On post-separation abuse: isolation
It's so common to hear stories about abusive relationships, where as the relationship continued, the victim's world grew smaller and smaller. We've come to recognize isolation as a debilitating coercive control tactic.
What we're not talking about as much, are the stories of isolation that many are faced with after leaving.
There are so many stories of women leaving behind family friends from the marriage or partnership, because upon leaving, it becomes unclear who can be trusted and who cannot.
It’s also not uncommon to see family friends become abuse enablers (ex: minimizing abuse, refusing to “take sides”).
Enabling behaviors, I call out here, as also isolating behaviors, because they can leave a victim so alone in her experience. These can look like chronically invalidating behaviors that don't acknowledge the abuse.
"Marriage is challenging and we're sorry you couldn't work it out."
Or, "We still invite him over for dinner because the kids are friends."
People who were once family friends, may also become eyes and ears for the abuser, violating the victim's privacy or even orders of protection/restraining orders. This might look like accidentally sharing information about the victim with the abuser, or in the worst cases, literally providing screenshots of private text messages or private social media posts to the abuser for family court cases.
If questioning the safety of every existing relationship isn't already bad enough, in many instances, the abuser will continue with a smear campaign within the community. Most often, this is sharing stories of the victim's alleged mental instability and unfitness as a parent. If there's any kind of court decision, they'll often use whatever parenting privileges they have as "evidence" that they are telling the truth. They'll commonly twist narratives or make up new ones all together.
The smear campaign can span from friends, to children's parents, to teachers and school officials, to child protective agencies, to medical and mental health providers, to guardians ad litem and attorneys for the children, to family and the children themselves. Coercive controllers often seem to have boundless energy for this, as if it is some kind of life mission.
As smear campaigns successfully take momentum, it is now no longer just the abuser sabotaging the victim's relationships, but now also anyone else clueless enough (or abusive enough) to align with the abuser.
For victims, the whole process can feel like having the floor fall out from under them. "Is this real? I was abused, and now I've been cast out by society, and everyone believes I'm a perpetrator?" Classic DARVO*-- that unfortunately most of the general public is blind to.
Victims often will display an increasingly urgent need to be believed, while simultaneously exhibiting a newfound and appropriate suspicion and anxiety around relationships. This unfortunately, only helps play into the abuser's narrative that "she's crazy."
Some victims decide they can trust almost no one without jeopardizing the safety of their family, and come to rely on a tiny circle of friends and/or professionals.
Many victims come to rely heavily on these dwindling safe relationships, only to validly fear losing those, too. The reality is that it is nearly impossible for many victims to ensure reciprocity in relationships, when the victim is experiencing a never-ending onslaught personal crises: unraveling abused children, daily threatening or gaslighting from the ex, the stress of constant family court demands, the resulting financial ruin required to fund it, and often resulting chronic illness or mental health impacts.
While coworkers or friends may have been supportive at first, many cannot bear to believe that the victim's struggles may never completely come to an end, and that society is completely incapable of protecting them from a life sentence of abuse.
If the victim has somehow managed to make it this far, there are still vast consequences around experiencing the compounded traumas from the abusive relationship and the subsequent institutional and societal betrayals.
It is difficult to reacclimate to everyday life and go on as if everything is normal.
While the victim's (metaphorical) house continues to be set ablaze, life drones on. Conversations with other acquaintances or other parents may seem superficial and pointless. Careers that victims once excelled at may seem meaningless in the context of this larger social crisis.
Most family court survivors have devastating stories that cannot be safely spoken, and that once spoken, can take hours to explain (and still leave much left unsaid).
At the heart of it, many of us may feel that what we have experienced is nearly impossible to fully communicate to anyone. That we are now somehow too complicated for most people to understand-- that what we have experienced has somehow rendered us unknowable.
*DARVO is a term coined by Jennifer Freyd in the 1990’s. It is an acroynm and term that reveals a common pattern of how abusers typically respond to being confronted about their behaviors: by first denying they did anything wrong, then attacking: reversing the victim and offender.
