Movie clip discussion/argument. Your thoughts?

[LovebirdsFlying]

@linux.poet Thank you for your insight. I was hoping the thread would take off. You make a lot of valid points.

Hubby and I both had some experiences before we met. We've been married 16 years now, and it's taken a while for us to learn not to view each other through the filters of our previous relationships. Just because his ex made them late for everything, for example, doesn't mean that since I'm a woman, I'm going to make us late too. At first he might have thought he needed to hurry me along, constantly reminding me what time it is and when we need to be there, but he caught on. On the other side of the coin, there were times, early in our marriage, when I needlessly freaked out because, somehere in my head, I thought I was about to be abused. The conditions were right for it.

Well, hubby doesn't do that.

The emotional scarring doesn't come from just my first marriage. I grew up abused, which is how I was set up for that kind of relationship in the first place. What we grow up with, we tend to see as normal. There were red flags almost as soon as we started dating, but when I saw them and wanted to end it, family convinced me I was unreasonable and making a big deal over nothing. Needless to say, his treatment of me got worse and worse over time.

Contrast again. Early on in my now and forever marriage, we were getting ready for bed, backs toward each other. He took his belt off. When I heard the zzzzzip behind me, as the leather cleared the loops, just for a split second, I panicked. Before I even realized it, I was all but *under* the bed. Of course, it only took a moment to realize I wasn't in any real danger, but the body remembers, and reflexes make it do all sorts of things. I was in my 40s and hadn't had a belt taken to me in decades.

Hubby understood. He'd been abused by his father as well. He's been cautious since then about taking his belt off in front of me, warning me when he's about to, so it doesn't take me by surprise. Most of the time, we're not even in the same room when he does it. I can't say, even now, that the unexpected sound of a leather belt clearing loops wouldn't cause me at least a momentary startle. As is common with complex PTSD, I have a startle reflex with a hair trigger.

Ex would have taken it personally. "You don't have to jump like that! It's only me! What kind of monster do you think I am? You're crazy!" He would have gone on to weaponize it against me, perhaps teasing me by sneaking up behind me and taking his belt off as suddenly and as noisily as he could, then laughing at my reaction. To take it from the hypothetical to the actual, he did know I was afraid of snakes, and he did more than once capture a snake for the sole purpose of sneaking up on me with it. Trying to toughen me up and get me over it, he might claim. But exposure therapy doesn't work like that. Exposure therapy is done gradually, by a trained professional, under carefully controlled circumstances, with full consent of the person being exposed. (And even trained professionals don't practice on their own family members. It's unethical.) Truth is, he wasn't doing things like that so I could benefit from the exposure therapy. He was doing things like that because the little snotburger enjoyed torturing me. Seeing me show any kind of weakness at all made him feel powerful, therefore masculine. Which brings us full circle to the topic, warped views of what masculinity really is. 'Cause that ain't it.

 

[linux.poet]

I grew up abused, which is how I was set up for that kind of relationship in the first place. What we grow up with, we tend to see as normal. There were red flags almost as soon as we started dating, but when I saw them and wanted to end it, family convinced me I was unreasonable and making a big deal over nothing.

The interesting aspect of my story is that I was "abused backwards" in that respect, with my dad telling me and my brother to never get married, that our children would be "little monsters" and that I was looking for marriage to "avoid working." Work was (and is) my dad's idol - everyone must become an engineer or computer programmer or face the consequences.

Needless to say, I wanted to become a writer instead, and I faced the consequences. But the bottom line is also that I tried to become a computer programmer and I failed, so I wasn't given much choice. When everything doesn't work, you end up cultivating your best talent (writing, in this case), or die. Perfect scholastic and work performance was what was expected. Marriage and having any sexuality at all was a sign of weakness. So I got isolated and locked up in the house (with no car because I couldn't afford one) with all the touch deprivation symptoms and CPTSD that came with it. Neither extreme is good. The human body is not designed to live without physical affection, which made my trauma symptoms worse.

However, this situation did give me the luxury of choosing my own relationship in terms of who I wanted to marry because I wasn't supposed to have one. And since I was being forced by my parents to try and fix my scholastic failures, I spent a lot of time researching psychology to find out why my brain wasn't functioning. I encountered a lot of nightmare predictions about my future relationship prospects from the data. The first is that the abused marry abusers because that's what they know and expect, and many get in a cycle of abusive boyfriend after abusive boyfriend out of desperation for any relationship. The second is that the abused become abusers, and that pattern is vivid in my family history. My great-father abused my grandmother who abused my father who abused me. So for an abuse victim to get married and have a healthy relationship, they have to deal with their attractions to the wrong people, and also deal with their desire to abuse others. A lot of the research is from Dr. Cloud and Townsend, Safe People, Cloud's Changes that Heal, Dr. Meyer's Don't Let the Jerks Get The Best of You.

The first person I wanted to marry was an online relationship, and sure enough, that person was an abuser. I broke off the relationship, and nearly broke my affection deprived brain doing it. Second attraction? Unbeliever and abuser. Third one was me trying to get control over my disruptive desires for affection by me looking for someone I could dominate and control, so I apologized to the poor soul and left in shame. My current boyfriend is attraction #4, and I'm keeping him. He is a generous and kind soul. I wasn't violently attracted to him like the others, but he is objectively better for me. According to Meyer's book, you actually want to avoid intense attractions and start with a friendship to break out of the abuser attraction cycle, because you're going to want the wrong person.

And with the college degree in English so I could write comes the literary analysis, which gave me another incentive to use my intellect to probe the relationships between beliefs, mental illness, and reactions. (It also doesn't help that I have web design degree as and thus also know how Internet Marketing works, which allows me to combine degrees and know how Facebook works. )

Contrast again. Early on in my now and forever marriage, we were getting ready for bed, backs toward each other. He took his belt off. When I heard the zzzzzip behind me, as the leather cleared the loops, just for a split second, I panicked. Before I even realized it, I was all but *under* the bed. Of course, it only took a moment to realize I wasn't in any real danger, but the body remembers, and reflexes make it do all sorts of things. I was in my 40s and hadn't had a belt taken to me in decades.

My biggest trigger was, and some extent still is, doors. If my dad's door opened in the middle of the night while I was still awake, I knew that trouble was coming. He would scream at me in the middle of the night to go to bed, disconnect the internet, turn the power off to my room by going down to pull the breaker, at one point removing the door from my room from its hinges, physical violence, etc. If I hear a door opening, I will turn and look at the door. It's a weird reflex when sitting in a college classroom and every time someone comes through the door you look at them as if you're going to be attacked. Fortunately nobody noticed except for me.

Hearing someone walk up the stairs of my house still scares me a bit, especially when I know that my father is home. Other people consider it rude to interrupt me in the middle of my work, but my dad doesn't care (still, even though what he's saying now is boring stuff like schedule changes instead of screaming at me or making stupid employment suggestions).

Doors not withstanding, a big part of my story is that while I had CPTSD, I wasn't allowed to have CPTSD by the people who were giving me CPTSD. So my mind forcibly tried to reconstruct itself and would reach for any healing remedy available. If one is not aggressively focused on mental performance, this disease could linger on for a lot longer. It doesn't help that you had your father and then your abusive husband on top of that. With that being said,

Ex would have taken it personally. "You don't have to jump like that! It's only me! What kind of monster do you think I am? You're crazy!" He would have gone on to weaponize it against me, perhaps teasing me by sneaking up behind me and taking his belt off as suddenly and as noisily as he could, then laughing at my reaction.

this doesn't work because your ex is just as much of an abuser as your father was. This reinforces the trauma trigger by telling it is correct. "Man taking off belt = danger, run" isn't solved by having another dangerous guy do the same thing. Now it is even worse.

Trauma is NOT healed by exposure therapy. Trauma is your mind being damaged by abuse - too much "exposure therapy" has already been given and your mind needs to reconstruct itself. Exposure therapy is for spoiled and coddled children who are scared of challenges, not trauma victims. Exposure therapy is like weightlifting for an atrophied arm; trauma is trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for your arm to carry and breaking it. Now you can't even lift normal weight because your arm is broken.

My experience has been that trauma is not solved from the outside, it has to be dealt with from the inside out. The arm has to be put in a cast to protect it and your body needs to be given what it needs to heal the arm. But that is the problem with my mind: it is highly internalized. I have the ability to modify my own behavior and reactions at my own will if I so choose. I don't react as much to my triggers when I know my dad isn't around. My intellect also tends to sit in the driver's seat of control. An extroverted personality will need a vastly different healing program than my bookworm, classroom, (and to some extent, online forum) approach, for example.

With all that being said, I can see now why you are struggling with this, because you had two male abusers in your life instead of one. Now I see why you want to define masculinity as a group on performance and make contrasts between one set of behavior and another. It's probably compelling for you. Probably not like my mind likes to endlessly rerun connections between my interests to calculate the perfect way to make money and thus appease my former abuser's demands for financial perfection but no less hardwired.

For now, just ride the wave, but know that this trauma that your brain is processing out. To an intellectual perspective, it's not fully sound though. An abusive traumatic experience or a healthy relationship really doesn't say anything about the gender or sex of the abusers or healthy relationship partners. I think your mind is trying to come at that idea using the contrast between your two marriage relationships to try and establish it, as opposed to the more intellectual means that I established it with. It's possible that you value relationship quality more highly than intellectually sound conclusions. My observation is that is true for a lot of women. To be fair, I think that my relationship with my younger brother (who is not an abuser) has also been part of what inspired me to take a more individualistic approach - both my brother and my boyfriend are two very different people with very different behavior, but neither of them are abusers and both of them are very much male human beings.

Just because his ex made them late for everything, for example, doesn't mean that just because I'm a woman, I'm going to make us late too. At first he might have thought he needed to hurry me along, constantly reminding me what time it is and when we need to be there, but he caught on.

This reminds me of my boyfriend's mom neglecting him as a child, and every time I'm late for something, it makes him feel like I'm neglecting his needs. It's morbid because I struggle to be on time for things as a function of my own rebuilt wreck of a brain. This has gotten better over the course of the 2 years we have been together, but I haven't fully figured out what to do about it yet.

I will probably stop soon though, as long posts are things that people don't want to read. I know that much, and Proverbs 16:30 .