Does It End With Us?

Thoughts on the domestic abuse and violence in popular culture

Hello friends,

I will start with a trigger warning. We are going to discuss domestic violence. If you are not feeling like going there today - I get it - that is partly why I am writing this, because my algorithm keeps bringing up this conversation, when I least expect it.

This is a topic I have wanted to write about since I started this newsletter, but aside from this piece, and various allusions to this topic: have written numerous drafts but not felt ready to publish them. Before I start, I want to underline, that I see this topic embedded in everything else I write about - the aid sector, travel, global systems - to me they are all entwined.

As you can tell from the title, I want to talk about ‘It Ends with Us’, which with its publicity drive and the surrounding discussion of the cast, has thrust domestic violence into the popular sphere. And for me that meant being unprepared for flashbacks, triggered by a few videos on YouTube, while cooking my dinner after work.

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

While it is a subject I consume with care, it is also one which I have studied for years, since, in my twenties, my partner turned violent a month after we got engaged. That is not my only experience of abuse, but it was the most tangible, and negotiating this confusing intimate space until finally crawling away made me an obsessive student of the ways people behave while professing their deepest love.

The strangest thing about popular culture suddenly abounding with commentary about abuse, is that normally, no one talks about it. Outside of the safety of therapy, I rarely discuss it. Most people go quiet when I mention my experience. They look confused. Skeptical. Unsure.

I was a gender expert for years, after all, I am educated and travelled the world. This seems to lead to the common assumption that I couldn’t be a victim of abuse, but I was. More than once. The long work I put into healing is a testament to how I show up today, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. My body reminds me of that frequently.

I have been at parties, where people pontificate about abuse in abstract academic terms, naively assuming no one at the table has been a victim. That is my turn to go silent, my body too rigid with fury and fear to be able to articulate trauma to people who cannot fathom why women do not leave, or who think it’s just terrible, blissfully convinced that it could never happen to them (or anyone they know).

While I notice some thoughtful comments by Justin Baldoni, I have been mostly struck by the way the promotion of ‘It Ends With Us’ seems to have mostly raised awareness of how uninformed so many people still are about domestic abuse.

Aside from her obvious self-promotions, Blake Lively, despite playing the character of the victim in the film, comes across as unable to comprehend the complex and intense emotions that occur when you are deeply betrayed not only by someone you love but also by the concepts of love and trust themselves.

Her interviews, while painful to watch, illustrate many common societal norms. She tries to brighten up the intensity of the topic with a few florals. She tries to say the right thing because she should, not because she understands or wants to. She illustrates how I see many people respond when faced with a testimony of intimate violence - they are shocked, drawn in by the drama of it - but push away, make light, the reality of it.

Yet, that dark place is where all survivors are forced to go.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

To leave, you need to believe that little voice inside you, the tiny voice that knows something isn’t right. You have to trust that voice more than what he says, more than what society taught you, more than the words your friends use to comfort you and more than the other voices in your head, the ones of shame, blame, love and perseverance. And that is no mean feat.

When you crawl out of an abusive relationship, you are forced into learning about the cruelty of human psychology and society alone. You are also alone trying to regulate your physical and emotional reactions - which will often surprise even your own rational mind. You are alone trying to piece together and understand of what went wrong. Because you loved him. Because this wasn’t what was meant to happen. The world promised you something else. It must be you who is to blame.

Finding the compassion, healing and support needed to recover is something you do cluelessly, with no map to show you the way. We think we should be over it already. We are taking too long to heal. Sometimes, as in my case, you wander into more abuse, blind to it happening again. (And no, not all therapists are trained to offer help either).

For the most part, our mainstream culture seems unable to accept the fact that many many men are violent. Especially to women, who they say they love. Especially behind closed doors. When the statistics show us that violence is scarily normal.

Of course, while it is happening, your body in flight and fight, your nervous system in a state of constant vigilance, it does not feel normal. Quite the opposite.

But if you take a step back, you can see how commonplace violence is in our world. 1 in 3 women are likely to experience domestic violence in their lifetimes (that is 736 million women). In some countries, it is over half of women. And domestic violence is just one aspect of violence and abuse in our systems. War is constant and prevalent, for example, see this data on global conflicts since the Cold War) or look at the global conflicts happening as I write, or the more subtle everyday violence in places where police are corrupt and criminals have more power than peace and lawmakers.

We are also exposed to patterns of gaslighting and abuse within many of our institutions. The recent P Diddy arrest is cracking open a story which potentially impacted numerous victims, demonstrating again how patterns of violence and abuse of power exist even in spaces we idolise.

We think violence is shocking, and it is, but it also happens much more than we admit to ourselves. So much so, that sometimes peace seems like the real story.

One consequence of assuming violence to be rare is that we do not see it happening. And blinding ourselves to violence allows us to convince ourselves that the unsafe is safe. To overwrite our instincts and inclinations. He just had a bad day. He didn’t mean it. To go deeper and deeper into the swamp. Because we don’t know it’s a swamp. It just seems normal. It is how love is.

Abuse doesn’t happen one day, it is a pattern of normalising the unacceptable. And when it happens around love, it tramples on the tender parts of our psyches which we have laid open to someone, in a space we thought safe to do so.

Abuse enters your life and lives with you. With it comes the numbing of self. The tiny muscle twitches. The calculated quiet. The efforts to appease it, tame it, co-exist with it, until one day, unconsciously we do something - like go to the shops without telling him or add the wrong sauce or pick up a spoon - and there it is suddenly, terrifyingly, right there, when we were certain this time it had gone.

The world has evolved from when I first tried to make sense of these experiences. Social media, academic study, law reform and therapy have helped victims exchange information and better understand patterns. Yet, I still see a huge gap between those who have had to learn about abuse and subsequent trauma and those who see it as an abstract thing, the sort of thing you watch in a film, not embedded into the world we live in, woven so absolutely into our everyday.

Maybe the discussion around this film will raise our awareness. Maybe it will help women feel able to talk about their experiences and be believed and listened to when they do. Maybe this will help more people understand the resilience required to step away from abuse and the further resilience required to face that lonely road of -repair repair repair repair -to be functional, mostly, somewhat functional again.

But this film has been troubling me for weeks. And now I see why.

Because it reminds me it will not end with us.

No, it reminds me that it will go on and on and on.

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And I don’t want to see that world. So that is why I am writing this. That is why I am here.

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Travel with me

If you have read this and relate, I would like to know:

• What resources would you share to support someone to understand abuse?

• What do you wish people understood about abuse and violence in our world?

• If you are affected by any of the issues in this post and you want to share your experience, do also feel free to reach out to me privately.