Noli Irritare Leones

Let me start by mapping out a larger space in which a book might discuss abusive or exploitive relationships, and showing where Carnes’ book lies in that space.

Gendered vs. Non-Gendered: Carnes is describing a wide range of relationships, including basically any situation where someone is being abused, exploited, or mistreated, but still feels some loyalty to the perpetrator. This could include child abuse (sexual, physical, or emotional) or neglect, battered spouses, emotionally abused spouses, sexual exploitation or harrassment in a professional situation, or even other situations where a company is exploiting or mistreating a worker who still treats the company with loyalty. Some of these situations, in our culture, are more evenly divided among the genders than others. So you can choose to make selections that place your emphasis on women in abusive or exploitive situations, and why they stay, or you can look at both women and men.

Carnes is at great pains not to describe this phenomenon in a gendered way. He’s explicit about saying that this is not just something that happens to women, but to men as well, and the case studies that he sprinkles throughout the book show every combination of genders: a wife battered by her husband, a husband still entangled with an ex-wife who is manipulative and prone to bouts of rage, a woman seduced by her female therapist, male clergy and doctors who sexually exploit female patients, a man exploited in a professional way mainly by another man, a man physically abused by his parents.

Now, since at least some of what he’s describing, in our culture, isn’t all that evenly distributed between the sexes (wives are more likely to be battered than husbands, and, given who holds more positions of authority, women more likely to be sexually harrassed by men than the reverse), Carnes is telling one side of the story. I’m glad, though, given his other choices in focus, that he made the choice to look at the ways in which exploitive or abusive relationships are gender neutral, and how both men and women can wind up feeling loyalty to people who are actually mistreating him. Particularly since he’s focusing on the psychologial factors that bind people, and, you know, we already have a boatload of self-help books on how women love too much, women are codependent, women keep on trapping themselves in relationships with jerks.

Societal Factors vs. Psychological Factors: Why does a battered wife stay with her husband? Is it the money? A lack of safe avenues for escape? Do you look at social factors that make it hard to get away, or do you look at psychological ones? Carnes comes down firmly on the side of looking at psychological ones:

… “Why doesn’t she leave?” It is not about money. People with many financial options stay in these situations. It is not about being a woman because it happens to men as well. It is not about the person; it becomes a factor across many relationships. The answer is that she does not leave because she cannot; the chaos, the extreme danger, the living on the edge coupled with a degree of kindness or nobility are all so compelling. She is no different than the alcoholic who cannot leave the bar.

Normal vs. Abnormal: Are these “trauma bonds” things that can happen to any normal person, in the right situation? Or to people who are particularly vulnerable because they’ve already been damaged by their childhood? Here, Carnes comes down on both sides. Using Patti Hearst as an example of Stockholm syndrome, and also talking about the damaging effect of sexual harrassment even on women who come into the situation with a normal, healthy self-esteem, he makes the point that anyone, in the right circumstances, is vulnerable to trauma and what he called trauma bonding. But he also talks a good deal about the ways in which people’s childhood experiences predispose them to be victims or victimizers as adults, and the exercises that you’re supposed to be doing in your journal as you read the book tend to assume that you had a troubled childhood and a difficult relationship with your parents.

A word on those exercises. I didn’t do them (for the most part – I’ll describe the big exception), but did read through them all, and my reaction varied. Carnes starts with a Post-Traumatic Stress Index, a long list of questions that you’re supposed to answer, and tally your scores on several categories of questions. Carnes asks that

Although the statements are written in the present tense, if the statements have ever applied to your life, then place a check next to that item. Statements are considered false only if they have never been a part of your life.

I was skeptical about this way of tallying the score – isn’t it going to way overestimate how traumatized you are now? – so I went through this index two ways: first, by checking every statement which had ever applied to me (which in my case includes a period of severe depression more than two decades ago, after the death of a guy whom I had been romantically involved with), and second, by checking only those which had been true of me in the last year or so. Huge difference, in my case. The first way, I wound up suffering from “trauma reactions” and “trauma shame,” and it was suggested that I reprogram myself with affirmations and write letters to my perpetrators saying how I had been harmed. The second way, I wound up with occasional insomnia and not much else, not enough to qualify as having any sort of PTSD.

I suppose there’s one positive side to checking items for your whole lifetime – it showed some definite patterns in how I do and don’t respond to severe stress – but if you’re checking many items that don’t have much to do with your life now, that might be because, after all, you’ve recovered from your past experiences. It’s also worth looking at how long various statements have been true for. It’s one thing to obsess over an ex for weeks, or even months, but if you’re obsessing over a past relationship for years, there’s something going on (in that relationship or in your life) beyond just a bad break up. And I know it’s pretty standard, in tests for depression, to look only for symptoms you’ve experienced for at least two weeks.

Some of the exercises are likely to trigger very different reactions depending on how you look on your childhood. An example is an exercise in which you draw an oval, write words that you think of when you think of your parents, and then start cataloging all the events in your life that were painful and difficult, drawing little curves in the oval as you do so. I get along with my parents, and, other than the divorce when I was in junior high and Dad’s slow death a couple of years ago from cancer, have trouble thinking of much in the way of painful events associated with them. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to abuse or exploitation (though in practice I got away relatively quickly from the one friendship that I now consider to have been abusive). Under the right circumstances, I’m also vulnerable. If you’re toward the Patti Hearst end of the continuum in your experience – caught more by circumstances than by repeating some childhood trauma – you may want to go into cafeteria mode on these exercises, taking the ones that look most useful to you and leaving the rest.

And it’s not all recording memories of your unhappy childhood. Besides the exercises that are supposed to make you look for unhealthy patterns in your past, there are ones that involve setting boundaries for your present and future: bottom-line behaviors, ways of handling relationships where you want no contact, ones where you’re obliged to have limited contact (for example, because of shared custody of kids), and ones where you’re aiming at a full relationship (e.g., your abusive husband is in counseling with you, and you’re trying to give the marriage a chance, but need to set expectations for what progress needs to be made before you’re willing to consider moving back in).

Now, a word on that sexual addiction/sexual anorexia stuff I mentioned yesterday. Evidently, Carnes has a whole book on “sexual anorexia,” and other books that cover “sexual addiction.” This book never really describes “sexual anorexia” in detail, though it does refer to it, and places “sexual addiction” in the context of a larger pattern of compulsive behaviors, and “sexual anorexia” among a larger group of behaviors of “trauma abstinence,” including compulsive saving and actual anorexia.

I question the usefulness of this analysis. In the first place, it seems to me that just about anything unhealthy that you might be doing has gotten lumped into this analysis, and while, yeah, trauma can lead to a whole bunch of different not so healthy long term behaviors, I’m doubting that the optimal treatment for “sexual anorexia” has that much in common with the optimal treatment for anorexia. My fuzzy memory of college abnormal and clinical psychology classes is that the kind of therapy that’s most likely to benefit you depends heavily on just what you’re actually suffering from. Likewise, I know that there are all kinds of compulsive excess, but do all of them really benefit from the same therapy? Of course, I have no clue what therapy does benefit “sex addiction,” and am still not altogether sure how it’s defined (that, too, is another book). It’s possible, though, that Carnes’ treatment for sexual problems is just great, however debateable his analogies. Since this book is more about being trapped by loyalty to bad relationships than about either sexual addiction or sexual anorexia, I can’t say.

Description of the betrayal bond: Here we get discussion of abusive cycles, the honeymoon period, things like being persuaded to ignore your intuition, being bound to secrecy by mistaken loyalty, and the role of belief in your own uniqueness in trapping you in an exploitive relationship. Also some statistics; for just one example

Of women over the age of 30 who have been raped, 58 percent were raped in the context of an abusive relationship.

Carnes referenced studies as he goes, about factors involved in domestic abuse, common characteristics among pastors who wound up sexually exploiting their parishioners, etc. What caught my attention was the role of alcohol, both among battering husbands and among professionals who sexually exploit positions of trust and authority.

In the wake of my husband’s diagnosis as bipolar, I took a “Family to Family” class for family members of the mentally ill (which I see I never did very thoroughly blog – it was good, and I recommend it). One of the things I remember discussing was practical issues if your mentally ill family member is also violent (locks on doors, having a phone available at all times, bottom line boundaries to set for yourself). Now, as my husband will tell you, the threat of violence from the mentally ill can definitely be overblown. Mental illness raises your odds of being a victim of violence much more than it raises your odds of being violent (in part because lots of mentally ill people wind up on the street, and it’s not so easy to stay safe on the street). My own husband (who is very treatment compliant and who doesn’t use alcohol or drugs at all) hasn’t been violent in the nineteen years I’ve known him. But there’s one situation where the risk of violence from a bipolar partner skyrockets, and that’s where you also have alcohol or drug abuse. So, in this case, what I read in this book underlined what I’d gotten out of Family to Family.

There’s some brief discussion of the difference between codependency and the trauma bond, though it appeared that the difference just wound up being what kind of destructive relationship you were trapped in – is it one where your partner is an addict, one where your partner is abusive, or both?

And there’s a lot on what pulls people into a “betrayal bond” or “trauma bond.” The one question I’d raise here is whether Carnes may be overestimating draw of the excitement of the drama of the relationship, and underestimating the role of just plain isolation (though he does speak about the role of secrecy in keeping people trapped). The Stockholm hostages, and Patti Hearst, weren’t just getting alternating threat and kindness from their captors; they were also isolated from anyone else. And, to some extent, so are a lot of people who are trapped in more ordinary abusive and exploitive relationships.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 7:45 am and is filed under Books, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.