Violence pattern

1）By J K （USA）June 2009.

Summary: I am seeking responses from counselors who have discharged on their own impulses to be violent or counsel regularly with clients working to free themselves from recordings that urge doing harm to others.

Text: When I first began to counsel men who have perpetrated violence and who wanted to free themselves from these urges, I conceived of them as having "a violent pattern." When I also began to work on my own urgings to do violence to others, I also thought, initially, in terms of have a single pattern of violence.

But I have come to question that view. Now I wonder if "urges to do violence to others" may be more like sexual feelings in that both can become attached to almost any other distress recording.

Harvey used to envision early sexual feelings as sticky flypaper that could attach to almost any distress recording--we could have sexual feelings adhere to recordings of isolation or close contact; of being insulted or sweet-talked; and to almost any object--white gloves, smells, palm trees, football, etc.

I wonder, now, if recordings of "wanting to harm others" aren't also like sticky flypaper in that they can accompany a wide variety of distress recordings. Some recordings might involve insults, humiliation or powerlessness; others might involve sex or weapons, men, women, or children; others might attach to feelings of frustration, hatred, or shame.

I'd like to hear from some folks who've actually counseled in this area about whether they think the urge to do violence to others is a distinct pattern, or whether it winds its way around a whole variety of distress recordings, like sticky fly paper*.

I think there is an important difference that could affect how we client and counsel others on violence. If there is a parallel to work on Early Sexual Memories, maybe it'd be useful to begin to share and collect techniques for working on Early Violent Memories--when was the first time you felt the urge to harm someone else?

*Sticky fly paper in the US consists of long strips of yellow paper that have a sticky substance that attracts and kills flying bugs and insects.


　

2）E M (USA) June 2009.

Dear J,

Thank you for bringing up this topic. I have counseled some in this area, but have also been close to to a lot of people (not necessarily co-counselors) whose behaviors can turn to violence.

From your suggestion, if we were to counsel in a similar way to early sexual memories, then, rather than "what is your earliest memory of wanting to do harm to others?," might it be better to have a  more open question, such as "what is your earliest memory in any way at all connected to violence?"?
That way a greater variety of distress recordings might be more easily accessed. What do you think?

　

3）By J K (USA) June 2009.

Dear E,

Your refined question will cover a great deal of territory, and since all oppressions and most hurts involve violence, this question would open up lots of ground. Probably the way to drain off recordings of "wanting to physically harm others" is through thorough discharge of one's own experiences of receiving violence.

But I do want to keep the focus on the oppressor end of the recordings-of those people who feel desires to harm others and/or who have seriously assaulted or killed others.  For discharging on those experiences, asking when the person first felt such a "desire" seems like a logical place to start. My experience to date is that such recordings got installed when the person felt powerless to stop violence aimed at them, did not get to discharge on the violent actions or words or threats that they heard and experience, and felt that the only way not to be victimized was to hurt others in return.

Thanks for helping me sort through all this.

4) B S (Ireland) June 2009.
Dear J  and all,

Thanks for your question.

The history of oppression, the education system, sex and violence, sexism and internalized sexism, science and religion.

I like the question someone else suggested "What is your first memory of violence in any form ?"

Also I think I need to be aware of the history, and encourage myself and clients to understand the history of violence. In Ireland we have a huge history of violence, a lot of which has been hidden. For instance 1 million Irish people died ( at least) in the 1840s Great Famine, and another 1 million ( at least) emigrated . Only this year have we been able to commemorate this disaster for the first time. Recently a report on what happened to poor Irish children in industrial institutions has been published. 170,000 children were in  these places from around the 1930s until the 1970s. Their stories are shocking. I am discharging as I write this. I went to a boarding school myself where violence was daily and brutal.

We've been meeting regularly to discharge around Irish Liberation for the past three or four years, and we're learning together how to give eahc other a hand with this stuff.

Recently I did the Honours History exam for people at the end of our second level cycle of education.( This exam is the way people get to university or third level education.) I did this to learm more about Irish, and world history, and also to experience how our education system works. Our education system works on the principle telling young people what to think, and is hugely oppressive and abusive. Before the exam started I gave one of the young people a very intense and fast session on her terror, and after the exam I listened to another young woman telling me she burst into tears when she looked at the questions on the exam paper. This young woman had shared with me essays she had done during the year, and they are excellent. Her difficulty is that she expected questions exactly similar to what she had learned, and any slight difference was totally confusing to her. These young people are told that their lives depend upon how they do in this examination. How terrifying is that ?  The results are due out on August 12, and young people spend the summer waiting and wondering about the results, and how many "points" they will get. The "points" system is the mechanism of entry to university.

The leader of the 1916  Rising ( revolution) in Ireland, Patrick Pearse called the education system "The Murder Machine", saying that this idea of people "cramming" ( learning things off by heart, or rote learning) for one special examination was inhuman, and did no assist people in learning how to think. There is a public debate presently about how young people are being prepared for examinations.

Violence and sex are very close in male conditioning. If society tells men to be big boys and not to cry, the message is men are not supposed to feel, and human beings whose capacity to feel has been interfered with can do desperate actions to themselves and others. Men are trained to be in control by whatever means are available, bullying, arrogance, unthinking, uncaring violence,including suicide, rape,  institutional violence, kill or be killed.

I think also in counselling, and being counselled, we need to understand that both science and religion can be misused in creating opportunities for violence, and that  our institutions of sceince and religion are infected with patterns of sexism and internalised sexism.

If we're going to counsel well on liberation, then we need to client well,
so as to be able to give each other the support we need to end harming and
being harmed.  Also we need to remember that laughter is an important means
of discharging terror, fear, especially around sex and violence.

Good question. I'd love lots more information from others about this.
　

5) By T. J (USA)   Oct. 2006

Last night a young adult man I know talked with me at great length about the violence that has been part of his life since he was a young boy and a friend of his was murdered in the woods.

He spoke of how he and his friends celebrate if six months have gone by without one of their friends dying (of heroin overdose, murder, suicide etc.).

He spoke of losing track of the number of people he knows who have died in his life.

He spoke of recently getting a permit to carry a gun and how often he uses it to threaten people into dropping plans to attack/kill him and his friends.

He spoke of being jumped (this means attacked) just for being a tall man. "Seems people want to prove something to their friends by trying to beat up the tall guy."

Listening to him reminded me of the recent posting about the killings in the Amish schoolhouse and the idea that the girls were killed because they were female.

My thought is that this is just like the other messages of sexism that use women's femaleness as the excuse for oppressing them.

Those girls weren't killed because they were female. They were killed because of the brutal effects of men's oppression upon the humanness of the man who killed them.

It seems therefore that it would be wise for us as women to remember that the fight is not simply about standing up against such acts of violence. I think it is powerful and necessary for us to shout and march and protest loudly against the ways we are targeted as women. And, if we don't combine telling men that their actions are unacceptable with being their allies in ending men's oppression, I don't think, in the end we will get very far.

It just doesn't seem rational to protest the way men target women with violence and other forms of oppression unless we are at the same time committed to dismantling the institutions of men's oppression: the armed services, the criminal courts, police and prisons, workplace exploitation, the '"sex industries", the alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutical and illegal drug industries, the "sports industries," schools, religions, the family (taken from The Human Male). I don't think it is compassionate and I don't think it will work.

I think that believing the idea that women are raped, killed, attacked etc. because we are female is perhaps to get sidetracked into thinking that we can end our oppression based on some change we can make in ourselves, in our femaleness (in our physical/emotional strength, in our appearance, in our gender, in our way of talking, in our choices about the people we hang out with). As Nancy Luna Jimenez (a women's leader in the northwest) has so brilliantly pointed out...Being a tomboy or a girly-girl are just different strategies we come up with for trying to get hit less hard by sexism. We look out and identify the piece of sexism that looks like something we can handle (and the ones that terrify us) and chose a gender identity that we think will grant us a degree of safety. To be caught up in making such changes (and thinking they can help end sexism) is to accept the blame for our oppression.

But it's not because we are female that we are oppressed. Gender is as much a myth as race in distinguishing one human being from another. We are oppressed because the capitalist system works better with us oppressed and because men were brutalized into taking on the role of our oppressors.

If we want sexism to end, we need to end men's oppression. To be able to see that this is a rational strategy we need to discharge the internalized sexism that keeps us believing that our femaleness is the reason for our oppression.

It is easy for the message of the Amish killings to be "See how dangerous it is to be female." Instead we can think "see the brutal effects of oppression." And then, after some discharge, we can lightly and confidently say, "So, let's end it."