Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

When we can’t move forward and the gap widens, many of us become paralyzed. The breach between the real self and the imagined self is unbearable, and the reality of our lives becomes unacceptable, undoable, and we become stuck: we can’t move out of our parents’ house, we can’t take a job that compromises our entitlement, we can’t actually fulfill our dreams and, finally, we can’t adjust those dreams.

African-Americans are assumed to have slavery pasts and so become (correctly or incorrectly) its reminder to the world. But white people are assumed not to have slavery pasts, and so those of us who do, pass incognito.

As a result, slavery becomes something that was done to Black people by no one.

For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent “right” not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation; that whatever is keeping them together is not flexible.

Perhaps because Supremacy in some produces Trauma in others, they can become mirror images.

and they know it is possible.

one key difference in the projection and anxiety of supremacy behavior vs traumatized behavior is that what feels to the supremacist as a “right” often feels to the traumatized as “shame.”

The offering of honest information can be a test to see what it is like to tell the truth, to see if real experience will be met with rejection. But I find that if the information is received with consequential recognition, i.e., “Now that we know this, our relationship is elevated,” there is a possibility of a backlash, because that means the experience is real; the awful thing is no longer a repressed secret but a recognized reality.

The recognition itself is now called a harm.

Both teams felt that people who come at conflict from guilt approach it very differently than people who come at it from shame. In fact, both studies found that people who come from guilt very much want to negotiate, are able to apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. People coming from shame, on the other hand, direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party.

people who feel guilt experience less emotional stress and anxiety than those who feel shame.

guilty people can therefore focus more on the implications of their o...

It is commonly understood and a frequent social trope in popular culture and casual discourse that as an adult, normative conflict can be very frightening for someone who is already traumatized and has not been in a recovery process long enough to be able to identify their own distorted perceptions.

Interrupting Escalation

In all cases, this destructive involvement with the state takes place after the explosion of overreaction. The police are called after actual violence has occurred.

Ideally, the people to call before are the healthy, fair, and self-critical group—family, friends, community—who have the love and awareness to see what the conflicted cannot see, and who can help the anxious calm down and seek communication and negotiation, and in this way create reconciliation.

This, as Dudley Saunders says, is the time when overreaction is “internally logical,” but not an accurate response to the external.

It’s true that my discussion is “undisciplined,” as it is not rooted in traditional academic research or controlled studies with live subjects. But it’s civilians who will have to find solutions to escalation, and in this spirit I am looking within, thinking, feeling, observing, listening to eclectic sources and other people’s stories, to try to think of ways to help myself and others to not escalate Conflict so that it becomes Abuse; to face and deal with it, instead of avoiding it.

When I think about moving forward, in mutual recognition, towards resolution, I think about the word agreement.

we would communicate enough to agree on what each of our differen...

1. Scapegoated people cannot be made to stand alone.

2. Community needs to move towards negotiation.

3. More and more people have to join in together to create change.

4. The conversation is not over just because an escalator insists

Escalation is almost always exacerbated when parties are members of shallow communities like dysfunctional families and bad friends.

Religious/racial/national Supremacy concepts are at the basis of destructive groups, bound together by negative values.

this whole bullet point is especially loaded

Interestingly, this behavior, describing intimate relationships, is also an accurate description of how the US state treats poor women, showing again how intimate constructions become social dynamics.

They can bring the ideology of their Supremacy, especially White Supremacy or Male Supremacy, into other people’s lives through the integrated conviction that they should not have to be aware of others, negotiate with others, take other people into consideration. This is an ideology that men often bring to their relationships with whomever is serving them, whether it is a mother, a female or male partner or child, or another female adult. The objective is that the woman’s independent needs, or the subordinate man’s actual experience, should be subservient to keeping the supremacist male on track with his goals, even if those goals are dependency or self-aggrandizement.

As well, it is common for adult men to expect women in their circle, including the workplace, to drop everything in order to perform favors for them that usually involve

Many discourses, both popular and clinical, exist to address how those who have survived violence, sexual abuse, and psychological assault during their childhood may behave, depending on where they are in their developmental process of awareness in order to “feel safe.”

But now those of us who have become dominant continue to use this trope to repress otherness. It is used by the dominant to defend against the discomfort of hearing other people’s realities, to repress nuance, ignore multiple experiences, and reject the inherent human right to be heard. Instead, it may even be considered victimizing by the supremacist/traumatized person to not simply follow their orders when they “feel” or say that they “feel” endangered, even if that feeling is retrospective.

But I guess my question then is what is the responsibility to the supremacist/traumatized? surely this is a conflict and needs a more nuanced resolution than "no more safe space"

safety is an acquisition of power, often dependent on unjust structures of subjugation to satisfy the threatened person or group’s need for control.

Normativity itself is dependent on the diminishment of others.

I find this really hard to reconcile this with the previous sentence and Schulman's deconstruction of safety

[Overreaction] can only be discussed as an observable phenomenon, not an experiential one.

they must refuse to validate overreaction simply out of “loyalty” or to avoid getting too engaged with the emotional issues of the individual.

There is, in other words, a social responsibility to provide scale when w...

In some places, there is an ideology that undue control of others is inherent to the recovery of an abused person.

confuses vulnerability with danger,

between the projecting traumatized person and the entitled self-aggrandized supremacist person is that both need and want dominance in order to feel comfortable. And yet the sources of this need are so different.

Inherent in the insistence on a refusing party’s righteousness and the other’s blame is the illusion that the control is value-free, neutral, natural, and simply the way things are.

Trauma and Supremacy are ideological but also emotional and perhaps biological,

The dehumanization involved in overstatement of harm as a justification of cruelty is a form of illness, a systemic malfunction that is produced by our humanity, mortality, and literal vulnerability compounded with levels of protection, societal placement, and reward.

the injury of false blame.

During that vulnerable period, our city welcomed people whose life calling was to understand and heal suffering as they emerged from mass killings by fascists.

It’s a cogent representation of the desire for understanding covered with shit.

Many of these Nazis and collaborators were individuals whom the refugees knew personally and so had to be dealt with on very personal as well as socio-psychological terms.

Many had the desire or the fantasy to engage fascists in treatment, to help them understand that feelings do not need to be acted on.

if we could all acknowledge that suffering has content, we could all understand, as a community, somewhat better how to help each other.

Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening.

In my view, the recognition that a person has distorted thinking that comes from or produces suffering is important, but it has no inherent implication for action. It doesn’t imply medication, incarceration, or any particular brand of treatment. It just means stating openly that an internal conflict is not being resolved, is instead being expressed externally, and that those who did not cause the pain will be the ones to be blamed and to pay for it.