Some years ago, I was recovering from a bad marriage. After gaining 100 lbs in the last year of the marriage and making an ill-conceived decision to go blonde, I chopped my hair down to an inch all around and took a much needed vacation with my parents to celebrate their retirement. I believe I was one of 3 people on the 2 week cruise, whose hair was not yet gray. One day on vacation, I met the other two. They were a couple. The wife’s story involved horrific abuse at the hands of her parents, siblings and her own ex-husband. She is very in touch with her own history, and chooses not to profit by it. To my knowledge, she never sought criminal prosecution, revenge or self-aggrandizement. She only needed peace and the self-respect that had been wrenched from her by her abusers. She was truly on the path to recovery. I applaud her choice on how to approach her situation.
Through the years, I’ve met victims of many different crimes, and I have to say the most healthy survivors seem to be the ones who acknowledge it but choose not to live it on a daily basis. There was a part in my recovery from my divorce when I made this decision for myself. I was no longer going to be the woman in charge of the local divorce recovery support group. I was going to cut them loose and make them find another leader. I was no longer going to be “the divorced lady” or a victim of any variety. I was free. In consulting with clients and potential clients about their court claims, we sit down before initiating a claim, to weigh their potential benefit from going to court against the knowledge that being in court extends the period of time that you must identify yourself as a victim and repeatedly recount the details of your victimization.
With the growing awareness of family violence, some advocate groups encourage victims to prosecute every wrongdoing to the fullest extent, to join marches and start foundations and disclose your story to all who care to listen, to ruin the abusers. Some groups insist that women are victims and men are abusers, with very few exceptions. The truth is that women are just as capable of cruelty, abuse and nastiness, and men are just as capable of being victimized. The difference between the sexes involves choice of weapon and the reaction to being victimized, the path to recovery and availability of the support system necessary to recover. However, the fact of being victimized is no different. In the early years of domestic violence awareness, the news was, “it happens in the best of families”, and the focus was to educate the public that this is a problem that crosses social status. The new message needs to be that both sexes are equally responsible for abuse, and equally victimized. Gender is no more of an indicator of ability to control one’s anger and handle it appropriately, than wealth or social status.
In 40 years of growing awareness of domestic violence and child abuse, some have learned to abuse the system, crying “victim” at every turn. We hear commonly of parents turned into CPS by people they had an unrelated disagreement with, and everyone knows that even an anonymous CPS complaint automatically generates an investigation whether or not it is a credible accusation. And while the phenomenon of false domestic violence accusations has been known in the justice system and family court system for decades, the general public is slowly being made aware of false accusations, through infamous public cases. More and more often, those who have learned to abuse the system that was meant to protect victims, are being exposed for their lies. There is growing realization of the fact that some people who claim “victim” status are abusing the system. Every false accusation of abuse cheapens the real ones, and makes the real ones harder to pursue.
My vacation acquaintance, who was recovering from abuse, had to contend with a public who is wary of false accusations. She checked her memories with others, to satisfy herself that she was right, because victims of “false memory syndrome” had infamously victimized the people they were accusing. Well meaning friends, family, advocates, and even therapists, might encourage the imagination of the troubled person, encouraging the image of abuse in places where the troubled person had no actual memory. In several infamous examples, the high suggestibility of persons with troublesome feelings was shown to result in false accusations of bizarre and nasty abuse. Prosecutors and other attorneys seeking to show the existence of a pattern of abuse are faced with the problem of proving that the memories of abuse were obtained in a manner not likely to result in false accusations. Some infamous cases where entire daycare schools were indicted and destroyed on the basis of false accusations, have caused the reins of justice to tighten on the issue of what is admissible evidence in these cases.
My friend has the luxury of having independent proof of the fact that her memories are real. Her husband has a lot to do with that. He seems to have some instinct on the issue, and was familiar with false memory syndrome. He also cared about her enough not to put words in her mouth. He did not finish her sentences when she was not able to do so for herself. He did not push her to remember. He simply waited. He knew only the tip of the iceberg about what caused her issues, (her previous marriage) but he did not let his curiosity cause him to push her. He just loved her and made life safe for her and waited until she was ready and able to remember. A gal pal would never do this. Our culture is too full of images of the Sex In the City girls gossiping about their boyfriends over cosmos, or Bette Midler movies about divorcees getting together to find creative ways to get revenge on their exes. Gal pals, in pretending to cheerlead for each other, have become counterproductive to the therapeutic process. More about this in another post.
Like a true recovering victim, my vacation friends seems to feel very little need for revenge (at least compared to what most would think she WOULD feel). The hallmark of a true recovery from a traumatic event is that you have become indifferent to it in most respects. Just like the opposite of love is “indifference”, the opposite of being a victim is becoming a survivor. Not a survivor who relives the events over and over through re-telling it to support groups and at marches and public speaking events, but rather the quiet survivor who can rebuild a normal life without symptoms of the previous troubles entering into the new version of normal. Building a version of “normal” that is more satisfying than any previous version the victim had lived.
Eventually, after going through a divorce recovery programs and being the facilitator for a few years, my own feelings about my divorce became less intense. I was no longer a victim and I no longer wanted to be known as “the divorced lady”, so I could not envision myself becoming part of the vociferous group of domestic violence victim advocates who were trying to convince me that I was one of them. I was never a victim of physical violence and do not choose to be identified as a victim of any other kind of abuse. I do not hide the things that others would have claimed cause me to be a “victim”, but I do not need to discuss them. I am recovered. I wish the same for every true victim out there. And for those whose “victim” status has arrived by virtue of friends patting them on the back and telling them about how they were victimized, offering to help prove it as a strategy in the divorce, etc… I wish you the best of luck. The energy it takes to secure your status as a victim can be overwhelming when you’re competing in the memory of the court system participants, with memories of those who came before you with false accusations.
If you have identified yourself as a victim of abuse, please consult two different professionals, a therapist, who can help you sort out what your friends tell you that you should feel, from your truthful feelings, and a lawyer, who can help you identify pieces of evidence which will be admissible as proof of your status as a victim, and help you decide whether your status as a victim has any value in the particular court case you choose to pursue. Stay tuned for more information about cases where your status as a victim may be entirely irrelevant to your case, which will also be the subject of another post.
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