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One of the most insidious ways in which people support abuse is by presenting a supportive of both, 'they are both equally nice, lovely people who've had an unfortunate falling-out' narrative. By saying there are no sides to be taken, they take the abuser's side.
Abusers love being equated with their victims. They do it themselves. "We both made mistakes, let's forgive and forget!" "You know how it is, let bygones be bygones!" And mutual friend circles so often enable this false equivalence.
I know take a stand can be hard. And its even harder to have to scrutinise what you can see and learn about a relationship from the outside, in order to make an informed opinion about things that may not seem blatantly abusive.
One way to clue in to this is to look at who is avoiding who. Abusers, even those who have thrown out and rejected victims at certain times in the past, rarely feel uncomfortable in the presence of their victim. They get pleasure from interacting with them.
Another is to see who gets drained and depressed from the interactions. Abusers get stimulation and energy and affirmation from interacting with victims. Any engagement is a form of attention for them.
We've been fed this half-truth that friendship is making peace between people in intimate relationships to hold institutions like families and marriages together. But community service is to establish clarity about what is unacceptable.
So many divorcing couples and estranged kids get comforted by this 'you both love each other, its just a disagreement' narrative that is lazy. Because it does not look at the clues presented to see if abuse is a factor in the split.
We're socialised to pick up unspoken cues of anger and unhappiness in the powerful so well. I wish people would apply some of those psychological tools towards reading the signs of an imbalanced, abusive relationship more often, and better.
Its perfectly normal for someone to be abusive in one relationship and have been abused in another. Few people are one-dimensional monsters. Our job as mutual friends should be to hold the line against unacceptable behaviour.
I think people want to say 'they both fucked up' as a way of saying 'they're both likeable, they are neither evil monsters'. But we HAVE to move the Overton window of discussing abuse to assuming complicated backstories and subtleties in abusive actions.
Of course its scary and uncomfortable, because forming an opinion on what is unacceptable in someone else's relationship opens the door to changing one's opinion about what we have accepted in our own. But friends grieving breaking relationships deserve this carework.
As someone who's been gaslit multiple times by well-meaning people, please, really think the next time you want to smooth things over when someone shares a relationship rupture with you. Even silence is better than negating abuse as equal harm.
Excellent point. Yes. https://twitter.com/QualiaRedux/status/1296842549957623809?s=20
