Sometimes very little makes sense

Many years ago I worked with a young lady who was in housekeeping.  She always was in the best of moods and never said a negative word.   She also had a husband who was in prison. She counted the days until he would be out of prison .   She was thrilled when her husband was released.  Of course, right after his release, her husband came home drunk and blew her arm off with a shotgun.  After that I lost track, except, not surprisingly, I learned she stayed with him.

I got into one of those “whatever happened to….” moods. She died in 2019.   The good news is it was clear she had separated from her husband two years earlier.  She never divorced him.  She was still working as a housekeeper.  

John. I was a magistrate for almost thirty years.  I cannot begin to recall just how many domestic cases I saw, where one person would not file charges against the other.  Or several months later when the backlog of court cases came around, they would change their statements and claim it didn't happen.  And end facing new charges of their own.

As you said some things are soooooooo very hard to understand!  Please try to be at Peace, I don't believe that you could have made any difference in the outcome.

Some things are just plain painful to deal with.  What I have found to be important is how we each deal with those painful things.

As always, I hope you may find your Peace

I read a book a few years ago by Patricia Evans called Controlling People. In a very compassionate way, she explains how some people (the abuser) are stuck in a senseless way of thinking and they really don't know what they are doing. The victim also doesn't see what is happening.

It was a huge eye opener for me into why I always "deserved" whatever senseless chaos that resulted in me being constantly injured as a child.

Patricia Evans refers to it as a spell, and I agree this is accurate. When a child is raised this way, they are accustomed to abuse, don't recognize it as abnormal, may not even recognize verbal abuse for what it is, and as adults, may even get sucked into the sometimes deadly vortex of domestic abuse. Meanwhile, the abuser doesn't know how to change, and those workshop for anger management don't always hit the target (when people aren't standing in reality)

I buy a lot of used books, and when I get a chance, I often add a copy of this book to my cart for a couple of dollars and give them to counselors in the domestic abuse field.

If you get a chance, read chapter 12. I understand people better because of it, and can be more compassionate about the whole problem. (I think police should read it too so they can better understand the victims and enlighten them.)

Hi Ra,

Very true. I have found that bullies tend to see themselves as victims.  Of course, when a bully gets confronted about their behavior, it just proves to them they are being picked on.

If you go back into the history of many (most?) bullies, they were bullied themselves at some point. Abuse is a pattern that repeats and goes for generations if we don't intervene.

This is not to excuse bullying, but just to consider root causes.

John F Dean wrote:Hi Ra,

.  Of course, when a bully gets confronted about their behavior, it just proves to them they are being picked on.

🤣

And they really believe it too: it seems they are all heros in their own minds, and believe themselves to be high functioning perfectionists (no such thing, as character perfectionism is a malady!) but that's why you are cruel for pointing out anything untoward!!!

😆

Some are simply so irrational that insane the only description that fits
Or they can be insane with certain close targets (but not with the postman, oh right they no longer exist) , when ALONE with them (like the type of bully the book points out -- it's almost like trying to possess someone with a false all smiling teddy bear with a very short memory) -- the kind in that book are really psychopaths I think (I've read a lot about psychopaths to better understand one lol)

As one author who has worked extensively with the prison crowd calls it: character disordered.

Phil Stevens wrote:If you go back into the history of many (most?) bullies, they were bullied themselves at some point. Abuse is a pattern that repeats and goes for generations if we don't intervene.

This is not to excuse bullying, but just to consider root causes.

Yes exactly: intergenerational trauma

AKA intergenerational insanity ;-)

Because shooting off your partner's hand is really insane!

I used to farmsit a horse rescue and knew a gal who escaped a partner she suspected tried to drown her daughter, but she had a premonition and arrived on her horse in time to stop what was happening

Later, he murdered a neighbor with his own chainsaw
Tried to escape prison by shooting himself in the head, but only blew half his brains apart and survived to go to prison and was killed there by people who couldn't tolerate him

It seems there were a lot of missing men who had come from central America to work on his property and the only thing the police found was one suspicious shirt -- but he was probably a serial murderer.

She was by this time in a long term roller coaster relationship and I asked her when she is going to get sick of being preoccupied with what percentage of her is currently in his dog house

The dog house phenomenon

Yup! Lots of crazies out there!

John, to outsiders it surely doesn't make sense. But to the person intimately involved, it seems perfectly sane.

I was raised by parents who, I now know in hindsight, were not all that well mentally balanced. It took many years of being away from them before I realized and accepted that my childhood was not in the normal sanity range. But I had grown up in that household and viewed life there as totally normal. Thank heavens I was able to break away.

I also thank heaven that my hubby and I decided not to have children.  Neither of us had what could be called a mentally and emotionally stable, normal upbringing. I realized afterward that I really did not know how to raise a child normally. I’m sure that we would have really messed up the poor child just like we had been. The abusive pattern would have been repeated in the next generation.

Over the years I twice yanked a friend out of a mentally abusive relationship. Not a mild one, but one insanely obvious to everyone around except the person involved. Yes, the person involved simply can’t sanely judge the situation. I don’t know why, but I do know that my hubby and I both experienced the phenomena.

I’m no psychologist and can’t figure out the whys behind the behavior. But I can relate an interesting experience I had. I lived away from my parents for decades, but then I became their caretakers for the last few years of their lives (in their late 80’s). Though I refused to have them live in my house, I did care for them daily for a hours each day. My husband saw me slipping into the pattern of the mental manipulation & abuse, and rightly took offense. But I couldn’t see the problem developing. I can’t say why. But it took his intervention to keep the situation from going completely toxic. I had to build a mental/emotional wall between my parents and me in order not to get sucked in again. But as a result, I had no emotion other than "good riddance" when they died.

Su, souch of what you say I relate to.

That you got sucked back into the toxicity you knew about but needed help to be pulled back out of.

I've experienced it too, and for myself (I'm not a psychologist either) I realized in retrospect that I was in reaction mode and not able to be in observation mode, to see how things were escalating

Perhaps like when one drives too long on a highway and has the illusion one isn't moving anymore, the escalation isn't noticed -- only that it's bad, not that it's getting worse

Ra, how well said…. Reaction mode versus observation mode. Yes!!

That is a very sad story.  I am not sure what the point was.







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How a victim can become desensitized to domestic abuse : it seems senseless that they can even stay until it kills them, meanwhile, the abuser doesn't always understand that they are insane -- the senselessness of this

I guess we're trying to support John, original poster, in what might be getting through the grief of the meaningless loss of a friend