You Do Not Have To Be Hit To Experience Domestic Violence

[joreth]

I wish this was taught alongside the messages not to allow someone to hit you.

When I was a kid, I was bullied.  I had no lessons in how to deal with strong emotions.  So my emotions exploded outwards in fits of physical rage.  I broke a lot of shit.  My parents would get mad at me for being so destructive, of course, but there were no resources for telling me how *not* to be destructive when my feelings were just too big for my body.

I learned to swallow my rage at being bullied and it turned inward instead, towards self-harm, depression, anorexia, and suicidal thoughts.  As an adult, I continue to battle explosive rage and depression.  The physical violence, however, seems to have been pretty well taken care of with the suicidal depression and the apathy that it manifests as, which I haven't been able to shake in the last 5 years.

I'm basically now that lab rat who is so used to a horrible existence that I have no motivation to change it even when given opportunity, because I don't believe it will really change.

When I was a teen, I was engaged to someone who damaged property every time he got jealous.  I was absolutely confident he would never hit *me*, and, to be fair, I still am.  But this was not a healthy dynamic whether he ever hit me or not.

So when I got engaged a second time a few years later to someone who threatened to break my collectible figurines if I dared to sleep on the couch after arguing all night about him sexually assaulting me while I was trying to sleep, it took longer than it should have for me to figure out this was abusive.

As in, I eventually managed to leave him (with most of my possessions intact), leave the state, and grow into middle age before I learned that this also counted as "abuse".  I left him because I thought he was a jerk, not because I recognized what he was doing as abuse.

Abuse, according to all the after-school specials, was someone hitting me. I have never been hit by anyone other than my parents, and even then it was rarely and always followed by extreme remorse.  Breaking objects was just what people did when they got mad.  We even have pop songs about it.  Some people enshrine it in their ethnicity's culture.  It's normalized.

My rage as a kid was the result of long-term abuse from my peers.  I had no other way to process it because I was not given the tools necessary to either empower myself to escape the bullying nor to manage my emotions.  It was never about showing my power over someone else, it was about being *powerless*.  I expressed my property destruction in private, usually on my own things.  My rage was not intimidating, it was impotent.

And when I realized it was hurting my family to see me be so destructive (even if it was my own possessions I was breaking) as well as hurting me because it was my own stuff I was destroying, I turned that rage inward so that my family would suffer even fewer effects of my rage and I'd stop losing possessions.  As an adult, I express my rage with hurtful words on the internet.  But the closer a person is to me, emotionally, the less hurtful my methods of dealing with them are.  I save my rage for the relative safety of the internet.

But an abuser saves his rage for only those *closest* to them.  While most people abuse because they feel fear and insecurity, their abuse is intended to *take back* the control that they feel they are owed.  It is not an expression, a venting, of an already-lost control, the way my rage is.  Their rage is *the tool* they use to gain control back.

They might genuinely be hurting, as I was, but their hurt comes from the loss (or fear of the loss) of control over you, whereas mine comes from the loss of control over myself to someone else.

I rage because I keep having my autonomy taken from me.  Abusers rage because they keep having their toys taken away from them.  Neither are healthy, but only one is abuse.

When people rage, they want you to see how much they are feeling.  When someone's rage is to show you that they have the potential and the desire to hurt you because you are not allowing them to control you, that's abuse.  That's violence.

I wish I had known the different kinds of rage, the different expressions of fear and pain, and the different ways that control is exerted when I was younger.  I would have made different choices.  I also wish there had been resources for managing emotions.  It would have helped both with the crushing pain of being bullied AND with the crushing anger that leads to bullying, which later leads to misogyny and racism and acts of terror and abuse.

Everyone wants to feel sympathetic towards the stories of mass shooters who were supposedly bullied as kids, as if being bullied turns us into sociopathic killers.  It doesn't.  But emotions that are too big to handle on our own does turn us into a wide variety of monsters, depending on what those emotions are and where they come from.

Since we don't have those resources, the best we can do is recognize that these emotions (and their expressions) in particular are violent, abusive, toxic, and learn how to avoid and escape from them.  When someone breaks your stuff and slams doors and furniture, it's a message to you of their anger and of how much they want to hurt you.  It's meant to show you how bad things *could be* if you don't manage their emotions for them right now.

I scream at people to leave me alone.  Abusers intimidate people into staying put.  It's not enough to just not allow someone to hit you.  They have to not intimidate you by violence *near* you too.  Because violence *near* you, in your direction, is still violence *at* you.