Courage Network

Originally published at Women's Self Defense Federation

March 20, 2010

There is a lot of confusion over whether marital/couples therapy will help couples in abusive relationships.

You may have heard that marital therapy is not the proper modality for domestic abuse. Even stronger, you may realize that marital therapy is actually contra-indicated in the treatment of intimate partner abuse.

Then, you may also realize that some couples who deal with abusive control issues in their relationship can learn to develop new skills to facilitate their use of non-violent and non-abusive behavioral responses with their intimate partner.

With this apparent contradictory information, one remains confused as to whether marital therapy works or does not work. Does marital therapy help or hurt in the treatment of domestic violence?

When Marital Therapy Can Help

Marital therapy can help couples in which there is interactional relationship violence. That is when the abusive control dynamics go both ways between the parties.

At one time, one of the people uses power and control tactics, and on other occasions the other party employs the same tactics of abusive control. These dynamics continue within the relationship with the partners merely alternating roles of perpetrator and victim.

For the marital/couples therapy to work as an effective intervention with these couples, it must have both a psychotherapeutic component and a domestic violence corrections component.

When Marital Therapy Can Make It Worse

Alternatively, if the couple is dealing with classic “intimate partner violence,” marital therapy will not work to remedy their dysfunctional relationship.

That is, if the abusive control dynamics go in one direction, and one direction only, as in the case of intimate partner violence, then marital therapy is not indicated and will not alleviate the abuse dynamics.

If there is one abuser and one victim and both parties consistently operate from their respective position, marital therapy can serve as a platform to exacerbate the battering dynamic…posing greater risk for the victimized partner.

If you have tried marital therapy and notice that the abuse in your home escalates after your therapy sessions, then you are best to find an alternative solution to remedy the abuse in your relationship. Chances are you and your partner are better suited for a treatment intervention that addresses battering and victimization separatelyindividually.

When Marital Therapy Can Hurt or Help Abusive Relationships

If it is the case that your couples therapy appears to give your battering partner a stronger edge in maintaining his/her abusive control, recognize why this is so and you will be best guided to the proper intervention for your relationship.

Marital therapy is based on a systems approach. The goal of the therapy is to maintain the homeostasis of the system. Each party in the relationship is part of the system, and the responsibility for marital discord and dysfunctional interaction is spears across the system.

The problem with this approach, when treating classic unidirectional intimate partner abuse, is that it demands that the victim assume partial responsibility for the battering behavior. Moreover, it gives the perpetrator permission not to become accountable for his/her use of power and control tactics in the relationship. The net result strengthens the abuse dynamic, rather than interrupting the cycle of abuse.

In the case of interactional relationship violence in which the use of power and control tactics goes in both directions, couples can come to see the impact of their mutual behavior on one another. Under these circumstances, marital therapy gives a voice to both parties and can be a platform to facilitate change within the relationship.

What Therapy Is Right for Your Abusive Relationship

If you are in an abusive relationship, take a hard and fast look at the dynamics that you live. Ask yourself these two very important questions: Are there one or two victims? Are there one or two abusers (“control freaks”) in your relationship? …Your answers to these questions will guide you to the proper course of treatment for domestic abuse.

Posted on behalf of Protective Mothers Alliance International

Allegan County, Michigan - February 27th 2010. A Family court  judge in Allegan County, Michigan sentenced disabled protective mother Maria Melinn to jail for 21 days in response to non payment of child support.
Maria has been unable to work and thus pay child support due to her medically diagnosed disability.  Maria's ex-husband  broke  her back  during a rage of anger.

The judge chose to ignore the physician's report that Maria is disabled and cannot work. The judge refused to acknowledge legal documentation that Karin Huffer M.S. Marriage Family Therapist. author of "Legal Abuse Syndrome" helped Maria fill out under the American Disabilities Act (A.D.A.).  In addition, this judge also chose not to provide  accommodations for Maria's disability, which he's required to do under the ADA.

On November 6th 2009, Maria was sentenced and served 10 days in jail.  This was for buying a pack of cigarettes in the last six months. The judge reasoned that if Maria can buy cigarettes, she can pay child support. Maria was unable to inform the judge that her cigarettes were bought by a family member, because she was so shocked.   
     
Currently, this judge has put Maria in jail again without accommodations, and without being permitted to use her prescription pain medication.  Please help this disabled mother.

If you would like more information please contact Protective Mothers Alliance International: 941-822-5592.

lb.jlpma@gmail.com.

We need to stay informed about proposed laws and what's happening around us with domestic violence, abuse and human rights if we are to know how to help ourselves, our loved ones and protect our families.  If you want to stay informed about the latest legislative alerts and updates effecting domestic violence in the United States, go to the Family Violence Prevention Fund website by clicking here or copying and pasting this url:  http://capwiz.com/fvpf/issues/ .  Templates have already been designed by FVPF that can be emailed after filling in your information.  The letter will be emailed directly to your representative after you click on the send message button.  If you choose to mail the letter, the site will provide you mailing details based on your location. 

The National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) also watches the face of domestic violence and abuse policies.  Visit their Public Policy page also contains the following:  Policy Issues, Understanding the Legislative Process, Take Action and Action Alerts.

To stay connected with the latest in human rights around the world visit Amnesty International and the United Nations websites.

It is worth the few minutes to get the latest news about what's happening in the world around us.  Send your letters of support for the issues affecting the safety of every person. Learn and take action!

Links directly to the : The Lives of Abused and Battered Women and Heart-Boosting Poetry

Take the time to show a little love and compassion

“The Lives of Abused and Battered Women”

This book was written to tell the story of abuse the only way that it could be, by someone who knew what it was truly about. No one can tell it better than someone who had walked a mile or two in the shoes of abuse. For twenty-five years I lived the live of being abused. The cold harsh words, betrayal, and physical abuse were all I ever had to look forward to. Being told that no one would want you for, but only one thing made me stay in the relationships. I felt that if I left the relationship, no one would want me because no one seemed to be interested in me anyway. In and out of every relationship it was always the same thing, taking what my mates dished out in order to have a man in my life, and I thought that they loved me. I always prayed that my mates would change, and begin to treat me the way that I deserved to be treated. Being picked at and taunted by people who knew what was going on in their cold, harsh, and sneaky ways. The thought of being told that, ‘if you couldn’t hang with the big dog that you should stay on the porch’, which only meant that I either accept what they were dishing out, or that I could go somewhere else. I knew that it wasn’t right to be treated that way, but I had low-self esteem. I lived that live style all those years, then it hit me, I finally realized that I was better than that. It hit me one day that God allowed me to go through my trials, to strengthen me so that I wouldn’t allow anyone to treat me that way ever again. Then I was told by a minister at church that it was Gods’ will for me to tell my story to be a blessing to other women (men). I wanted to be an inspiration to the young children that may be tempted to get into this kind of relationship not knowing what they were in for. I wrote this book to tell of my abusive lifestyle as well as that of other women. I wanted them to know that the only way that the situation would change was if they stopped accepting it. It tells of how women do things to other women, taking their men, and feeling that they had done something big. If only we had walked away at the first sign of abuse, things would have been better. It’s time for us to stand up for our rights. It’s a subject that is not on only in the low-class minority of women; it’s in the in the middle class, and high minority of women also. Hiding abuse under the rug only makes a lump, then a mold hill, and then it turns into a mountain that can’t be climbed. I wanted to be a blessing to anyone that had not been abused, and to the ones that were still living it. My heart and prayers are with them.

Barbara Hart

by Nancy Werking Poling

author of OUT OF THE PUMPKIN SHELL

During Women’s History Month we like to recall women who have made significant contributions. Last week’s trip to Maryland to visit my 98-year-old mother-in-law got me to thinking about women whose very survival merits remembrance.

****

My relationship with Virginia got off to an inauspicious start. For Jim the weekend was a chance to introduce his girlfriend. For me a chance to be with him and escape the college campus. For Virginia, a working mother, an imposition.

Saturday was cleaning day in the Poling household. I picked up a dust cloth, expecting her to say, “No, you’re company.” But she didn’t. And when I offered to help in meal preparation that evening, she gave me the task of mashing potatoes, which Jim’s bratty nine-year-old sister loudly mocked at the dinner table for being sticky.

As friendly as I tried to be, I don’t recall Virginia matching my efforts. My most vivid memory of that weekend was her getting upset over Jim and me teaching his siblings a card game. In fact, upset was an oft-used word among family members, as in “Don’t upset Mother.”

She opposed our marriage. At the time I assumed it was me she objected to. Later I came to understand that yes, twenty was too young to make that huge commitment.

On subsequent visits, both before and after Jim and I married, his father would draw him aside to relate how The Change was upsetting Virginia (symptoms that lasted at least fifteen years). Naturally Jim sympathized with him and passed on to me the conviction that dealing with his mother was a challenge.

For one thing, a small incident could ignite an emotional outburst. And she was a scrapper. She would not be told what to do. To her, even a hint came across as a command. Her feistiness was mainly directed toward Jim’s father.

She wasn’t a nurturer. I don’t remember her cuddling her grandchildren. I doubt that she took pleasure in being a grandmother. Yet she expressed affection in ways congruent with who she was. A quilter, she once made long patchworks skirts for her daughter and the three daughters-in law. She made a puffy bed cover in pink and red for our daughter, a wool comforter for our son.

Once Jim and I discovered a clue about the possible cause of her obstreperous personality. A few questions about her father evoked a shrill, “I don’t want to talk about him.” She never said much more, except that he’d been domineering.

Not until I myself had matured and become a little wiser did I begin to sympathize with Virginia. An intelligent woman, she graduated from college in the thirties, during the Great Depression, with a major in French. The only job available was as a secretary at a church’s national headquarters west of Chicago. For her it was a time of independence and close friendships. She was in daily contact with people who were traveling abroad. When she was almost thirty she met and married Jim’s father, a seminary student. Within a short time she found herself the mother of three boys. A daughter came along later. Virginia’s adult life was marked by hard work and stringent expectations about what the pastor’s wife should be like. Her husband’s salary could barely support a family, and the small parsonage was overcrowded.

Jim’s father died in 2002, leaving the family stuck with a cantankerous old lady. An old lady who’s blind and can only hear if someone yells in her ear.

An old lady myself now, I’ve become more understanding of Virginia’s nature. I see her as a survivor. Maybe a genetic disorder made her subject to emotional outbursts, and her father didn’t know how to deal with her. It was, after all, an age of Spare the rod and spoil the child. Or maybe he was an abusive father and she survived by fighting back. Or maybe something terrible happened when she was young, a traumatic event she’s repressed in an effort at self-preservation.

What were her dreams? Did anyone ever ask? Last Saturday, in her room at the nursing home, she asked Jim where I was. He told her I was introducing myself to area bookstores, familiarizing managers with my novel. “I always wanted to write,” she said. She went on to tell him she’d long had ideas for stories. Sunday she asked me for a full account. I leaned close to her ear and described Saturday’s venture.

How is it that age has finally offered us the wisdom to accept each other? After nearly fifty years she seems to recognize that I am no threat. I have come to admire her strong will. She said on Sunday she’s going to make it to one hundred, which wouldn’t surprise me.

These thoughts lead me to extend my musings to a wider circle of women, women labeled as screwed up, bitches, whores, bad mothers. Some live in self-protective shells; some lash out from an intense fury; some try to dominate. We don’t know their stories. We do know that by the time she is eighteen, one in four girls has been sexually abused. Too many grow up in violent households. Too many are denied the opportunity to pursue their dreams. Yes, trauma and neglect can have a lifelong impact.

Can I, in my new wisdom, find ways to accept and support women whose lives are marked by anxiety, fury, a fear of being controlled? Women who are hard to like?

When we said goodbye Sunday, my eyes watered over the possibility that though Virginia is determined to make it to a hundred, she may die before we again make the long trip to see her. If that is so, I can’t picture her dropping off into a peaceful hereafter. No, she’ll exit this earthly life fighting.

This originally posted on my blog Late Enough:

Almost 25% of all U.S. women have experienced domestic violence.

Focus

He finally broke my glasses.
The company claimed indestructibility.
But I knew better,

Even then, years ago,

I told the saleswoman, nothing lasts forever.
Most things hardly last at all.
But she was almost right,

The glasses lasted longer than most.

When I thought my face would never hold a pair
Between the broken nose and eyes to match,
The glasses waited on the hospital tray,

For an hour or a day, once for a week.

Rising, I would put the wire rims on my shame
And he would pick me up a block away
In his blue Ford, full of apologies and promises.

The ride never lasted long enough.

As the sun rises against my blurred hospital bed,
I cradle the cracked, delicate lenses
And gradually lift them to my face.

I know forever when I see it.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, you can get help.  The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1.800.799.SAFE (7233) & 1.800.787.3224 (TTY) for ANONYMOUS and CONFIDENTIAL HELP 24/7.  Calling may be safer than using your computer since computers can be monitored.

If you are a healthcare worker, your patients have experienced domestic violence.  Are you screening them?  Do you know that domestic violence leads to lead to over 73,000 hospitalizations and 1,500 deaths? Feel free to read more at US Dept. of Health and Human Services' page where there are programs and tools for healthcare workers on domestic violence.

If you work, encourage your employer to create a comprehensive workplace response to domestic violence.  It DOES effect your workplace.  Absenteeism, increased healthcare costs, reduced productivity and the fact that we are ALL human beings even at work.

If you have four friends, you may have a friend suffering from domestic violence.  It happens to all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations and social statuses.  Please take the time to learn, pray educate and donate.

These statistics and information are a conglomeration of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Best Business Bureau, and US Department of Labor. The poem is by me. No magazines wanted it, but the poem was published in a local chapbook, 'Sound and Sense,' and my friend who runs a writing workshop for women in prison asked to use it.