This post is inspired by The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, a book that I would recommend most people read.
This phrase made its rounds on social media a whole bunch - the greatest sign of childhood abuse isn't bruises or scars, it's staying with someone who treats you poorly and trying to make them treat you right.
Gavin de Becker claims that staying is a choice. But I don't think it's staying that is actually the choice that we are making. One very common characteristic of many neurodivergent people0 is a strong sense of justice. I believe that's one of the things that makes us more vulnerable to abuse. If Gavin de Becker is right, and he is, the choice we are making is to pursue justice. And our fallacy is thinking that we can achieve it.
Growing up, I developed a strong sense of justice and a moral perfectionism. I became convinced that if I just followed all the rules perfectly, everything would be ok. Spoiler alert, it still wasn't because the new rules would appear, or the rules would contradict themselves, or the rule had a specific exception that I was not made aware of. Yet this sense of justice still prevailed. And I expected it of others to, in part due to my concern for their safety. As a child if I saw someone break the rules I would feel the urge to shout it out. By my perception they probably didn't know, and I was warning them so that they wouldn't get in deep trouble.
Safe to say, that behavior got me into trouble, A LOT. As a kid, and later in life, too. Looking back, every mistake I genuinely should have known better than to make came from the same place: a deep, unwavering need to "make things fair." Whether for myself or others, it never once served me.
Mind you, it has however made me an expert at finding loopholes1 and malicious compliance when appropriate. Like when a rule is so absurd following it so rigidly would render it useless2.
But justice isn't safety. It isn't even happiness.
De Becker argues that staying in abuse is a choice. I disagree. On two different grounds.
Leaving is the choice we want to make in these situations. Though there is some argument that leaving would only escalate the situation, increasing the likelihood of a worse outcome. The choice we make is not staying, it's justice. It's the search for an apology, changed behaviour, the belief that if only we did enough things would get better. Because just disappearing would not be nice to them, and could make their life harder, which is not fair. And despite all evidence to the contrary we grew to believe that if we just do enough, things will get better.
CPTSD survivors are prone to moral perfectionism because following the rules used to be our only way to survive. When the rules failed, we assumed we had failed them, not the other way around. And our abuser uses that. Who hasn't heard something like "I am doing this for your own good", "This is difficult for me too, but this is the only way you will learn", "You brought this onto yourself"...? And the list can go on and on.
As children, we are inherently dependent on our parents for everything. Food, shelter, emotional support, education, everything. There are stories of children running away, but the rope they have is not very long. Often they are found. Sometimes they end up in other precarious positions. But ultimately there are many hurdles for children, even if they chose to run away. A child cannot get a job, therefore earn an income. A child cannot open a bank account. A child cannot rent a house. Where could a child run away4?
So use the authorities, you may say. As any child in a violent household can tell you, the risk of failure is even greater. In some places the police will easily side with the parent "You must have done something to deserve this.". And even in places where Child Protective Services are competent, they are so underfunded and so overworked the cases they are able to take on need to go through rigorous triage. And you know the saying in therapy of "whether you drown in 10 feet of water or 100 feet of water, you're still dead"? When it comes to what CPS can handle with the resources they have, they are for the most part only looking at 100 feet or below.
Talking to former CPS agents, what seemed to bother them were the cases that weren't bad enough when they got called in for them to be able to do something about it, but then they became a lot worse. That's the risk of failure, once an external party is aware, the abuser's image is at stake, and that is most certainly a crime for the child to have committed that they need to be punished for.
Pursuit of justice kept me trapped. I had it from a very early age. I would get in trouble with my parents as well as with teachers when I would react loudly when I saw someone break the rules I was taught. I would loudly declare that they broke the rules. Because in my mind, the reason they were breaking the rules is that they didn't know, but that wouldn't save them from the punishment that would come if they got found out. So it was my duty to rectify things.
That behaviour got more filtered as I grew up, but the fact that I sought fairness didn't leave me. But I still took me a lot longer to genuinely be able to accept that justice in life is rarely achievable. So I strived for it. In both how I behaved, doing things that weren't good for me because it was fairer for others, and how I tried to get others to behave, and ultimately failed. Justice rarely comes, and even if it does, it may be too late, and it's likely to cost the victim a lot more than the perpetrator.We can live by our values, but we cannot force them on others. That is the basic principle of boundaries, and ultimately leaving is a boundary. If you don't treat me right, I will leave, and remove the ability for you to treat me poorly.
But that's now what we learn growing up. And it's also not what the world likes to present. People love stories like that of Daryl Davis, the Black man who convinced KKK members to leave. Victims who manage to change the abuser's mind and get them to become a better person. But nobody talks about the many who tried and may have even died in the attempt. Is it because there are too many? When Niemöller tried to stand up to Hitler, he ended up in a concentration camp. He was right to, and he was among the lucky ones to survive. But how many didn't?
How many people stood up to their abusers, and failed? How many of them got hurt, or worse, in the attempt? We don't hear their names for they do not make history, yet theirs is the more common story.
Is it wrong to seek justice? Absolutely not. We have made the progress that we have made because people sought it. But seeking justice won't necessarily keep us alive.
So why pursue justice? Because while on an individual level it may not be an answer, on a societal level it has repeatedly led to progress. The Gwangju massacre lead to the democratization of South Korea. But those people are still dead, and many more scarred from the events of those days5.
Justice is a beautiful thing to pursue, but when as a survival strategy, it fails, miserably. The hardest lesson I learned was that sometimes, the only way to win is to walk away. Even if that means they get to get away with it. Whatever "it" is.
The world may be unfair, but we don't have to be the ones bleeding to prove it.
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0 Be it Autism, ADHD, C-PTSD...
1 As a rule follower I have many times had to solve problems within the rules. Everything has rules, and if you have a problem, there will be ways to make the rules bend to the solution.
2 In recent news of pronouns being banned at work, guess who would be removing all uses of I, you, he, she, it, we, they, etc. from all communications? This gal.
3 I will admit that the book does focus on adults. But as it presents cases of patricide in the cases of abuse I think as it doesn't explicitly exclude it, I assume it includes it.
4 At times, the only visible escape route is one that shouldn't exist at all. As a child, I considered it more than once. But like with any other escape, the risk of failure was never zero, and that risk was too great.
5 Most beautifully presented in my favourite book of all time: Han Kang's Human Acts.