How I Saved Myself

Wow, wonderful story!! The great escape!

I wish I could remember the name of the old Star Trek episode I saw on late night cable years ago but I could never even find the synopsis. Maybe I dreamed it? In any event, I now think it was a great analogy for escaping abuse– at least one particular aspect of it: breaking the psychological chains and how those chains will dissolve further through time and getting to a safe distance.

From what I remember of the episode, Captain Kirk is trapped in a cave on a desolate planet and increasingly spellbound and mentally controlled by a giant, pulsating, disembodied, telepathic alien brain in a bell jar to the point he resists being rescued by the crew. As Kirk staggers around in the cave doing that Shatner-Shakespearean-meltdown thing, he exclaims, “My memories… fade…I am… losing… myself…and…all…sense…of who… I am!!!” But somehow he musters some last bit of perspective and finally allows himself to be beamed back to the ship, then goes through some more Shakespearean convulsions as he regains his own thoughts and identity.

Basically Kirk just had to get out of the orbit of Mutant Telepathic Alien Brain planet to retrieve his true sense of self. I think it’s similar when escaping an abuser who’s been committing what one trauma psychologist called “perspecticide”: the process of insidiously and gradually– through sowing chaos, instilling chronic anxiety and the usual “Pavlov’s dog”-type random reward/punishment to produce “learned helplessness”– tearing down the world view and self concept of the victim and then replacing these with the abuser’s nihilistic, distorted and mutant perspectives. Because this process is a sort of twisted circus mirror version of the normal “perspective alignment” process that people do in relationships in order to reduce conflict, most victims don’t even sense it happening and don’t realize they’re being incrementally terrorized into adopting the moods, feelings, views, etc., of their abusers.

These days the process has been branded “narcissistic abuse” but I’m old school and just think of it as plain old “domestic abuse” or the newer and more descriptive term for subviolent abuse, “coercive control.” This is said to induce what is now commonly called “trauma bonding” but, again, I’m old school and prefer the more apt original term, “Captor Bonding”– aka, Stockholm syndrome– which, instead of implying two equally messed up people pulling each other down in a flood, distinguishes between perpetrator (captor) and victim (captive), identifies the effective state of the victim (captivity) that acknowledges the potential difficulty of escape and the crime of aggression and control (entrapment). I think captor bonding is far less victim-blaming than the new coinage “trauma bonding” (coined, in fact, by the very victim-blamey sex addiction guru Dr. Patrick Carnes).

This is why I’m so glad that legitimate domestic abuse experts like Dr. Christine Cocciola are focusing so much on the phenomenon of “post separation abuse” and that this term is now in increasingly common usage because I think– as Best illustrates so eloquently– it shows exactly what survivors had legitimately, realistically feared would happen all along from the moment they attempt to escape and the very reason many hesitate and put off that escape for years. To mix a bunch of metaphors, post-separation abuse is the “other shoe” they always knew would drop if they let go of the “tiger’s tail” at last.

That’s the bit that was missing from the Star Trek episode because, unlike some domestic abusers, the alien brain apparently didn’t have the power to telepathically zap Kirk to death to stop his escape (or take custody of or weaponize Kirk’s crew or leave Kirk in poverty or stress him out to the point he eventually got cancer, etc.). By the same token, when survivors actually survive post-separation abuse, it’s easy for bystanders to say “Well, see how it all worked out? Why didn’t s/he do that years ago?”

(Mixing more analogies) It’s kind of like Glinda the Goodwitch’s prank at the end of Wizard of Oz when she tells Dorothy that, rather than going through the whole perilous nightmare of bumping off WWW, all Dorothy ever had to do to go back to Kansas was click her heels and chant “There’s no place like home…” No one ever considers the idea that Glinda was lying (after all, she’s the asshole adult who sent a child to assassinate Glinda’s rival and withheld the magic incantation to escape Oz until her dirty work was done).

The Monday morning quarterback assumption that breaking free had always been an easier feat than survivors imagined and solely required breaking psychological chains (just click heels, get beamed up!) robs credit to survivors for sheer courage since actually surviving this process is never a given. It misses the fact that the psychological chains themselves were typically constructed through insidious campaigns of fear and coercion and whittling down the victim’s faith in themselves and faith in the world– proof of which is often how nasty FWs/abusers become at separation. The fact is it’s realistically a statistical gamble whether an abuser might turn murderous (roughly half of domestic murders weren’t preceded by earlier reports of violence) or will simply sow so much punishing chaos that it causes the victim to perish or simply end up crippled from stress related illness.

Anyway, Tuesday may come and go but, personally, I think I have many more years of remembering and reviewing all the myriad ways I was subtly frog-boiled over a period of time. I just don’t believe Glinda that some of us didn’t have to fight the flying monkeys or kill WWW first in order to get out of Oz. I don’t believe escape is solely a matter of mustering a sense of identity and getting beamed off Alien Brain planet. Regaining perspective is certainly part of it but it doesn’t explain the process of instilling fear and hopelessness by which some of us gradually lost our grips to begin with nor the fact that those fears are often based in the reality that abusers get incredibly nasty when thwarted.

This is all by way of honoring Best and any of us who broke out.