OPEN THE DOOR TO SCHNEIDERMAN

This morning I expect many people who read The New Yorker story about Erich Schneiderman are not just doing a lot of thinking, but also finding themselves in an emotional riptide.  So much of this issue is un-/sub-conscious, hidden in gender assignments, and — well — there’s just so MUCH of it.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/four-women-accuse-new-yorks-attorney-general-of-physical-abuse?mbid=social_twitter

Besides that, it is now explicitly political, losing people their jobs and elections.  The president is involved though so far no one has claimed a physical expression of abuse.  It’s mostly been sexual and employment opportunism.  He doesn’t like personal risk — just revenge.

I’ve been trying to address other issues, but this one has preoccupied me for so long that I need to stick with it here.  Not in a moralistic way.  I have much feeling for the man with the need to dominate — which is often dangerously intense — as well as for the woman who fails to detect and respond to it.  And then, there are women gripped by the same thing.

This is personal.  I’ll call my former husband X to keep the web-scrapers and crawlers (so creepy) off the stories.  I was the first of four formal wives, more relationships than that.  The first wife got beat up.  She was X’s high school student, the only blonde in a territory of Native Americans, which complicates the thinking.  The second wife, French-Canadian, was a fighter and threw things — gave as good as she got, just as her parents had.  I think to X this was a way of copying with his tendency to strike and threaten.  He was ashamed and he had been legally cautioned.

I accepted much dominant behavior because he WAS dominant.  Twice my age, highly competent, a little darkened locally by the stories of bad behavior.  Convinced by his mother that the family was landed gentry in absentia.  I was barely 21, over-educated for my place, with a mother convinced at the core that men were primary over women.  Marriage was sacred, unique and permanent. The proper role of women was to enable men.  (The proper role of smart-aleck oldest daughters was to enable little brothers.)  One of her hot buttons was primogeniture, which is a backhanded acknowledgement, even as it is a rejection.

Once divorced, the problem was not solved.  It came out of several forces, one being admiration of potent, charismatic, effective men — the kind I wished my father were instead of the dormant, passive, absent person he was.  (He’d had a concussion in a car accident.  His phobia of alcoholism didn’t excuse him from the dynamics.)  I discovered that by helping I could maintain a relationship.  Even if I did NOT get slapped or spanked (as I was as a child), the offer to help became a demand and then a risk.  

The training I’d had in order to become a teacher, a clergy person, a left-wing humanitarian, were all forces that kept me pinned.  At least I never married again, but I did slide into relationships that were sometimes uneven but tolerable or even pleasant when I was protected, though based on inequality.  And a few times those got far too close to abuse.  i was never struck, because I left before it was immanent.

On the other hand, theatre training (both acting and directing) matched with a fairly decent humanities background meant that I was always asking WHY on both sides of the relationship.  I was too tolerant of men who wanted to get my approval, but I was at the same time compiling a dossier.  When it was complete, I yanked the trapdoor catch and they were gone, out, goodbye.  

There were women who wanted to either make me their tool or become part of my life.  One had been advised by her counselor to become part of the lives of those she admired, though she didn’t seem to realize that a large part of mine was simply sitting there reading a book.  They were imagining something like a toddler’s bliss at helping mom.  The hardest part of that was being “gifted” as a way of confirming relationship — giving me something so I would be obligated.  Of course, some were simply acting as though they were editing a high end fashion magazine.

When I began to seriously work at what happened in my marriage, the person who was most helpful was still not that well-known.  I already had a long history of reading the Third Force psychiatric community — Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and dozens of humanistic variations — until reaching the Fourth Force, which is transpersonal, moving to community.  That makes today’s neurological brain research the “Fifth Force” though no one calls it that.  I do think it’s relevant.  

This last was confirmed when X’s cousin came to visit — a man he barely knew — and turned out to be almost exactly alike in the dimension of narcissism and dominance.  X was horrified but I thought it was funny.  I think it is a personal characteristic that feudalism and class systems select for at an early age.

Sam Vaktin was VERY helpful.  Put his name into YouTube and you’ll get a cornucopia of insight and advice, all practical and jargon-free, but beginning from the idea of narcissism — the state of only being able to value oneself and therefore having learned a lot of ways to make others part of that.

Last night I watched “Trial and Retribution” on Acorn.  It was Year 2, Episodes 1 and 2, and featured as the villain a young Iain Glen, the benign protector of the “Mother of Dragons” on ‘Game of Thrones.”  His handsome Scots face was made satanic as he caused the tortured deaths of women through susceptible men (dominated by mothers) without ever doing anything himself.  It’s a Lynda Laplante production, using the themes that eventually become “Prime Suspect.”  It is an exploration of sexual perversion at a deadly level.

Beyond that, this is about the point where verbal abuse, situational demands, become physical.  Police procedurals that deal in murder are essentially asking “what is a human being?” in terms of the vulnerability of the flesh.  Step off the curb too carelessly, offend the wrong people, misinterpret an animal, and other innocence can get anyone killed.  We need to add to our self-protective skills how to avoid abuse from humans who find it easy to hurt and destroy us as a way of maintaining themselves.