To have any real hope of ridding ourselves of relationship violence we must deal with the underlying cause, not the emotional reaction to what has happened.
It is generally accepted that a persons character is set during the formative years – the terrible twos – somewhere between 2 and 4 years old. By the time they start school it is set for life unless the person has a life threatening experience and gets a fresh start.
We spend the terrible twos mostly in the company of women – mothers, grandmothers, aunts, elder sisters, neighbors, and babysitters so most of what we learn and become, consciously and subconsciously, we learn from them. Sadly mothers and grandmothers carry the mind virus inherited guilt from the fall from grace, so many are easily triggered to psychotic bursts of violence, which are automatically dissociated as soon as they have passed. The child can never heal from this if it is never discussed.
This is compounded by the mental health professions “Freud” mind virus which cause most practitioners to regard all childhood memories of maternal violence to be dismissed as imagination.
Self help guru Louise Hay said something like “In our adult relationships we tend to recreate the emotional atmosphere of our early childhood”. So a violent relationship in childhood almost invariably leads to relationship violence, real or perceived, in adult life.
As we form a new relationship we develop a new shared subconscious personality by combining all of our mind virus’s, so that we automatically protect each others beliefs and dissociation’s and individual, family, and cultural secrets. Relationships would be chaos without it. So both people in the relationship slowly change outer personalities to match their new subconscious shared personality. Depending on the mix of what comes from each partner violence from either partner can easily erupt.
The only way to end the scourge of relationship violence is to end permanent survivor mode and dismantle the mind virus’s.
Regardless of who may have attacked who, both parties are victims of a broken and dysfunctional society, and to single out one for individual blame is victim blaming of victims.
As long as women also attack and kill men, which they do from time to time, although in lesser numbers, this is not gender based violence but societal violence.
As Andrew Denton used to say at the end of each show – “Remember, society is to blame”.