The trigger for this post is comment made by Pissy on The Day In The Park. A number of you have previously made similar comments about manipulation, button-pushing, and hoop-jumping.
One of the reasons I keep my personal journal and these blogs is to be able to look at my own feelings and experiences from a more objective standpoint. I am aware of my own desperation to fix things in my relationship and my propensity to sublimate my own needs at the first sign of hopefulness.
In one of my earlier posts I made reference to Stockholm syndrome. Today I intended to make a more full reference to abuser identification. I found a great reference on Stockholm syndrome on the Wikipedia. I followed some of the internal references in that article elsewhere including battered woman defence, battered person syndrome, Emotional detachment, learned helplessness.
I do not claim to be battered in the physical sense. I have some suspicion that I may qualify as emotionally battered, but I'm not fully comfortable with jumping onto that bandwagon because of not wanting an "easy excuse" and for ego reasons (remember - I'm a guy - how could I be battered? I'm perceived by most people who know me as being one of the strongest personalities they know...).
Here are some interesting excerpts from what I found:
battered woman syndrome
[subsequent edit: i am looking at this syndrome from the perspective of me being abused and controlled]
Theory
The term "battered woman syndrome" was coined by American feminist and psychologist Lenore Walker. In 1978-1981 she interviewed 435 female victims of domestic violence. She concluded that the violence goes in cycles. Each cycle consists on 3 stages:
- Tension building stage, when a victim suffers verbal abuse or minor physical violence, like slaps. At this stage, the victim may attempt to pacify the abuser. However, the victim's passivity may reinforce the abuser's violent tendencies.
- Acute battering incident. At this stage, both perceived and real danger (of being killed or seriously injured) is maximal.
- Loving contrition. After the abuser discharged his tension by battering the victim, his attitude changes. He may apologize for the incident and promise to change his behaviour in the future.[subsequent edit: mrs_c does this a lot after she drives over me]
Walker used the Martin Seligman's theory of learned helplessness to explain why many battered women do not leave their abusers. In Seligman's experiments, rats repeatedly suffered electric shocks without being able to escape them. After this, they did not attempt to escape a shock even if they had such a possibility. According to Walker, females who are repeatedly battered produce similar psychological responses.
Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness is a well-established principle in psychology, a description of the effect of inescapable punishment (such as electrical shock) on animal (and by extension, human) behavior. The theory was developed by Martin Seligman through experiments going back to 1965.
""Learned helplessness" offered a model to explain human depression, in which apathy and submission prevail, causing the individual to rely fully on others for help. This can result when life circumstances cause the individual to experience life choices as irrelevant."
"...people in a state of learned helplessness view problems as personal, pervasive, or permanent. That is,
- Personal - They may see themselves as the problem; that is, they have internalized the problem.
- Pervasive - They may see the problem affecting all aspects of life.
- Permanent - They may see the problem as unchangeable.
I have written previously about my detachment in my relationship, or at least Mrs_C's perception of me as being detached. Even just the other day on Nice Things To Do To Make My Wife Feel Special I made the following comment:
I'm an emotional and sensitive guy, just not very demonstrative - lots of times I think something, or feel something, and then neglect to inform Mrs_C of the thing I think or feel
she thinks this is being distant. Me, I just completely [go] "doh!" I meant to say something there.
I have no current conclusions, I just thought that I would put in words what is swirling through my head. [subsequent edit: i am using the above theoretical lenses to examine why i am staying]
No comments:
Post a Comment