Intimate partner violence: causes and effects

Whenever we encounter a violent act in a couple, we ask ourselves How is it possible that two people who say they love each other can treat each other that way.

The beginning of this type of aggressiveness, which sometimes ends with murder, is found in gender stereotypes and in the difficulty of accepting that the other is a different, independent person and not merged with us.

Love and intimate partner violence

The Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi affirms that “love is a hard drug”. I would say that sometimes it is, precisely when the difference that separates one subject from another cannot be accepted, the otherness that reminds us that we are two instead of one who make up that bond that sometimes confuses us and makes us believe that we are one fused. Con-fusion means “fusion with” (with that other that I love, that feeds my soul, that makes me be).

Love makes being to such an extent that in extreme cases a man can mistakenly believe that his woman is part of himself., who is there to attend to him, to take care of him and, if he is not there, it is because he does not love him, he hurts him, he hates him and arouses all his hatred. And a woman, in extreme cases, can believe that with the love that her partner has for her, she makes him be in such a way that she has to endure whatever it takes to not lose it. If he doesn’t treat her well afterwards, she thinks it’s because she surely has done something wrong and tries to redouble her care and attention.

The yearning for fusion is especially strong in love passion. All passion has a point of alienation or madness that language registers as folie à deux when it refers to intense passionate ties that affect the two protagonists of the relationship. But as all passion is a hoax, to those who are victims of it without any warning, reality is in charge of making them feel that the differences are inevitable and with them, the frustrations. It will depend on the degree of maturity that each one has to recognize this painful truth so that their behavior in the face of inevitable disappointments and/or separations is of a reasonable duel that helps to mature and distance themselves so as not to be trapped in a bond with no way out or, on the contrary, let them be grudge and fury.

The abuser’s mind

The men who come to kill their wife when they are abandoned by her are men with characteristic problems that until the outbreak of violence arrives they are hidden because they have a partner who contains them, supports them and accompanies them.

When this ceases to be the case because they separate from them or announce their desire to do so, all the fragility of their psyche appears, the collapse of their inner world that leads them to feel as a personal attack what their partner provokes with her separation. They enter a state of alienation, victims of a belief that turns them into dangerous victimizers. They feel ashamed of themselves, but they cannot avoid the violent act with the supposed hope of recovering with the murder those parts of themselves that they feel are lost in their partner who is leaving.

In psychoanalysis, those psychological disturbances that do not present symptoms as long as certain conditions are met are called white psychoses, such as that the person is supported and sustained by a love that makes them feel solid and whole, or a creative ability that can be developed and satisfy.

Both a couple and a created work serve as a substitute for a fractured subjectivity, like a kind of cement that fills the cracks. When this welding does not exist, the aggressiveness that is awakened can be very dangerous. It is not by chance that the murders occur after a separation or when the couple communicates the desire to separate.

Subtle psychological abuse

There is also another type of abusive man with more perverse characteristics.. He knows perfectly well how to destabilize his partner, but he can give a careful image of himself in front of others and skillfully hide his manipulations aimed at destroying his wife, disqualifying her when she speaks, disappointing her when she tries to exercise a certain autonomy, hurting her self-esteem in many ways. ways but so subtle that she doesn’t quite realize what made her feel so bad. A type of man who is capable of using insane techniques, such as those used in the film Gaslight, in which the leading woman saw gaslights that came on intermittently at night, and the man accompanying her denied it, when he himself was the one who actually turned them on and off.

This behavior tends to drive the other crazy, make him doubt his sanity, especially because the one who uses this manipulation shows himself with absolute security in what he denies. This type of abuser does not murder, he tries to get his wife to commit suicide. This type of abuser is not innocent, he is a deeply disturbed person.

This is not the case of the former, whose fragility can sometimes also be fueled by cultural messages that force him to act in a way that reinforces all the gender stereotypes that define traditional masculinity, and that does so much damage to men and women. All these issues are completely covered up by the culture in which we are submerged, which insists on passionate love as a paradigm of true love, fueled by the myths of romantic love that are sung in songs, soap operas and popular beliefs that permeate the unconscious. .

cultural models

This myth is also fed in an asymmetric way, in which behavior models for men and women are distributed that establish a complicity that allows coupling.

The model for men consists of dominance messages from their women, expressed through excessive control, unjustified jealousy, of a possessiveness that is considered normal even if it is not, but that can be seductive to a woman who is not aware of the dangers that it implies. “Black heralds that cloud reason and poison” is how Serrat defines jealousy in a song. “Green-eyed monsters,” Shakespeare calls them. It is not the same for a man to express a desire for possession that speaks of his desire for the woman he loves to belong to him, than to turn that desire into a demand that, if not fulfilled, makes him dangerously aggressive.

Behavior models for women consist of submissive and surrender messages to their man. The asymmetry exists in the fact that the suppressed otherness in the man leads him to believe that his partner has no other desire of her own than to be aware of satisfying his, which implies denying that she can have other desires that do not include him or separate her from him. And in the woman, on her part, the suppressed alterity would consist in not feeling authorized to have her own desires that do not imply her submission to others or her vocation to serve.

In this sense, many women are victims of a savior complex, which comes from a maternal background, which leads them to believe that with their love for their partner they will save him from all his suffering and, at the same time, soothe his insecurity of not being loved for feeling intensely necessary in the bond with a man whom they feel so helpless.

Power, necessity and autonomy

This situation occurs, for example, in the extreme case of domestic abuse, when the momentarily repentant partner begs her not to leave him, to forgive him, that he will not mistreat her again. It is the only occasion where a battered woman feels needed and has power over him. Power that exists beyond those specific moments due to her man’s dependence on her towards her, but which is denied by him because acknowledging it humiliates him as a man and shows him to be dependent on her, which she cannot bear.

If a man is asked and taught that to be such he has to dominate, to know, to be successful, to be productive, not to be contradictory, to be powerful, hypersexed, even promiscuous, being tough, all those insignia that require him to stifle his sensitivity and his limits, it is evident that when this does not happen, he has no symbolic resources left to recognize himself and that arouses enormous violence in him. The solution then is not for women to stop aspiring to autonomy, but to help men develop theirs outside of promoting dominance over others as a fundamental value. Because machismo kills not only the subjectivity of the men who suffer from it, but also the lives of their partners. And subjection to the stereotype of women’s femininity that demands that they be destined to serve others as the only desire recognized as valid can only generate an infantilizing dependency that harms female self-esteem and does not allow men who settle in a women to grow. big kids position

women and love

Women are much more vulnerable to the expectation of love because from the cradle we are taught that we have to wait for Prince Charming to rescue us, to give us a value that we believe we do not have on our own. We are insisted on submission as an unquestioned value, on unconditional surrender, on being patient, putting up with whatever it takes to save the marriage, sometimes in the name of our children, sometimes because our own mother takes a toll on the mistreatment received and believes that It is an inevitable destiny for any woman.

All these messages favor a breeding ground that generates the conditions for the idealization of man. who loves us to such an extent that when abuse appears, the moral and painful collapse that this causes to the woman who suffers from it conditions her to deceive herself into thinking that something must be doing very wrong, something must be wrong in her dedication to the relationship to be treated that way. It is not about masochism, it is a painful stupor that causes her to mistake herself for the aggressor and that she blames herself in a desperate attempt to save the relationship.

can be prevented

How do you prevent all this? From an educational perspective that warns against the trap of conventional stereotypes, which are alienating for both sexes, and from a therapeutic perspective that helps men and women to travel a path of growth and emotional re-education that will give them the possibility of “disappearance”. hold on” than forces them to act in ways that are so unhappy for both of them.

Therapy is still a privileged opportunity to travel along a path of personal growth supported or supported by a witness with whom a very deep bond is established that allows emotional internalization of other ways of seeing oneself and the other.