yeah

The partner believed that if she were better able to express herself and to explain what she meant, her mate wouldn’t be angered by her question or thought.

The partner believed that if she didn’t have some inexplicable problem in perception, she wouldn’t take things in “the wrong way,” as she was told she did.

The partner believed that if she weren’t inadequate in some way (“taking it wrong and making a big deal out of nothing”) she wouldn’t feel so much pain and hurt.

The partner believed that just as she was sincere and caring, the man who said he loved her was also.

The partner believed her mate was the same at work and/or with his friends and they didn’t make him mad and they had no complaints, so there must be something wrong with her.

The partner believed that she was suffering needlessly because of some lack or flaw. This lack or flaw was not particularly defined but was instead a general sense of inadequacy derived from countless accusations.

Interestingly, when a verbal abuser is berating his partner, he may actually be describing himself. One partner quoted her mate’s accusations thus: “You take things too seriously. You jump to conclusions. And you see everything in the worst possible light.” Actually, the partners of verbal abusers consistently seem to overlook the seriousness of their own suffering and to hesitate to reach any conclusions. They are almost universally optimistic, looking for the best — seeing everything in the best possible light.

The partner believed that as soon as her mate understood that angry blasts or sarcastic put-downs really hurt her, he would stop. She reasoned that she just hadn’t found a way to explain to him how much some of the things he said bothered her.

The partner believed that the way her mate was was the way men are and that she just wasn’t able to understand him the way other women understood their mates.

As long as the partner does not understand the dynamics of the relationship, she does not know what to do or what is happening to her.

Many partners try to improve communication. The partner’s attempts to enhance the relationship, improve communication, and find some happiness all lead to difficulties.

The more the partner shares her hopes and fears with the abuser, hoping for acceptance and intimacy, the more the abuser views her openness as weakness; the more superior he feels; the colder he becomes, and the more Power Over he feels.

The more the partner shares her interests and goals, the more the abuser introduces a situation or judgment which throws her off balance, diverts her from them, and reestablishes his control.

The more the partner brings up topics and attempts to engage the abuser in conversation, the more the abuser withholds, entertained by her attention and basking in the power he feels in getting it.

The more the partner accomplishes, believing the abuser will be happy for her, the more the abuser trivializes and diminishes her efforts in order to be one-up and dominant.

The more the partner lets go of her hope for acceptance and intimacy with the abuser and relies on friends for companionship, the more angry and hostile the abuser becomes.

These paradoxes demonstrate how all attempts the partner makes to grow, to be whole, and to improve the relationship bring her pain and confusion.”]

A discussion of values can be contentious if we insist that everyone involved in a group share the whole values constellation. It can be destructive if we demonize those who don’t share our own values. So one question to ask is: “Is this value core to our work together?” If we’re organizing a peace rally together, I don’t care whether you clean your bathroom or do your dishes after every meal. But if we’re planning to live together, your level of tolerance for clutter becomes much important than your position on the proposed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Collaborative groups remain dynamic and alive when they respect diversity of beliefs and opinions as well as other forms of diversity. Yet we must also set the core values that define the group. Some kinds of diversity are not meant to work together: if our goal is to ban the growing of genetically engineered crops in our county, we’re not going to work well with Monsanto. Yet we should also beware of drawing to tight a circle. If everyone in our group has to be a vegan, polyamorous, non-gender-specific advocate for peace, we’re going to lose. “]

With a more scientific understanding of the neurobiology of trauma, traumatic memory can now be understood as a highly complex phenomenon. How each individual encodes memories of the traumatic past is unique and different, but what each has in common is the way in which memory is fragmented and unintegrated. Some trauma survivors have more explicit memories for events; some have little to none. All have a host of implicit memories, including trauma-related emotions, autonomic arousal responses, muscle and body memories, cognitive distortions, and visceral memories, as well as tactile-olfactory-visual and auditory memories.

And to a greater or lesser degree, all “remember” via trauma-related procedural or conditioned learning (Grigsby & Stevens, 2000), too. The procedural memory system is a subset of implicit or nonverbal memory that encodes function, action, and habit: that is, riding a bike, driving a car, social behavior like shaking hands or smiling on greeting others, and well-learned abilities from playing the piano to playing golf or tennis. Survival “habits” are also encoded as procedurally learned behavior—for example, tendencies to automatically disconnect from strong emotion or to feel overwhelmed by it, difficulty making eye contact, need for a certain physical proximity or distance from others, withdrawal or isolation, difficulty asking for help or disclosing feelings and personal information, a tendency to say “too much” or “too little,” phobias of emotions or emotional expression, avoidance of having one’s back to others or to doors and windows, habits of freezing, fighting or fleeing in response to stress or triggers.

To the extent that the individual has difficulty identifying implicit emotional, physical, or procedural memories as “memory,” reality-testing can become compromised, creating a kind of self-triggering. When particular people or situations are experienced as unsafe, there is a tendency for them to become “demonized,” that is, to become associated with danger or menace. Once the trigger is also a trigger, the body responds to it as a danger signal in its own right; the prefrontal cortex shuts down; and there is no witnessing brain to discriminate memory from present reality. Gillian’s fear of helping professionals illustrates how innocuous or even positive stimuli can become associated with a sense of threat and thereafter experienced as dangerous. It also demonstrates that if the implicit memories and trauma responses are associated with a child part, reality-testing will be even more challenging because a child part’s cognitive style, limited by the age or developmental stage of that part, is likely to be more concrete.

Gillian developed a fear of therapy and therapists in her early teens: as the family’s identified patient, she was sent to one therapist after another to be “fixed.” None of them “got” what her behavior was communicating about her mother’s alcoholism or her brother’s abuse and focused on strengthening her relationship with her family by getting her to be more compliant. “Not being understood,” “not being heard,” or “no one getting it” are all very powerful triggers for traumatized individuals. Without realizing it, the therapists’ automatic assumption that this was a healthy but overly permissive family with a challenging child made them triggering stimuli and therefore dangerous. Isolated from her peers, the “best friend” of her fragile mother, dependent on her father’s financial assistance, and triggered by the helping professionals, Gillian regarded therapy as a dangerous place she had to navigate rather than as a source of help and safety. Had she known that her fear was a communication from a young child part that longed for help but was triggered by the failure of former therapists to “believe her,” Gillian would have been able to make a connection between the past and present. She might even have felt protective of this little girl and tried to stand up for “her.” She might have been able to reassure the child that, even if no one else did, Gillian believed her unquestionably. Gillian knew what had happened. She might even have been able to tell the little girl that not being understood or believed was hurtful but it wasn’t dangerous—as long as she was in Gillian’s care.

For trauma treatment to be effective, no matter what methods we employ, survivors have to be able to integrate past and present. Concretely, this step requires education: about what traumatic memory is and is not, about triggers and triggering stimuli, about learning to accurately label triggered states (“this is a feeling memory”—“a body memory”), and cultivating the ability to trust that triggered states “tell the story” of the past without the necessity to either recall or avoid recalling specific incidents. When the therapist can also help clients connect implicit memory states to young parts of the self, it is easier to address them as a record of old dangers instead of signs of current threat. Also, when the triggered sensations, emotions, and images are reframed as “the child part’s feelings,” clients are better able to tolerate their intensity. Feeling compassion or protectiveness for younger selves also helps the clients to feel their “big-ness,” to appreciate the physical size differences, the adult capabilities and resources, and the greater respect which individuals are accorded as adults and the greater safety it enables them to count on.”]

strange anatomy - 15" × 22", monotype with pencil

[“THE INVISIBLE BUTCH, OR THE UNREPRESENTABLE BODY

I go back, now, to the question that’s been a silent but present one throughout most of this article. On the cultural landscape of lesbianism, in the realm of representation, where is the butch? Given the above evidence, it’s clear she remains on the margins, rarely seen. Why? Perhaps most obviously because like the butch, unlike the femme, is not consumable; her relative invisibility on the cultural landscape has to do with her perceived (un)attractiveness. Sue O'Sullivan points out that the butch is “the caricature lesbian whipping girl, the one who serves as the repository of mainstream hatred and fear of feminism’s ‘excesses’…. She is ‘mannish’ but not at all stylish and at the same time she is definitely a woman. Therefore she has to be ugly— in other words butch.” Or, as Sherrie Inness, nicely encapsulating this point, maintains: “Butches fail to fulfill heterosexual ideas about what is attractive and sexually appealing in women.” In other words, the butch, a woman marked more by conventional masculine characteristics than feminine ones, is considered “ugly.” And given the configurations of our mainstream cultural landscape, there is little room for those deemed unattractive. In fact, such supposed unattractiveness is an affront to an image-based culture; such as O'Sullivan contends, “the so-called loony, ugly (read not stereotypically feminine) lesbian, increasingly designated as an arbiter of political correctness, remains a figure for derision and hatred.”

But perhaps such "derision and hatred” towards the butch, and her invisibility on the mainstream cultural landscape, is not so simply explained. Another characteristic attributed to the butch that conceivably marks her as unrepresentable is her socioeconomic status. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Lillian Faderman points out that from the 1920s through the 1960s, the butch-femme pair was usually associated with the working class. Indeed, one need only read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues to get an idea of the type of blue-collar jobs the “stone butches” of the 1950s and 1960s held, working primarily on docks and in factories. I would assert that this connection between the butch and her working-class status further contributes to her mainstream undesirability. Look for a moment at the following description of butch-femme relations, as described in a 1993 article in New York magazine:

“It was very different when I came out in Texas,” says Jean Sidebottom, the editor and publisher of Sappho’s Isle, the tri-state lesbian newspaper. “That bulldyke world was very much the scene I first came out into. The first lesbian bar I ever walked into, in Houston, was owned by a woman called Papa Bear. She was mildly obese, with short-cropped, masculine, stone-butch hair. She smoked cigarettes and wore T-shirts and blue-jeans— she had a key chain on her belt loop and a knife in her boot. Her girlfriend was a stripper. There was a certain sleaziness associated with it that I somehow could never accept. It gave you a feeling of being less than a real person.” (Emphasis mine)