FACING LOSS WITH RESILIENCE
My guest blogger, LaDonna Carey, wrote about the losses of betrayal trauma and how it affects one’s identity last month. This blog explores resiliency when dealing with these losses.
Resilience Cautions
Dr. Pauline Boss defines resilience as “flexibility in the face of pressure” in her book, The Myth of Closure.[i] Resiliency is an important quality, but she cautions against over-focusing on it when distress is unavoidable.
Feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and depressed is an unavoidable result of intimate partner abuse. Seeing how victims are affected as a lack of resilience is victim-blaming and may promote shame. Many survivors also experience racial or LGBTQ injustice. When survivors are supported in recognizing how any oppression affects them, this becomes a building block for resiliency. It puts the focus on those who oppress, instead of pointing at survivors’ behavior. No survivor behavior justifies harming them.
Dr. Boss says most people have a self-righting ability to cope. Especially when they have friends, family, psychological family, and professionals that care about them. She also indicates that people’s coping skills are as diverse as their racial, religious and cultural backgrounds, and that we must respect these differences.
Applying Resilience to Survivors
Dr. Boss reveals that resilience is especially important when there are no immediate solutions. This is often what intimate partner abuse survivors face: no immediate solution. Sometimes, coercive behavior continues even after leaving. Dr. Boss prescribes adaptability, flexibility, and tolerance for ambiguity. What do these mean for victims of intimate abuse?
Adaptability and flexibility do not mean giving in to a coercive controller. They refer to an ability to identify what isn’t working and learn new behavior. For example, keep communication with the abuser written and make it brief, informative, friendly (not hostile), and firm (BIFF.) Bill Eddy teaches BIFF and other skills within his books and website programs.[ii] I recommend them.
Tolerance for ambiguity requires patience and the ability to live with uncertainty. No one finds uncertainty comfortable. It’s even harder on survivors when they experience others pressing for change. Divorce, with its process of evaluation when custody is contested, is a good example of uncertainty that weighs on participants. Survivors find it difficult to rest in the knowledge they are doing what they can and live in the present moment rather than in fear of what might happen.
I believe acceptance comprises another aspect of resilience. Coercive controllers do everything they can to maintain control. When victims set limits, they often have to accept partners will not change. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking it or thinking it’s just. And, it doesn’t mean survivors have failed. Accepting their partners will not change falls within other major life events such as accidents, serious illness, and death. Their goals should be attaching their self-worth and contentment to what they can control.
Victims of abuse often find solace by focusing on work and taking care of the home. Dr. Boss points out that resiliency grows stronger when people manage daily life issues during crises. Keeping the house picked up and playing with children are activities that promote making a new normal given the changed reality. Such everyday interests reassure them that they haven’t lost everything. From there, they can build the next chapter of their lives.
Guidelines to Abuse Resiliency
Dr. Boss provides guidelines to cultivate resilience, which I am applying to intimate partner abuse survivors.
- Find meaning. This involves naming what happened as abuse. It includes learning about coercive control and how it affects anyone who receives it. And best of all, it involves reclaiming their lives and deciding how they want to live. This often brings a painful understanding that partners value being in control more than they value keeping them.
- Reconstruct identity. This is closely related to finding meaning. My previous blog, The Importance of Story, emphasized how what we tell ourselves affects what we believe we can do. Healing involves survivors seeing themselves differently as a result of taking ownership over their stories, instead of believing what their partners say about them.
- Adjust mastery. Mastery refers to the ability to control their lives: to make choices and live according to their values. Contrast this self-mastery with coercive controllers’ entitlement to control their partners. Self-mastery is a right; controlling others violates that right. Mastery for survivors is about how they handle the curve balls thrown by coercive control. Example: A coercive partner doesn’t return the children when the custody agreement dictates. Instead of collapsing into fear and helplessness, a survivor can contact a friend or attorney to discuss options. Mastery may also be predicting possible problems based on their past behavior and identifying options ahead of time.
- Normalize ambivalence. Losses often include mixed feelings. For instance, survivors may feel relief from the abuse and sadness at the loss of companionship. Sometimes survivors doubt their perceptions or second-guess decisions when they feel ambivalent. Knowing a mix of emotions is normal prevents seeing them as evidence of a mistake. If emotions feel overwhelming, counseling may be helpful. Therapists offer emotional management strategies and reassurance that painful emotions will not last forever.
- Revise attachment. Survivors who leave partners have to revise their attachment to them. This may be complicated by continued contact with children. An example of revising attachment could be developing a co-parenting relationship with former partners but not relying on them for emotional support. When coercive control continues after the survivor leaves, it interferes with this type of transition. Survivors may revise their attachment even when they stay with partners who agree to change. Hopefully, they transition to a relationship with equity and respect. Ironically, this also can take some adjustment because equal partnership may be new to them.
- Discover new hope. That happens slowly and steadily as survivors heal. As LaDonna Cary’s blog indicated, survivors can focus not only on their losses but what they gain. Eventually, the gains become the main focus. There often is time for the things that they felt they missed while in the relationship.
Note to Survivors
If you experience abuse from a partner, begin with identifying the resiliency traits you already have. In addition, recognize how coercive control interferes with your resiliency. Find supportive friends/family/professionals that don’t stigmatize you for how your partner behaves. This facilitates your healing and ability to make decisions that fit your situation.
[i] The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change, Pauline Boss. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021)
[ii] Bill Eddy book BIFF: Quick Responses to High Conflict People, Their Personal Attacks, Hostile Email, and Social Media Meltdowns (Scotsdale, AZ: High Conflict Institute Press, 2011. He’s written other pertinent books, including Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. His High Conflict Institute website has many resources.
