My second video on “Why Study Feminism?” intends to inform on the topic of Domestic Violence, largely, and unhealthy relationships that figure into women’s/people’s experience (and eventual activism) specifically. The biggest power of Feminism in the 20th century, to me, is how it has been able to create social movements that offer a critical consciousness to bring individual women’s/people’s suffering to the foreground as a mass, social problem. I’m a Third and Fourth Wave feminist, but I was educated by the Second Wave, and I am all about their mass movements on multiple fronts, including on domestic violence. In fact, Feminism has given me my life, in innumerable and often inexplainable ways (which I always share as personal experiences when the occasion and topics arise in class, in solidarity with my students; we are ALL in this together!)

So Domestic Violence was a part of my life as a child, between my parents, and my mother to her children. I clearly remember that the mass consciousness at that time, was to ignore the crimes if between families and “loved ones.” Yes, there were cops at my house as a child, on several occasions. (My ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experience) score is 6 out of 10.) I remember the police taking my father out of the house, and he would then come in, grab stuff, and disappear into the night, gone for days. My mother was often accusing him of cheating. In fact, pretty much every Christmas, they’d go to his or her work party, and come home and fight, into the night until they went to blows. Truth be told, my mother was often the aggressor, and my father the victim. There were nights of terror, to be clear. Watching the two people you love the most tear into each other is something no child should ever suffer . . .

But my mother suffered beatings as a child and identified as a victim through-and-through. As her children, we suffered endless stories--on repeat--of the many times she had been abandoned and betrayed (adult business being wreaked on our lives). In fact, this is what made me a trauma therapist (probably more on this later). She was certainly Borderline in the end, an unofficial diagnosis I was able to arrive at when I studied Diagnosis as a Counseling graduate student. The fact is, my mother beat me several times in rage--against my budding sexuality . . . my mother was the narcissist and aggressor. My daughter-self is my mother’s co-dependent. But that’s also a longer story.

Which is all to say, domestic violence victims can be and sometimes are men, and I am not the first to admit it. They most often are perpetrators, but my feminism is fed by fighting against oppressive systems and for all oppressed people—(and I have experienced negative, oppressive behaviors from self-described “feminists” in presumably female bodies as well, tbh). Probably, I am a rare feminist who can testify to men being abused by women. But I also must wrestle with my mother having had been abused throughout her childhood—which is probably what caused her (undiagnosed) Borderline Personality Disorder, a delusional disorder based in a 2 bewildering triangulation. My mom had to love/hate her primary attachment figures. No child should have to experience this, and I have devoted my life to healing and preventing future exploitation of children in particular, whether emotional, mental, or physical. In part, I have done this because of what I suffered at my mother’s hand, trying for a lifetime to understand why love can hurt so much. In another part of me, I do this work because of my empathic abilities to feel others’ suffering, a talent and knowing that I would never give up, despite its neurological and other difficulties. So before my mother was an oppressor, she was a victim, and this psychology is part of what I hope to help others understand as a feminist educator.

In time, I hope to do one or two video essays on the various psychological dynamics between victim and oppressor in intimate relationships. There are complex attachment and relationship dynamics involved and the short answer is that we can each be both! Please stay tuned, and thank you for sharing this time with me and my story. Witnessing is never easy--but sometimes transformative, with healing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bppBFhA-N1o