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

by Sarah Schulman

The “bad” family, as we understand it, is the opposite of this Supremacy model. Instead of bonding with each other to the detriment of outsiders, the family turns on its own members directly, demeaning them, beating them, fucking them, conditioning them towards self-destructive and socially detrimental behaviors. As my father once told me, “Families do worse things to their own members than they do to other people. They kill them, they rape them, they burn them in boiling oil.” And he was right. The problem with this pathological dichotomy is that when “bad” families destroy their own members, they produce people so traumatized that they can’t problem-solve with others and become the source of impulsive, triggered acting out: e.g., blaming others, committing violence, overstating harm, bringing in the police or the state in lieu of problem-solving. The problem with “good” families is that they do the same thing, but from a place of over-privilege and Supremacy, so that when they are cruel and unfair, their family members “stand by” them, and create no consequences for their actions. Both of these systems hurt other people’s lives and produce new adults who don’t know how to be responsible and to problem-solve, who are entitled to a level that is detrimental to the rest of the world. And the rest of us have to live with these people. Even if we also are them, taking into account our earlier recognition that Supremacy and Trauma can exist in the same body. I believe that a t...