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

by Sarah Schulman

We are supposed to pretend it’s simultaneously reasonable, undiscussable, and not happening, and simply obey.

The supremacist, who blames others because they have to be perfect, and the traumatized person, who will fall apart entirely if they understand any flaw, both say, “You need help.” The responsible person who understands that all parties participate in conflict, says, “We need help.” If we really think that someone “needs help,” we help them. The claim “you need help, therefore I will compound your problems by shunning and bullying you,” obviously is entirely unethical, hypocritical, and socially detrimental.

Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied.

Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems; in most cases it is petty and primarily a way to avoid an adjustment of the self that is required for accountability.

If it has no terms for resolution, it is simply a form of asserting supremacy and imposing punishment, and punishment, as we know, rarely does anything but produce more pain.

So here I want to briefly look at examples from four systems of thought, all vastly different from one another: Historical Psychoanalysis; Contemporary Psychiatry and its pop psychology filter; Modern American Buddhism through “Mindfulness”; and Al-Anon, a 12-step program. All four of these divergent methods understand the combination of triggering followed by shunning as significantly destructive enough to be critically addressed.

Weigert identified something she called “manic flight reaction,” a capitulation to anxiety that “denies the tragedy of human existence.” “Manic” implies compulsion, acting without being able to think through the consequences, the desired goal, or possible alternatives. Manic action not only involves not being able to think through, but a companion lack of awareness of what is happening. Instead, unreasonable answers that escalate problems are experienced as reasonable and successful.

Wilhelm Reich, one of my heroes,

uhhhhhhhhhhh is that the guy who has a museum in Rangeley and believed sexual energy could make it rain and got arrested by the FBI? I really love that Kate Bush song

theorizing fascism as an emotional and psychological expression with the implication that it is treatable through the therapeutic relationship.

Here she made the crucial link between personal behavior and group cruelty. Using the word “transference,” she implied an attachment of an emotion to people who are not the source of that emotion. In this way, we externalize internal conflict.

In other words, here she presented the roots of both Supremacy and Trauma discussed in the same breath; spoiling your son or demeaning your daughter can produce the male supremacist son, and the victimized, traumatized daughter.

I mean, sure, but why gender it like that? isn't that incredibly loaded?

Dr. Weigert made the connection between personal projection, overstatement of harm, and political injustice. She treated people whose problems were both fascism and neurosis, with the underlying understanding that fascism is an expression of neurosis. Contemporary psychiatry and its public face, pop psychology, are less inclined towards articulating those relationships politically.

Psychiatrists call it different things and interpret it in different ways, but they all recognize it as an overly reactive expression of pain that has negative consequences on other people’s lives.

Lack of empathy, of course, is central to conflating Conflict and Abuse. Inherent in the sequence is an absence of thought as to the consequences of the false accusations on others.

Here we see some of the same elements that were identified earlier in the process of refusing the responsibilities of Conflict and transforming it into overstated claims of Abuse: blame, scapegoating, one-dimensional explanations of people as purely good or exclusively bad that prohibit complex understandings of Conflict (not Abuse) as being mutually produced.

It is “simply” biology, a system they have not designed and that, in some ways, has its own objective beyond their control.

There is an underlying ideology that bettering one’s own life improves the lives of others, a kind of spiritual trickle-down. A central tenet of mindfulness is what they call “acceptance,” which is theorized as the beginning of “real change.” Mindfulness also includes a concept called “allowing,” which is a kind of recognition that one does not know everything, and that there are realities, experiences, and understandings that reside in other people and other expressions of life

a five-year Buddhist teacher training

jesus what

Brach is an attractive, healthy, but somewhat bland woman in early middle-age.

uhhhhhhhhh

“It’s not our needs that produce conflict. It is our strategies for meeting them.”

On shunning, Brach quotes Adrienne Rich, saying that two people “telling each other the truth breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.”

And she poses blame as an obstacle to evolution.

“Vengeance,” Brach says, “is a lazy form of grief

If you put aside the blame, what would you have to feel that is difficult to feel?

She refers to the experience of being triggered as a biological reality, which she calls “flip your lid,” at which point she opens her hand as if the brain was actually turning over.

“The gift of mindfulness is that it unsticks emotion.”

Al-Anon, the companion program for people whose lives are affected by someone else’s drinking, was founded in 1951 by Wilson’s wife Lois. Their central concept is that by applying the 12 Steps in a peer-organized setting, without leaders or counselors, the person affected by someone else’s drinking can improve their own life even if the qualifier (an Al-Anon term for the alcohol-abusing person whose behavior is affecting others) continues to drink. Al-Anon literature focuses not on the alcoholic, but on the Al-Anon member.

At its core, Al-Anon addresses the experience of loving and trusting someone who is not reliable because they have the disease of alcoholism.

It means loving someone for reasons other than for what they can do for you. It means loving them because they move you, not because they provide for you.

The qualifier is often very demanding of the Al-Anon member, maintaining expectations that they will take responsibility for things, fix things, and pay for things, as well as cover up problems, create positive environments, accept unequal conditions, and live with inconsiderate situations without protest. This kind of expectation is called “alcoholic behavior.” Or, if you are using the mental illness model, “distorted thinking.”

When someone is drunk, or fixed in some other system of distorted thinking or projection, they act out on their friend or partner or family member, not in appropriate measure to how that person deserves to be treated, but as a propulsion by other forces such as alcohol.

The shunning that follows the trigger, or the flight of both fight, flight, freeze and manic flight reaction, is what Al-Anon calls, ironically, “Detaching with an axe.” This is considered undesirable and something to avoid doing to other people.

is the source of social and personal cruelty and the cause of great pain.

As the increasingly normative queer family gains access to this machine of Supremacy, separation, and the arm of the law, it too risks becoming or does become a force for reaction.

Of course the greatest challenge to feminism has always been and continues to be the family itself, and the Queer Family may not be the exception.

The social imperative that women become married and mothers now also affects women who are queer and is more and more the expected norm. There’s no way out.

We already know that the family is dangerous, espe...

Growing up with chaos can make it harder to know how to create order as an adult.

Today, a “good” family model is based on an ideology called “loyalty” or, more neo-liberally, “being supportive.”

damn sarah, going straight for the throat

No standard for how to treat others is forged. They can reproduce class and gender Supremacy systems by not expecting their members to face and deal with conflict, to learn how to take care of themselves or others, to literally and spiritually clean up after themselves, or to be self-critical. As a result, family members learn how to be exploitative, expectant, and entitled. They learn to view some jobs as beneath them or some paths as above them; they understand that accountability is beyond them because they always have the family and its emotional resources to fall back on.

But women still earn less than men, have less social currency than men, and internalize guilt and sacrifice as a national and international pastime.

The biological basis for inclusion is interestingly replicated in the contemporary state-approved version of the queer family. In these cases, often love creates the interest in having children together, or having children together is an external marker proving love. But in many of these families, sex and reproduction have no relationship. And yet, a kind of simulacra of reproductive sexuality is prevalent when lesbian parents look for donors with biological markers that stand in for a fantasy sexual reproduction between the women. This is most noticeable in cross-racial or cross-cultural female couples in which the women look for donors representing the non-birth parent’s race or close to it, so that the child will resemble an imagined biological melding of the two. Everyone knows that child was not produced by the two women having sex, and yet they choose a biological mix that imagines that it does.

As pro-family ideology has come to dominate queer communities, we are quickly forgetting everything we ever learned about family when we were still feminists and looking at how all social institutions affect women.

In this way, some white and bourgeois queers moved to urban centers and became centrally located in queer communities, which were more interracial and cross-class than their straight cultures of origin.

The pro-family politic in the queer community has overwhelmed a lot of things that we once understood but no longer remember. Childcare is privatized instead of collectivized. Interestingly (and I leave it to historians to chart this one), lesbians in the feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s, before the dawning of the pro-natalist mentality, were more overtly active for quality child care, which was considered to be one of a number of issues that were grouped together as “reproductive rights” (“Abortion rights, affordable and safe birth control, an end to Sterilization Abuse, Lesbian Rights and Quality Child Care”).

Even though men earn more than women for the same work, twice as many women leave the family to take care of themselves and others.

While the oppression or demeaning of women inside the family makes women individuate and leave, it is the diminishment of women in the family that keeps men infantilized.

Being attracted to or even loving a woman has no relationship to treating her, and by extension one’s self, as a person who matters.

There is also the adjacent idea, comforting but false, that the sons and daughters of lesbians are inherently feminist. Because they don’t have models of intimate male power at home, somehow they are supposed to extrapolate a connection about refusing male privilege in the world.

But feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it.