Looking Inward, Looking Outward, and Looking Directly At It
Content Warning: Domestic violence, human trafficking, rape, assault, abuse
*Many of you felt seen in my article on being an outsider in one’s own family. So I’d like to expand more on topics of abusive dynamics this month.
Novels that accurately demonstrate the intricacies and nuances of abusive dynamics:
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
One of the worst aspects of abusive dynamics is how insidious they are – how it can be hard to convey to others the damage done to one person by another if they weren’t there – if they didn’t see it for themselves. The novels in the above list do an excellent job of showing the reader the dissonance between what has happened to a character, how they are able to describe it to others, and how others react to what they say. As readers, we are shown the abuse and the intimate aftermath that the characters experience internally because of it.
With these novels in mind, there are three different facets of abusive dynamics that I want to explore here today: a survivor looking inwards, someone looking outwards at an abusive situation that another is in, and then looking directly at what abusive dynamics can manifest as.
There is looking inward:
A great reference for this type of perspective is Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.
It's taken me most of my life, until fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, to understand that my urge to tell my family about my day, to give them a hug when they are stressed, to talk to them, form bonds and nurture relationships, is not a personal fault of mine.
These drives have often felt like self sabotage, stupidity, and hopelessness. Feeling this way about my own need to connect with the only family I had damaged how I saw myself. I felt like I was outside of my body looking in, judging myself for having behaved like a kicked dog.
But over time, I’ve realized that’s not true. My need to connect, to love and be loved, is not self-sabotage...it is human.
Intellectually, I understand that the dynamics in the family that I was born into do not work. That what I have always wanted has never been available to me there. That does not negate my human need for it. This seems simple, yet feels complicated.
I still have the desire to find that acceptance and approval, to create it, because I am human – not because I don’t understand that my family cannot provide that for me, or because I crave abuse. Yearning for connection with the only family I had was not something that was wrong with me. It was simply that I was a person.
There is looking outward:
A great reference for this type of perspective is Sydney Waverley’s character in Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen.
I have experienced frustration that people I care for won't leave abusive partners, won’t move on with their lives, won’t act like they deserve better, and they do deserve better…from me as well. I know better than to wonder, “why don’t they leave?”. But still: I have caught myself thinking it.
I know why they don’t leave…why I didn’t leave. I know that housing is often unattainable. That abusers can be clever about slowly tightening the rope of control around you so that by the time you realize they have power over if you have housing or sleep on the street, it’s too late: you are trapped.
And as much as I deeply, intimately, understand harmful dynamics…I’ve still caught myself experiencing frustration towards friends in abusive relationships and families. I’ve caught myself feeling the same misplaced frustration that had been directed at me – that had felt almost impossible to address or navigate.
I know that they…I… are well aware that we deserve better.
And then there is looking directly at it:
A great reference for this type of perspective is Difficult Women by Roxane Gay.
“He will kill you,” I had thought, I had said, when my coworker and desk-mate would show up with a black eye again. When she couldn't answer the phones that day because she could barely speak past a croak, trying to hide the thick bruise around her neck from where he choked her.
“Why don't you leave?” I had thought, when years before that, a different coworker begged me to come to her apartment in the middle of the night. She was afraid he was going to shoot her. She sat petrified in a chair in the living room, eye swollen, lip bloody.
I stared daggers at him as I walked in the door and said evenly, icily, “you do not touch me. If you come within 5 feet of me, I have another coworker on speaker phone, and if I don’t give a code word in 15 minutes, he has your name and address with instructions to call the police.”
He laughed, haughty and unconcerned, ambled into the kitchen and slammed a drawer.
I knelt in front of her, careful not to touch her. She hadn't moved, hadn’t blinked, barely seemed to breathe.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked her softly. “Let me know and we can do that.”
She did not look up, did not answer. She stayed frozen, petrified.
“You can come with me. Just get up, just get in the car. Please.” I made to put my hand on hers but stopped, hovering, as I saw her tense…I pulled it back.
I begged her, crouched on my knees in front of her chair, my back to her husband, but she would not let me help her leave.
She could not.
Years later, a passenger sat in the back of my car as I drove for a ride-share company. As soon as I looked, I knew.
When I arrived to pick her up at the shady hotel, I noted three men watching my car from strategic positions, guns visible under their shirts: one on a balcony, one in the back of the parking lot, and one in a shaded alcove in a hallway, all making sure that the woman got into the car they’d ordered to deliver her to the bus station.
I made sure to look ditzy, to only register the men as I pretended to have soooo much difficulty moving the car in reverse to get out of the parking lot, waving my elbows akimbo and exaggeratedly checking my mirrors while laughing with my mouth hanging open. I was just an idiot, don't mind me. I am no threat.
We pulled out onto the highway.
Slowly, cautiously, all acting left behind in the parking lot, I mentioned I was familiar with the hotel I'd picked her up at. That it had a rep. That I'd been there myself…That I now do activism work in human trafficking resistance.
She was quiet…didn't answer. Looked pointedly out the window.
I didn't push.
When we got to the bus station, she put her hand on the door handle to get out. My heart sank.
But then she stopped – met my gaze in the rearview mirror – and said quietly, “…when you say human trafficking...do you mean….” she couldn’t make herself finish the sentence.
“Yes,” I replied just as softly, not turning around, but meeting her gaze in the mirror. I was being careful not to spook her: letting her register that my car doors were unlocked (and she did note it), that my hands were resting where she could see them on the steering wheel, that I was leaning back in my seat, not tensed to strike or trap. She could leave…or stay. She had a choice.
For our whole conversation at the bus stop, I made my face pleasant and relaxed, happy, ditzy… just a chatty driver, as I suspected that like at the hotel, there would be men here who watched us to ensure she got on the bus. They were sending her to work hotels near a convention in Texas this time, she told me.
She had nowhere to stay, she no longer had any family. She had no one to help her should she try to escape. She had no way to get food or shelter outside of what her traffickers gave her…and she was ashamed. She could not reach out to anyone she knew to explain. How could she ever possibly explain this nightmare to someone who didn't already know?
I said quietly, “I can help, if you want me to. I have a friend who specializes in extraction and support. I can call her, but I only will if you want me to.”
So softly I could barely hear her, she whispered, “yes” and closed her eyes, leaned back into the seat.
“Ok.” I kept my phone and my hands where she could watch me dial, doors still unlocked.
I called my friend, who happened to actually be at that same bus station, working another extraction. This may seem like a good thing…but it was not. The woman in my car was living a life of constant abuse and entrapment, of violent hands, lies, and manipulation. I knew.
And here I was, a stranger, who just happened to recognize her situation.
…and just happened to work in human trafficking resistance,
…who JUST SO HAPPENED to have friends who do extraction,
…WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE RIGHT HERE AT THIS VERY BUS STOP, RIGHT NOW.
It felt like a trap. This now seemed like just another operation, exchanging one abuser for another. She knew a set-up as well as I did.
My friend asked if we could wait, she could come get her in 15 minutes.
But the woman was spooked now and leaning forward, checking the door locks again, putting her hand on the door handle.
“No,” she said, clearly uncomfortable. This was the answer if I was just another kind of trap.
Then she said, more dejectedly, “...I’m not ready yet.” And this was the answer if I was a way out.
“Ok,” I said, my heart sinking again. “Ok.”
My friend on the phone said, “have her put my number in her phone, if she thinks that’s safe, and save it as someone else's name.”
I handed the woman my phone so she could do that, so she had control over it: I wasn't making her, she could see the information with her own eyes, choose not to take it if she didn’t want to.
She saved the number and handed my phone back to me.
“Is there anything I can give you that would be safe to have on you? A business-card sized pamphlet on how to get out, a pen with a hotline phone number on it, the business card of my friend in the parking lot?” I asked.
She said yes, and I gave her all of these. I always have some with me (where I am from is likely not where you are from. I do not mean this in a geographical sense).
She said thank you, got out of my car, and went into the bus station.
I locked my doors, already having marked two men watching my car, like the three who had watched it at the hotel.
I drove away.
I have told you of three instances, but there have been countless. I have told you about three times when I was the one who saw it happening to other women and tried to help.
But...perhaps shamefully or perhaps because there are simply too many of those words for me to try and contain them here today…I have not told you about the times when I was the one with the injuries. When I was the one sitting frozen in the chair. When I was the one too afraid of another trap to escape the one in which I stood. But make no mistake, all of these times and more have happened. And though I am not, I feel so desperately, relentlessly, violently, old. So very tired – as if I have lived a thousand lives already, yet somehow, here I am: no wrinkles yet on my face.
You cannot make someone accept help.
Can you offer them free, private, unconditional, housing, protection, and support? For them? For their children? Their pets? Would they even be able to accept it in the make-believe world where you could? If not, you cannot judge them for staying where they are. There may be nowhere better for them…for us…to go. I do not ever want to forget, to distance myself from those I speak of. Because I cannot.
I don’t have a perfect solution because the solution is bigger than just one person. But the start to finding any solution, piece by tiny piece, often starts with just one person.
We need affordable and attainable housing, we need abusers to be held accountable. We need to be believed when we report rape, assault, coercion, abuse. We need easy access to targeted resources. We need so very much. We need only basic human rights.
Until then, it is often just a single person waking up one day and saying, “enough”, packing a suitcase, starting to think of a plan. Until then, it is often just the person who offers a phone call, a business card, an ear to listen. We need so much more than what we have. And every single step we take to get there is a step forward.
Resources for those experiencing abuse and/or human trafficking:
24 Hour Hotline: 855-435-7827
National Human Trafficking Resource Center: 1 (888) 373-7888
SMS: 233733 (Text "HELP" or "INFO") Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week Languages: English, Spanish, and 200 more languages
Website: traffickingresourcecenter.org