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

by Sarah Schulman

In some places, there is an ideology that undue control of others is inherent to the recovery of an abused person. Because the child’s real needs were violated and disregarded, adulthood can produce an inability to tolerate difference, or confusion between vulnerability and danger. Inadequacy, failure, or even discreet incidents in which the partner does not repress all signs of difference can be experienced by an unprocessed hurt person as threat or Abuse.

If someone is upset but thinks that it is Abuse, the focus could instead be on understanding what it is about them that creates their overreaction; it could be Supremacy, or it could be unprocessed Trauma. For this reason, Conflict must be discussable. Accusations of Abuse cannot be substitutions for talking things through. Very little is automatically clear. As Sara Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and ultimately dismantled.

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. Unfortunately social convention that either denies the existence of mental illness in one’s own ranks or uses it as an excuse for shunning others, makes it difficult to call the Supremacy/Trauma mirror what it is: delusional, i.e., rooted in untruth. And if you can’t name something honestly, it cannot be acknowledged, addressed, and healed.

Homogenization breeds Supremacy ideology and difference becomes re-conflated with blame.

wrt: "queer"

Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. 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.

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. 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. And if that obedience is not in place, huge feelings emerge of being threatened by the others who express disagreement.

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 an inability to self-criticize or to see one’s self as one reason for the conflict. There is lashing out in punishment, acting out in blame; calling the police on an HIV-positive sexual partner, organizing a community to shun and isolate a lover or friend, dehumanizing of Palestinians or other entire peoples or races. These attributes of official definitions of “borderline” reveal both intense fear of difference and overreactions to difference as a projected threat to one’s safety. At their root is a refusal to alter one’s self-perception of a threatened perfectionism.

IN OUR CONTEMPORARY MOMENT, one human disaster rooted in over-identification with the “bad” group or unself-critical family that blatantly violates human decency is the Occupation of Palestine and the suppression and murder of Palestinians by Israelis. Like all creations of the other as monster, Jewish Supremacy is a pure manifestation of “loyalty” without opposition; a creation rooted in the mirror of Supremacy and Trauma. One of the most glaring and lethal applications of this false accusation of harm as a justification for cruelty in turn is the way Palestinian resistance to occupation has been pathologized instead of supported.

These actions reminded me of the anti-Jewish pogroms initiated against my poor ancestors in Russian shtetls or ghettos during the time of the Czar, or any pogrom-like event where large numbers of civilians are punished for the actions of a few. In this case, Israel’s false claims that Hamas was holding the teenagers hostage when the government knew that they were dead inflamed already paranoid fascist elements in the Jewish population. Vigilantism and street rampages were reported widely by Palestinians.

Then there were those who justified Israel’s cruelty and expressed unexplored, fixed group identities or false loyalties, regardless of the actual values Israel espouses. They saw everything through their racial/family-based group lens, which trumped the reality of what was happening. Many of these people, some of whom I had known for a long time, expressed racial clichés, cultural Supremacy ideologies, and all of the components of overstating harm in order to justify acting out with cruelty.

Despite everything I knew about “bad” groups, about a desire of the Traumatized to seek alliance with bullies, about group shunning, about the paradigms of perfections that keep us from taking responsibility for our part, or the origins of projection in both Supremacy and Trauma—despite all this understanding, I was still shocked. I was frustrated and upset to read on social media that people I knew personally were justifying, and therefore identifying with, this cruelty unfolding before them.

Israelis continued to re-enact their own historic trauma on the people who were not its cause. European Jews suffered the multi-generational trauma of a genocide perpetrated by European non-Jews that we already understand travels psychologically, culturally, and biologically through time. Then, via a spectacle of protection-through-dominance, they used the tactics of myth-building and accrued might, rooted in themes of European racial Supremacy.

The Israelis need to maintain the false notion of the Palestinian monster because it is only in opposition to that monster that the Israelis can construct themselves. When that “other” asserts its needs and realities, as Palestinians have tried to do, even by reading the names of the dead in the Knessset, they become the new accused.

It is the identification of traumatized people with bullies, who cannot be opposed or acknowledge mistakes. The Jews have an opportunity to deprogram themselves, as some of us have chosen to do when faced with the Palestinian challenge. We change our self-perception, our myths about ourselves. We challenge the terms of our group belonging to families, religion, state, and nation that are bonded together by bullying, shunning, perfectionist views of ourselves, and the dehumanization of others. But many Jews resist the change, viewing change itself as a threat of violence, pretending away the fact that this violence is one that we Jews are ourselves perpetrating.

If we are in groups that cannot be self-critical and therefore punish difference, we will join in on the shunning, excluding, and cold-shouldering. But if we are in groups that promote acceptance, intervene to create communication, and recognize that people have contradictions, we will be able to face and deal with the true nature of Conflict: that it is participatory, and cannot be solved by being cruel, spreading rumors, enacting laws, or incarcerating, invading, and occupying.

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