Transcription
[Music]
Guess what time it is, kids? It's time! Get your bandanas out. It's time for Facts of Your Friends. Oh man, I'm looking at, I, I set it up like it's all right.
So today's Fact of Your Friends, I'm just going to say at the outset, this one's tough because I'm going to leave with some, some concrete steps, some concrete things to look for. But I also am going to leave you with some open-handed, open-ended discussion topics. Um, because I'll be honest, I struggle with this. And I should. This is one of those things that like, as somebody who spent their years working with abused and traumatized people, I should be able to rattle this off. And I've called some of my colleagues across the country. I have sat on the internets. I've read books. I really struggle with the definition of the word abuse.
And when you say that's abuse, we all know what that is, right? It's, it's physical abuse. It's harm. It's somebody hurting you. It's psychological abuse. It's sexual abuse. It's neglect, right? We know when we hear the word abuse, it, it's easy to think like, I can, I know it when I see it, right? Like that old court case about pornography, like, I know it when I see it, right? But as a science nerd, just a nerd in general, that's not good enough. I like to define it. What is it?
And so I could, just a simple definition online. I, this is just a random place. I just typed into the Google, "What is abuse?" And here's the definition: Abuse is defined as any action that intentionally harms or injures another person. That makes sense, right? So some of my discussions with my colleagues was, yeah, it's, it's an intent to harm. It's an action that that intends to hurt somebody. The reason where I bulk at that is neglect is also abuse. Like the last caller we had, a dad just sitting around while his kid needs to go to the ER and he's just not paying attention. He's just eating chips. He's not trying to hurt that kid. He couldn't care less about that kid. That's abuse. And so there's no intent there. There's just neglect. There's just complete disregard. And I would suggest that's still abuse.
And here's another, um, challenge. Um, I had a colleague once that was, we were all having a meeting and the meeting got, got tense. But we al, it was a tense meeting. We were also laughing back and forth. And the boss said something, right? Like the, the highest ranking person in the room said something and everybody's laughing. But it was like a very passive, quiet, just silly throwaway thing. And it wasn't an insult. It wasn't a, anything derogatory. It was just like, ah. A little while later, my colleague came out of that meeting and she was rage crying. Rage crying. She was shaking to her core. And the way she explained it was this incredibly abusive behavior by the boss. I was there. Everybody was there, men and women. And nobody saw it. In fact, we all saw the opposite. We all saw some attempts to kind of let the air out of the room and to connect.
And I think it would be dismissive to suggest that her body was not in full fight or flight. Her body had moved to defend itself, to to run, to freeze, to come back swinging. And so for me, in my, just be like, ah, it's not abuse. I don't like that either. Doesn't feel right. And if we create a culture where the end user, the end receiver is the person who defines abuse, you get the world we got now where everybody's offended about everything. And you know, one of the cornerstones of anxiety is you got to go through it. You got to work. You got to head right into the middle of the storm. That's where healing is. But we've created a culture where everybody's anxious about everything. Everybody's fired up and worried about everything. And it's everybody else's job in the world to bend their lives around our offense or our discomfort. And it's chaos. It's madness. It's a moving target.
So I don't like saying that every person gets to define abuse for themselves. That doesn't make sense. So I find myself in this quandary. I like the idea of abuse is harm, right? It's a harm whether you meant it or not. I also think there's got to be some sort of boundary there, otherwise you get into these thought crimes. And this, you raise an eyebrow and all of a sudden it hurt. Like, I, it's just such a mess. And so I leave that to you. I think it's an important topic to discuss. How do we define abuse at the end of the day?
Um, I even have to go this far as I'm, and I want you guys to see or guess experience this. It's annoying. My wife tells me I'm, I'm, I try to think through an argument in my mind and get all the way to the end of the argument. Um, I can also imagine a scenario where certain behavior would be unifying in one situation and abusive in another. Right? So it may be, um, fun. It may be unifying to poke, to make jokes with some of my childhood friends. The very same jokes, the very same behavior may be unifying for us. And to somebody else, like my wife or a colleague, that may trigger something that happened when they were a kid. And it's, and it's very re-traumatizing, right?
So I think approaching the world, I've got to be able to speak my needs out loud. I've got to know when my body is reacting. And I have to be willing to be hospitable. And and I got to be able to say, hey, I didn't mean harm. It's probably best if we don't work together. I didn't mean harm in any way. I will never make say that again, do that again, make that joke. I had no idea I was neglecting you. I thank you so much for telling me. Consider that problem fixed. It's solved, right? So I think it's a, a mix of both.
Um, here is, um, this is from choosingtherapy.com. Here's a couple of, uh, I'm just going to run through a couple of these terms. Signs that you may be in an abusive relationship. Um, somebody's verbally abusing you. They're swearing at you. They're yelling and screaming at you. And sometimes you can abuse somebody very, very quietly. Somebody threatens violence. They threaten to withhold love. They threaten to withhold food or safety, right? Verbal abuse. Um, some, uh, unpredictable behaviors can be abusive, especially for kids. When they don't know what mom or dad they're going to get. Whether it's going to be the rage dad or the drunk dad or the angry mom or the happy mom or the super, you know, engaged dad. Their nervous system can never stabilize. It's always toggling with this hard back and forth between the sympathetic and parasympathetic response. It's, it becomes a mess. Um, cruelty to animals or others, right? Um, threatening behavior, forced sexual activity or disregard for others' desire, right? You can be abusive through forcing somebody to cater to your sexual whims. Can also be abusive to withhold connectivity, weaponize it. That can hold somebody hostage.
Um, here's a couple other ones. Financial abuse. Stealing money from the joint account, lying about expenses, making making somebody go through you or go through them in order to spend money. I've heard of couples who somebody gives the other person an allowance. They got to run every expense by you, or you don't have your own debit card or whatever, or they have their own account, right? There's financial abuse. Um, there's taking out credit cards in your name and spending money and racking up debt. You've got to pick, right? So, um, there's public shaming. There's harassment. There's bruises and black eyes. And by the way, there's the fight or flight or freeze response. One we don't talk about a lot. That's a trauma response. An abuse response is fawn. I'm going to nuzzle up to you and get so close to you that you won't hit me anymore. I am going to get so close. So it can look like intimacy. It can look really, really close.
So I think the key here for me is anything that makes my body feel like it's got to protect itself could be abusive behavior. It's not, it's not a guarantee every time. Anything that causes my body's sympathetic nervous system to fire up, fire, flight, ready to rock and roll, could be. It might not be. It might just be that I'm really, really tired. I took that the wrong way. And that's where it's incumbent on all of us to learn what we need to learn, how to regulate our own nervous systems. I can't outsource that to everybody. I can't make that everybody's job. That's my job. And if you've experienced trauma, that means you got some work to do. You got some healing to do. That's hard.
If you are being abused right now, if you're in an abusive relationship, call somebody. Call somebody. Call somebody. Your life has value outside of being somebody's punching bag. You're worth being loved. And you're worth more than that. Call somebody. Reach out to a local hotline. If you don't have a friend, or like the last caller, call some buddies and say, "It's, I need help. Come get me. And let's make a plan for what happens next." Life's too short to be abused. And if you're abusing somebody, stop. Go get help.