How Do I Get Past Approval Seeking?

I’m bothered by the fact that the OP’s therapist was focusing so heavily on supposed self esteem issues which clearly resulted in the OP having… low self esteem about her low self esteem!

When I prosecuted a workplace stalker, most of the victim/witness services available through the court were geared for battered women so I had the repeat, annoying experience of intake people asking me– right out of the bloody gate as I tried to sign up– why I thought I “deserved” to be abused. I said I didn’t. I was stalked by a coworker, not a partner. I’d never even dated the guy. And I put the guy in jail. Doesn’t that kind of suggest I don’t think I “deserved” it?

But so many intake people or “helping professionals” would keep stubbornly drilling in that direction– basically doing damage to my self esteem on the basis that I supposedly had low self esteem– as if this was the one hammer they had so every problem had to be a nail. Or else, on learning my case didn’t fit the pigeon hole, the intake people would drop the approach and then try to actually confide in me their general contempt towards battered women: “Oh at least you’re not like those battered women we deal with who keep going back.”

I heard some version or other of that sneering snark from many people, including the head of a major state shelter and an ADA. They wanted me to nod along and take my pat on the head at the expense of other women but it felt disgusting and treasonous. I started trying to push back though I didn’t have the data or tools yet to do this effectively. So I decided to get the tools and be effective.

It was seeing how DV survivors were treated in official helping channels that first motivated me to get involved in advocacy for victims and especially to search for organizations that offered an alternative to this victim-blaming pallooza. I started to develop a growing sense of genuine horror over the consistently contemptuous, patronizing attitude of people doing crisis triage for women in the throes of violent, catastrophic abuse. It seemed not only incompetent and potentially retraumatizing but dangerous. I wasn’t even a DV victim at the time and still found it retraumatizing and even declined services just to get away from the patronizing attitude. I imagined that was probably true of countless DV victims and wondered how many had died rather than be subjected to more humiliation.

Because I remembered reading something about this kind of clinical victim-blaming in Susan Faludi’s Backlash years before, I hit the library and book stores and started pulling on that thread of criticism for standard therapeutic response to DV survivors and came across a trove of reformist views including the work of Dr. Evan Stark who, using research and statistics, almost single-handedly gutted the traditional victim-blaming approach. But apparently no one had shared the news with most helping professionals specializing in DV who, at the time, were almost all stubbornly operating from the blamey perspective. Then I found a network run by people who knew about Stark’s work and were hiring based on the Soteria House model– non-mental health professionals who were survivors themselves and/or had strong affinity to the non-blaming view of survivors outlined by Stark and a few other experts.

But for all his decades of work and research, Stark and other reformists were still “outliers” and clinical rebels then. Consequently, the network I found operated on a shoestring from private funding because, as it turned out, spewing the blaming view was apparently necessary to get state funding. That was the first hint that the blaming view prevailed because it aligned with dah patriarchy. It was also an education in how science is corrupted and weaponized by politics and that, to fight back politically and move the dial on policy, regular people have to develop at least functional literacy.

I discovered that the then-prevalent therapeutic assumption that victims’ self esteem was somehow causal to abuse and needs chastising correction comes from applying traditional victim-blaming theories like the “psychological deficiency” theory of abused women– the idea that, due to preexisting psychological issues, victims are “drawn” to abusers or draw abusers to themselves on– as we bitterly joked– “dysfunctional Voodoo tractor beams” or “low self-esteem beams.”

To quote Dr. Emma Katz from the Mighty podcast interview with CL, that view that victims all come from childhood trauma and have preexisting “issues” is statistically “rubbish.” Abuse victims as a whole don’t statistically differ from the general population in terms of background or psychology, etc. What is not true of the whole or even most survivors should never be automatically assumed to be a factor. Not that it couldn’t be a factor making it more difficult to escape but it’s not why victims were victimized in the first place and therefore shouldn’t be the first assumption that’s foisted.

But as Stark and his wife and fellow researcher Ann Flitcraft argued, helping professionals typically led with the blaming model. And because those that did would typically encounter far more failure to “liberate” victims from abuse, Stark and Flitcraft noted that, rather than blaming the junk science theory for this failure, these helping professionals would simply double back more blame on victims for failing to be helped by the unhelpful theory. This would then fuel increasing contempt that these helping professionals would develop towards victims over time.

Stark believed that what lends false credence to the bad theory is that a certain percentage of survivors– though no higher than the general pop– will have experienced previous trauma and also that survivors will obviously all universal have self-esteem issues following abuse. But Stark and Flitcraft called this therapeutic reversal of cause and effect “Misapplication of Contingency.”

Thankfully there’s been an increasing shift away from the moldy old theories in advocacy channels for domestic abuse. But guess who dusted off the debunked junk science and is now repurposing it to damage, shame and blame yet another set of abuse survivors? Esther Perel, the RIC establishment, “sex addiction” guru Patrick Carnes and the whole CSAT clusterfuck.

What a disaster. Because it’s now increasingly frowned upon to apply the split-blame/two-to-tango model to victims of overtly violent abuse, the above clown collective are actually incentivized to combat and tamp down any attempt to correlate cheating with categorically criminal forms of domestic abuse– meaning the mercenaries are effectively standing in the way of progress in that sense.