No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

It is, perhaps, a powerful aphrodisiac, the idea that someone is gripped by love so intensely he or she is powerless in the face of it. Though the intellectual coercion required to make a man believe that his love and his violence stem from the same place inside himself is of course utterly duplicitous.

Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety.

How unfair it is that we live in a world in which they’re made to believe their tears are shameful.

Urination and defecation are physical functions, like sweating and digestion, that happen below our level of consciousness, and are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Sacral nerves in the brain stem—which happens to be the final part of the brain to expire—control the sphincter muscles. So urination and defecation weren’t a sign of fear, McClane showed Strack, but rather evidence that each of those victims had been very near death. And each one of those cases had been prosecuted as a misdemeanor.14

“What pisses me off so much is the lack of imagination we tend to have for people who haven’t had the same experience we have. As if lives are synonymous.”

We tend to have easy empathy for people suffering mental health issues when they are universally beloved and when their actions affect only themselves (a Robin Williams, say), but our empathy falters, perhaps rightly so, when those actions affect the lives of others, such as what happened with O’Hanlon.