The Abuse Was Not Personal
I come from a people who lived through many generations of war and other violent brutality. The resulting patterns were acted out in my home and directly at me.
At a West Coast Catholic Liberation Workshop several years ago, Joanne Bray (International Liberation Reference Person for Catholics) invited me up front to have a session on the violence that had been directed at me. She encouraged me to get angry, an emotion I try to keep hidden. At one point, she asked another Co-Counselor, V—, to stand in for [represent] my stepfather and stepbrothers who had all abused me.
V— is a solidly built man who shares my Central and Eastern European heritage. He has seen more than his own share of violence and has done a fair amount of discharging on it. He gave me permission to “let him have it” [not be restrained in targeting him]. With the attention of the group, with Joanne’s confidence in my goodness, and with V—‘s smiling encouragement, I poured out years of bottled-up rage. I threatened to hit V—, I tried to humiliate him, I even told him I was going to kill him—all the while pushing him and staring him right in his face.
After about five minutes of this, Joanne said, “This is going great, but I want to change it a little. Instead of directing all of this rage at your family members, direct it at the oppressive forces that divided you and kept you from having each other.”
At first, I couldn’t understand what she was talking about and I asked her to repeat it. Then my mind just opened up. I could see that what my stepbrothers and stepfather had acted out at me was not personal. It was a result of how they, too, had been brutalized and trained into the dominator role. The quality of my discharge changed. I went from what had felt like dramatizing my helpless rage to sobbing with powerful indignation. Suddenly I could tell [notice] that what I was fighting for was my inherent connection with my brothers and that this connection was much more real and permanent than the oppressive patterns. Coming at the “fight” from this perspective, I had much more clarity and hopefulness.
After this session, my ability to think about the men in my family shifted significantly. I could tell without a doubt that we share a strong bond of love that is permanent and worth fighting for.
Now, after about ten years, my relationships with these men have changed in ways that I never would have thought possible. We can talk and laugh together about our childhoods. They have even begun opening up about the violent things that happened to them, and the other things that left them feeling hurt and alone.
I share this story because it seems relevant to what we are now trying to think about: “What role can an RC Community play in relation to the ever-more-visible irrationalities and oppressive forces in society?” Being honest and upfront about how we have been dominated, and how we have dominated (or still want to dominate) others, is an important part of the work we get to do.
USA
(Present Time 203, April 2021)