Why Doesn't She Just Leave?

Why doesn't she just leave him?

Before my first marriage ended in shambles, I used to wonder why people, usually women stayed in controlling or abusive relationships. It seemed the most obvious thing in the world, especially if there were no children involved. Generally it was a woman married to a man who could not be satisfied by any of her efforts to be a good wife. On occasion, nothing she tried kept him from getting so mad that he felt a need to hit her, bite grab her ankle and swing her head and shoulders against the wall like a bat (true story). Obvious solution? Grab your stuff, get a lawyer and leave. Most common reasons given why women don't do that? He might kill her and she has no idea where to go.

The first one is an understandable fear, but, the media hype notwithstanding, the percentage of controlling spouses who actually murder their partners is small. I'm not down playing how horrific such a thing is or deny that it happens, but statistically it is not a good reason not to leave. More importantly, people in fear for their lives often do attempt to escape.

The second objection to just leaving, she doesn't know where else to go, may have been a factor fifty years ago, but most of the women I have known who were in such relationships were well educated, well-liked, successful in their careers, and well-traveled. In short, there was no way they couldn't find some place to go.

Both of these objections appeal to our sense of what makes sense and divert attention away from blaming the victim, certainly a worthy motive, but perhaps misguide. Everyone I know in such a circumstance has told that they were (or are) trying to do the right thing by staying.

Like I said, I used to subscribe to the above notions, until one day a friend said to me, “Why don't you just leave?”

This was in response to hearing about how unhappy my marriage was. For me there was the likelihood that I would lose my children because fathers do not do well in divorce when it comes to custody, but that was later and I knew she was going to leave me as long as I stayed where I was. Before that, though, this question from a concerned friend, perhaps the only one who even knew that things were so bad, caught me off guard. I realized a few things immediately and a few more things eventually. First, it occurred to me that to an outsider I was enduring controlling relationship in much the same way some of my female friends were. At the same time, aside from my kids, I had to wonder; why didn't I leave, or make preparations sooner for the virtual certainty that she would? I didn't think she'd kill me and I had options for other living arrangements. It took a long time to piece together the logic behind control, but when I did, it made so much sense and seemed almost brilliant in its simplicity. I could be wrong about this, but I thought I would share it and see if this makes sense to my billions of readers. 

Most of the people I know are by nature helpful and friendly. I have been blessed to be surrounded by people of many faiths or no faith at all who step up when there is a need for their help. I like to think that I am such a person. It dawned on my very slowly that when I help a person, there seems to be a need for some kind of feedback that says one of four things.

1. Thank-you, that was helpful.

2. Thank-you, that was not helpful.

3. Thank-you, please keep helping me.

4. I don't need or want your help.

To be clear, this is not about needing gratitude but about being informed about whether or not my help was useful, still needed, or not even wanted. The message needed to be that my help was finished or not. The same thing was true of my efforts to help cheer up my first wife when she was in a bad mood. The underlying instinct for the need for this feedback seems to come from a sense of obligation to help others because we are all connected by compassion and mutual needs. Put simply we have a duty to be of use to each other that is grounded in our capacity for empathy. The greater a person's capacity for empathy, the greater the sense of duty they will feel. Empathy consists of two elements; the first is the ability to feel vicariously the pains and joys of other people and the desire to alleviate pain and augment joy in other people.

But what if you are trying to be helpful to someone who is not connected to you by means of empathy but who sees you as a tool or a plaything. Such people are hard to recognize even at times for experienced psychologists. Such people are much more common than you might think. Worst of all, such people have a genius for using your kindest instincts against you. I realized that in my first marriage that virtually everything I ever did for my wife regardless of whether or not she said thank-you, was also met with some kind of comment or signal to indicate that it wasn't really enough. Or was too much. Or was the wrong things. On some level, I was still obligated, not only to keep trying, but to make up for the successive failures that piled up almost daily over the years. They on the other hand simply need to lead you along with a tiny carrot – possibility that one day you will be good enough, or occasionally pull out that stick to beat you with the guilt of not being good enough yet.

See the genius? The control of another is accomplished best by getting that other to keep trying to measure up. The person being controlled does almost all the work necessary to keep that control in place. That stick I mentioned for the bit of guilty beating is often just one rhetorical question, with a myriad of variations based on the change of one word.

“What kind of a _________ wouldn't help someone who really needs it?”

That blank can be filled with any word that encapsulates what you believe to be your best qualities; man, father, husband, wife, mother, sister, Christian, Jew, Catholic, neighbour, and so on and so on....” And so you double your efforts to prove you are a dutiful or loving or kind or dedicated etc. man, father, husband, wife, mother, sister, Christian, Jew, Catholic, neighbour, and so on and so on....

The controller says one sentence, but the controlled adjusts everything in his or her life to accommodate the controller because the controlled believes it to be his or her responsibility to do whatever it takes to make things right.

The controlled feels they are doing something virtuous. This is a lie. And it is a cherished lie. And it usually crumbles slowly until a wearied victim realizes not only that they resent having made this effort for someone who will never reciprocate in any way, but also that the love that motivated this prolonged effort had long since died. 

Then the controlled no longer feels they are doing something virtuous. They just feel foolish.

And nobody, male or female, wants to be a fool.

Grantley Gibbons: Lifelong Coward

"You walk behind me. Or I'll kill you."

It was not the thick hand around my throat that convinced me to accept this as sincere. It was not the pressure of the restroom wall on the back of my head. It was not his teeth, nor was it the quiet way he said it. It was his eyes. Terry was probably no taller than I was and  not more than a year older, but he was wide, strong, and feared in a school where it seemed like everyone knew kung fu. This might sound like the beginning of another one of those novels that are so popular these days, Hunger Games, Divergent, City of Bones, but it's not. William Beagle Junior Secondary School was a cultural mishmash and, no kidding, we had many, many serious martial artists. We had an a riot that made the news. What school in Canada has riots? During a lengthy strike by the Canadian Union of Public Employees it was vandalism, not cluttered halls or overflowing garbage cans that closed the school. I was part way through ninth grade in Surrey, British Columbia. This is not a fiction piece; nobody writes fiction about Surrey, British Columbia.... but I digress.

As an aside, I have changed the names of the brothers in this story…just in case they are out on parole.

As I said, it was his eyes. I first wrote about this on 9 June, 2011. It was not even intended for public consumption at the time. I just wrote because I couldn’t talk about the way the memory came to me with such force that I was unable to speak about it at all. I struggled for days to come up with an appropriate simile that would convey how cold his eyes were. They were a pale blue, but clear and razor sharp. They weren't dead like a vampire or cold like ice. But they were cold. It has been more than thirty years since that day and I am convinced that Terry is either dead or in jail for murder at this very moment. I haven't thought of him in years, but when his eyes came back to my vision I didn't know how to tell people this story and have them know just how brutal this experience was for me. Lest anyone think that I recovered a lost memory in the manner so trendy in the 1990’s, I should point out that I had not ever forgotten about this moment, I just hadn’t really thought about it much for decades. The image hit me while I was at the gym. I was warming up for chest day. I was sitting on the edge of the bench getting ready to recline and do my first heavy set. 

I don’t think now is the time to explain why my mind had been prepared to receive this epiphany, but my having been reminded of what it was like to be bullied as a kid was part of it. Moments before I got in position to grip the bar, I suddenly remembered Terry threatening to kill me. I didn’t have a panic attack and I didn’t freak out, but suddenly I saw my life in stark clarity and contrast to how I had seen it for many years. Underneath everything I had ever done, every decision I had ever made, there had been an undercurrent of fear that matched that moment. Even good decisions had been tainted by it. That is an epiphany that can’t be put off until you have finished wailing on your pecs. I looked in the mirror and saw in my face an odd mix of confusion and clarity competing to occupy the same face. I grabbed my stuff and left the gym. I told no one about this for days. Writing was the only way I could think of to process a memory that had resurfaced after three decades. I had literally never told anyone about this event. And I didn't know if I should, after all these years. Floods of clarity are unpleasant and hard to articulate. And it led to other memories that explain who I have become and even a small scar on my right hand. Again, I had not recovered lost memories; I had just suddenly seen the true impact and the lifelong damage of those experiences. I had been bullied before and had been that kid who learned to roll with it and often get out of situations by being funny, clever, or at the very least talkative.

This was different. Terry was feared by everyone. No one got in his way. One day, for reasons I still don’t understand, he pointed at me and told me I was dead if he ever caught up with me. For many days my routes from class to class were planned around dodging Terry in the halls via a series of sudden course changes and a strong reliance on the prey's instinct for knowing the predator's routine.

Of course, there came a day when I let my guard down and walked into a restroom before Terry did. I was washing my hands and looked up to see that he was standing at the urinal. Wouldn’t you know it, the urinals were between the sink and the door. I had to pass behind Terry and thought that he was too busy to catch me. I said everyone feared him, right? Here’s why; I kid you not, while still peeing he shot one leg out behind himself. With his foot against the wall opposite the urinals, that leg blocked the narrow space that led to the door. He finished what he was doing, zipped his pants up, and turned to deal with me. He didn’t need to stop peeing to detain me. That is cold. I was six feet tall and weighed 145lbs. He was a juggernaut. Perhaps because of those terrifying eyes, I really don’t remember anything physical about that moment. His hand gripped my neck and he smacked my head against the wall tile to get my attention, but I remember neither of those contacts. He reminded me of his promise to kill me. All I could think to do was ask him what he wanted. “You walk ten feet behind me from now on or I will kill you.” I managed to avoid being killed by simply accepting his terms. It didn’t happen often that I had to walk the same route that he did, but when I did I walked just a bit behind him. My total surrender worked. In fact, there was a certain safety in being in that spot because no one would ever violate Terry’s space. The surrender worked so well that you would have thought we were old friends if you'd seen us together.

And you would have been right. We were old friends. 

Surrey, BC was an awful place in the seventies and eighties. I did grades 1 through 3 at Hjorth Road Elementary and hated almost every minute of it. I have always felt too young to be where I am and that has made me feel like I was born to be taken advantage of. Being born in November means you are about the youngest in the class and one of the most immature, even if you are among the smartest (especially if you are among the smartest). It also means that if you are a gentle person and afraid of conflict you are a target. At times I don't even blame those who bullied me. I had it written all over me. I even got beaten up once or twice by kids who were shorter than I am but had no fear of losing and could sense my panic. To tell the whole truth, I had actually started grade one at another school and my teacher told my parents that I would never survive because I was too nice. So we moved to another apartment complex, where I first met Tim and Terry. This new school was also a nightmare much of the time, but when I got home, I would go bike riding with Tim and Terry. At first I simply ran along because, chicken that I was, I had not learned to ride. My parents had tried to help me, but… Anyway, one day at the age of seven I borrowed a friend’s bike and managed to teach myself how to ride and off I went. My parents got me a bike with a banana seat right away and from that day, Tim and Terry and I were pals.

After three years we moved. Then we moved again. And again. And again. By ninth grade I was back in Surrey and attending William Beagle Junior Secondary School, where I met Tim again but not Terry. Tim and I shared a couple classes, but the friendship was gone and we were just classmates. Terry was a year older so I didn’t even expect to reconnect with him.  In fact, when I was warned to stay away from this frightening monster named Terry, I did not make the connection. It was only days before he trapped me in the bathroom that I even connected him to Tim.

I had tried in the past to stand up to bullies. I had been hit a few times, even at church. So violence wasn’t new to me, but Terry’s coldness was. He didn’t hit me, didn’t molest me in any way. He just convinced me with his cold eyes that he meant it when he said that he would kill me. And I caved in to his demands.

And that was the real trauma. I saw malevolence and I folded. I have twice run into burning apartments to help the people I heard screaming. I have stood up for others at the risk of losing my job. I have driven to confront the parents of my daughter’s fifth grade bullies in their own homes. But I have lived in a perpetual state of fear when it comes to standing up for myself. Bosses, neighbours, coworkers, my first wife (especially my first wife) fellow churchgoers, etc. have all benefited from a powerful but nonspecific fear I have had of defending myself. This is true even of people who would have never had done anything to hurt me, but still had interests that conflicted with mine. I just accommodated everyone and believed it was because I was a nice guy.

At 44 years of age, I was shattered with the sudden awareness that, where standing up for myself was concerned, I was not a nice guy, I was a coward. Confronted with the idea that maybe the only reason I was about to bench press 240 lbs was to compensate for choosing cowardice as a scrawny kid, I couldn’t face the mirror in the gym. 

And the gym is all mirrors.