There is something I hear very little about in our politicized queer communities, in all of our talk about physical and sexual violence, as well as accountability and healing. It is the invisible dirty secret nobody seems willing to address, and yet it pervades our interactions with each other, how we conduct our politics, how we offload shame from ourselves onto each other and perpetuate cycles of violence and harm: emotional violence.
Emotional violence can be described as all of the non verbal and verbal ways in which we inflict harm upon another. Tactics made to instil fear, dominance, control, to erase the autonomy and will, needs and feelings of another and to supplant with one's own. Tactics meant to penalize and degrade, that are often insidiously difficult to address because of the lack of physical bruise or scarring left behind but which cause damage and distress in people nonetheless, and which can have a tremendous effect on one's ability to cope and function.
If you google emotional violence (EV) you will see very standard descriptions of what this may look like and how it may manifest in intimate partner relationships. You may even find some literature and resources specific to queer and trans relationships. What you won't find, is a thorough guide to naming and understanding the nature of emotional violence and its impacts. You won't even find this in child abuse literature.
Perhaps this lack of information on how to name and identify EV is why we rarely address its harms in our communities. It goes without saying that I am writing this from my own narrow perspective of generational immigrant east/western european norms, and I dare not say that my understanding of emotional violence is applicable to all communities. EV and harm may look very different depending on what community one is from and what the norms are for emotional expression in that community. I will leave it up to you to speak on your own behalf of your understanding of what is emotionally violent. What I can offer, is an understanding from my own background, of how I view emotional violence and perhaps it will resonate with you in your own understanding of healing, community building and accountability.
In my family context, emotions were never directly expressed on my father's side. He was a product of the war in Germany in many ways and had learned to bottle up all emotions and convert them into rage, silent or otherwise. My mother was always far more emotive and expressive. I do not know if this is representative of her Balkan heritage but the volume of her voice regardless of her emotional state never falls below what I consider to be mild yelling. Within this context, piled and layered with copious familial stress, severe mental illness of two family members, ableism and a lack of resources for supporting a child with profound physical and intellectual disabilities, created a toxic environment for dealing with distress, in which emotional violence was often the result.
A year after I had stopped speaking to my father (another story altogether), one day my 13 year old self was playing with my best friend in the basement when I acquired a moderately severe injury. I had used our half finished washroom and not realizing my father had placed his toolbox at the edge of the bathroom door, when I excitedly flung the door open to run back to my friend I tripped on the sharp edge causing a thick chunk of my skin, flesh, and fatty tissue to be exposed to the bone beneath. I held my soggy bloodied shin in my hands and crawled crying up the stairs to poke my head for some assistance. My father lay on the couch and my mother was nowhere in sight. I hesitated and kept my face half below the living room floor and asked my father for a bandaid and told him what happened. Without missing a beat he told me to "shut the fuck up, YOU BITCH."
This one memory holds salient in my veins. It is compounded by memories of an innocent 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 21 ... 35 year old who for no discernible reason would experience periods of abrupt rage filled explosions and silence and shutting out from my father for periods of days, to years. One minute I was his buddy - a substitute son at times. The next, I was dead to him. I had no clue what I had done to provoke this.
When you grow up in an environment such as this, many things can happen, the least of which being an acquired sensitivity to the many ways that violence and harm can be inflicted and stay forever embedded in thick strands of scar tissue on your heart, mind and soul. Years of therapy can never erase the impacts of a parent or caregiver deliberately, suddenly, and cruelly shutting their child out. In order to maintain any sense of order at all a child in such a situation determines unconsciously what is needed in order to emotionally protect themselves and cope. This will look different for everybody, and perhaps sometimes the same. But what I had learned from a young age was that the interactions we have with each other, whether in passing or in relationship, can greatly impact our health, hearts and functioning.
Many of us in queer community hold a lifetime of unnamed interpersonal violence in our bones. We struggle to validate our experiences in their entirety, while forever managing ourselves and our emotional lives in connection with others. We may be more or less aware of the impacts, and have more or less insight on our mal/adaptive and preferred coping strategies and how they play out in our interactions with others. We may continuously be drawn to, re-experience, and re-invoke situations in which we are emotionally triggered and react in self protective ways that spill harm onto others. Compounded with transphobia, homophobia, racism, ableism, misogyny, the legacy of residential schools, genocide, and poverty, and a whole array of systems-based harms and traumas - we carry amongst us the ingredients to perpetually re-live and redistribute the harms we have encountered in our lives.
We may find ourselves going through cycles and circles of friends, lovers and pockets of community. We may feel helpless and enraged on a continuing basis when the same harms continue to surface amongst us. We may feel that our politics and language allow us to speak provocatively and expressively about the nuances of community building and accountability all the while covering up the harms we perpetuate amongst each other. We work in fields of violence. We support others in their experiences of violence. And we enact violence on each other in sophisticated ways that go unnamed, unaddressed, and unaccounted for. They may even be endorsed as good politics. The politics of shaming ourselves and others in our communities. The politics of righteousness.
But what is left unaddressed is a focus on the genuine healing interactions that are so needed they are foundational to actually building a community with one another. You cannot speak of community nor accountability while neglecting, divesting, or harming your personal relationships or navigating social relations in ways which undermine, exclude and harm others.
What I would like to call attention to are the myriad ways we offload our shame and rage onto each other. When we refuse to take accountability for how we address each other, approach each other, speak to each other, acknowledge each other, exclude and demonize each other without trial or process, we are perpetuating cycles of violence. We can no longer claim immunity. There are no discreet lines between perpetrator and victim. Anyone can enact harm on another at any time, all the while performing amazing acts of compassion and non violent intervention in the rest of their everyday lives. When we allow our experiences of harm to govern our interactions with others in ways that preemptively shame, exclude and punish, we are participating in emotional violence. We are carrying our legacies forward.
How do we avoid this? There are no easy answers. But I do believe each of us must commit to doing our own personal work around our own healing. We must seek whatever personal and social resources we can muster to do so. We must commit to a reflexivity of evaluating our own emotional states, responses, triggers, and ways of communicating that forever checks, pauses, and diffuses the desire to operate from a place of reactive pain and suffering and to legitimize one's behaviour as not having an emotionally harmful impact on those you interact with, whether casually or intimately. This is not to say that we must abandon self protection. If one has experienced harm by another in or outside of our communities, we can limit the ways we interact with that person so that we do not continue to expose ourselves to harm. We can be protective of ourselves in ways that are fair and do not enact processes which effectively result in character assassinations. We can support each other in ways that provide much more room for feeling the impacts of our conflicts and harms while allowing for space for each party to come together with support to figure out ways of raising awareness, restoring ourselves, and recovering from the impact of harms.
If we are truly to address healing in our communities, if we really would like to invest in our collective health and functioning, we can no longer look to intellectualizing the notion of anti-oppression in our politics. We cannot rely on our ability to cite terminology to excuse the ways in which we justify the perpetuation of shaming and social exclusion amongst each other. But most of all, we need to get real honest with ourselves about what harming each other actually means and looks like.
For a valuable introduction to this topic read "The Revolution Starts at Home."
