When one party has been significantly hurt by the violent behaviors of parents, long before becoming half of a couple in adulthood, sometimes the partner is made to take responsability for the damage done by the parents. The partner is then charged with creating the fantastical ‘safe space”.

No one with power in America “comes around.” They always have to be forced into positive change.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

As Will Burton says, “pain has a story, a narrative,” and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves.

The past is never dead. It is not even past.” – WILLIAM FAULKNER.

My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.

People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people.

I have come to understand that the same action of unjustified escalation most often comes from one of two positions: Supremacy, or Trauma. And in realizing this, I am surprised by the similar behaviors expressed by these two divergent experiences.

Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John.

Then they went on to discuss other things because there is always something more to a person than what somebody else does to them.