Cathey / Goodfriend / Ph.D. Voices of Hope Breaking the Silence of Relationship Violence

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-4578-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 358 Seiten

In this visionary and powerful work, Pamela Lassiter Cathey and Dr. Wind Goodfriend have combined the hopeful stories of women and men who have experienced domestic violence, dating violence, and child abuse with the theoretical constructs of narrative therapy and professional trauma advocacy to create a book that will change lives. The narrative in Part One reveal the courageous voices of ten women and men who have experienced relationship violence, and have emerged on the other side as stronger and more compassionate human beings. And though the violence is horrific, the hope these writers communicate as they describe how they moved through victimization and survivorship to become the heroes of their own stories reminds all of us that even the most devastating of life's experiences can result in goodness and race. The professional guide in Part Two offers practical suggestions for how each of us can get involved individually and collectively to respond to relationship violence in the present, and to prevent it from happening in the future. This section also includes an overview of narrative therapy protocols for trauma service professionals who are interested in supporting victims and survivors in further integrating their experiences and healing more completely. Voices of Hope Breaking the Silence of Relationship Violence elegantly blends the personal with the political, the practical with the theoretical, the reality of where we are today with an optimistic vision for the future. The end result is a book that will ignite hope in those who have experienced violent relationships, in the friends and family who want to help, and in the professionals who offer support in healing from the trauma. 'We may not always have a choice as to what we experience, but we always have a choice in regard to how those experiences shape who we are.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cathey, Pamela Lassiter

Goodfriend, Wind

Ph.D.,

Leseproben

– CHAPTER ONE – Finding Our Voices I was living in Las Vegas at the time, working for a client who needed an interim VP, and had just ended a relationship with a man who had been emotionally, physically, and sexually violent from the beginning. I wish that I could say that I felt frightened, ashamed, and confused. I didn’t. The truth is that I didn’t feel anything. I was still so numb from what had happened and worked a lot to distract myself from the pain I wasn’t ready to feel. The company with which I was contracted needed to raise money on a private placement offering, and for months I flew back and forth between Las Vegas and Manhattan. I always left late in the day on those trips so I could fly all night and land in New York the next morning in time to attend early meetings. On those long red-eye flights, I found myself drawn to a writing project I had been forced to abandon months before when I fled the relationship. It was a novel, a coming of age story about a girl and the two boys she grew up with on a horse ranch just outside of Sun Valley. The original plot had nothing to do with relationship violence, but during those long flights, as I sat there typing away in the dark, something interesting happened: My protagonist Andy, who by that point in the story had become an adult, married one of those brothers and her marriage turned violent. When this new twist came up on the page I knew that my unconscious was dealing with the violence in my own life through the fiction, and there was a part of me that did not want to confront it. The story, however, had taken on a life of its own, and the writer in me couldn’t help but follow. So one night when I was once again headed East, I found myself writing a conversation between Andy and her father Grady. She was talking about how ashamed she felt that she had stayed for so long in an abusive marriage. Her father listened quietly and then, in response, told her a story: Grady looked up and said, “You know Andy, if you take a live frog and drop it into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out and save itself. But,” he said, reaching up to turn her face toward him, “if you take that same frog and drop it in a pot of cold water, and slowly turn up the heat until the water is boiling, that frog’ll die. You were just like that. You didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.” As the words came up on the screen I stopped typing, closed the computer, and sat there thinking back over the relationship. I tried to remember the first time he said something cruel, threatened me, wrenched my legs apart in the dark, or knocked me off of my feet. And as I sat there on that plane, the memories I had so studiously avoided for months slowly began to trickle forth, and I found myself sitting in the audience of my own life watching a woman I barely recognized do things I couldn’t imagine doing, and I struggled to make sense of a timeline that was random and confused, dialogue that was splotchy and disjointed, images that moved in and out of focus. It felt like watching a movie of someone else’s life, and it took a long time that night to think my way through what had happened. By the time we landed I was acutely aware of how divorced I had become from my own story, how being in that relationship had anesthetized me so completely that at some point I had stopped living my own life, and had started watching myself live a life that was unimaginable. And as awful as that realization was, there was a flicker of hope around it: Maybe I wasn’t fatally flawed. Maybe getting into that violent relationship and staying in it hadn’t entirely been my fault. Maybe there was a way to sort through those blurry images and disordered details and once again create a life that made sense and had meaning. I don’t remember the rest of that trip. I don’t remember the meetings I attended or what I accomplished for my client, which, given my state of mind, probably wasn’t much. What I do remember is coming home and pulling up the Clark County business directory on my computer and looking for “shelter” and “domestic violence” and making phone calls; and finally, after a fair amount of heel dragging, I started attending a battered women’s group at a shelter in North Las Vegas. The group was colorful and diverse. Some of us were there voluntarily and others were court ordered. Some of us drove up in Mercedes, and others stole change from our husbands’ pockets in the middle of the night for months to get enough bus fare to get to the shelter. All of us were hurting and confused. In classic Las Vegas surreality, the leggy facilitator of the group was working toward a Masters Degree in social work and spent her days working with battered women and her nights dancing in one of the casino revues. There was a script each of us had to follow at the beginning of each session: “Hi, I’m Pamela and I’m a battered girlfriend/wife/mother. I left my abuser X months ago.” We then had to describe one incident of violence. I hated those introductions. I hated saying that I was battered. I hated feeling like a victim, but I kept going, and every week I listened to those stories and sat in my chair with tears running down my face and was amazed at how we could finish one another’s sentences. It didn’t matter what our background was; we all knew what the abuser was going to say and do, and we knew what the victim was going to say and do in response. This intrigued me. If the dynamics of relationship violence were this common, this formulaic, why hadn’t we been taught how to protect ourselves from it? In junior high, high school and college we had endured the drug and alcohol talk, the abstinence talk, the sexually transmitted disease talk. Why hadn’t someone made us endure the relationship violence talk? I kept thinking that if someone had taught us how to recognize the early warning signs of violence that we might have been able to make changes before the abuse became so entrenched and debilitating, before the pot, so to speak, began to boil. I became mildly obsessed with this thought. Well, actually, I was more than mildly obsessed; I became completely obsessed and started coming home after each group session and writing copious notes about patterns and parallels. I dusted off my novice college research skills and started spending time in the UNLV library searching for articles and books about the dynamics of violent trauma and the warning signs of relationship violence. My academic pursuits were balanced by my own painful, personal therapy as I began sorting through the past, trying to create order out of chaos. And what helped most during this process was, once again, my writing. By that time, I had stopped writing about Andy’s experiences and had started writing about mine. It still felt like fiction in my head, and there were times when I tried to convince myself that maybe it hadn’t really happened. When that wasn’t possible, I tried to talk myself into believing that it hadn’t really been all that bad. My heart, however, knew the truth and with the help of the therapist, the facilitator, and the women I came to think of as sisters in that group, slowly I confronted what had been my own story. When I first started attending the group, I felt like I was stepping into a cold, dark tunnel that was filled with terror, nightmares plagued by men trying to kill me with knives, unpredictable moments in the car when I would look up and suddenly feel my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, humiliating screams at the office when a colleague would walk up behind me and say something before I knew he was there. In the early months of the work, I kept telling myself that I just had to keep stepping forward and feeling my way along the walls of that tunnel, and sooner or later a light would appear and I would find my way out. The group, thankfully, dragged me out of that cold, dark place and gave me a new metaphor. Eventually I realized that healing wasn’t a linear process wherein I would walk from Point A to Point B and then it would be over. Instead, healing was an onion that was going to peel away a layer at a time as I remembered and felt for the first time what it was like to have someone I loved and trusted try to destroy me; and every time a new layer came away, I cried until it felt like my eyes were going to shrivel up and drop out of their sockets. The onion theory wasn’t comforting or comfortable. It was, however, accurate, and slowly I realized that feeling was actually a good thing. The numbness I had experienced all of those years hadn’t discriminated; it had blocked out not just the pain, but also the joy, and for the first time in a long time I had moments when one of those layers fell away and I genuinely felt happy. And so I kept writing and talking and peeling and sobbing and it was really hard; and as hard as it was, I couldn’t stop because the hope that had been ignited that night, when Grady told Andy his frog story, had burst into flames. I found myself charged with the thought that the violence I had experienced all those years might serve a purpose. The strategist in me knew instinctively that there was a way to teach others how to recognize the early warning signs of a violent relationship so they could prevent what had happened to all of us in that group from happening to them. Eventually, I...