then the mother-daughter team was disgusted by both of us. They made fun of both of us a lot, laughed about how we both threw each other under the bus, felt way more superior and upstanding compared to us, took the story to their friends and had a laugh there as well, and continued to take advantage of the rift between Johnny and me to get as much for themselves as they could at Johnny's and my expense.
As far as further meddling, I'm sure that Johnny is still at it, trying to split people apart, still triangulating, or he's reveling in how easy it was to do in one situation or another, and will be easy to do in all situations. He laughs sadistically about his "wins".
I took this long test from a psychologist when I was still trying to grapple with Johnny's agenda. There were all kinds of questions like number of insults, kinds of insults, how I responded to the insults. There were questions about what he said to other people about me. Questions to do with triangulation. Questions to do with ways he touched me. What kinds of demands he was making on me. It was a pretty thorough break-down of his actions towards me, and against me. It was determined that he was probably a malignant narcissist. And the dangers of relating to malignant narcissists were relayed to me. The gist of it was: I shouldn't even try the gray rock method on this kind of narcissist, as you could try with a run-of-the-mill narcissist. Malignant narcissists are quite a bit more dangerous, and the best thing to do is to make sure he was never in my presence or life again.
And my own test turned up "echoist", not nearly enough self preservation skills, terrible boundaries, responses that were largely ineffectual in terms of self preservation, not enough empaths in my life, not correcting people when they made assumptions about me, not resisting enough to domination and control, body language predators pick up on as being fair game, not defining myself first before others judged me, feeling undefined in a lot of ways, and all of the things that create an "echoist state", and that create a host of problems with making and keeping boundaries of respect. I was much lower than the general population on all of the tests I received to decipher narcissism (some of which I didn't even know were a measure of narcissism).
So in other words, my job was to learn how to end any conversation where I was not treated with dignity, respect and ethics. I actually had to get lessons in that.
The only thing that put me closer to the normal end of the spectrum than most echoists is not letting people define me (my internal voice did not match their voice inside my head, in other words) and so my self esteem was not blown apart, where for most echoists it is (and I thank my father, husband, all of my cherished long term relationships, and teachers for that).
Then after these tests, some things were stolen from me long after Johnny and I parted, that he would have wanted. Being stolen from is a sign of criminality, no resolution skills, an entitlement to break into other people's houses, extremely low empathy (especially if you know the perpetrator) and most likely a Cluster B personality disorder, especially if it is not over food, shelter and basic necessities.
So, how did I react to "It was so easy for Johnny to split my relationships." I didn't like it, that's for sure, and even when I tried to do something about it, I was ineffectual. The trauma symptoms were sky high, and I dealt with depression and feelings of helplessness for many years. But it also showed me a lot about human nature and where we are in our present evolution.
More than half of the population can be manipulated pretty easily. It's what I'm finding out in terms of politics too. It aligns with that.
When bad characters are on soap-boxes and telling people what they want to hear, or that there is some reason to avoid a group of people, or a person, roughly half of them will follow the person on the soapbox who is trying to prejudice them. It's the old story of the salesman who tries to sell you your dreams, but it's just snake oil (it's the story of the two-faced snake oil salesman). We're either going to buy the story or not. And it's up to all of us to decide.
You can't change the minds of prejudiced people, who are bound by their own belief systems, and who like their beliefs just as they are, and who may even think their belief system is the best one around (arrogance).
Some people just want to join a certain belief system or cult, or follow a certain leader or person.
Jesus's statement, "They know not what they do" is appropriate here.
Also, a lot of people like tyrants. A lot of people like to be followers of tyrants (they think that the tyrants will keep them safe because tyrants show aggression and are willing to show might, and go to war much more readily than other types of leaders). If the followers are tyrants too, or follow one, they believe they will be able to get the upper hand, and the riches, and influence people in selfish ways, and beat out the competition, just like the leader is able to do it, or just like Johnny did.
A lot of people like violence and aggressive acts as a way to get what they want out of others too. Some people like narcissists (look at who gets adored in elections). A lot of people like bullying behaviors, invasions into other people's relationships, lives, personal resources. A lot of people like sitting around and gossiping, deriding people, talking in an arrogant style, building a prejudice against others. A lot of people like narcissists who keep their eyes peeled on how to get more money and the things money can buy at the expense of more important things. A lot of people think being two-faced is brilliant. They like invasions and maneuvers. They adore people who hate certain parts of a population.
So I haven't exactly forgiven, but what I have done is to go through a realization process of that kind of darkness. Before I was plunged into darkness, I was so naïve, so in denial. I just did not want to see evil, until evil played hard ball with me. But once I knew exactly how dark some human beings can be (mainly through studying narcissism and psychopathy), I also understood much more clearly about what I wanted for my life.
"The door" of radical acceptance of some of these facts has led me to a new life. I have accepted that Johnny is narcissistic, probably high on the scale, a person who will never change his ways (malignant narcissists are very, very resistant to change). He will always be unempathetic; he will always be in competition for riches and resources; he will always play head games with other people. He will always play dirty to get what he wants; he will always try to break people apart to get what he wants; he will always be thinking of ways to create false narratives about other people; he will always be two-faced and inauthentic; and he will always try to get people to "do as he says." Those are the tenets of malignant narcissism.
And beyond that I don't know much about him because we did not and do not have normal conversations. There is always an agenda that he has behind every discourse. He's also an alcoholic (drinks an excessive amount every day, the sign).
The only way to curb malignant narcissism in society is to educate parents on how to bring up their children. Good luck with that, right? Also what if the parents are narcissists themselves? What if the parents are substance addicted? It would have to take an extreme amount of societal effort.
So the only way to really stop it is to educate people what the signs of narcissism and psychopathy are so that they can resist and traverse them. I tend to see them as the black holes of the human race. The more out of orbit you are, the better off you will be. That's the path I have decided to take.
Radical acceptance and saying no to any more exposure to malignant narcissists and all of the people who follow them is what healing is all about. That is assuming that the gravity of the black holes hasn't become inescapable and you have a way out without being disabled or killed, or on the verge of either one.
I think all survivors of domestic violence come to a place of radical acceptance rather than forgiveness (in most cases).
When you are surrounded by evil, you can't live a quality life, have good health, and in some severe cases, you can't even concentrate on anything. In the severe cases, you are just dealing with trauma and its symptoms, day in and day out.
All of my relationships are with empaths now. I like my humble life, the beauty that surrounds us, the ability to detect good and evil much more than I ever have, the ability to set boundaries with more conviction, the ability to put my energies into more noble causes instead of worrying where the next attack is coming from. All survivors worry, naturally, but you adopt the best ways of protecting yourself, and talking to people who are invested in your safety and healing, and letting go of those who just want to judge. The ability to detect the intentions of others has advanced in leaps and bounds for me too, and the ability to heal, and to help in healing others is better now too. Healing yourself and those around you cannot take place when your body and brain are filled with trauma symptoms.
So part of the journey is not just staying out of abusive relationships, but healing from trauma too. And for that I also suggest trauma therapy.
We all deserve to live in peace. Whether we get there through forgiveness or radical acceptance does not make a difference, really.
ADDENDUM
(why it was hard to write this post)
Writing this blog was hard for me because it brought these memories back at a time when I'm in a new phase. I would rather have not revisited the past. But I wrote it in part because my father suffered from the actions of the same people. He wouldn't have liked or wanted to be around any of them, knowing who they are, and I realized, to a large extent, that he shielded me from them much more than I ever knew. His presence may have even hid me from them even looking at me as a source.
The other reason I went through with this post, and even started to research and write this blog, is because he never understood that he was dealing with other people's narcissism. He thought all human beings sought redemption. No, they do not. Evil exists and is much more stubborn and fixed and becomes evermore hellish once it infects certain minds of human beings. If there are ever any more Robert Winnes who are born into the world who are living through what my father lived through, I have left this blog for them. If I had known what I know now, I think he could have healed.
I have largely healed because I searched in ways that neither of us knew how to do at the time. I won't be on my death-bed looking to someone for the answers the way he was. I know enough now that I don't need to research and write for my own sake any more, just for the sake of others.
If truth be known, I'd rather put my energy into healing arts, music and art, and spend my free time walking woods, fields and ocean paths, dancing in the moonlight on a snowy night, listening to the
Sons of Serendip,
watching
Jonna Jinton videos, falling in love with the harp,
living in Lothlorien types of environments, being enlightened, and living in a better world than in the past, full of empathy, compassion, wisdom and beauty, and full of people much like my father, only healed and leading the way.
FURTHER READING
5 Reasons Why Trauma Survivors Shouldn’t Forgive (Forgiveness can be psychologically and physically harmful to trauma survivors.) - by Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC for Psychology Today
Why Forgiveness Isn’t Required in Trauma Recovery (Imposing forgiveness can be problematic in trauma treatment.) - Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC for Psychology Today
Forgiveness is the Wrong Response to Trauma (We must encourage healing, not forgiveness.) - by Rosennab for Medium.com
Is Forgiveness Necessary for Trauma Recovery? Part 1 - by Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC, EMDR Certified Therapist for Symmetry Counseling
Is Forgiveness Necessary for Trauma Recovery? Part 2 - by Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC, EMDR Certified Therapist for Symmetry Counseling
35 Scripts for Trauma Survivors to Set Family Boundaries (A comprehensive cheat sheet.) - by Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC for Psychology Today
10 Things Not to Say to Trauma Survivors - by Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC
Why Family Members Take Sides in Sexual Abuse - by Hilary I. Lebow, and medically reviewed by Janet Brito, Ph.D., LCSW, CST for Psych Central
(note: this article tells how common it is to side with the abuser ... this one focuses on sexual abuse, but in all forms of abuse, it is not uncommon for people to side with abusers over victims, but I couldn't find any more convenient on-line articles. For those kinds of articles, you should look in periodicals)
Why Do People Often Take the Side of the Abuser? - by
Caroline Abbott, a ministry counselor, for her own website
Case Dismissed: Why domestic violence offenders often get away with it - by Sarah Buduson and Mark Ackerman for News Five, Cleveland, OH
RECOMMENDED: FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KNOW HOW INTERPERSONAL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BLEEDS OVER INTO OTHER CRIMES: Understanding intimate partner violence in context: social and community correlates of special and general victimization - by Maiju Tanskanen and Janne Kivivuori for Nordic Journal of Criminology and Taylor Francis Online (professional paper)
8 Tips for Forgiving Someone Who Hurt You (Forgiveness is the ability to regain peace when part of your life didn’t work out the way you wanted. Who doesn’t want that?) - by Charity Ferreira for Stanford Alumni Magazine
Forgiveness: Letting go of grudges and bitterness (When someone you care about hurts you, you can hold on to anger and resentment — or embrace forgiveness and move forward.) - by the Mayo Clinic Staff
How to Forgive Someone (Even If They Really Screwed Up) - by Crystal Raypole, Medically reviewed by Jennifer Litner, PhD, LMFT, CST for Healthline
Should You Forgive a Friend Who Has Hurt You Deeply? - by Sonya Matejko, medically reviewed by Janet Brito, Ph.D., LCSW, CST for Psych Central
Forgiveness: Your Health Depends on It - John Hopkins Medicine
How To Forgive Someone Who Has Hurt You: In 15 Steps - by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer for his own website
How to Forgive Someone Who Has Hurt You - a Wiki How article
When Is It OK Not to Forgive Someone? - by Brittany Loggins, fact checked by Aaron Johnson for Very Well Mind
The Power of Forgiveness: Why Revenge Hurts You More - by Wendy Hooker
The Difference Between Forgiveness vs. Acceptance - by Beth Elkassih for Made You Smile Back
6 Reasons Not to Forgive, Not Yet (When we advise people to forgive and move on, we may make things worse.) - by David Bedrick J.D., Dipl. PW for Psychology Today
How Do You Forgive Even When It Feels Impossible? (Part 1) (Forgiveness isn't something you do for the other person.) - by Andrea Brandt Ph.D. M.F.T. for Psychology Today
What It Takes to Fix a Broken Relationship (Co-rumination, moral repair, and forgiveness.) - by Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP for Psychology Today
How Do You Forgive Someone Who Abused You? (Forgiveness has many positive effects. But forgiving someone who abused you is a personal decision and one you make for your health — not your abuser’s.) - by Kurt Smith, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, AFC, medically reviewed by Kendra Kubala, PsyD for Psychology Today
Forgiving an Abuser – Should I? And if so, How? - Criminal Injuries Helpline
Is It Possible to Forgive Child Sexual Abuse? - by María Prieto-Ursúa for Department of Psychology, Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid, Madrid, Spain and for Frontiers in Psychology
