Faith, Hope, Love, and Science Sustain Us Through a Shame Darkened March of History

• Responses to First Learning about Affect Theory by Jim Duffy a.k.a. J.C.D., 2/28/97
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    • Comment by Rich Kuyper, 3/25/97
      
      

Rich, I want to tell you that I felt considerable enjoyment learning that my sharing some of what I know from reading Wispe and others of a similar outlook has provided you with one beacon of light. Shining all the light we can on the grim and terrible subject of DV is a helpful remedy for removing some of the immense amount of dark shame surrounding it. I would like to suggest another item of possible interest having to do with your observation that the legal system may be moving in the direction of understanding compulsive abusiveness as a malady (at least in the case of female abusers) and thus a mitigating consideration in legal proceedings.

In no way do I disagree with you that it is easier to see the source of distress in the abused wife (whose experiences of traumatic mistreatment at the hands of an abusive spouse are relatively recent and thus easier to see and connect causally to her other-attack). Moreover, it is easier to sympathize with her plight because her suffering and her consciousness of it are often easier for her to express and for others to observe; thus she behaves in a way that makes others’ sympathy possible.

I would simply like to add another consideration in discussing the broad subject of DV, a consideration that I hope is especially apt for this forum insofar it seems to be a forum about shame as much as about Affect Theory. (I invite Don to correct me if I misunderstand the purpose of this forum. I worry about this a little because I wonder if my earlier postings may be regarded as having moved too tendentiously away from Affect Theory itself.) Thus my additional item: the myth of male power and male abusiveness.

There is a cultural pathology with very sturdy, deep roots that would have us believe that being a man is itself a condition rendering us suspects as likely abusers. If you have not read Waarren Farrell’s masterpiece “The Myth of Male Power,” you are fortunate, because one of the most interesting, moving, sad, and shame-lifting experiences may yet await you. This book is one of a handful that has been life-transformative for me.

Are men the oppressor gender? I don’t think so. Are men oppressed, unappreciated, shamed for being male, exploited, and expected to be invisibly altruistic to the point of heroic bodily self-sacrifice? Yes, often. It seems to me, Rich, that it is not only the case that the perpetrator/victim mentality obfuscates and distorts our understanding of abusive human relationships;. although I certainly agree that this mentality is a huge part of the problem in understanding DV. There is, in addition, more obfuscation, mistaken myth-making, benighted ignorance, and severe gender-wide shaming associated with the underlying assumption that men are usually perpetrators while women are victims.

Let’s consider circumcision as a possible paradigm for abuse of males. In the United States about 60% of men have been circumcised. Until very recently, this procedure was routinely conducted on infants without the benefit of anesthesia. Sometimes it still is, according to my sources. Men circumcised as babies without anesthesia were introduced to a quite severe SAR (stimulus-affect-response) scene in which sexual arousal and violence first met. (Babies feel and remember pain. See web site: http://www.net-connect.net/~jspeyrer/babies.htm )

What are we to make of this male trauma ritual? To me this torturous pain-anguish-violence-sex ritual is paradigmatic of so much of what is wrong with our culture’s approach to understanding the roots to violence whenever the emphasis in placed on males being seen as predominantly perpetrators. Thus, there is here in circumcision without anesthesia to nonconsenting infant boys: (a) ignorance about human pain physiology (paradigmatic of cultural ignorance of what is means to be a human being needing soothing and love and sympathy whether male or female), (b) a willingness to inflict a ritual of excruciating pain on little boy babies right at the core of their sexual being (paradigmatic of many pain-distress rituals for males that define “being a real man”), (c) a denial of one’s empathic resonance to the distress and pain of the baby boy (paradigmatic of the attitude that boys are supposed to be brave and take it like a man--so let’s not let them think we notice their suffering), (d) a silence on the whole subject of how men/boys might be traumatized by this ritual (paradigmatic of the “don’t cry” norms for males and a ubiquitous “don’t talk about how men are mistreated” attitude) , and (e) a widespread amused trivialization of the possible significance of traumatic infant circumcision both as a trauma in itself and as an example of how boys are mistreated with impunity if not self-righteous pride (paradigmatic of the attitude of wanting to put men’s issues into the category of silly whining).

But, amazingly, Warren Farrell has so many, many, more examples of the same sort of paradigm that one can be left, as I was, weeping for all of us men. This one book by Warren Farrell was probably the most shame liberating experience I have yet experienced. (For more information of the trauma of circumcision, you may wish to check out the following web sites: http://www.cirp.org/CIRP/pages/reviews/goldman/ht.html and http://www.birthpsychology.com/violence/baker.html and http://www.cirp.org/CIRP/ )

I hope I am not going too far afield from your interest, Rich, in DV and its treatment. My point in elaborating on all of this is to encourage you as you encounter people who would shame or criticize you for wanting to seek a humane approach to understanding the sources of DV. Your approach is not only unworthy of shame because it is in fact humane, it also happens to be scientific through and through. The science of human behavior is a search for causes, and we are especially eager to find causes of behavior that is as distressingly symptomatic and socially disruptive as is DV. Just finding so-called perpetrators and causing them lots of distress by “punishing them” is not a search for causes or solutions unless one thinks of locking them all up and throwing the key away as a solution. That’s quite expensive and won’t work anyhow unless they’re locked up for life! And it probably won’t help us help other yet-to-be “perpetrators.” (Some few people, of course, are so badly damaged that we may have no recourse but to protect ourselves from them by locking them up.) Psychological science is far enough along that we are doing more than guessing when we look to shame-attack-other or trauma-repetition explanations for identifying causes.

We are making progress in slowing moving away from abuse completely as a respectably intelligent way to solve problems. But progress is agonizingly slow. Along these lines I am reminded of something Reinhold Niebuhr wrote; it’s something I keep on my wall. It’s a quote that is good for social-change agents to recall when needing comfort in moments of grim discouragement. He said: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.” To see how much and just how the repetition of trauma has been slowly, slowly overcome, century by century, over the long haul of history, check out The History of Child Abuse, an essay by Lloyd deMause, founder of the Journal of Psychohistory and renown authority on the history of childhood. This essay is accessible from my web site at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/3162.

The propensity to reinflict childhood trauma on others as an adult is done in many ways by many persons in society. Chauncey, when I can finally purchase his book, is, I expect, going to show me how many ways authorities at one’s work reinflict on workers their childhood (and other) shame, pain, and distress traumas. At the personal level in close relationships where DV is found, reinflictions of one’s earlier traumas are not socially or legally accepted, especially not if the one delivering physical blows is male and the recipient is female. If a child receives the blows, social indignation is less strong, unless the blows cause noticeable injury and unless the blows are carried out in one of many socially-approved boy-abuse rituals such as football. There are no abuse-rituals encouraging girls to receive physical blows (to be a “real woman”), much less blows that cause injury. It is socially acceptable to reinflict childhood traumas on “the enemy” in war and on other “enemies”” such as criminals and other “shame-deserving perpetrators.” I do not want to sound as if I am trying to ridicule the legitimacy of the motive for vengeance. Vengeance is a motive that helps make the world socially just and is in fact the purpose of the legal system, pontificating claims of vengeance being a primitive motive among some legal and other professionals notwithstanding. But a humane, enlightened, scientifically-informed system of vengeance such as Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming (he may object to the term ‘vengeance” in reference to his work, I’m not sure) is long overdue given our present level of knowledge about human behavior and the failure of most present and past social arrangements for dealing with persons stuck at the “attack-other” mode of coping with their shame. Thus, enlightened vengeance combined with skillful, comprehensive sympathy can lead to some helpful solutions to the attack-other problematic way of coping with shame.

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