(The Stairs)
I heard the car-door slam. He was back. He’d left the house for hours. We didn’t know if he’d return. My sibling and I were downstairs.
He walked in the garage door and nodded our way. He walked up the stairs and brought her back down. She stood on the landing a few steps up and he stood at the bottom of the stairs.
He turned to us and said, “I’m the man of the house, and I want us all here and I’m going to show you that I’m apologizing to your mom.”
I was a fearful teenager. Their fights worsened over the years. At that moment, I stayed silent. I looked at Her, her face hung low, in shame. She was tired and watching him. She looked humiliated. She kept her hands together in front of her and raised her eyebrows, waiting.
He groveled an apology and emphasized to us — two young girls — a man of the house took responsibility. Responsibility, of course, isn’t the same as accountability. And he’d spent much of the fight backing her into the corner. She fought her way out. There was running, slams and sudden stops before he bounded out the door.
Something didn’t fit. I didn’t have words. We were made to believe it was her fault and he was being noble. But it didn’t feel that way, and back then I couldn’t pinpoint why.
His grandiose apologies were big and often. Nothing seemed to change. He held tightly to his rightness and deceptive charm.
And neither recovered.
(The Ride)
He’d offered me a ride back to where I was staying. It was only a half hour away and instead of taking a Lyft, he said he’d rather drive.We’d just met, but I didn’t want to make my friend feel awkward, so I accepted..
Her partner had a rather abrasive personality. Every statement was dramatic and he came off as a ‘good ol boy at the bar.’ A jovial persona, and at first brush, seemed like a guy who can have a good time. But conversations were uncomfortable and exhausting. I was no stranger to fielding the type, so I did.
When we walked through the garage, I made a joke about her car vs his 4-wheel drive.
He barely acknowledged what I’d said before he started in, “She never talks about people she works with, but she talks an awful lot about you.”
“Oh yeh?” I answered. It was something to say, but in my head, I immediately wondered if this was a good idea.
What came next was a ride of a thousand grandiosities, or so it seemed.
He boasted of his military career, global travels, multiple marriages and then a clincher, “I mean I got her to marry me, I needed a passport.”
I nodded and said nothing.
We stopped for gas, there was a pause in conversation and I tried to break the moment, ‘Well she’s beautiful, that’s why we gush on each other!’
He ruffled, “She’s beautiful on the inside too!”
I looked at him curiously, “Of course, it’s the whole person.”
It was the first time he’d said anything complimentary. The conversation was about him, and what he ‘got’ out of her. She was far more achieving in her work life than him. And before we’d left he’d shamed her in front of me, I stood up to him but the scene wasn’t comfortable.
Best to just let it all slide that day. It wouldn’t be the last time I encountered him. He made it known over time, he thought I was a threat, made jealous accusations, stalked me and started fights with her over me.
She would later tell me he’d ‘saved her.’ I knew enough to understand the statement.
(My Ticket Out)
And so, once upon a time, I accepted a proposal, pregnant and hormonal and determined to get ‘out’ of where I was, fielding the abuses of my origin story and choosing the abuse of another and at the time it seemed like my only way out.
He was back and forth about whether to leave me impregnated or marry me, and growing up in the American Christian Church, we weren’t presented with too many options. I didn’t really want him, but I needed a solution that didn’t involve moving into my childhood environment, especially as a 20 year old who’d barely gotten out two years before.
So when he called, swooned over his dreams about me, and wanted to come back for me (he’d already left to move toward his first air-base), I said yes, let’s do it. I sat on the stairs in the basement of the house I lived in, where I was a nanny for 5 beautiful kids. My time was coming to a close with the family and I was toggling with what to do about my pregnancy. I chose to believe in him.
I wanted to believe him. It made sense.
His solution seemed fitting.
I believed he wanted what was best for me, and at the moment, I wanted out and he wanted me out, so we eloped.
Time went on, an aborted pregnancy, abuses in the bedroom and consistent cut-downs, I still wanted it to get better, or maybe just bearable until one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even then, he tried to get it annulled (I refused) and ultimately manipulated our terms.
Coercive Control begins with the mind games.
Abusers subjugate their partners (or others) to humiliating tropes, isolation, demands of loyalty, or promises of a future (known as future faking), and grandiose expertise. It’s about controlling the narrative, the relationship, and the image they want to deliver.
Psychological abuse often predicates any physical or sexual violence. Even if the latter don’t exist or isn’t as apparent, the mental and verbal humiliation are enough to break a person.
A Coercive Controller will play benevolent, and even uses their control to suggest they’re “protecting” the one they harm, through demands, isolation or social exclusion.
It all slowly gaslights the receiver into believing they are unworthy of their own mind, thoughts, beliefs, needs, and desires.
In turn, they lean in on the abuser for a solution, they please them to maintain some sense of sanity or to earn more good moments. And they may often seek the abuser for their sense of self, because it’s been so stripped away. It’s survival.
It’s not an easy prison to break through. And as it happens, what goes on at home is a reflective trope of our patriarchal society. It’s a crisis of divine rightism, egotistically wedged into the white colonial thinking and yes, Western Christianity.
Theologically it is suggested that Jesus’ martyrdom took on the ‘sins of the world’, past present and future, thereby clearing the way for people to go to a place called ‘Heaven’ (a physical ticket out, for which even Jesus would not have expressed in Jewish culture, and he kept saying, “the kingdom of heaven in here, now.”), if they only accepted his god-ship and that he rose again.
Now the story is told during a time when Christians were a minority and being killed by Rome. They needed hope. Many stories of the gods and goddesses have been told like this.
And as beautiful as it can be in someone’s interpersonal world or community, as normal as it can be to want someone to swoop in, it was a Story popularized under the Byzantine empire, then moved west with a much different tone. It became the Colonizer’s expansion, enslavement and enforcement tool. Domination in the name of ‘the Christ.’
The poor translations of the Biblical scripts over time were misused, abused, and ripped apart.
The religious attachment to this and colonization by violence infected Western faith and culture.
When Saviorship exemplifies a Story where “one man saves the day and the world,” it leaves other characters in the Story often reliant on the super power of their leading character to attain an outcome of utopia or bliss.
The Story of Christian Saviorship, in particular, was a deflection and put the responsibility on ‘outer forces,’ or ‘protective’ mantras that excuse torturous behavior.
Abusers love to either play the role of savior or use their professed savior as an authority to maintain control. And they exist behind the religious pulpit, in congressional seats, and in millions of homes.
Perpetrators assert their self-importance by negotiating the worthiness of their scapegoats and shaming them if they try to leave or when they do. And sometimes, it turns into murderous violence.
On the flip side…
When an abused person,
…then affirms the control of their abuser as being protective or speaks of being ‘saved’ by that figure, it often puts the weight of wound-cleansing on One, the sole solution to a problem, with the expectation of a happy ending.
Their Saviors are a ticket, and often, a spiritual bypass for them to (not) be self-reflective or to do the hard work of continuous self-evolution.
That evolution means they’ll have to face grief, darkness, the lie they believed, and they’ll have to forgo the faux sense of safety. They won’t be able to hide or avoid the pain.
Healing will be deterred.
When we do this, we mitigate empowerment for which we are capable, we deny collective community and we lose our authentic voice.
Dr. Gabor Maté suggests ‘we have a genocide of authenticity’ in our culture.
Is it any wonder when we outsource the responsibility of our soul work, we only then function in controlled circles of behavior ~ and struggle to ever break free?
It takes recognition of our language, our engagement with the world to understand the painful prison we remain.
Perhaps, I liken it to the story in The Truman Show. It wasn’t until Truman Burbank realized: he’d been deceived and controlled his whole life, there was more out there than the prison he lived, AND that he held the power, inside of him, to walk out, to claim his freedom and own his sovereign being.
It’s time for a new Story. But perhaps instead of the Hero’s journey, how about a Heroine’s Journey? A journey where Grief becomes permissible, where we break free from shame, and where Joy can finally emerge and create the fullness we’re meant to experience?
Let’s shift the language Saviorship.
Let’s, instead, use our Survivorship to tear down the Temples of Coercive Control and give each other permission to live and move and own our being.
Footnotes
- If you or someone you know is in need of help or advise, visit, The National Coalition of Domestic Violence, or call 1–800–799–7233
- If you’re interested in further resources or coaching, click the hyperlinks: Coaching w/ Ash, Activist Resources
Originally published at https://ashgallagher.com on February 2023, support the author at Hyperlink here.
