The Lion & The Lioness: How We Repeated a Pattern of Family Violence and What it Took to Stop It
Jessica K. Bruhn, MA, CCC
Re-Creation Healing Psychotherapy
Setting the Stage
For a long time I believed that if you were clever and smart, witty and knowledgeable, you would be safe in this world. I believed these traits would protect and insulate you; not many people would be able to rip you off, dupe you, exploit or use you. I wasn’t thinking with my heart, only my head. My heart was offline, unreachable, underutilized. In its avoidance of, as Brene Brown has made a house-hold term, vulnerability, my heart was in fact naive and gullible in this delusion of certainty.
My heart was ripe for exploitation, for manipulation, duping and fooling. And like many children and youth, I had a distrustful relationship with the social aspects of the public school system. As a competent female student, I was routinely mocked for being top of the class, called bossy and yet constantly hounded for help. I also witnessed countless others be mocked for the opposite: they were at bottom of the class, needing extra help, or in place of academic success, they excelled at sports or music or art. Then, they were bullied for that. It was so foolish to me, this calculated system of separation based on performance and whose performance was better or worse (sometimes it was good to be bad at math; and some times it was bad to be good at English). It never made any sense.
Insecurity never makes sense as it is emotional wounding that fuels it. And emotions, by their nature, make no sense. We still need them though and I’m glad emotional literacy is becoming more of a regular practice in schools, workplaces and homelives for much of the world. Emotional mindfulness breaks have long been practiced for eons in eastern cultures such the Taoist and Buddhist traditions of Tibet, India and Thailand. And for a bunch of newly incarnated souls, bouncing off the walls in grade school, all coming from different households with various parenting styles, expectations and baggage, it sure does help to be taught how to ground. That’s my adult-voice talking.
Not knowing something is a normal part of eventually learning it. It’s choosing to ignore what we see and know is happening that is the real failure. I didn’t want to be ignorant and I listened to all of the sociological and anthropological studies on gender, race and political theory when I was a youth to try and piece together what bullying actually was, why it was so prevalent and how it related to power. I also have a particular aspergers trait in wanting to comprehend incredibly complex human social systems. Ah, constantly changing, highly unreliable social systems. But I digress.
The study was necessary for my comprehension (and spiritual survival), but I didn’t enjoy it. I began to identify the actual philosophical principles that underpinned the bullying. It was disgusting for me: the misogyny underpinning the boys calling me names and threatening to rape and beat me when I said I didn’t want to help them with their homework. The sexism, elitism, homophobia, racism, classism and multi-modes of oppression that underpinned so much of the bullshit I saw go on in other kids’ dynamics. The self-loathing of one friend who shared how he worried he might be gay reflected the intensity of these impacts. After going for a run together and telling him that I would support him if he ever came out as gay, he vehemently protested my gay-positive mindset, telling me I was going to hell for it. That took a bit for me to process at 14, but I got there. The best defence is a good offence to a boy who was terrified of anyone finding out and murdering him because of it. This was 2002, so a lot of that shit was still happening to teenage gay boys. Still is in many places.
Silence
I developed a form of social anxiety disorder in my early teens followed by what I can safely retroactively define as acute PTSD, precipitated by childhood sexual assault and betrayal trauma. By the time I was 13, I wanted to die. I’ve never fought in an actual armed conflict on the ground as a solider, but I do know what it’s like to be five years old and have no escape, watching as three older kids hold you down and rape you. After that day, my life changed and I began to fear the world and the people in it for many years. I began to take up mental arms; I went on the offensive.
I trusted no one and believed this would protect my heart. My friends had raped me. Since the attack, I was uncertain about friends up until my mid-twenties. I would make some but hold them at a distance. I didn’t want to be sexually assaulted again and suffered from a common anxiety symptom of hypervigilance that created a great deal of physiological stress in my body, effecting my muscular and immune systems. But I did have one remaining aspiration of intimacy and connection that was not impacted by parental betrayal or the violent actions of friends: romantic love with a life partner.
So I attempted to hybridize my two influences of first wave feminism and Disney-influenced delusional love-goggles by forming myself into an independent and ambitious young woman with a tender spot for boy-doves with broken wings. I had a great first aid kit: gauze, splints, rolls and rolls of bandages, everything to keep them safe from outside invaders and more malice. But I could do nothing to protect them from themselves. The doves I found and lovingly placed in my emotionally safe cardboard boxes were really lions. The threat lay within, often dormant until they finally felt safe and loved. No amount of external love can heal an internal hemorage.
I have been a cat-lover and animal-lover in general for most of my life and I have watched and studied many a National Geographic special on pride behavior. The female lionesses do most of the hunting, the cub-rearing and typically don’t spend a great deal of time with the male lions outside of breeding and when they require protection from invading prides or rogue males from other areas. The male lions lounge around, survey the landscape and sleep a lot. They benefit from the female lions’ hunts and as primary protectors, often get first dibs along with the dominant females in the pride (and their cubs). Lions are notoriously vain and self-obsessed; they can become irritated and aggressive if a stray cub wanders too close to their favourite napping tree. And while lionesses get down to business and are responsible and effective, the lions’ petty, overly emotional interactions with others is actually where the term “catty” came from... I speculate.
I Married a Lion
The most important part of realizing I married a petty, egotistical, self-obsessed man is that my doing so had revealed a previously undetected deficit of mine from a very early age. This deficit fits in perfect symmetry with 95% of all sexual abuse survivors: poor self-esteem, self-invalidation and a lack of self-compassion.
Now my metaphor of a “lion” is deliberately simplistic, but I will elaborate further in a humanistic context. Sexual abuse survivors often develop a sixth-sense-like strong emotional intelligence toward others’ suffering. We often become counsellors, social workers, psychologists, medical professionals because we know what it is to be hurt and in need of good, qualified, competent help. Often, we didn’t get particularly good care ourselves so we strive to become that which we never had and perhaps felt robbed of.
But if the survivor of sexual abuse is insufficiently supported due to conflicting family views, inconsistent support figures, mixed messages that include victim-blaming and other forms of chronic invalidation, no matter how smart or intellectually gifted they well may be, their sense of emotional security and love gets damaged. To learn more about this phenomenon, I highly reccommend taking a look at Hong et al’s study on how chronic environmental childhood sexual abuse invalidation impacts mental-emotional resilience and cognitive scaffolding in attachment patterns in their journal article, “The aftermath of trauma: The impact of perceived and anticipated invalidation of childhood sexual abuse on borderline symptomology.” I will link to the study in the references section.
How We Attach as Children Forecasts Significant Adult Attachment Patterns
Attachment theory starts when we’re infants and not long after our first few months out of the womb we begin to form a definite style of attachment. This style plays out into childhood, adolescence and adulthood with our primary caregivers (our parents, extended family, guardians, and whoever raised us with a strong emotional bond present) (Bowlby, 1958). When we seek out a mate, we subconsciously repeat this pattern of love-making and intimacy bonding. Attachment with others and corresponding self-attachment in the forms of what I described earlier (self-esteem, self-validation and self-compassion) aren’t static processes. That means our primary attachment style can change with mindful awareness, effort and thoughtful behaviour change. This is known as “earned secure attachment” as a result of doing emotional-psychological restructuring work (Main, 1985). I will tell you how I developed earned secure attachment with others and myself in this next part.
I found my mother to be inconsistent but warm; I found my father was inconsistent but cold. They were and still are good people, they just had a lot on the go when I was young and impressionable. I developed a preoccupied attachment with my mother (female caregiver) and an avoidant attachment with my father (male caregiver). At the time of marrying my ex-husband, I identified as heterosexual and attached in the style of my male caregiver (attracted to men with an avoidant attachment style). I had very low expectations and I was subconsciously prepared to do most of the work, with very little practical reciprocation from my romantic partner (the new adult primary caregiver). Predictably, as I began to change after doing significant personal work in confronting the unhealthy patterns in me and my parents’ relationships, my relationship requests to spend quality time together three times a week became overwhelming to my husband. He expressed derision at my “demands” for intimacy/bonding time. The more I worked through the abuse of my childhood and residual pain of my early life, the more my self-esteem, self-worth and self-compassion blossomed.
How I Stopped My Part in It
I practiced a lot of meditation, I wrote and created a great deal of art and music, and I gently exposed myself to new situations and people while respecting myself, my feelings, boundaries and needs during every interaction. I used my mental health education to treat myself, as well as continued to learn from mentors and attend regular counselling sessions as a client. I took regular breaks to test out the exercises I describe to you now, on my own, as taking breaks from therapy is needed to generalize the skills gleaned from it.
I was willing to receive love and kindness from others in personal, non-clinical relationships. I absorbed it. I distanced myself from unkind, aloof and unstable people without any judgement on them as humans. I let go of significant grief and loss, guilt and shame via daily letting go ceremonies involving one of the four elements. Whether it be burning materials with abusive connotations/associations/memories written on them, washing myself or objects clean, burying items that would decay and go back to the earth to be transformed or blowing out candles with the power of my own and the earth’s wind, I put the painstaking effort in to do it. And it paid off. In abundance.
I did what felt good for my purposes and removed judgement of myself. I only judged my actions and words in terms of their congruence with my core beliefs and values. This is emotional presence, healing, and was a newfound intelligence for me I deeply valued.
I not only began to appreciate my value and understand my worth, I began to seek out and initiate opportunities to make my inner values, beliefs and worldviews match my outer choices. In psychology, this is known as “congruence” and is incredibly important for me to do personally as well as professionally as I strive to be genuine and authentic in helping others work through clinical and pathological problems. I never ask a client to try to do something I haven’t tried myself. To do so would be the height of hipocrisy and arrogance and there are enough counsellors out there who unfortunately say one thing but do another, discrediting much of the field (i.e. Carl Jung sleeping with patients and Freud getting high on cocaine to numb-out the intensity of his neurosis are just a couple of historical examples).
I am no better or worse than anyone else and am no more or less deserving of love and respect. I can also f&!@ up big time, and am still learning how to get to the bottom of what I did wrong, how it happened, take ownership and make amends without lambasting myself for every mistake as though I was super evil for being human and fallible.
Final Curtain to a Really Long Drama
I wasn’t then and I’m not now going to give up on myself. And I take a stand in arguing that neither should you, or anyone for that matter, regardless of your personal experiences, whether you harmed someone or were harmed by them (or both). After doing all of that work at confronting and healing sexual abuse, betrayal trauma and more with my parents, I realized that the prospect of holding my husband accountable for what he did and leaving him was not so bad. I realized I had been through worse, and thereby could lay my hands on tangible mastery that no one could ever take away. That’s the reward at the end of all that work. And we can take pride in our work.
But back to the end of my marriage. I began to confront the lion, but not alone. I had a huge group of peers, allies, friends and role models who backed the idea that I deserved respect and reciprocity at home, and could leave a partner who chose to use abuse toward me, guilt-free.
I finished my master’s degree under the supervision of an extremely talented therapist who supported holistically, and with scientifically precise application, the exponential growth in comprehension of what to do and why for my own problems as well as our clients’. I learned that you don’t have to be perfect (or pretend you are) to help people, you simply have to be willing to do the work and be a bit braver to encourage others to do their work.
At home, the more I attempted to build intimacy, connection, collaboration, healthy communication and co-plan a life with my husband, the more he balked. He would metaphorically swat my face if I got too close via verbal castigations, blame and contempt for my audacity to request emotional closeness with him.
My requests were called selfish; my attempts to bond and share ideas, interests, goals and invitations to participate on projects were silly or impractical. He defined my way of being as incompatible with what he preferred, what he liked, his processes. There was no attempt made on his end to investigate, on his own, why all of these fairly typical communication requests were so agitating (why not just leave me if I’m so incompatible?) because to him no attempt was necessary. It was my fault I was rejected by him because I should’ve known. I was the lioness after all, the provider, the worker, the diligent yet unofficial keeper of the pride. He was supposed to keep face as the official king of the jungle. Period.
The lion didn’t want to move, didn’t want to play, hunt or raise cubs. To the lion, why on earth would the lioness ask these ridiculous things of him? Didn’t she know who he was? Didn’t she remember what she signed up for? But I wasn’t a lioness anymore. There were other forms of psychological abuse and a couple of instances of physical threatening, but the primary modality was emotional abuse like gaslighting, undermining, public humiliation and covert financial obstruction. Where’s this month’s rent, honey? Oh, I spent that on a trip to Florida for myself… and didn’t tell you… oops. But you can’t get mad… I’m just such a good guy, remember? I had changed and I needed him to get off his royal ass and also change. He couldn’t do that.
I kept myself safe; I knew how to safety-plan and I knew about power and control dynamics. I practiced nonviolence and truth-telling as core spiritual elements in my personal faith and they also helped build my resolve and decrease my ambition at fixing the situation. (I couldn’t fix this dickery with my first aid kit, and no one could. Except the man doing the dickery.)
I’m happier now than I was before and after I married the lion. And it has nothing to do with him or anyone else, but me.
It took me about 8 months total from identification of what was happening, to getting out, to starting again. It took me about 2 years to heal from the after-effects of the emotional abuse. I had a couple of relapses and reached out to him to see if he had changed. I would describe this reflex for toxic codependent companionship as akin to an addict craving a fix after being sober for a year. It was hard; he hadn’t. He was abusive again. And I got back on the wagon of no contact. Each post-relapse awareness was like a hangover that strengthened my resolve. I didn’t want to be a cop-out to my clients; they helped motivate me to stay sober from him and turn to myself for love instead of an unreachable place.
Last Words
I want to end with the reiteration that I was privileged to have resources, safe people to stay with, validation that I wasn’t crazy and finances to fall back on to get out. And I got out relatively fast in under 3 years of marriage. So many others aren’t so lucky, don’t have money, people in their corner or the education I had to exit out of abusive relationships. That’s why people stay, even when they know it’s wrong.
Donate to domestic violence agencies whenever you can. Long-term change takes time; I had an advantage early on in life, despite the trauma I suffered. I’ve made it my life’s work to try and give back for all the guidance and support I received, to provide knowledge and presence to others they may not otherwise get. You are no better or worse than anyone else; you are no more or less deserving of love and respect.
Lastly, when you are tempted to buy-in to those awful voices from previous lovers or cruel friends or unsupportive hippocrates, remember that love is more powerful than fear. Those messages of judgement and criticism were said in fear of your own right to power. They were afraid of you, your abilities, your compassion, your intelligence. Power and control cannot survive where there is love, support, acceptance and compassion.
Love and be kind to yourself first; you won’t find it or be able to freely receive it (without resisting it) from anyone else until you love and cherish yourself. This is the great secret that should never have been kept silent.
In solidarity,
Jessica K. Bruhn, M.A., C.C.C.
Peaceful Warrior, Advocate, Creator, Healer
References:
Bowlby, J. (1958), The nature of the child’s tie to his mother. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, XXXIX, 1–23.
Hong, P. Y., Ilardi, S. S., & Lishner, D. A. (2011). The aftermath of trauma: The impact of perceived and anticipated invalidation of childhood sexual abuse on borderline symptomatology. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 3(4), 360–368. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021261
Main, M, Kaplan, N. and Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Vol. 50 (1). DOI: 10.2307/3333827. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3333827
