Category: Domestic Violence Smarts

In the first article we hit a brief overview of why the cycle of domestic violence is self-perpetuating and stubborn. The cycle demands repetition and assuages a deep anxiety triggered by potential tribal instability.

If you are in the self-defense industry this is going to become a factor in your reality. You will have students who are actively in a domestic violence relationship. Teach long enough, you will have a student who is in a DV situation and who decides you are integris enough to entrust you with this information.

Think about why you teach. Take a minute and list out the deep, personal reasons why you choose to invest all the time, money, injuries, cost against family etc. to do this work. At some level, a good instructor knows s/he teaches because they want good people to be stronger people. Oversimplifying it, you want good people to have the power to choose their responses to bad situations.

If you have a student in a DV situation who shares this information with you, it may come to light after she has violated a series of tribal taboos – meaning, after she has left the relationship. This is the easy one. There may still be threats to her safety impacting her choice to train, but she is off the script. The student who is training with you and continues going home to the abuse is the tough one. She is going to trigger all sorts of frustrations for a self-defense instructor. Her subconscious allegiance to the script is going to highlight your glitches.

Note: Glitches are the emotional trigger points that interfere with our capacity to consider a situation, belief, interaction, etc. through a purely logical observation

What is your gut response? Are you angry with her for staying in the pattern? Do you feel helpless? Are you tempted to dismiss her? Do you want to track down the violent partner and meet out justice?

Do you want to save her?

And what exactly is your role? What is your duty to her? What is overstepping? When, in your righteousness, will you accidentally do the same thing her violent partner is already doing – treat her as damaged and less than?

For now, I am forgoing any dialogue about Duty To Warn obligations as it relates to professions who may have reporting obligations. The number of self-defense instructors who also carry these may be more the minority and warrants a separate conversation. What follows are a handful of basic guidelines for a complex dynamic. This is not exhaustive and the guidelines may, in fact, be wrong depending on the specific situation.

Guideline #1: Honor her trust. You may be the only person in her life right now who can demonstrate what respect looks like. The respect that communicates she is, in fact, capable of making her own choices about her own circumstances. Respect that honors her right to make those choices. Now that she has disclosed her situation to you, do not assume you know how she wants you to support her. Instead, ask. What kind of support do you want from me? Another variation of this is what does support [from me] look like to you? Do your damnedest to honor her response. If she tells you she doesn’t know, try not to dictate it to her, she already has plenty of that happening. One request she may make could be particularly difficult for you. She may ask for your silence. If she doesn’t want you telling anyone, don’t tell anyone.*

Guideline #2: You are not a social worker or a psychotherapist. Even if you are credentialed for these professions as her self-defense instructor, this is not your role. Don’t pick up the mantel for it. If you are untrained in this role you have a better than average chance of making the situation worse for your student. You will almost always make your life more difficult as well.

If you take up this role will you be prepared for phone calls at 2 am? For long conversations after class? Are you up for holding in confidence detailed information about one of the darker aspects of human behavior? Are you personally equipped for processing this violence? You can’t unknow this stuff. There is such a thing as secondary post-traumatic stress. What if she calls you to help her move out? Where will you set your boundaries with her? This gets slippery fast so don’t step onto the slope. Licensed therapists have rules and training for how to manage personal boundary-setting with clients. It is unlikely you have this training if you are not licensed. You could end up in the deep end of the pool with no understanding about how to swim through the water.

Guideline #3: You don’t get to save her. It is not your job. I don’t care what argument you want to throw back at this. It just isn’t your job.

It is her job. We know when DV victims are rescued they typically return. When they make the decision personally, when they have reached their own clarity – it sticks.

I have a decent amount of experience working with DV victims and survivors. I am about to offer a series of suggestions and encourage you to take them as a first step, not as the final word. There are people who have a significant degree more experience than I have and there is an extensive body of research available if you are interested.

1. About Guideline #1. Silence. This comes at a cost. If you are asked to keep her story in confidence, how will you process the impact it has on you? If she tells you and doesn’t want you to do anything, watching her continue in the script can take you to places of frustration and anger that may be new for you. You are her instructor and you get to set your own boundaries about what’s necessary for you to successfully work with her (including not losing your mind over this). Options include telling her you need counsel on how to best support her, get her permission and then get counsel. If she refuses, talk it out with her. If she still refuses get counsel but leave every single piece of personally identifying information from the story and reach out to someone that does not know your tribe. This is risky. She may experience it as a violation of her trust. You may have to decide between the two.
2. Be Prepared. With the statistics being what they are, assume you are going to have domestic violence victims in your class. Know what the resources are in your community. Have them at quick access and be able to hand this information to a student. This will help avoid a sense of powerlessness and can help assuage your inner hero’s desire to save her. No, it isn’t going to automatically fix everything. That’s not going to happen no matter what you do.
3. If you feel compelled to get involved, understand this. Law enforcement officers are taught that a DV call is particularly volatile and dangerous…for the officer. The violence can turn on the neutral party. You could end up as a target for the violent partner. You could experience your student turning on you as well. In class, at your dojo this may not be physical but, it doesn’t have to be for her to wreak havoc. Hold to a Do No Harm rule. Ask yourself if your involvement will make things better and how it might make things worse.
4. This is not your fight. It is her fight. And sometimes people die. She can do all the “right” things and not survive.

If she dies, or is seriously injured in a violent encounter you are going to take impact. The voices in your head will be noisy. They will want you to feel blame and fault. These voices are going to sound off in other situations as well. It’s part of the territory for the emotional make-up of a lot of people who go into the self-defense instructor profession. Get to know your glitches and blind spots. Cultivate a relationship with a violence industry colleague to whom you can extend a deep level of trust. This needs to be someone you can talk to openly and without filters. Let this relationship be strong enough to function as a crucible for conversations about your glitches and possible blind spots. Cultivating this relationship should live in your thinking as a Hard Rule. The crucible relationship will be a critical component for hanging on to your sanity in an industry which daily addresses the elements of humanity most people avoid.

*Trust and Confidentiality. This is one of the murkier issues. If you tell someone, will it help? If you violate her trust will it be for a better outcome overall?

As a topic, Domestic Violence is complex. There is a multitude of research on the causes, the correlations and intervention strategies aimed at reducing the incidence of domestic violence. In the United States, for example, statisticians generally settle on 1 in 3 women will experience some sort of domestic violence in their lifetime. This is an unsettling statistic and has driven funding and research for decades. Add to this, 1 in 10 female homicide victims are murdered by someone known the them, frequently by a former or current domestic partner.  These stats are generated by a variety of sources and the numbers do vary. Do not take them as solid numbers but rather as a context for the prevalence of the dynamic.

It is also important to shift the numbers out of a statistical context and into the reality of people. The next time you are out in public, look for three women. By the numbers, one of these three is in a domestically violent relationship. If there are six women in the group, two of them are being abused by their partners, etc. Put real people to the numbers and the gravitas shifts.

This will be a two-part article series and is the product of conversations I have had with self-defense instructors from different parts of the globe over the past few years. The question comes up: how do I handle a student in a domestic violence situation?

I am glad the question is being asked because what lives under the question in many of the instructors I have talked with is an instinct that the instructor should be doing something to help her.

-Note: I am using the feminine pronoun for ease of writing. This does not negate that there are men in domestic violence situations but instead reflects the provenance in women is significantly higher based on what is reported.

To get started, we need to look at why domestic violence is the cycle that it is. The abuser lashes out, she gets hit/beaten, etc. In the aftermath the abuser expresses remorse – which does not always mean accepting responsibility – the couple puts the violence behind them and then the gradual tension begins again until there is another physical outburst. Even if she leaves, she typically comes home in the remorse stage.

Our discussion of why this happens is going to be a short and, as a result, an incomplete review. There are entire books written on just this piece of the topic. Here we go:

As humans, we are deeply social creatures. It is part of our survival blueprint. In hostile territory a single human’s survival chances are questionable. With a tribe, survival chances increase. For the individual to survive, the tribe must survive. The family unit is interpreted by primitive brain function as our current concept of tribe. Add to this, the social and cultural ideas of family structure, which are equally powerful and programmed into our thinking from birth. This is the concept of the Monkey Brain.

Instability in our tribe is interpreted as a threat. Remember, if the tribe doesn’t survive – you die. If the tribe is unstable or at risk of falling apart, then your survival is threatened. These perceptions are deeply unconscious and primitive. Logic based conversation will rarely be enough to overpower these instincts.

All of this adds up to two things.

1. The pattern of domestic violence becomes one of the defining scripts of the relationship. As the cycle continues, the Monkey Brain see this as stability. “My tribe is stable; therefore, it will survive. Tribe survives, I survive.”
   2. Leaving means the tribe is no longer stable. The family disintegrates = the tribe disintegrates and this feels like a powerful threat to personal survival.

Logically, we all know this doesn’t make sense. Domestic violence can be fatal. It is clear the abuse is a direct threat to the physical well-being of the victim.

BUT…and this is a very powerful and important “but”… the Monkey Brain and the more primitive survival mechanisms see the pattern rather than the physical violence. The pattern indicates that whatever the victim of domestic violence is doing, it is working exceedingly well.

How? Simple. Each time there is a physical altercation, a slap, a beating, the primitive survival mechanism in her brain notices something very important “I am still alive. Whatever I did during this violence, it kept me alive.”

Being alive is more important than being injured. If the decision she is making gets her hurt but doesn’t kill her, the unconscious primitive mind will see this as a good decision and will work to have her repeat this choice in similar future events.

The pattern of domestic violence becomes a script defining stability and survival. Leaving and stopping the pattern is experienced as a powerful threat to survival.

So the pattern continues and for self-defense instructors, this pattern can be deeply frustrating. If you teach, you likely teach because you want to help people lead stronger, happier, healthier lives. You want people to find strength and the internal fortitude for liberty v. oppression. Knowing one of your students leaves class only to return home to a situation of violence and presumed oppression is vexing enough to keep you up at night.

Managing that is for article number two.