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Sexuality and Intimacy: Paradox, Transcendence, and Spirit
New Orleans � May 8-10, 2003
Systemic Treatment of Violent/Abusive Couples: A Victim/Perpetrator Perspective
Noel Larson, MSW, Ph.D. & Resmaa Menekim, MSW (SEX23-05)
MENEKIM: I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I actually am a Programming Director at Tubman now. For the past thirteen years, I've been working in the area of domestic violence. I started off with children who have experienced sexual abuse, neglect, and also physical violence. Then I started working with women who had been victimized; and within the last eight years, I have been working with perpetrators and also victims who are dealing with domestic violence. This is the work that more so that I think I have chosen, it's the work that chose me. It's something that through all of the experiences that I've had, I've been able to become a better therapist. I know for a lot of people when I'm telling people about what I do and the work that I do, the most common response is, �Why do you do that? That must be hard. Those people...something is wrong with those people.� I can honestly tell you that from all of the work that I've done, the one constant that I've pulled from the work is that the people that I've worked with really aren't that much different than me. I know that may sound strange, but the fact of the matter is that there are many more similarities between how �normal� people deal with relationships and people who are in domestic violence situations. There are more similarities than not. I know that doesn't make people feel that good, but a lot of times I think relationships are difficult and they're tough. It makes very little difference whether or not we're talking about a couple who is experiencing domestic violence or are just a very high-confrontational couple. The dynamics and the power and control dynamics are the same.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start off, because what I'm not going to do today, which I can do from time to time in other presentations, is start right where I'm at as if you guys are right where I'm at. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over a little bit of the history of the domestic violence movement and kind of get us all on the same page and get us caught up. Then we'll move into talking a little bit more about the model � about how is it that we've gotten to a place in the work that we do and why we've gotten to the work, with the help of Noel, the help of Dr. David Schnarch, and her husband, Jim Maddox � Dr. James Maddox � as well as another professor from the University of Minnesota who specializes in doing cultural work, Dr. Oliver Williams. So a lot of what we do at Tubman Family Alliance is based on a lot of their work � differentiation and things like that, which I've heard a lot of you have heard the term today. But we're going to explain it a little bit more in the context of domestic violence.
So the first thing is this is the ecological paradigm. So if you were supposed to be in another paradigm, this is the wrong workshop. You're in the ecological paradigm. We're going to be dealing with the evolution of services and beliefs for those struggling with family violence.
One of the first things, the first place we're going to start is the 1950s. Okay? These are some things that were going on in the 1950s. Two major beliefs. The community belief was that it's a family problem...that the situation of domestic violence was a family problem. It needs to be dealt with in the family...in that context, right? It's nobody else's business. It's a family issue. The people that need to struggle with it are those contained within that family.
Society's belief, or society's response, is this is not a crime. For a long time, domestic violence was not considered a crime. Is anybody here old enough to remember? No? That was a joke! It was not a crime. That's hard for some of us to remember now, right? Well, for some of us young buffs like me, it's hard to remember that, that it's not a crime. It's an issue between a husband and a wife, and therefore it's an issue that they need to work out and work through together. Okay? That was society's response to that. What we're going to do is we're going to take questions at the end if it's all right. Is it all right?
The 1960s: Community belief was that it's a woman's problem. So it shifted a little bit from the 1950s to the 1960s. The 1960s, though, there were other things happening in society that allowed this to take place. So this is also what we're talking about when we're talking about the ecological approach � the larger systems or the larger context and also the little details. The top is that it's a woman's problem and also how that is reflected in the home. Because that idea isn't just reflected in the society overall; it's also reflected in the home. Society's response � considering the safety of women. This is also the advent of safe houses when safe houses began to come out. Networks of women getting together figuring out what they were going to do to keep women and children safe. Not just women � there were some men in the movement who were also behind this, okay? But the women primarily took the leadership role in getting our thought processes about this issue to evolve.
Then the cultural upheaval, the cultural revolution, and the feminist movement. That's also what was happening in the larger context within the society. Okay? So it was not just that the first two things were just taking place in a vacuum; they were taking place within the context of what was going on in the society � the Feminist Movement, the Black Power Movement, Civil Rights. All of those things were also taking place, so it was almost like the apple cart was starting to get turned over. So people were beginning to think about other ideas and what needed to happen on a societal context.
The 1970s. Domestic violence shelters were created to safely house women and their children, fleeing abusive partners. Okay? The shelter portion of the agency that I worked for was the second shelter in the country to open up � the Harriet Tubman Center...Harriet Tubman Shelter. It was spearheaded by people in the feminist movement, to say, �Look, we've got to do something. This is no longer...we can no longer sit around and just say that it's a women's problem. We need to take this to a level in which everybody has some responsibility in this. So if other people aren't going to do anything about it, then what we're going to do is we're going to begin to move towards having something that's a service for women and children. One of the first things that they came up with was domestic violence shelters, which is an extremely expensive solution to the problem. Housing women and housing children is one of the most expensive solutions to the problem. I think it's needed. I think safety is a concern for the women and children that are in these types of situations, but it is an expensive solution. The movement highlighted women's safety as paramount concern. You need to understand that, that the creation of shelters was done because it was about keeping women and children safe. Women and children were dying, okay? Because if you remember in the 1950s and 1960s, the response was that it's a women's issue. Right? It was either a women's issue or a family issue. So when the police showed up on the scene, that was the societal response in the societal context. So what did the police do? �Come on, guy, let's go for a walk. You know, you really shouldn't be that mad. It's not that bad. Let's go have a drink,� or �Let's walk around the block.� What happened? Let him go, he goes back, and somebody ended up dead.
So the society began to change when women began to say, �This can't continue to happen. We have to do something.� So safety of women because of the death rate, because of everything that was happening, was a paramount concern; and it continues to be.
In the 1980s, for victims a couple of things began to take place. Legal advocates in the 1980s were allowed to accompany victims to court filings for orders of protection. In this day and age, for a lot of us we can't understand what's so monumental about that; but before this, before the 80s, legal advocates could not accompany victims to the courts. Therefore, they couldn't be advocates for women and children. They couldn't be advocates for the safety. They couldn't be advocates for women figuring out what they needed to do in order to move on and move through this relationship.
Legally, in the 1980s women's issues began to change the courts and how people responded to women. This is a very important point because in the 1980s the legal pieces became paramount. How do we hold people accountable legally? How do we then protect women legally � in the courts? For a number of years also, it wasn't called domestic violence. That's a relatively new term. Also, the act wasn't called domestic violence. For a number of years it changed. Originally, if you remember, it was called and still is in some places, it was called battering. Why do you think � this is a rhetorical question � why do you think the term �battering� was used? Because it was already legal. That was already a legal mandate. The battering terms was already within the language of what was already being done. That was a crime. Battering or battering somebody was a legal crime. Spousal abuse was not. Nobody even knew what spousal abuse was. It was not a crime. So the genius of the movement was to begin to get into the legal arena to make this issue a crime. People follow me so far? So that's the part of the evolution that we're dealing with is that the legal arena was one of the first inroads to respond. The movement chose the legal inroads as a way for people to respond to what was happening to women and children. It was needed. The legal arm was needed in order to protect people.
Development of support groups for victims to understand power and control. Okay? This is also when this began to take place. Now our idea of power and control and what we do in the paradigm that we work for, we define it differently for reasons that have to do with getting traction in the therapeutic work, not for reasons of establishing why people are doing what it is that they're doing. It's for how you define power and control in a way that allows you to get some traction, and where the rubber hits the road when you're dealing with clients, how you use those terms to get traction in the therapeutic work. Not the legal work. I'm making the distinction between any evolution of the movement and how we got to where we're at in terms of legal and therapeutic approaches because I think that's where some of the confusion lies for us.
In the 1980s for the offenders; this is where it began to take place for the offenders. Ellen Pence developed the Duluth Model that changed the law enforcement and the courts. Anybody in here not heard of the Duluth Model? If you haven't, you need to check your card at the door when you leave...no, just a joke! Everybody's heard...even if you haven't heard of the Duluth Model, you know the tenants of it. Everybody knows the tenants of it. It's almost like osmosis: If you do any work in the domestic violence arena, you've heard some of the pieces around the Duluth Model. It was a legal and judicial set of shared values and follow-through. Does anybody in here � this is not a rhetorical question � does anybody in here know why it's called the Duluth Model?
AUDIENCE: It comes from Duluth itself.
MENEKIM?: Do you know why it was developed in Duluth, Minnesota?
AUDIENCE: It's cold up there.
MENEKIM?: Because it's cold up there!
AUDIENCE: It's really cold!
MENEKIM?: Right. It's interesting that that's where a lot of people start the history; but if you go back a couple of years before that, Ellen actually tried to start this in Minneapolis before she started it in Duluth, and she couldn't get buy-in from the police, from the courts, from the advocates, from all of the people within the system. She couldn't get everybody around because Minneapolis is a big city. So in order to get the lawyers and everybody to get buy-in, she couldn't do it. She couldn't get everybody at the table. So what she did was she went up to Duluth. A much smaller community. Instead of dealing with twelve public defenders, she'd only be dealing with one or two. Instead of dealing with fifteen different police precincts, she dealt with one. So what she was able to do was get people all around the table and change the system so that each part of the system was held accountable by the next part of the system. When police showed up on the scene, they knew that when they arrested the person, not based on what the victim said but based on evidence and based on the law, that the police knew when they filled the report out that the attorney was then going to carry it through. The attorney knew that when they carried it through, they knew then that the judge was going to do their part. Do people understand what I'm saying? What she was able to do was structure a whole system that held each person within the system accountable for what they were supposed to do. New laws were created to support arrest and prosecution and conviction and hold abusers accountable for crime, arrest, jail, and groups.
Now this last piece � hold abusers accountable for crime � we'll get back to this, but this idea of accountability is a very important term because they mean two totally different things when you're talking about the legal arena and you're talking about the therapeutic arena. Okay? I think something that Noel said earlier is that when you're working with these clients and if they have any legal pieces attached to them in terms of child protection, in terms of probation officers and things like that, other people within the system think that you work for them. Okay? It's hard to pull yourself away and say, �No, I'm a therapist, and my job is to try and figure out how this person can get better,� � for themselves. Not that I do the work for them, but I help along that line. That sometimes flies in the face of what the system wants in terms of accountability. Do people understand what I'm saying? And that's where the tension is for us, I think, as therapists, is how do you then begin to start saying, �I am not a social control officer.� I mean, for me to even say it is like an echo in the room. That is not my job, and be very clear about that. And that's difficult especially when you're talking about domestic violence and given everything that the movement has done to get us to where we're at right now. This is not a separation between us and our model and the movement. It's the continuation; it's the evolution.
The 1990s � observations: These are some of the things in the 1990s that we began to observe, and I think all along people began to observe; but in the 1990s people really began to talk about it and start to write about it a little more. Victims kept coming back to shelters. Does this sound familiar? They either kept coming back to shelters or kept going back into treatment. Even with our best work, they kept coming back. Victims continued relationships with their abusers. We had no way, if you go back to the 80s, the legal arena had no way of dealing with this. But what they did say is there are certain things you can't do because people wanted to do therapeutic work, they wanted to do couples work, they wanted to do individual work, and a lot of the laws that have been influenced by the Duluth Model say that you can't do those things. They're not effective, they put women in danger, and you can't hold people accountable. Those were the reasons why you couldn't do work other than groups and other than court-mandated groups that were influenced by the Duluth Model.
Abusers are held legally accountable but continue the abuse. I'm making the distinction that they were arrested. They did go to jail. They did get prosecuted. All of those things within the legal arena took place; and when they got out of the county workhouse, their wife was there to pick them up from the county workhouse.
Cultural nuances. The Beijing Conference highlighted the different cultural beliefs toward separation of the family. One of the big things in the legal arena was to separate the abuser from the rest of the family. The reasoning was that because it put the women and the children in danger. Right? That's why the system is there,, that's why you need to get them away, but the thing is that even when all of those things took place, they came back together. If they didn't, the husband found somebody just like her or the woman found somebody just like him. And I think something that Noel said, you've got to understand the mental template. If you don't understand the mental template, everything else will be a blur when you're working with these clients because you'll begin to ask yourself questions: �Am I doing the right thing? What's wrong with me? How come I'm not effective?� It's because the paradigm that you're operating out of doesn't take into account these things. Okay? And the cultural pieces that Dr. Oliver Williams talks about is that there are certain things, especially women within my cultural background, there are certain things that just are not going to happen if you're doing a group with African-American men. If you're doing a court-ordered group with African-American men � perpetrators � and your style is to confront them by screaming in their face and making them admit that they're a batterer, you're going to have a long day. That simply is not going to work, and what's going to happen is that they're going to wash out. What you're going to say is the reason they're washing out is because they're resistant, not that your paradigm sucks. It's easier to say that the defect is within the client than it is to say that the paradigm that I'm operating out of doesn't work because then that means that if you have to say that the paradigm you're operating out of is not working, it's a gut-wrenching process. It's the same process that we're asking our clients to go through: Take the leap of faith, move through it, soothe your own hurts and pains, tolerate discomfort for growth. All of those things that we're asking our client to do, in order for us to do this work with perpetrators and victims, we have to do the exact same thing, and many of us as a field do not want to do that. It's uncomfortable, but it's ecologically sound.
Systemic observations. A number of people began to write. A General Theory of Love, which is an excellent book. Noel turned me onto it. It really helps you understand what happens in the brain for people. That way, you don't beat yourself up as therapists when they don't get cured in a year, or two years. You understand how much work it takes to help people change their mental template and why it takes longer. One of the things that it did for me is help me understand how arduous this process is in helping people remake themselves, because that's what this is about. I'm just going to say this for a second: the process of therapeutic work and actually people grow up and heal is actually...the best word I can describe is that it is a process of creation. It is where therapy, and for me spirituality, intersect with one another. What we're actually doing is helping people remake themselves from the inside out. There have been a number of people that I've worked with where you can actually see in their eyes, in some of the most horrible perpetrators you can imagine; and then one day you're sitting there looking at them, and you're seeing this is a different person. This is not the same person. They actually have remade themselves. You don't do that by telling them what to do; they get there by the process of this grinding, gut-wrenching process of growing up, and it really is a creation process.
�Motivating Batterers to Change in the Treatment Context,� which is an excellent article. Passionate Marriage , by Dr. David Schnarch, and Incestuous Families . What all of these do is talk about both the little details and the bigger context, and it really does take a very ecological view of how we do this work. Okay?
Key learnings. One of the things we did, and have done, and we do with both the victims and the perpetrators in our groups, in our couples, and our individuals is we ask people, and in this particular case we asked the victim, how they felt and what they want. Now that sounds simple, but not a lot of people do this. We don't ask our customers what they want for their families. We started doing it in our organization as part of our learning organization over and over and over again. Here are some of the things we got from that.
Urban and immigrant victims wanted to stay with their partners but stop the abuse. So they didn't want the separation. They wanted to stop being hit, right? They wanted to stop being abused. They wanted their money to stop being taken away and being used for crack. They wanted their children not to be intimidated. They wanted to be able to go visit with their girlfriends and their mothers without suffering the wrath when they got home, but they didn't want their families broken up. They said they were lonely, economically vulnerable, and their children were fatherless, and they wanted their families together. This third one is an interesting one: Feeling guilty about seeing the abusers and breaking shelter rules. So we say we want to reinforce helping the client; but if the clients then snuck out � what we call snuck out � and went to visit with the abuser that they were in the shelter for, they felt a tremendous amount of shame, which reinforced the template that we're trying to get them out of. While families were wanting to stay together, the traditional court system was forcing them apart.
This is what we did with it: Analyze services and realize that they didn't meet victims' needs or wants. That's what we all have to do from time to time, especially when we keep hitting up against the wall when we're working with these couples and these clients. These are very tough clients to deal with. These are not easy clients to deal with so you have to constantly reevaluate what you're doing and whether or not it's effective.
Services were focused on the individuals only and not their families � the woman or the child. We couldn't even talk about the fact that we might want to offer services to men or gay and lesbian couples because that was starting to come through our doors a lot more. But we didn't even have groups that would address the perpetrator side so that was a piece that we couldn't even approach. And most of our programs were focused on short-term crisis intervention � healing them, putting a band-aid on, getting them medical services, getting some food, getting them some transportation, those types of things. Maybe doing an OSP, safety plans, those type of things, that's what most of our focus was on. What we began to see was that people were coming back six or seven times. They were staying. They were coming back to maybe get some other services that we had but facilitated a crisis in order to get into those services.
New developments. Develop program for perpetrators to address accountability as well as relational dynamics. Let me tell you, when we first started doing this...now when we first...when we first and NOW, the fact that we're talking about relational dynamics, because we are the largest domestic violence organization actually in the country now � service organization � but also in Minnesota...we're very big in Minnesota � people lost their minds. When we said we were actually going to offer services for perpetrators, people lost their minds. When we said we were going to offer services for perpetrating females, people lost their minds again. It was like an atomic bomb. People were like, �You're putting women in danger,� �You're blaming the victim,� you're doing all of these...anybody ever heard this? That you can't do this work because if you do this work, you're going to put people in danger. What I'm saying is that for us not to do this work puts people in danger, for us not to figure out why people keep coming back, for us not to help people with their own issues, whether it's a male or female, and help them work through it is putting people in danger. Because I'm telling you, even if I'm working with a perpetrator and he never gets caught again, if his mental template is the same, he's going to find somebody that fits his mental template. The good girl, he is not going to stay with because he doesn't even know how to accept a good girl. He doesn't even know what that looks like. You're telling him, �You know, you dated that girl. She seemed to be nice.� �Yeah, but she wouldn't put out.� It's always something, and it's because the mental template is the same, and we don't address that in treatment sometimes, especially working with perpetrators. Most of us are frightened to death of perpetrators, and they know it. That's why most of them can ply and walk all the way through it and never get anything.
Perpetrators equip themselves with self-regulation tools, and perpetrators are pushed to self confront, which might be different than me confronting them and me holding them accountable. Okay? Now, if they break a law, do they have to deal with the consequences of that law? Yes. This is not to say that people can just hurt people and not have to deal with the consequences, but that's separate from the work that I do. If he beats his wife again, he needs to go to jail. Once he's done with jail, he comes back. A lot of the way that treatment is set up now, if he breaks the law and goes to jail, all he has to do is that time. He doesn't have to come back. What I'm saying is it should be both ends. If he breaks the law, if he hurts people, he deals with the consequences of that. Now let's deal with the other stuff. Once he's done with that, let's deal with the other stuff.
Last are new beliefs. Beyond intervention, prevention and life change, not just intervening when the police are called to the house. One of the things that we do now, we have an initiative called Minnesota Child Response Initiative. What that is that whenever there is a domestic violence call in this certain geographical area, we send with the police a child therapist. If there are children involved in the domestic violence call, we send child therapists out there. Once again, people lost their mind. Child protection people, the therapists were saying, �Well, Child Protection is going to get involved and they're going to take the kids away� and stuff like that. That's not our experience; that's not what's happening. You have to make it very clear what your role is. We've made it very clear our role is not to gain evidence for the legal proceedings. Does that mean we won't get subpoenaed? No, we'll get subpoenaed, but we understand what we're there to do; it's not to gather evidence.
Beyond anger management, emotional help. Without regard to behavior, we value every human being. What that means is every human being that comes through the door deserves respect. Regardless of whether they're perpetrator or victim, they deserve respect. Some of these techniques that we've used and that we kind of canonize in this work don't do that. Every individual brings their own gifts, resiliency; and sometimes it's very hard with perpetrators to see that. Sometimes the most difficult task in our work is to see that they actually have gifts. Sometimes you have to actually take the weakest parts that they're giving you and see and almost twist it on his head and look on the other side of it to see the gifts. That's hard to do when the guy is calling you every name in the book, doesn't like you, and is skirting around every issue he's ever had. It's hard to see the gifts. Not just guys, but women too � the perpetrating women that we work with � it's the same dynamic. Services must be customized to the person served.
So these are the new beliefs that I and our agency have come to. These are the things that we do. Okay? Now, what we're going to do now is continue on with the presentation with actually how the model works. So what we've done is given you some of the history. Now what we're going to do is talk about actually what we do. What are the techniques and what are some of the core beliefs that we do that actually get to some of these new beliefs?
AUDIENCE: We're talking about grief. Like grief <Inaudible comment.> What are we talking about?
MENEKIM: The way we structure it is that we have groups for perpetrating men who have been convicted. It's interesting, we have groups where men have been convicted of perpetrating domestic violence. What we've found is that yes, some of the men that come through are perpetrators; but some of the men, their mental template is not perpetrator. Their mental template is victim. So we have groups for men, groups for women, and also some of our therapists, including me, also do couples work and individual work. So sometimes a man may be going through group, and I'm saying, �Look, he needs much more intensive types of work.� So what I'll do is as we get along, I may then pull him out and do some individual work. Or what has been happening lately is their partners have been calling and saying, �We need some couples work.� Or their partner will call and say, �Are there groups for me?� in which I can do some work.
AUDIENCE: So you break it more along gender lines rather than any other relationships?
MENEKIM: No, no...well, in the groups, yeah; but they break down in terms of the other labels, in terms of victim/perpetrator, in terms of their mental stance. So even if I have a group of perpetrators, their mental stance, I may have to pull a guy who is in a perpetrator group, pull him out because he's got so much victim stuff and his stance is so victim-oriented that I have to pull him out and work with that piece of it. Do people understand what I'm saying? That's what makes this approach different, that it's not just what they come through the door with. Legally, what they come through the door with, that's what I have to work with; but their mental template and their mental processes may be something that's outside of that, and I have to work with that. Does that answer your question? Okay, thank you.
LARSON: A nd it wouldn't be unusual for me to also involve the whole family as well, even through the impact that the domestic violence has had on the kids because typically it's had an enormous impact on them as well.
You guys know me by now. Fifty-four percent of victims know their assailants. Intimate violence is primarily a crime against women. In 75% of intimate murders, a woman is the victim of the crime. Those are the stats, but let me also say, and somebody asked the question during the break that I thought was very appropriate, that doesn't negate the number of women that I see who do, �Come on, hit me!� They shouldn't be hit; that's not the issue. But in terms of the perpetrator/victim dynamics, the interplay is very powerful in terms of them getting hit and then having a huge amount of leverage and the moral high ground and oftentimes the legal high ground. So it reverses who has the power in a system and who has the control, and oftentimes these women will end up with both if they can effectively keep assaults going in an intermittent basis.
MENEKIM: Right, which also scares us when we have to work with these couples. When we have to work with a couple in which that's taken place, that scares us because the way that the field has constructed the problem is that you don't deal with that piece. We haven't developed the tools as a field yet to really deal with that piece � the �Yes, I'm a victim, and I'm doing this.� That's not victim-blaming. What I'm saying is not blaming. He is responsible if he hurts her, if he beats her down, if he takes her money. He is responsible, and he needs to deal with the consequences of that, and the other side of it is now somebody has to work with her, with this piece � not blame her, but work with the mental pieces of what's going on . What I say, too, is not just the mental pieces, but the mental and the heart pieces. It's a balance, and it's difficult to help people through that, and that's what scares us.
AUDIENCE: Excuse me, what do you all do in those situations? Personally, I have been in situations like that personally, in which knowing that that was going on, but the pathology is so strong. What would you all do or what would you all recommend because I don't know anything else to do at that point but just put a lid on it and just try to set the boundaries strong enough where you just have no interaction at all.
MENEKIM: That's what we do. Right. Okay.
AUDIENCE: I mean, I was in a situation a few years ago, and then I was worried I was going to lose my degree. It was so scary going through that, man, and looking at it and saying when getting down to the bottom of it, things can happen.
MENEKIM: That's right.
AUDIENCE: And it scared me so bad, I'll tell you what I did. I actually called my attorney.
LARSON: Yep. Yep.
AUDIENCE: This is a true story. I called my attorney and I talked to my attorney because I knew this was going on. And finally through that process, I was able to actually get out of there, but not before being taken out of my house in handcuffs. Because if you say it, that it was said that I did it. I was furious, man. It was unbelievable when it happened.
LARSON: You bet. There's a whole societal underestimation of the influence of women on these types of things. I've done a fair amount of work, for example, with priests helping them not get seduced. And again, it's their job to keep their pants on; but in terms of their naiveté about how women will pull them into that kind of a dynamic is unbelievable. I had quite an interesting case that taught me a lot, and your talking to your attorney reminded me. A woman who came in, I saw here for a while, and she said, �I'm poisoning my husband with arsenic.� Her husband was also her pimp. She said, �I took him to the hospital the other day because he was really sick and he wanted to go.� The doc came out of the room and said, �Somebody is poisoning this man with arsenic,� and she said, �I don't know anything about it,� and the doc said, �I don't know anything about it either,� and sent him home. I called the police, which I figured was what I was supposed to do, and they said, �Why are you calling us? As far as we're concerned, a crime hasn't been committed. When he's dead, we'll get involved.� What your responsibility is, my lawyer told me, is to warn the guy. I thought I was going to be dead, and she may be dead. I have no idea. I had to call them in, sit them down, document that she was killing him with arsenic, and I never saw either one of them again. That's a crazy system when we have to do it in that particular way. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: We're also seeing it with adolescents and parents where the adolescents are saying, �Come on! Come on! Come one!�
LARSON: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Then the parent loses it, and then the parent is arrested. We have to tell parents don't ever play because you will be arrested. I've had to deal with parents who were arrested and were with DCF because their kid pushed them and pushed them and pushed them.
LARSON: Same dynamic...same dynamic. Moral high ground; and once the system gets involved, kids have an enormous amount of influence...once the system gets involved. And it turns things topside where they become the big guys and the parents become the kids.
MENEKIM: Let me also just try and kind of address a little bit about what you said earlier. I worked with a client in which that same process was taking place. I had worked with him for about a year; and then about a year after we started working together, he was actually starting to begin to...he was a perpetrator. His mental template was perpetration, right? So his whole thing was kind of, �I'm going to get you before you get me,� and that was his way. His partner, about a year after we started working together, said, �I would like to come in to try...he seems like...I'd like to come in and work with you and him and try to figure this out.� In the meantime I find out that the more he's starting to stand on his own two feet, the more she's starting to go crazy? Okay. That's the dynamic. And I already know that. Because of the work we do, we know that that's going to happen. But here's the key piece: Once they start working with me, I'm starting to see, okay, here it is. She's got a lot of control pieces going on. Okay? So basically, what it came down to is he ended up having to make...if you go to Dr. Schnarch's tomorrow, it's called a two-choice dilemma. This was after about two years of work with them two together. Then it actually got to a point where he had to make a decision. His wife thought she was better than him. She said it to him. She finally got to a point where she was saying it to him, but it didn't come out until two years after we were into it. He was telling me, �You know, she keeps saying to me she brushed me off, she pulled me out of the gutter, she did all of this stuff, and now I should be grateful that she was in my life.� I said, �She just gave you a gift.� I said, �What are you talking about?� �She gave you a gift. People go for 15, 20 years and think that their partner actually likes them. She just told you exactly what she thought about you. Now, I know that doesn't make you feel good. I know that's not easy for you. But here it is; this is what's on the table.� And I'm saying that while she's in the room, right there. I don't mince words. If you're dealing with people's lives, you have to deal with them with respect. That's what was said.
Now, I know as I'm saying this to him, her anxiety is going through the roof. Because what is she trying to do? �Well, that's not exactly what I'm saying.� �That's what you've been saying for the past year. That's what I've been picking up on. That's what you said. You said those words.� �Well, he's not that bad,� and stuff like that. I turned to him, and I said, �Do you hear what you hear? Do you hear what you hear? I'm not telling you what to hear; I'm just asking you, do you hear what you hear?� and he said, �Yes.� �Well then, you've got some decisions. I'm not telling you get out of the relationship. I'm not saying you get out of the relationship and you pick someone else who's going to be any easier. I'm saying this is what it is. I'm not telling you that you have to stay in a relationship with somebody that you think you are better than, but that's what's on the table now. You two are going to have to figure out what it is you're going to do. You're have to figure it out what you're going to do in terms of are you going to stay with this person and figure out what you need to do to grow up as a woman, or get out of the relationship and grow up. And on your end, you can keep pretending that you're not hearing what you're hearing, or you can begin to hear it and let that be and do what it is you're going to do and make decisions. You can no longer stop making decisions and shut the system down because it makes you nervous. That's not an option anymore. Things are too tight and you're hearing too much, and you know what's on the table. Or you can go home and beat her ass, and move around it.� Do people understand what I'm saying? You can go home and beat her and then move around it, and that'll take it off. You guys will have great sex tonight after it happens, right? And you've successfully maneuvered around what's sitting right there in the middle of the room.
So I don't know if that answers it, but that's what we do. It's like, �Here it is. Let's put it on the table� because people have to get to a point where they're scared, nervous, their guts feel like they're going to fall out, their brains...they don't know if they can do it. They want to get away. One guy I'm working with now, he actually was in a gang for a long time. Did horrible things to his wife. He went to jail on a federal charge for ten years. Came out. She was right there at the gate after she'd divorced him while he was in. Picked him up, and now, right now, she is...they're going through this thing, and she is telling him exactly what she thinks about him. Right? And his use is skyrocketing. For about four months or five months after he was out, it was all cool, right? Now they're in therapy, and his use is creeping up, and his parole officer wants to violate him. I had to talk to the parole officer and say, �Look, if you want this guy to get healthy, I'm not saying that you have to condone his use.. I'm simply saying let's look at it for what it is. This guy hasn't used for five years. Now she's telling him what she really thinks about him, and he can't handle it, and that's what we're working on. I expected him to start using.� Okay? Do I wish he wasn't using? Yes. If you're going to help people rebuild themselves or reshape themselves, they're going to go through all of the things that they were doing before they came in with you, and you've got to be prepared to keep your guts quiet and help them through it.
LARSON: Violence is everywhere in our context. Five to six violent acts an hour on prime time, 200,000 violent acts witnessed by the end of adolescence. Talk about template development. Laboratory experiments have shown that merely viewing 15 minutes of a relatively mild violent program increases aggressiveness. So you're fighting not only what goes on in a couple, but you've got enormous amounts of social support for violence, particularly seeing that the average American child spends about 40 hours a week consuming media.
Some of you probably are familiar with a game called Grand Theft Auto. We're working pretty hard in the Youth Service Bureau in St. Paul, actually, to try to get Target to stop selling that to underage kids; but it includes that you get points when you have sex with a prostitute in the back of this car, and you get even more points when you kick her to death. And if you can actually kick her to death, you're pretty well guaranteed you can win the game. Now, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old kids are rehearsing this program in their brain, and they're desensitizing themselves to these kinds of things.
�He's been in a marvelous mood since he learned that one out of every 150 Americans is in jail.� We've surpassed Russia. We now have more people per capita in jail than anyplace else in the world. Being an American is itself a risk factor. We exceed all other nations in homicide, even for whites where the rate is 11.2 per 100,000 � far more than second-place country, Scotland, which I think is pretty interesting.
In terms of sexual aggression and PTSD, one way to think about it is that it's an over-reaction to PTSD. It's a PTSD-generated template, and therefore a maladaptive stress response. I think you can extend that to all forms of domestic violence, whether it's marital rape or abuse, that you have an individual who has a trauma template, and he or she is acting out of that trauma template � fight or flight. It's a limbic response.
Let's just quickly take a look at what might be called the general arena for couples:
�Pass or run, pass or run, pass or run. Defense! Defense! Defense!�
The standard male/female template:
�Why do you automatically assume that I'll fly too close to the sun?�
You can't see that, but she says, �Are we going to stoop to your way of being tonight or to mine?�
�I know I'm wrong, but I'm sure you can make me more wrong.�
Now remember, all of these fit into what David Schnarch talks about as normal marital sadism.
�My concession speech will be very brief. You win.�
�I'm sorry dear, I wasn't listening. Could you repeat what you've said since we've been married?�
�Wow! We could really fill this room with uncomfortable silences.�
�Not at all. We're just breeding contempt.�
�I'm not asking you to change your spots; I'm just asking you to take out the garbage.�
�Ooops! What goes around comes around more annoyingly.�
� I said I'm ready to make a commitment.�
I talked a little bit about this this morning, but knowing some of the neurobiology, I think, helps us develop a little more compassion when we work with this population. As you know, we've got a triune brain � three parts.
The reptilian brain, which is, �His name's Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single-parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and co-dependent, and he urges me to let my inner cub heal. I say we eat him.�
When an individual is threatened to that level � and it doesn't need to be with death; it may simply be, �She's going to leave me� � you can find people responding out of that reptilian brain instinctively.
The limbic brain � the emotional brain. �My God! What's wrong? You look like you were caught in the headlights.�
Fight or flight. Obviously, that's a flight response.
And the neocortical brain, what's commonly called the thinking brain: �Sometimes I wonder if there's more to life than unlocking the mysteries of the universe.�
The brain's early-warning module, the amygdala, is located in the emotional brain. That's where people survey, �Is this something that's dangerous? Is this something that I need to pay attention to or not?� It happens automatically. Some of you have had the example of walking down the street, and you can't hear anybody behind you but you know somebody's there. That you actually can pick that up, and that's a no-words kind of picking it up. It's an instinctive response that's part of the animal part of us. It's a place of no words, no cognition, and no consciousness. It sets off a full-body hormonal response that bypasses the conscious brain � it's automatic � and it's experienced physically as overwhelming, irrational, and uncontrollable fear. Place of no words; no cognitions.
MENEKIM: An interesting piece about this is that in men, the last one � �Experience physical overwhelming, irrational, and uncontrollable fear,� you can never use the word � and this is kind of a tip � you can never use the words �fear� or �hurt� with men. �Nervousness� is a good word. �Does that make you nervous?� or �Does it make you feel a little nervous like that?� That works much better than, �Did that scare you? Did you fear something? Did that hurt?� As soon as you say �hurt,� they think psychobabble � men do. Women might, too, but men in particular think psychobabble. You can't use �hurt.� If you say �nervous� or words that don't kind of infringe on what they perceive, the societal perception of manhood, you'll get much better traction. That's just a tip.
LARSON: Remove a mother hamster's whole neocortex and she can still raise her pups, but even slight limbic damage devastates her maternal abilities. Pretty interesting stuff.
Okay, I'm going to go through just a little bit of this. For modern neuro anatomy, it's apparent that the entire neocortex of humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it evolved, that the thinking braid is mediated by the feeling brain and not the other way around, which tells us a little bit about where we need to focus our attention.
Now let's take it into the more high-conflict, more dysfunctional couples. What I don't like, how she like figured out I was like having an affair with like the babysitter.
�Oh, darling, we have three whole days and nights together while she thinks I'm at Promise Keepers.�
�Ya slept with her, didn't ya?�
�We had an argument, and now he's trying to make me feel bad.�
�She's on her fifth soul mate.�
�I may have called out another man's name, but look on the bright side � you're the one who's getting laid.�
�I can't always be there to kick him when he falls.�
We talked about this before. I think most of you have seen the abusive family structure. Let's say a little bit about coupled pairs. Resmaa already alluded to some of what he sees at Tubman. We've identified four different perpetrator/victim marital dyads: The identified perpetrator who interacts as a victim, married to the perpetrator who's not identified as the problem. I see it again and again and again. It's the most common incest pattern that I see where adult woman marries little-boy man, and he has sex with a peer, which happens to be his daughter, and she runs the show. It's a tough couple, in my experience, to work with because she has the high moral ground and she doesn't see herself as part of the problem. He's part of the problem but she's not.
The second version is the identified perpetrator interacting as a perpetrator with a perpetrator spouse. This is oftentimes the domestic violence scenario that I see in my office. Two power-oriented individuals who are trying to overcome each other.
MENEKIM: Can I make a...?
LARSON: Oh, sure.
MENEKIM: How many of you have had the couple in your office in which one person will do something to the other one and then the next one will do something to the other one and they keep amping it up? That's that dynamic. It's power, power, power, power. That's different than if a person who, somebody will do something to them, and then the other partner will then control it. What they will do is, �Okay, you hurt me, so now I'm going to make sure we don't have sex for the next year.� That's a control move. Do people understand the difference? There's the influence and then there's the limiting and shaping of the influence, and that's the dynamic she's talking about.
LARSON: The third version: Identify perpetrator as a victim. Oftentimes little boy/man married to little girl/woman. It's a little like doing child therapy when you work with those couples, and their violence is a little bit like on the playground � you know, grabbing each other's toys and stealing stuff from each in a little-kid kind of way.
The last version, which I think is the public stereotype, the big bad guy and the poor, helpless, fragile woman who can't do anything to protect herself. That's the least-frequent pattern that I see in my office. I don't know if that's true for you.
MENEKIM: That's true. Yeah, it is. It is.
LARSON: And that's a pattern around which many, if not most of, our domestic violence programs were developed. You'll see, and I won't go into all of them in detail, but they're in your handouts. You can look at them at your leisure. Victim and perpetrator couples have consistent relationship double binds, and the damage is in both directions. They have damage to their ability to attach and all of the thoughts that come with it.
�I wasn't speaking to you; I was speaking to our imaginary husband.�
�Now that our last is off to college, could you tell me who the hell you are?�
And they have damage to their ability to separate. They can't connect in any kind of meaningful heart way, like Erasmus is talking about, and they can't feel themselves as a separate, independent, fully functioning, grown-up individual.
�Know what I think?� ��Course!� Fusion.
�No, I don't want to change you, Darryl, but it sure would be great if you were completely different.�
Okay. David is going to be talking a lot more about this. This is the orientation that Erasmus and I have for working with these folks. It's the same type of orientation you can use with normal garden variety who care engaged in various kinds of conflict. It's even more critical when you're work in groups with high-conflict or violent couples. The first is the ability to maintain a clear sense of self in proximity to others. These people cannot do that.
MENEKIM: I'll give you an example how it works with perpetrating, either males or females. Let's use an example of perpetrating males. When you start talking with men who are perpetrators in domestic violence � and I mean who also have the mental template � the ability to maintain a clear sense of themselves while close to an important other. Well, when you say that and you start talking to them about choices that they're making and the people they have in their lives, that in itself makes them nervous. A lot of times, the perpetrating men don't have enough of a self because they haven't done the work to develop a self. The self that they present to you is really a shadow self. It's not a real self. What you're talking about doing is try to get in and work with the real self. That's one of the reasons why it seems like the resistance is like ten inches of concrete and six inches of steel between you two because when you get past that, it's like marshmallow inside. And the marshmallow is unregulated so the stuff that's brewing inside, they have no way of negotiating and regulating and figuring out how to deal with these feelings.. So it's easier just to have the concrete wall and the steel wall with you and the partner. And it's also the thing that pushes the relationship to the brink. Do people understand what we're saying so far?
So this idea of maintaining a clear sense of self, you have to help them do that but also have in the back of your mind that their sense of self is so fragile that as you're doing the work, you're going to go through all of the defenses, all of the accusations, all of the anger. You're going to go through that as you're trying to help them build that within themselves. What we do in our groups and our individual and couples' sessions is try to take what's actually happening in real time as a way to highlight how they're having trouble with this. I may never mention these four things, but it's what I'm operating around when I'm dealing with them. So let's say we're just talking about the first one and I'm talking with the guy, and he says something to the effect of, �Well, you know, I told her. I told her that if she kept hanging out with her, that her girlfriend was going to do something to her...that she was going to stab her in the back. I knew it! Then she went and did it anyway. And yeah, I got pissed, because all I do is I talk to her, and she never listens to me. Then when some shit happens, then I gotta be the one to come pick it up for her.�
Then what I may do is ask on simple question, like, �Is that something you always do?� � What?� �When she gets in trouble, you go and take care of it because it's about you.� �It's not about me; it's about her.� Okay, so what I'm doing is just exploring this area of clear sense of self. And I'll keep grinding that. I may pick some of the other ones, but I'll keep grinding that point, and that's why it takes so much time is because what I'm doing is not just speaking to the head � the cognitive pieces � I'm speaking to the heart pieces. Then I may something to the effect of, �How does it feel to watch your wife crazy? What's it like for you to deal with your feelings when your wife...� Notice I'm not saying �what you think� because he keeps telling me what he thinks. I'm saying what does it feel like to watch your wife go crazy because perpetrators don't want to deal with the feelings pieces. So that's where that first one comes in at. You're working with those pieces not in terms of the cognitive � it may say cognitive because it's running out of my mouth � but it's really a lot less. Noel knows this: I touch a lot of my perpetrators. Most people don't want to touch perpetrators. Most people want to keep as much distance between perpetrators as they can. What we're saying is counter-intuitive to that. What we're saying is you actually sometimes have to get close. And I'm not like groping them! I'm not doing anything like that. But what I might do, especially when I'm talking a perpetrator, especially the template perpetrator, I may look right into his eyes and say something like, �I'll bet that's kind of tough. That feels kind of tough to you, don't it?� and then I'll walk away. Now with the victim I wouldn't do that. With a victim I'd be like, �Well, what are you going to do?� and I'll keep that distance, but it's still working with these four points. All right.
LARSON: Second: The ability to regulate one's own anxiety. In high-conflict couples, violent couples, the expectation is that their partner is going to be the anxiety regulator for them rather than themselves. So the emphasis is on getting their partners to change so they feel less anxious; and what we're talking about is changing the anxiety yourself, not changing your partner. Do you want to do the next one?
MENEKIM: Ability to maintain a non-anxious presence when the other is anxious. How many of us have a difficult time doing that piece? When your partner is anxious, you have a difficult time being non-anxious. That's hard for everybody, and that's the one thing about this that we're really trying to get everybody to understand, that yeah, in domestic violence couples it is in an extreme but the same dynamic is taking place. It's difficult for us. How many of us as therapists, how difficult is it when a client says, �Do you know what? I love him and I'm going back� and you know this guy is an ass because she's been in your office for the past two years saying how much of an ass he is. How difficult is it not to give advice...not to say, �Okay, let's do a safety plan� reflectively? That is difficult to do, and this is one...and the reasons why we help with these four things or revolve around these four things is because these are the things they're going to have to be able to do not to resolve the issue but to move through it. They have to be able to do these things even before we even start talking about the fact that he had an affair two years ago. We're going to be working on the real time, but he's going to have to be able to do this as that gets on the table, and she's going to have to be able to keep her own guts quiet and not to reflectively respond when he starts saying, �Well, yeah, actually it was three years and it was your best friend and your sister.� Do you know what I mean? When he starts really putting the stuff out there, it's going to be extremely important that people are able to do these...not necessarily do them perfectly, but at least have some sense that they're more grounded. They have their feet underneath them in a better way than when they walk into the office.
LARSON: The ability to tolerate pain for growth. The victim side is going to want to feel better, not worse. What you're doing by heating up the system is they're going to feel worse. They're going to feel more scared; they're going to feel more pain, and they're going to try to avoid it. And as Erasmus said, the perpetrator side doesn't want to deal with these feelings at all. They're going to want to think about these things. You start heating it up, and it can get pretty scary because oftentimes they'll pop right into anger and run over the painful part.
MENEKIM: And in our groups, the ability to tolerate pain for growth, I normally instead of �tolerating pain� say �discomfort.� It's another man thing. I may say something about tolerating discomfort for growth because a lot of times people can't see how the discomfort may actually be part of the process of growing up. When you say pain, in people's mind they think it has to be this gut-wrenching divorce or something...the extreme pieces. Especially the domestic violence clients, either divorce or I live in misery, right? But when you say �discomfort� for the possibility of growth, it kind of puts a different element to it.
LARSON: That's what we're going for � some kind of a balance between connection or attachment and self-regulation or self-direction.
Being in a relationship requires an individual, and being an individual requires a relationship. That's the paradox; that's the dialectic.
People who bond share unspoken assumptions about how love works; and if the attractors � which are those little neurons that you hit them and they'll light up that whole circuit � and if the attractors underlying those premises need changing, they frequently are the last people in the world who can help each other. They have the same blind spot.
We talked about this. In terms of attachment, this is part of why it's so tough to move them. The perpetrator trades anxiety. He can't attach or she can't attach. Very anxious. They trade anxiety for attachment provided by the victim's side of the relationship, who gives up usually her autonomy in order to have the protection of the person who has power because she doesn't have any. That's the bargain. �I'll give up myself if you'll take care of me. I'll take care of you if you don't leave me.�
So the perpetrator, who doesn't have much anxiety but a sense of attachment, has now a lot of influence over the victim. The victim, who doesn't have autonomy but has a sense of protection, now has control. That's the bargain. And I'll tell you, these people find each other like magnets. It is unbelievable.
MENEKIM: Let me say one piece to that. Can you go back one slide? In the field, how many people have heard this question: Why do women stay in these situations? Everybody's heard that, right? One of the things we ask in our perpetrator groups to the men is, like a lot of times a guy will say, �My wife is crazy. She's just crazy. I've been dealing with her for all of these years. I've been dealing with her for six or seven years,� and I may say, �So you've been dealing with a crazy person for six years! How did you manage that?� and I'm serious. �I mean, you're not crazy, right? I'm assuming by that statement that you're not crazy. So with I want to know that if you're not crazy, how did you manage to stay with a crazy person for seven many years?� An interesting piece is that the reason why these people find each other is because � and actually, her husband, Dr. Maddox, told me this a long time ago, and I think it fits � the reason why the find each other is because the rocks in his head fit the holes in her head. Because if they didn't, the mental template wouldn't fit, and they wouldn't stay together long. Do people understand what I'm saying? That the fit is the stuff you're not seeing, but it's the very thing that they pick up on as they're talking, as they're around each other. They pick it up. So the fit is that he is...here is another fit, that the perpetrator, the way that they look at the world is, �The world is a problem. I need to get the world before it gets me, and everything outside of me is the problem.� Right? The victim is, �I'm the problem. Something's wrong with me. Something's going on with me, and the defective point is inside of me.� So you've got one person that says, �I'm the problem� and another person that says, �Yep, you're the problem.� They find each other! So that's why it doesn't matter. You can separate them, but they're just going to just find somebody else with that template. They're just going to find some other holes or some other rocks to fit.
LARSON: He never told me that metaphor. It's a good thing! You notice how Erasmus asked the question. He pulled it away from the women that she's crazy and put it back on the guy: �How is it that you stayed with a woman who's crazy for six years?� That's a differentiation move. That's a move in the direction of him developing a self and identifying what's true about him. There's a question in the back.
AUDIENCE: I would like to know how can one develop a strong ego and yet be a victim...have a victim template? How does that happen?
LARSON: Are you talking about the resilience that I experience in victims? If I had to say, I don't know that I can talk about all of the �how� other than there's probably an inborn kind of resilience that somebody who moves in the V pattern has. There's a social support for it. I also believe that the pain tolerance � you know, we've been talking about differentiation as tolerating pain for growth � I also believe it allows for more development in the context of being a victim. So that if you think about it in terms of psycho-sexual age, V-types are older psycho-sexually than P types, who have very young and very primitive defense mechanisms because they can't tolerate pain, and pain is part of what grows us. So the fact that they're older enables V types to have compassion, which kids almost can develop around six, seven, eight. They can have the beginnings of compassion; and by adolescence usually they have it pretty strongly, we hope anyway. And if you think about the primitiveness of V types, compassion isn't there; it's parallel play. It's not attached play; and developmentally, it's �I'll get you before you get me.� There's not an understanding of the impact in two-year-olds and three-year-olds and four-year-olds of their behavior on somebody else. They haven't learned it yet; and they quite literally can't process it yet in their brains. So that's the difference in terms of how you think about it.
MENEKIM: I also think that what I have a tendency to do is separate self-esteem from core worth, and that they are not the same thing. So you can get a person who has �low self-esteem,� and it looks like they don't have any resilience. But the fact of the matter is that what we're talking about is a person's core worth � what they came on the planet with. That's what we're trying to reach, that core worth � that thing that rumbles around in there even when they kind of have a faint notion that it might be there. That's what we're reaching for. We're not reaching for the self-esteem. The self-esteem pieces usually are about validation. It either goes up or goes down whether or not the people outside them validate them or not. That's usually what the self-esteem is attached to. Especially when clients are coming through the door, their self-esteem is attached to other validation, not to anything that's really solid or core. Does that make sense? Okay.
LARSON: So the tendency is a performance-based tendency and a compliance-based tendency so that they look good to you.
MENEKIM: Right.
LARSON: Particularly if they're under the long arm of the law and they have to be there.
�If you'll have me, I'd like to be your blind spot.�
�I'm sure it's nothing.� A little denial.
We'll go through these principals quickly. I think we've talked about them throughout the day.
Accept clients' realities as meaningful and important even when they're not reflective of objective facts. Respect their experience even though you see it quite differently. Don't try to argue them out of their experience. You'll get nowhere. Do you want to do the next one? We can alternate them.
MENEKIM: Facilitate self-confrontation for personal and relationship growth rather than confronting the victim and/or perpetrator from an outside perspective. Like Noel says, you'll lose this one. What you're trying to do is get them to do it, and this is where it may fly in the face of external � if they're there through the courts or they're there through child protection � this is the one piece that may actually get you in trouble. When they're starting to say, �Well, he hasn't made any progress� or �She hasn't made any progress on her plan,� and you're saying, �What I'm trying to do is get them to self-confront so they make different choices.� But if you try to be the confronting thing, depending on their mental template, they'll either be happy to give it to you or they'll fight you every inch of the way. That's why the self-confrontation approach, if you can develop it within your own rhythm, is much easier to do than it is for you to be the confrontation point.
LARSON: Here's a simple example in the sexual abuse field � incest field. One of the expectations of the system � Criminal Justice System � is that an apology letter or an apology session happens before there can be any kind of contact, phone call, or anything else between the victim and the perpetrator. My deal is it takes a solid self before somebody can really do a meaningful apology; and what probation and parole wants is an apology before the individual can develop a solid self. And if I wait the two years that it takes for a solid self to develop, we've got an attachment disruption on the part of kids that primarily promotes reactive attachment disorder. And I mean, quite literally they will not allow me to foster or facilitate any contact. It's a major dilemma in the kind of work that I'm doing.
MENEKIM: Victims understand and find security and control. Long-range goal is empowerment. The perpetrators understand and find security and power. Conveying a sense of personal power is important, and long-range goal is self-control. The reason being is that victims gravitate towards letting other people be the power. They borrow the power from other people and the protection from other people. So what' you're trying to do is push them towards self-empowerment and personal power. If you think about a perpetrator, what a perpetrator wants to do is be total power. Just like an atomic bomb, influence everybody. Make sure that everybody knows that he or she is in charge. The difficulty is when you're telling them that they have to develop some kind of controls around their power. You're not trying to say to them, which was for a long time in the domestic violence field that a guy, the way you knew he was successful was that he had no opinion at all. He had no opinion, and he didn't get pissed at anything and nothing upset him. That's when you knew it was successful treatment. The fact of the matter is you're not trying to take power away from people. You're not trying to make them just nothing. What you're trying to do is get them to balance it. So developing some self-control around guys means they'll have to go in and get to some of those very pieces that they're not willing to go to. The feelings pieces.
LARSON: Help victims set boundaries, and help perpetrators to tolerate boundaries. Boundaries equal rejection in an abusive-couple contest.
MENEKIM: Don't push victims too hard or too soon. Don't confront perpetrators too soon or too directly. Self explanatory. Perpetrators already how to deal with you when you come at them directly. Victims know how to deal with you when you push too hard. They crumble. It's like trying to hold sand.
LARSON: Developing some structure. A way of approaching this with some structure and using some devices, even some cognitive devices, provides individuals with some sense of security that then you can move away from. The open, free-ended, �So how are you guys doing?� kind of thing that we might do with guard...
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