If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...
Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.
(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com
and
www.warrenfarrell.info.
If A Man Slaps A Woman, Should She Leave Him?
Since women are more likely to slap men, the question that should be asked is, “If your
partner
slaps you should you leave?” Shelters are only available for women and they see the cases that have escalated, therefore they believe, “a man who slaps you once will slap you twice, will eventually beat you and batter you.” They don’t see that women are twice as likely to be the first ones to slap a man before and after a marriage – at the rate of 26% before a marriage, as we saw above – and that both sexes are
less
likely to hit each other as a relationship matures. Nor do they see why violence decreases when it does – how some couples have used the signal of a slap as a sign that the situation is out of control, that they need help and,
as
they’re getting help, set firm boundaries: “if it happens again, I’m out of here.”
Walking out doesn’t consider the impact on children of one slap leading to the end of life as they knew it.
The power of a slap across the face from someone we love is not in the physical hurt of the slap nearly as much as in the rejection the slap might symbolize. If the slap symbolizes a breakdown in the system that has brought us love, it might hurt more than a broken nose on the football field that was achieved in the process of scoring a touchdown. The issue is not the pain, but the context.
We have allowed to atrophy the ability of our mind to “contextualize pain.” Ellen Langer, a Harvard social psychologist, found that once a person has reinterpreted their pain into a more positive context, they are unlikely to return to the original painful context.
The paradigm shift for domestic violence work in the future, then, is to use the slap so that it is eventually contextualized as the start of a better marriage.
Inventing The Victim: A Stage II Luxury
In Stage II marriages more people can afford to leave partners who physically and psychologically abuse them. They can afford
conditional
love. And this new freedom has spawned whole libraries helping us get in touch with “the victim inside of us” (co-dependency, addiction, incest, battering, molestation,...). As the pendulum swings from “endure anything from anyone” to “sue anyone for anything,” we have developed a new industry of competition to be the biggest victim. Lawyers and therapists are paid to find victims; when the supply runs short, they create them. We are making a transition from a nation who believed “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” to a nation who believes “When the going gets tough, get a tough lawyer.”
When it actually pays to be a victim, the pendulum swings from “for better or for worse” marriages to “he slapped me, I'm gone” marriages. Which sometimes means “he slapped me, give me the kids and pay me” marriages.
