The long of it...

When I entered into my relationship with X, there was a kind of intense and energetic passion that I had rarely felt before.  It is hard for me to understand why that was the case but there was something about her and I that produced an affective intensity that allowed for a relationship to blossom and grow far more quickly than relationships usually do and, frankly, probably led to a less than healthy dynamic.  Though I am now well versed in the concept of “new relationship energy,” this was an intensity that I was far from familiar with.  I believe that the intensity of the positive feelings I was experiencing, coupled with the newness of such a sensation and my overall happiness, resulted in my willingness to agree to things I would not have otherwise and to behaving in ways that do not reflect the integrity I wish to have in the world.  Today, I suspect that these things would not happen because I am healthier and more aware, though “new relationship energy” remains a normal part of my polyamorous life.

https://www.autostraddle.com/grease-bats-new-relationship-energy-391743/

Unfortunately, such feelings contributed to my abuse at X’s hands.  The intensity of the positive feelings that I was experiencing made it easier to overlook problematic components of the relationship that, in retrospect, were present from the beginning.  Today, I am more able to identify such problems, though I have to admit that I am too often attracted to arrogant, even narcissistic people, and that I am susceptible to manipulation.  This is something that I have been working on, but that I see occurring throughout my life, and not only in my romantic relationships.

Perhaps the form of manipulation and abuse that worked against me most in that relationship was the weaponization of social justice and identity.   Because my partner was a self-identified fat, neuro-atypical, queer woman of Native American descent who had suffered immense trauma in her life, while my identities exist in a place of structured privilege (white, male, straight-passing, able-bodied, well educated, etc.) and because I have trained myself to hear the criticisms of members of marginalized groups and to recognize my own privileges, this was an open door to her manipulations.  For example, anytime that I would raise concerns that I had about our relationship, my privileged identities would be used to insist that my concerns were invalid and small compared to whatever X was going through.  There was no real place in the relationship for my emotions, my pain, or for me to feel poorly or unfairly treated.  X’s disadvantaged place in the structured hierarchies of American society allowed her to present any concern, disagreement, or fight as a consequence of my structural advantages.  This removed any responsibility from her and placed all blame on me, and I accepted this.  After all, as a white male, shouldn’t I accept that I am fucked up, potentially oppressive, and that my perspectives are unavoidably distorted by my privileges?  This led to a nearly constant state of paranoid, frightened navigation of my own privilege (which I need to distinguish from the absolutely necessary and ethically obligatory self-critical analysis of advantage that all privileged people should engage in).  However, no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to be “good enough;” no matter what I did, I was fucked; no matter how hard I tried, acceptance was always miles away.  Though when she was happy with me, X would say that I was one of the few “decent white men” she had ever met, that she saw that I tried harder to overcome the effects of my privilege than anyone else she had known (whether or not these things are true is irrelevant), this was always a “tease” of sorts, and she would turn on a dime back to insulting me.  This built confusion and uncertainty in me as well as paranoia, anxiety, and fear.  The very real need to confront, criticize, and explore the realities of my privilege had been weaponized against me as a form of abuse and I didn’t even realize it at the time.

The most extraordinary example of such uses and abuses of my identities comes from the night that she and I broke up.  X and I had been fighting a lot at this point in the relationship and the fight was not unanticipated by me.  At one point in the argument, she got up to leave.  I suspect that she did so with the intent of having me stop her, begging her to stay; I did not do so.  In fact, I wanted her to leave.  Once she realized this, she backed up and sat back down; she never left.  Eventually, I asked her to leave.  She didn’t.  I begged her to leave, I pleaded with her to leave.  She didn’t.  Eventually, I found myself screaming at her to leave.  I was scared, angry, frustrated, and I wanted to be left alone.  She did not leave.  To the contrary, she said, to paraphrase, that “This whole continent rightly belongs to my people.  This land is mine.  You have no right to tell me where to go and I won’t leave just because a white man told me to.”  She refused to recognize that my apartment was mine and would not leave.  I felt that I had no choice but to leave my own home and go out alone to get away.  I therefore went into my closet to get dressed to leave (I was in pajamas at the time).  She charged quickly at the closet (I clearly remember fearing that she was about to become violent; to this day I get terrified if someone moves toward me during conflicts); she blocked me in the closet, restricting my ability to exit (as a larger person than me, she was able to block the doorway).  I asked her to move and she wouldn’t.  She told me that if I tried to make her get out of the way by physically moving her, she would tell everyone that, in doing so, I had been violent with her.  I was terrified of this.  I did not know what to do.

In left wing, feminist, and social justice oriented communities (of which I am proudly a part) we rightly strive to believe survivors, and we rightly recognize that women and other female-identified and non-binary peoples are more likely to be abused by men than the other way around.  It is pivotal that we continue to believe survivors and that we recognize that structured inequalities allow for abuse to be perpetrated.  In my abuse though, this was weaponized.  She would have been believed and I would have been in the unenviable position of defending myself against accusations of abuse.  Admittedly, I am an imperfect person.  I have at times yelled, cursed, been mean (though never violent), and so forth; as had she.  (It is worth stating here that I have been in therapy for quite some time now and have worked to overcome these previous behaviors and to understand where they came from.)  I was told that all of this would be used against me.  She would paint a picture of a pattern of behavior leading up to me physically removing her from my path if I left, if I broke up with her.  She told me in no uncertain terms that this would be used to alienate and isolate me; she would intentionally turn people against me if she could.

Somehow, I got out of the closet without touching her.  To this day, I don’t remember how.

An excerpt from a poem, the last line
of which she would quote
me in hard times.

As I put on my shoes to flee the apartment, she got very close to my face.  She began shouting, “White boy!  What, are your little fucking white boy feelings hurt? Poor fucking white boy with his fucking little white boy feelings!”  I said, “My race has nothing to do with this” at which point she laughed in my face.  I left my apartment and walked for hours.  I was terrified to go home for fear that she might still be there.  I was afraid of every car that passed by me because I was afraid it might be her coming to look for me.  I considered finding a friend and asking for someone to go home with me (I probably would have, but the confusion and shame of what was happening made me reluctant to admit it).  As I passed my apartment I discovered her car was gone, so I cautiously returned to my apartment and found she had left.  I then barricaded my front door with chairs, weightlifting equipment, and other heavy objects.  X had a key to my apartment and I was panicked that she might return.  To this day, I do not know if she attempted to come back.  I heard sounds that left me fearing that she was attempting to get in, but I was so scared that every little sound made me jump and wonder if someone was trying to enter.  I barely slept.  In the morning, I had to leave my apartment out of fear of being in that space, so I went to a coffee shop.  My home no longer felt safe.  I spent weeks barely able to be in my own home after having been driven out of it.  I traveled to Minneapolis more often than usual during this time and I went out a lot, often to bars with friends so that I could escape a place that no longer felt like home.

Events of this magnitude were unusual, but this was a pattern: this was an extreme version of a common phenomenon.  X would frequently use my ethical positioning to manipulate me into staying with her, to convince me that any conflict was entirely my fault, and to make me feel less than.  There was a night that I curled into the fetal position on my hardwood floor, crying hysterically, while she slept in my bed.  Before she fell asleep she reminded me of my identities relative to her own.  She had several times pointed out to me that in early pictures of Native peoples and white colonizers, the Native people were seated while the white people were standing.  This was significant, representing a sign of egalitarian respect from the Native and a sign of superiority from the white oppressor.  As I lay on my floor, she shouted, “Look at you!  Standing over me!”  I said, “But I’m lying down…”  I was told that didn’t matter.  I cried and eventually managed to garner the strength to slowly enter my bed.  She was fast asleep.

Occurrences like this, instances in which her claims were verifiably false, such as that I was standing when I was lying on the floor, were often treated as irrelevant.  In such instances, the topic would rapidly change to some other way I was wrong, some other way what I was doing was a problem, some other way in which I was benefiting from my many privileges.  This left me disoriented, paranoid, and confused.  I rarely knew what to do or how to defend myself.  I was left believing that I was rarely correct and that, even when I was sure I was right, that this could be used against me.  Though the aforementioned examples are extreme ones, they are symbolic of the overall trend of similar events of lesser significance.  For example, when I tried to talk about experiencing something X had done as “traumatic” I was told that I had no idea what trauma was.  As a privileged person, I had no right to use the world trauma.  Her life had, quite honestly, been intensely difficult.  She faced personal trauma throughout her life that are worse than anything I have experienced; she also faced the realities of cross-generational trauma as a consequence of colonization, racism, abuse, sexism, and so forth.  This was very real for her and is not to be made light of.  She used this, though, in her abuse to minimize the significance of anything I experienced.  I did not matter relative to her; my pain was nothing; my fear was pathetic; she was all that mattered and my subject positions as a white man were simply evidence that I needed to shut up and never complain; that I had to take whatever happened to me; that I deserved what was happening to me.  If I stopped believing that I had deserved it and started to question the relationship, she reminded me of a promise she had somehow convinced me to make: that if we were to break up, it would not be until a particular point in time.  To this day, I find myself fearful of making promises, as they can be used against me.

I ended the relationship after being trapped in that closet (admittedly, even after that I stupidly stayed in touch with her, attempted to be friends with her, and even had sex with her again).  To this day, being trapped, either physically or emotionally, is a major source of anxiety for me and the main theme of my nightmares.  I need an escape route from anywhere. This was, to some degree, true before then, but that phobia became extreme after these events.  However, even after all of this, I had trouble articulating what had happened and was reluctant to name it.  I would often say things like, “What X did felt like something almost akin to abuse.”  Such diminutives were a common part of my discussions until a therapist asked me why I felt the need to minimize my abuse.  I pointed out that many people, X included, faced far worse abuse and trauma than me; hell, I’m a white man, what right do I have to make a claim to such experiences?  X’s words coming out of my mouth.  My therapist reminded me that while it may be true that other people have faced worse, this did not minimize my own experiences.  I have since worked to stop wording my trauma that way.  It is still not easy.  I still often believe that I should take people’s shit; that I can do so and that, to some degree, it is my job to do so.  As a privileged person, I can offer this tolerance.  As a cis-man I have been taught to stamp out and control my emotions; thus, I can take it.  My therapist wonders if I somehow, consciously or not, think that I deserve this because of my privileges; that I should be punished and should take abuse from other people as penance for my place in the structural hierarchies of oppression.  I’m not sure, but maybe I do think that.

This is a song X introduced me to that I still love.  I sense in it a combination of beauty, sadness, and tragedy that speaks volumes to me and pulls forth complex emotions.

I left that relationship afraid—terrified—of what she might say about me.  As I attempted to remain friends with her (for whatever reason) even while preparing to leave the area, I remember a time that she was shouting at me from across a street, “I’m the only one who wants you here!  All your other friends are glad you’re leaving!  If you leave me, you’ll be alone!  No one else wants you here!  I’m the only one who loves you!”  I wondered if this was true (thankfully, part of my mind knew it wasn’t; my friends loved me, I think).  I wondered if she would start spreading lies about me in order to make this threat true. I wondered who people would believe: the disadvantaged woman of color, or the privileged white man who talked a good game about feminism and social justice?  Even as I write this, I fear that she may make good on that threat: if she finds out that I have written this, will she deflect everything back onto me?  I worry about this, to say the least.

Fortunately, I left there and moved back to Philadelphia.  I still miss my friends, but leaving there was for the best.  X was toxic for me but the relationship was compelling for some reason, not the least of which was the confusingly binary nature of my interactions with X.  To this day, I know that part of X is an interesting, smart, loving person; however, the other X, the abuser, is dangerous for me.  I wanted the former but had to run from the latter.  This binary presentation that I had to experience also left me confused and disoriented and made it harder to leave the relationship, as the “good her” would apologize and promise not to do such things again; she would say kind things, compliment me, tell me how much she loved me.  Too often, I believed her because I wanted to believe her; I did love her, after all.  She would also use her family against me.  She had introduced me to her children.  “You’re just going to abandon kids who like you?  I invited you into my home and you’ll abandon them like everyone else has?  How could you?  They’re just kids, they won’t understand.”  My desire to be a good person kept me around in those situations, like the promise she had somehow gotten out of me.  Honestly, her kids are awesome.  They’re smart, interesting, cool, fun people who I was very happy to get to know.  She did her best to be a good mom to them and I liked seeing her in the role of parent; I saw how much her daughters loved her, and I liked being a part of that.

The point: this is what abuse in social justice, sex positive, feminist, radical, punk, and anarchist communities can sometimes look like.  Social justice and privilege can be weaponized.  We must believe survivors; there must also be some way of dealing with the rare instances in which these ethical imperatives are weaponized and used as a tool of abuse (and these occasions are rare—almost all abuse is very fucking real and must be treated as such; we must believe survivors).  I honestly do not know how to do this.  I do not have the answers.  But we need to recognize the reality that this can happen; that it does happen, and that this can happen to the privileged as well as those who are subjugated to the systemic oppressions of this society.  Believing survivors has to mean believing all survivors: it has to mean that we believe the privileged who are survivors as well, even when their abuser is structurally less advantaged.  We also have to recognize that abuse is not always as simple as we want it to be: sometimes both members of a relationship are engaged in problematic behaviors.  In those cases, we have to believe both survivors, as hard as that will often be.  Believing survivors has to mean believing all survivors.  Those of us who exist in places of systemic and structural privilege relative to our abuser are inconvenient survivors; our abuse is not easy to figure out how to deal with.  The nature of our role as privileged people and survivors at the same time often leaves us silent and invisible; it also leaves us frightened because our identities have been weaponized against us and because defending ourselves all too often sounds like justifying our own privilege or denying our own problems, of which there may be many.

This is true and must not be forgotten.

Even to this day, I worry about the way this might happen again. It scares me because I know that trying to defend myself would likely make things worse, would make me seem like “one of those guys” who claims to be a feminist but cannot be criticized and does not listen when someone says I have done something wrong.  In spite of dedicating myself to countering the psychological and sociological realities of my privileged upbringing and identities, I would not likely be believed in the communities that matter to me; and worse, I understand why I would not be believed, why I and people like me perhaps should not be believed if we defend ourselves.

I am fortunate enough to have left the town in which X lives.  I still miss my friends there.  I did not leave because of X, I was already planning to move, but her abuse and her presence there made it for the best that I left and made it necessary that I do so.  I don’t know if she ever tried to spread those rumors.  For those who remain in the same towns as those who abused them, this aspect of abuse can be a never-ending process, lasting years, or worse, a lifetime.  I have no idea how to maintain the ethical imperatives of believing survivors and rightly privileging the voices of women, POC, LGBTQ+, and other minoritarian subjects while recognizing that there are some instances, such as mine, when the situation gets far more complicated and can be weaponized as a form of abuse and manipulation. I am writing this because I want people to know that this happens and to be aware that this is a part of our radical communities.  I know men who live in terror of this happening (or happening again if it has; or continuing to happen if it is happening) to know that they are not alone.  Dangerously, the loneliness that comes from such experiences may push men toward “men’s rights” communities, which are regressive, reactionary, and potentially fascist pseudo-movements of frightening misogynists and rape-apologists.  We need to find alternatives for men who survive abuse if we want to offer something better.  We need a place for those of us who are inconvenient survivors.  I don’t know what that is though. I hope this post contributes to a conversation about figuring that the fuck out.