I was having a few beers with an old ASPD friend (Ragin Cajun) the other night and started talking about a little stripper that we both know. About a year ago, her boyfriend put her in the hospital. We're talking about broken bones. He told me that she had recently moved back in with him.
That was a long time ago and hadn't thought about it in years. One of the women had her face mutilated with a carpet knife. I have seen some some bad things but this was horrific. Seeing her and because of her reaction to me being there, I never returned.
Back and forth, we kept bringing up women, that we knew, that had gone back into abusive, violent, situations or left one for another. I have never understood this.
Originally Posted by EZ.
EZ, first off you are a good person and empathetic to these women who have been injured.
However, you are making an assumption that isn't always correct, that the injured woman is having the same type of pain you would have. A broken bone hurts right? But are you sure?
There is something called allodynia, pain from non-painful stimuli. My autistic son had it. His feet could be covered in fire ant bites, and he wouldn't wince, but he would scream bloody murder when his hair was combed. Classically, you can see allodynia when someone with a migraine has to be kept in a dark room because light hurts their eyes. Point is pain can be an individual experience more often than we think.
And if people were so resistant to pain, then why would anyone do S&M? For some, pain is pleasure or at least a need.
The woman who set up the first woman's shelter was Erin Pizzey. She had what today would be a radical notion that women were just as violent towards others as men are.
Here is what she wrote about why one woman wouldn't leave her abusive man:
Moira is a wanderer, and in between bouts with Mike she, like so many others, stays in various homeless family hostels or refuges. She then gets allotted a flat in a New Town, a grant to furnish it, installs her kids in school, and orders from her mail order catalogues. She is such a good hustler that before long she has £3000 to £4000 worth of goods delivered from masses of different catalogues. Then, when it's all in, she sells off the lot to neighbours and second-hand shops, and flits with the kids back to Mike, if she feels like it, or to yet another homeless family unit. When she was with us she became the life and soul of the Refuge, and all the staff loved her. But she liked to taunt Mike over the phone. She would ask him to come over and see the kids, but when he arrived she would be out, taking the kids with her.
On one occasion, when she had made yet another such arrangement which left him raging on our doorstep, I asked him why he did not just forget her. I warned him that they both had a 'till-death-us-do-part' relationship, and it looked to me highly likely that one of his onslaughts would eventually finish her off. Then the kids would go into care and he would go to jail. Although he agreed, it was hopeless talking to him. He just kept repeating that he loved her and wanted her back. 'How can you say you love someone when you torture her?' I asked. 'In the hospital after the last baby, you screwed her on the balcony and split all her stitches'. 'She wanted it as well,' he said. There was no getting through to him. Moira eventually came back and found him there, and I saw the confusion on the children's faces as they struggled to understand the violent and perverted world of their parents. Now Mike was crying and promising to take them home. This was the same Mike who went berserk and smashed their toys and beat their mother to a pulp.
'Why do you do it, Moira?' I perservered in exasperation. 'Why do you need to get killed?' If I've asked a woman that question once, I've asked a thousand times, and each time the answer is roughly the same. In this case Moira thought for a few moments, then said 'It's the moment just before he hits me'.
It is hard to explain this need to people from non-violent backgrounds. The best way to explain it probably is to ask you to imagine a moment in your life when you are in mortal danger. Suddenly you find you are super-human. You deal with the situation perfectly. Maybe you rescue a child from in front of a car. Maybe you pull someone out of a burning house. Then after the event your knees collapse, you are shaking, and you go into a state of shock. What happened to you is that you put yourself on red alert. You perceived danger, and the message flashed from your brain to all the nerve centres of the body. Chemicals in the body alerted the system to a state of high arousal. You rose to the occasion. You were literally high on your own body chemicals. When the danger had passed, your chemical levels dropped dramatically, and the body suffered immediate withdrawal symptoms.
Once the danger is over, most people go back to normal, but not the violence-prone personality. This is the child that became addicted to its own body chemicals from babyhood. Probably it will one day be discovered that such children were addicted even before birth, when they were in the womb. Their entire system is constantly awash with the chemical of high arousal, as scarcely a day goes by without a violent family episode. Soon the body becomes so used to this feeling of the chemical rush that unconsciously the child looks for dangerous situations to provide it.
