A helping professional is almost always at a disadvantage when performing their admirable services. Although they listen and empathize with the client, our understanding of the client’s experience is always a step removed. It never resembles the raw feeling of emotion and confusion that the client is trying to impart. A therapist can sift through their memories, searching for an example of some similar feeling from personal experience, but the emotional reality of each person has a unique shape that ensures that there is a never a perfect match. This holds especially true in cases where the experience was ultra-traumatizing, as in the case of domestic violence. The day to day experience of being abused, mentally and physically, by a person who is supposed to be caring for you is almost impossible to grasp without a first person experience.
The educational structures for helping professionals try to close that gap. The texts that students cling to to help them make sense of the senselessness of our world often contain case studies that are meticulously dissected by author. Case studies attempt to act as a bridge that allows the student to cross that experiential divide. Yet, they are often a step removed as well, focusing on the sessions, not the traumatic events per say, or only including a recap intended to summarize the client for the student. Such efforts leave the student in a position to learn something about treatment, but lacks the raw personal tone that would really bring the experience home. Helping professions are left confronted with a dilemma, to provide the most ethical service possible the professional must understand the experience as intimately as possible, but where are they to get it?
An often overlooked source is the client. Rarely is a glimpse of the client given from a first person, personal perspective. Case studies hardly ever present the experiential information without the filter of the Author, yet who has more of a right to teach us, who has more of a right to be the author then the survivor?
I am happy to say that one such project has come to my attention, Stories of Survivors: Stories from those who have overcome abuse.
“… a collection of stories written by survivors of domestic violence about the their abusive relationship from the start of the relationship, the abuse, the leaving, and how they healed and recovered after they left.
Poems written by domestic violence survivors are also included, many of these poems offer a unseen glimpse into domestic violence. Poems were written not only after abuse, some were written during the abusive relationship as a way of coping with the abuse.”
It is the sort of work that embraces the power of a peer helping a peer, but this work is more than that. It is the sort of thing that should be required reading to anyone in the helping professions because it allows us to face scary possibilities head on. As a result, they will bring that much more empathy as a result of spending some personal time in between the pages with the survivors. This should not be optional, it should be required. This should not be the place where a students ends their studies, it should be the place they begin.
This is the type of project embraces the idea of social work and the understanding that everyone has value. It also takes a step back from the idea of clinical aspects of domestic violence which is so often put forth by experts and allows those who have experienced domestic violence to help other survivors. As social workers, as advocates, as teachers, this is a project which we must stand up and support.
More information about this book, organization, and their shelter project can be found at www.arkharbor.org
Written by Matthew Cohen, MSW
SJS Staff Writer
Updated 11/21/2013
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Name any sort of problem, and there are a variety of ways of analyzing the problem. Each different analysis suggests strategies for resolving the problem. Pat has been fired. Ask a group of people to give you some reasons for Pat being fired. Pat was fired because he overslept too many times after being on the internet until 3am; or he got fired because he made a snotty comment to a customer when he thought the boss wasn’t around; or whatever. Each hypothetical answer suggests the nature of the problem, and strategies for correcting that problem. Pat is being irresponsible, and needs to get more rest, rather than being up late on the computer. Pat is being petty, and needs to consider the appropriateness of a spoken observation, and so on. Pat, an irresponsible and petty person, is “troubled”; his behavior could reasonably result in being fired. These are examples of a “troubles analysis” of events impacting someone’s life.
After a while, hypothetical explanations for hypothetical Pat’s having been fired will eventually elicit a different category of hypothetical answer. Someone will offer a reason for Pat’s new employment status for which Pat could not be considered responsible, such as “the economy took a dive and the company had to let go 10,000 employees.” In this scenario, Pat may not be troubled at all; this Pat may be hard-working and conscientious, responsible and gracious, but still be newly fired. Pat’s firing is due to a larger “issue.” This hypothetical answer likewise suggests the nature of the problem and strategies for correcting that problem. But the nature and strategies go beyond Pat; indeed, they go beyond the company where Pat works. They are systemic, sometimes international. They are examples of an “issues analysis” of an individual’s situation.
DV is not a problem that is not best solved using the troubles analysis. Too often we want to focus on a “troubles” analysis of every problem, (especially sexual and domestic violence). In the United States, our dominant cultural ethos has been formed by the wild frontier and rugged individualism, by immigrants coming to make new lives for themselves at the cost of the lives of the people who were here when the boats started arriving (to mention only one). We as a culture have had little practice seeing the larger issue. Again and again “failures” are understood to be personal, rather than the individual’s fulfillment of some larger cultural expectation. This is easier psychologically and socially, because the problems are limited to those troubled few individuals, rather than being an issue for every one of us in this culture. Despite seeming to be an easier pill to swallow, it is not the best analysis of the problem.
The troubles analysis, tied to an individual, casts domestic violence as an aberration. Abusers were themselves abused, or lack anger management skills, or provoked, or what have you. An issues analysis, tied to social patterns at large, casts violence mainly, though not exclusively as a result of societal expectations that men will control women. Violence committed by women against men, or same-sex intimate partner violence, both equally serious, would be understood differently in this model.
I was excited by Social Justice Solutions raising this topic, because a therapist needs to hear from their clients. “Who … has more of a right to teach us, who has more of a right to be the author [of an article like this] then the survivor?” Exactly. I think if a therapist can take those personal experiences, and understand this in light of their own training, they will see how DV fits into the larger societal patterns. The therapist can engage an issues analysis with the first-person account, and see that if the only answer given to domestic violence is therapy, that the problem will continue. Therapy, anger management training, education, can be helpful, but they are secondary to the deeper issue which remains unaddressed by a troubles perspective.