Battering vs. Struggling, Part I

Triangles have the power to awake us from a trance

By Julia Colwell

Is there a difference between battering and struggling – with your partner, with your past? Between creating more bruises to acknowledging old ones?

Between the turmoil of then to the superimposed chaos of now?

Out of Control
"Things have been bad between us lately, you know," the woman tells me. She is agitated, anxious, wringing her hands. "And yesterday, well they got out of hand. We were yelling at each other, and next thing I know, she’s shoving me. I couldn’t believe it! I wasn’t doing anything except trying to reason with her! She wouldn’t listen. I finally had to get out of there. When I left her, she was sobbing. I went and told my friends and they said I have to stay away from her because she’s a batterer and batterers never change. She’s just going to get worse and start hitting me and then who knows what she might do…"

'Expressive Violence'
As feminists, the lesbian community has a strong philosophical stance about domestic violence. Many of us cut our political teeth in the seventies and eighties, when society minimized physical and sexual abuse against women to the point of nearly totally denying its reality. (In graduate school in the early eighties, I was actually taught that incest was rare to non-existent.)

Lesbians were at the forefront of creating and staffing safehouses and working to enact laws and policies that provided much-needed legislation in empowering victims of domestic violence.

Yet, as with any pendulum, the far swing of this one might tip the need for balance. At this point, the conventional wisdom in the lesbian community is that, if a conflict escalates into verbal or physical abuse, there are two roles, the "batterer" and the "victim." Once the behaviors of abuse occur, the next action is clear: the victim must be removed to safety and kept away from the batterer, who must either just stay away from the victim, or, with lots of anger management training or other intervention, might someday be rehabilitated.

My experience as a therapist (and partner in a long-term relationship) says that the picture is much more complicated. In fact, this old model of victim/perpetrator can actually interfere with couples’ ability to move beyond power struggles.

Because I imagine this to be a very dicey area, I’d like to take some time to define terms. Looking at domestic violence (or "intimate relationship violence," as author James Kline describes it), there are actually two types that get folded into the global term.

"Instrumental violence," that is, planned, premeditated intimidation and violence that is used to control another, is what we typically think of as battering.

However, there is another category that appears to be much more common. That is "expressive violence," and it occurs when someone is in a highly reactive state. It is impulsive and unpredictable.

Because intimate relationship violence research has not typically separated these two categories, it is unclear what proportion of violent events in intimate relationships can be classified as one type or the other. But I have puzzled for years over the research that has found that gays and lesbians have the same rates of violence in our relationships as heterosexuals. I know that I’m not apt to see many of these relationships in my practice, but I imagine that there would be some sign of them. What I do hear about, however, are the incidents that qualify as expressive violence.

It is quite common for arguments to escalate to the point where both people are  triggered into reactive states. In such a state, people say and do things they would never do if they were calm. People tend to be shocked to find this aspect of themselves or their partners emerging in intimate relationships, but the seeds of this were planted in their bodies long ago in their family environment.

Aching bodies

Many of us were raised in families in which it was extremely important to learn how to argue a point, to be right, to not give in, to put up a fight. In fact, when I am interviewing a couple about how they fight, I am the most interested in the sibling history of each. It is with our siblings that we typically have our most intense experiences of conflict. Often, out of earshot of parents (or many times, within), there are no rules of fair fighting. Ridicule, physical violence (where else in our culture do we accept daily "slugging," shoving and hitting to occur as if it is natural?), and verbal assault are part and parcel of siblings dealing with each other. Additionally, it is certainly not uncommon for parents to use shaming, ridicule and threats of (or actual) physical violence in interactions with their children. These experiences stay in our bodies, waiting to re-emerge when the right cues occur: intimacy, home, power struggle, conflict.

The focus, then, must be on learning what to do with these reactions that are lying in wait. Like a tiger hiding in the bushes, ready to leap out and attack when provoked, we need to find a way to tame our fight or flight impulses that get triggered when we perceive ourselves to be under threat. There is great power to create or destroy within these impulses; they lay to waste many relationships.

The main problem with using the old victim/batterer model to explain every encounter that spirals out of control is that the goal becomes labeling, sorting out "victim" from "perp."  

Once we've placed people into these either/or boxes, a great deal of social support is often available for the "victim." But for the "batterer" a great stigma arises, particularly within the lesbian community.

The result is that the "batterer" is thrown into a morass of such shame that she can’t objectively look at her behaviors or why she was triggered. And the "victim" probably also fails to see how she and her own past contributed to the escalation and endures another kind of shame.

From observing and hearing about hundreds of interactions between people, I strongly believe that, with nearly all episodes of expressive violence, both people share full responsibility.

This is actually good news. If both people can see how they contributed, each is equally empowered to change the future.

So, what would I say to this client? I would talk to her about how our bodies react physiologically to stress. I'd encourage her to adopt a sense of responsibility (rather than assign blame); that is, to claim her power to come through every interaction safely and   effectively create change (rather than figure out who is "causing the problem").

In Part II of "Battering vs. Struggling" I will look at ways to cope when one is  triggered into a reactive state. I will also explain how to release emotions that act as flashpoints in future intimate relationships.