CCChat April 2025.pdf - Flipbook - Page 14
When I volunteered in outreach, I got to see this
young woman and she was 20, she had a baby and
he had punched her when she was holding the
baby. She didn9t come from any background like this
at all. She rang the police and he was removed
from the house and put on bail. We thought he was
going to go on a Perpetrators Programme with
some really hardcore perpetrators. When she told
me about her partner9s childhood, where his mum
was a sex worker and drug user. He had seen and
suffered abuse as a child. I couldn9t believe he had
managed to make a relationship with someone who
wasn9t damaged.
Somehow his resilience was that he had made a
relationship with a person who was whole and the
fact that he had made this relationship with this
whole person indicated that he was amazing, but
also, under stress, he just reverted to his default
position. He9d been beaten up as a kid and when he
was stressed, he didn9t know what to do and didn9t
have the verbal ability to say, so he thumped and
what he did was wrong. What he did was very, very
wrong. He could have hit that baby and it could
have been dreadful but we can9t write that young
man off and just say he9s a nasty bad person and
have him sitting in a room with die hard, nasty
controlling blokes who have been doing it for years,
it would have done his head in.
There would be no commonality, he
wouldn’t be able to properly engage and he
would just feel shamed.
He would be so shamed to think that the world
thought he was like that and I think that someone like
that deserves an opportunity to be educated about
how you can be different. And to be educated on
how you can manage that emotional regulation in a
different way, so that he can make that work and he
wasn9t getting that. I never forgot that couple and I
think that Inspiring Families was written partly
because of them.
So that9s my stuff. I think there are a core of mainly
men out there who, through toxic masculinity,
through developmental trauma, because of the
rubbish they have been through as children, need
some help as adult males to understand that they
can have relationships that are not about violence.
It won9t work if there is control and coercion, I9m
not suggesting that, I think that some of that is so
embedded for some men that it9s not going to
change, but I think that we can at least think of
some of them being treated differently. We worked
with this Polish couple. He had punched her at a
wedding reception, pissed, and police were called,
he was arrested, bail conditions, but she would sit
in a group and she was clearly saying 8I9m not
frightened of him, he doesn9t control my money I do
what I want. His issue is alcohol.9
That book 8See What You Made Me Do9 (by Jess
Hill) just sums up what we do. I love that book and
Judith Herman9s book (Trauma and Recovery) was
hugely influential for me, when I was doing my
work. When I worked in adult mental health I was
constantly being told I worked with people with
borderline personality disorder, even though what
they had actually experienced was complex
developmental trauma as children, and I worked in
a really medical team and the doctors would say
8This is borderline disorder9 and then I9d go 8what?9
What does that mean, really? So they9ve had a bit
of a shit life, why do we have to label them? Why
can9t we just work with some of the consequences
of the horrors they9ve experienced, rather than
write them off?
This is what the programmes are about because,
again, a lot of the women who have had to deal
with DV get labelled with personality disorders or
something bizarre, and they9re not. They are trauma
victims. They9ve experienced trauma and we should
treat people as though they have experienced
trauma not treat people as though they9re ill.
I think there are a core of mainly men out there who, through toxic masculinity,
through developmental trauma, because of the rubbish they have been through as
children, need some help as adult males to understand that they can have
relationships that are not about violence.
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