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

by Sarah Schulman

I knew another woman whose family was in a similar situation of projecting the pain of the past onto an undeserving object in the present. A college professor named Diana had come from a family of intense violence and sexual abuse. At the point that we knew each other, Diana’s mother, sister, and niece were all unemployed and living on welfare; the father had died over a decade earlier. The mother was depressed and watched TV all day in a dark room. The sister was working in the sex trade, and the niece wasn’t doing much. The mother and sister had enormous fights on a regular basis, in which they would each escalate the conflict. The sister would yell, “You let Daddy rape me,” referring to events involving her abusive father that had occurred twenty years earlier. Instead of saying, “What your father did to you is wrong, and I regret that I didn’t know how to handle it. I love you and I am sorry, how can we make things better between us?” the mother would yell back, “Get out of here. I never want to see you again.” Neither the mother nor the sister knew how to negotiate, how to deal with conflict. They only knew how to escalate it. Whenever the mother became louder and more agitated, the sister would escalate by storming out of the house. The time that I was there, she took the mother’s cat with her. “Give me back my cat!” the mother screamed, further escalating the situation when she should have said, “I’m sorry we’re yelling at each other. I love you, let’s calm down.” S...