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

by Sarah Schulman

the same action of unjustified escalation most often comes from one of two positions: Supremacy, or Trauma. And in realizing this, I am surprised by the similar behaviors expressed by these two divergent experiences.

Affleck, for his own reasons, felt that the truth would hurt his public image, his self-image, his ability to make money, his ability to be loved, or some other kind of related currency. So he revved up the apparatus (in this case of the corporate state, not the governmental state) in order to not have to deal with the consequences of reality.

This event illustrates one element of Supremacy that is crucial to the question of escalation: the feeling that a person or a group is entitled to obscure information about harm they may be associated with.

That the telling of the truth is more significant than the ho...

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.

The traumatized person’s sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty 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 business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought.

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.

The people they can’t control become cast as monsters, dehumanized specters that both the Supremacist and the Traumatized collude to create as manifestations of their own projected anxieties: the anxiety of being faced with difference.

The only thing worse than not getting help is asking for it and still being denied. Now the stakes are even higher, the falsely accused is even more isolated, and the interveners feel self-satisfied while being entirely ineffective.

being punished is no measure of anyone’s innocence or guilt. But the person being shunned by being excluded, silenced, or incarcerated will not be listened to by others, so the terms of their punishment cannot be contested. In this way, shunning is a trap.

The dominance of white, wealthy, and male “needs” over the needs of poor, immigrant, and non-white women is a pervasive quality of the state. “Irrational agitation” is certainly another, as the renewed focus on police violence reveals.

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.

Just as supremacists may control what their partners say and do, people traumatized in childhood may consequently live with a fragile self as well as insecure boundaries with their partners that also produce control.

Both Supremacists and the Traumatized may conceptualize themselves as “weak” or “endangered” unless others around them are controlled, repressed, punished, or destroyed.

There is, in other words, a social responsibility to provide scale when we witness overreaction. Truly, an adult who would react this way to a child getting hysterical because he was refused a second dessert would be seen as parenting badly, as, in some sense, committing a kind of de-socializing child abuse: it is the parent’s responsibility to provide scale and set limits for children who do not yet have the capacity to experience reality accurately.

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

Because Trauma and Supremacy are ideological but also emotional and perhaps biological, they are compounded obstacles to peace. They are systems. These systems live within, and are expressed without.

As Will Burton says, “pain has a story, a narrative,” and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency.

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.

“You make her sound unstable” is an accusation that has much greater weight than the fact that she is suffering from instability, as many of us do, and as many of our life experiences justify. So we are not allowed to understand or say openly that our friend’s instability is rooted in pain, fear of being inadequate, shame about her sexuality, or an unresolved wound from childhood. We are supposed to pretend it’s simultaneously reasonable, undiscussable, and not happening, and simply obey.

It is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a framework in which one’s injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one’s own suffering.

The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected.

The new technologies like email and social media make this very easy. You can attack while hiding. You can articulate threats, misperceptions, and false accusations, and make sure that you never, ever hear information that could alter those perceptions.

It insists on unilateral reality, the removal of difference. It deifies the inability to negotiate and enshrines the imagined victimized status as a desired position to reinforce and maintain.

shunning as an end-point to normative conflict is the definition of absurdity.

Instead, unreasonable answers that escalate problems are experienced as reasonable and successful.

abreact

Weigert’s solution, in the end, has to do with Supremacy and Trauma’s common enemy: the desire to know and understand.

this case the psychiatric category of “borderline personality disorder” or the experience of “borderline episodes” closely resembles the trigger + shunning sequencing of “manic flight reaction.”

Whether through Supremacy or Trauma, we are unable to question ourselves. Perhaps because the person has been so belittled and violated by an authority figure or an oppressive system, they don’t have enough stability of self to face the conflict created by difference.

Inherent in the sequence is an absence of thought as to the consequences of the false accusations on others. This is followed by feelings of shock and rage when others resist their unjust treatment. All this, of course, is rooted in a childish but pervasive expectation that their orders will be followed.

Rather, the theory gives them an opportunity to understand that there may be a biological reason that is propelling their behavior.

If taking this biological information to heart, instead of carrying out instructions for punishment, was considered an act of love rather than an attack, then the kind of group bullying that currently accompanies overreaction could be redeemed.

The fragile self-esteem depends on keeping all sense of failure outside the self. So they present themselves with a self-righteous air of angry superiority and entitlement and accuse the ex-spouse of being psychologically and morally inferior. The spouse is viewed as dangerous and aggressive. Having been wronged these people feel justified in seeking retaliation. Or more urgently, they believe in launching a preemptive strike.

the falsely accused partner may hold memories of the happy times they shared and the essential positive qualities of the relationship, combined with empathy for the suffering borderline. But they need to understand that the borderline doesn’t feel the same way, as the disease, by its very nature, denies simultaneity and involves dissociation or loss of emotional memory.

She often speaks about the brain literally, such as, “the brain has the capacity for compassion.”

Finally, she overtly discusses the group, the person’s surrounding influences. “When we are stuck,” she says, “we need a reminder of belonging to reconnect … Groups can move us if they are conscious, meditative, communicating groups. Being in a group can move us from fight, flight, freeze, where there is hostility, to attend-befriend.”

loving someone who can’t be counted on to be present, fair, empathetic, reciprocal, honest, or dependable is a very particular experience. 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.

Al-Anon, because it preaches humane detachment (i.e., not reacting impulsively), not shunning, is by definition a program of reconciliation.

Lashing out by overreaction, as has been demonstrated, deepens the problem. All of these systems recommend the same tactic: delay.

In some ways, racism, class oppression, nationalism, and religious Supremacy are all family-based systems. They are rooted in identification with others theoretically by genetics, reproduction, or some culturally constructed simulacra of biology. Family systems are a model for the “us” vs “them” mentality. And as families adhere to governments, nationalist ideology and the state, they extend their institutional reach of punishment.

leave, it is the diminishment of women in the family that keeps men infantilized.

They become fearful and uncreative adults, even if they imitate adult gestures that signify boldness and creativity.

On one hand, lesbians give each other meaning in private, and yet this requires a transcendence of lifelong messages about women’s lack of worth. Treating another women with decency, care, forgiveness, and flexibility is certainly not an automatic impulse.

I know a man who advertises himself as an “eco-feminist,” but he expects his mother and her female partner to clean up after him.

But the Israeli government lied about their knowledge that the young men were dead. Instead they publicly blamed the kidnappings on “Hamas” and began to “search” for the boys as if they were still alive.

In fact, the crime had been committed by members of a local Hebron clan who did belong to Hamas, but were acting without the agreement or knowledge of Hamas leadership. Their original plan was to kidnap one Israeli and hold him for prisoner exchange; when they picked up one hitchhiker, he invited his two other friends to come along, and the kidnappers’ Hebrew was too limited to separate them.

Over the next eighteen days, under the pretext of “searching” for the Hamas members who were supposedly holding the teenaged boys, 400 Palestinians were arrested, 5,000 homes were raided, and six Palestinians were murdered by Israeli gunfire.