Sympathy for the Devil

• Responses to First Learning about Affect Theory by Jim Duffy a.k.a. J.C.D., 2/28/97
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    • What is Sympathy? Parts I, II, III, and IV by Jim Duffy, 3/21/97
      
      

I am intrigued by this discussion of sympathy, particularly the passage about “why it is sometimes difficult to feel sympathy for abusive persons”. As someone who has worked with domestic violence (DV) offenders for several years, I have long ruminated over society’s conceptualization of DV and the treatment approaches that flow out of those conceptualizations. You wrote:

Blinded by their shame and their responding in the “attack other” mode, abusive persons often behave and speak as if they were not suffering--but, of course, they are. And they falsely believe--and persuade naive others to falsely believe--that they are free to choose to feel and behave however they wish while they are actually stuck in a state of compulsive abusiveness.

This passage seems to accurately describe a significant proportion of the abusive men with whom I have worked, particularly those who gravitate toward the sociopathic end of the continuum. Of course, the complement to compulsive abusiveness is ‘compulsive vulnerability' and, as has been discussed previously on this forum and elsewhere, when the ‘attack other’ and the ‘attack self‘ types find each other, the ‘match made in hell‘ often follows.

Consistent with your observations, society, understandably, finds it considerably easier to sympathize with the compulsively vulnerable than with the compulsively abusive. Indeed, current socio-political frames of reference for domestic violence rather disavow the concept of compulsive abusiveness and tend to frame DV as the conscious excercise of power and control within a system of gender-based oppression. (Actually, there is also considerable denial, within the more militant victim advocacy movement, of compulsive vulnerability, since this is tantamount to ‘blaming the victim’). Naturally, this disavowal of the concept of compulsive abusiveness broadly influences offender treatment along pathways that hardly encourage ‘sympathy for the devil’, i.e. the abuser. Historically, in the field of DV offender treatment, sympathizing with the abuser has been widely shamed as colluding with the abuser (at the expense of the victim). In this view, the space between victim and abuser is a great moral gulf; the proper target of our sympathy is the victim and the proper target for our righteous anger is the abuser. Compulsive common ground is ignored if not actively denied.

Let me assume, for a moment, the position of ‘devil’s’ advocate and ask you to share your view of the treatment implications for abusive persons given your belief in their ‘stuckness’ and the importance of sympathy in the treatment setting.

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