A friend recently shared a Facebook post by Sam Whittle about Sarah Schulman’s book Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. The post is highly critical of the book, to say the least. It was written on April 17, 2017 and as of now has been shared 317 times. The post links to other critical reactions (here and here) which I also read.
My friend wrote that she was inclined to agree with the critiques after reading some excerpts from Schulman’s book, but was open to other perspectives. I’ve read the book and, though it’s flawed, it has led to some really productive conversations, and left me thinking that the perspectives and ideas within it deserve to be discussed and digested.
What started as a Facebook comment offering my thoughts got too long and became the following:
I am disappointed by these critiques of Conflict is Not Abuse. Sarah Schulman’s book is definitely vastly incomplete, imperfect, and flawed. I have critiques of my own, which I will get to. But I see the book pointing to a big problem spot, and a sore spot for many, in the realm of community responsibility. It’s difficult to address community responsibility in times of conflict or abuse, and it takes guts to enter a sore spot. A lot of people are grateful that Schulman has (imperfectly) opened up conversation about the community dynamics that she is pointing to, and the book has enabled some helpful conversations to take place. But these critiques don’t really address what the book is trying to do, or engage with the questions it’s trying to ask. They seem to imply that the book should not be read or discussed. Go ahead and cross it off your list. Move along.
I’ve read the book and I want to summarize what I hear Schulman saying, and how I am seeing what is controversial within it.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that the book takes the perspective of the community — how should the community respond when its members are in conflict? I emphasize this because some of the negative reactions frame the work in really personal terms. **
Schulman’s book is about many things: domestic violence, AIDS criminalization, inappropriate reliance on law enforcement to settle conflicts, Israel/Palestine, but we can get to the heart of what the book is addressing, and the controversy that it is causing, by picturing this scenario that Schulman calls up, a scenario that we should all know very well: two individuals (friends, co-workers, lovers, exes..) are having conflict, or maybe one is being abused by the other. One person has broken contact with the other, and wants support from their friends and community. The support they desire could include taking sides, speaking out against the other, restricting the other’s access to the community in various ways, etc.
How should the community respond? Schulman argues that it is irresponsible of friends and community members to blindly judge, shun, or punish the other, and irresponsible to rush to make a victim out of the friend they are trying to support. She argues that it is our duty to investigate what happened between the two, especially in order to ascertain whether abuse has happened/is happening, or whether the two are having what she calls “normative conflict,” which is the kind of interpersonal conflict that we all regularly fall into, where neither person is “the victim” or “the perpetrator.” [As an aside, I think that a big weak point in the book is that Schulman doesn’t explore how it can be difficult to decide whether conflict or abuse is taking place.]
If the community finds that this is a case of conflict rather than abuse, and the shunned or vilified party to the conflict is experiencing harm from the shunning, and/or the community is torn or impacted by holding this stuck conflict within it, then Schulman believes that friends and community members should do what is necessary to facilitate, encourage, push for a reparative conversation to take place between the conflicted parties. She thinks that this is the duty of the good friend: not to automatically accept your aggrieved friend’s characterization of events, including whatever blame they are invoking, but to take the broader view towards what is fair and just, and try to facilitate a fair, just, reparative outcome.
If you’re like me at this point, then you’re thinking that all of this sounds pretty reasonable and fair, at the same time as it implicitly calls up some really raw, difficult, uncomfortable realities about how we deal with conflict internally and externally, and the successes and failures of communities to mediate conflicts going on within them. It is not comfortable territory.
It is uncomfortable partially because a question poses itself very quickly: Why would a person unjustly vilify or shun another person, and try to draw others into their mischaracterization? Why is it necessary for the community to question a person’s pain, and the conclusions they are drawing from their pain, instead of taking it all at face value? Take a deep breath, because here is where it gets messy.
Schulman identifies the “traumatized person” as one kind (not the only kind) of person who is more likely to be “overstating harm” and conflating conflict with abuse, and thereby exacerbating the difficulties of conflict within the community. (I should clarify that Schulman’s “traumatized person” is a person whose trauma originates outside of or prior to the relationship in question, not from it.) A whole section of the book is devoted to examining this traumatized person, and the psychology that explains their behavior. This section is a difficult read. Sam Whittle characterized Schulman’s take on trauma as “pathologizing,” which is fair to say. Her understanding of trauma is out-of-date, her language is clinical, her tone lacks compassion, and she could easily be read as overgeneralizing a specific manifestation of post-traumatic response to be the definition of what a traumatized person is like.
For many folks, this is where they cease being open to Schulman’s perspective. But a lot of us want to keep going because, even though she’s doing it somewhat ineptly and offensively, we recognize what Schulman is pointing to. Because so many of us have at various times either been the target of, been a support person for, been in community with, or ourselves been the person whose reactions have been informed by an exaggerated sense of threat from the other, unfair projections regarding the motives of the other, and/or unwillingness or inability to own one’s share of the conflict. Maybe it is unfair, or unnecessary, to single out traumatized people here, though it has been my experience and the experience of the communities I’ve been connected to that disproportionate responses regularly, but not exclusively, come from those who identify as trauma survivors, and who often have expressed an awareness of their vulnerability to disproportionate responses and black&white thinking. In fact Schulman’s analysis of post-traumatic psychology in times of conflict, while very different in tone, is not altogether different in content from what I have found in the personal writings of people suffering from Complex PTSD, writings that have formed so much of my education about complex trauma.
And remember that the book takes the perspective of the community. Its goal is not to assign blame or deny anyone compassion but to facilitate repair between conflicted parties. In fact, one of the more inspiring breakthroughs in the book is an idea that Schulman receives from a social worker early on in the text: that we need to collectively lower the bar for who is deserving of compassion and understanding in our society. That you shouldn’t need to be a victim of abuse in order to receive support. The social worker theorizes that people are subtly encouraged to use the language of abuse when they are describing conflict because they believe that they will have more access to support and compassion that way. In a better functioning community support & compassion are not rationed so that only the most harmed receive them.
In a world where abusers are known to deceptively deploy the language of trauma and abuse to avoid accountability, and where abusers are sometimes legitimately traumatized people themselves, and where post-traumatic responses can distort and amplify conflict between parties, and where all of these realities affect community health and complicate accountability and healing, how is the community to discern the right course of action? That’s the question of this book, and it proposes that it’s irresponsible to simply take an aggrieved person’s interpretation at face value, and to think and behave the way they want us to, without getting a fuller picture of what’s going on. Because there are many situations where what an aggrieved person is suggesting is not just.
What are the responsibilities of the community? Is there a duty to attempt to repair conflicted relationships when the community is affected? Is it ableist not to exempt traumatized people from the duty to attempt repair? If it is indeed ableist, and traumatized people should be exempted, or supported differently, then what does that mean for accountability and conflict within communities? I do not mean these to be argumentative or rhetorical questions, at all. These are the honest humble questions I’ve come to from reading the book and contemplating some of the reactions.
It would be easy for someone defending this book to conclude that among the readers of the book are people who have cut off, shunned, or bad-mouthed a person who they were not abused by, but were in conflict with, and that they are rejecting this book because the book problematizes that behavior, and asks the community to confront that behavior, behavior that they have taken part in and are defensive about. But I don’t want to take that easy way out. I think that the book’s critics have identified some truly problematic weaknesses, errors, and offenses within its pages. But I want to talk about what its strengths and weaknesses mean for addressing the real problems in community conflict that the book exists to address. What can be used? Can the book start useful conversations? In my life it has. I’m looking forward to more. What do you think?
The pain behind these questions of community and accountability affects me deeply, and I am personally deeply affected by stalled conflict, when conflicted parties are blocked (and there are all kinds of blocks) from making amends. And if, as Dr. Gabor Maté says, our world traumatizes more and more people in more ways than ever, and our traumas prevent us from repairing relationships and resolving conflicts in our communities, then I fear we will have precious little resilience, mutual support, and solidarity to rely on for the struggles ahead.
** [ The one critique that engages with the big picture of what the book is trying to address and propose (“this is not a eulogy”) grievously misunderstands Schulman. The author of the post summarizes Schulman as advocating that “abuse should be reframed as conflict,” and that is just NOT in there. Seriously, whoa. Maybe this misreading can be explained by the fact that this critic hadn’t read the book. They also improperly apply Schulman’s framework for how the community should deal with conflict to an instance of the community confronting abuse, and says that in Schulman’s world, the community would have been prevented from addressing the abuse. The whole point of the book is to maintain that it is important to distinguish between conflict and abuse, and that we shouldn’t use our strategies for responding to abusers, which are necessary and appropriate in contexts of abuse, on people who are in (non-abusive) conflict. ]
