Dear friend, thank you for speaking out.

I dreamt it again

I dreamt it again. I dreamt someone stole my backpack – where I keep all my ‘precious’ things, the ones I use for my work, that is actually my life: books, camera, notebook, pens, few money, documents and mobile phone. My ‘safety’ objects, the ones that help me keep track of the people I meet and I work among.

I know this theft is an evolution of an older one – a folder with the content related to my studies in the past, a collection of essays. In my dreams – for months – it was stolen by my former boyfriend, the ‘psychotic bastard’ as I call him now after many years, and I know this time it’s him stealing my backpack again.

He does so because he hasn’t a life by himself. He has no character, nor personality, nor passions, nor interests. He has nothing. He is nothing. He steals other people’s lives, sucking their energy to the bones, to survive. And when he finds a weak, good, sweet one, he destroys him/her – by manipulating, by violence, by humiliation. Because this is his strategy to survive, while conscious of being nothing and so not having any alternative to base his existence upon.

There are some men who continuously humiliate and/or beat their women. Sometimes they kill them too. The amount of ‘private violence’ is unbelievable, and something striking us in our everyday life, among most of the women we know or get in contact with. A man killed his wife in Sevilla yesterday. And yesterday I did also get the information about a new (attempting to be funny?) group on Facebook calling rape a ‘natural masculine instinct’, so that it should be not considered a crime. Everywhere I look around, I see women acting as nurses to men – hoping to lighten their existential pain, allowing them to take it out on them, and repeating “he will change, because of my love and care; he will change, because of my love and care…”

No, he will not change. Because, as he opened his eyes, he would recognise he has/is nothing – so he won’t do it. And he doesn’t ‘have’ you, either: not being in love with you, because he is not he will be twice angry against ‘life’ that didn’t give him the ‘perfect woman’. And he will beat you: you may not be ‘perfect’, but still you are useful for his needs – that means physically absorbing his frustrations.

I rushed away – luckily after less then two years. The damage he left on my body and my soul can’t be counted. It can’t. I still face the physical consequences, 15 years later. Law protects them: as police told me, they can do something against him only in case of a failed attempt to kill me. But who says how deep is the beating you received? How painful is it? What did you think about during and after? And what if he was successful in his attempt to kill you?

I do also think, after so many years of slow psychological recovery, that it was also my fault. I had been a stupid idiot. I have no other words to define my dumbness. I wasn’t able to protect myself from him: I had no idea of what an equal relationship was, and I thought to ‘sacrifice for him’ was a value and a ‘right effort’. No, it wasn’t. It was only a stupid action by a stupid woman in love with a rapist – protecting him from all the ones who had already recognised him as he was. It was my fault to authorize his violence, to allow it to go and to repeat it in the future with someone else.

No, he will not change and he will not stay with his victim/wife/mate (stupid words these last two in this case) the rest of his life. When the victim begins reacting, he will hate her and make her feel deeply guilty. He will cry for compassion. He will ask for pity and assure his love. I remember him crying, and now also his sneer after he was successful once again because of that, and I came back. But the truth is that – at his eyes – as soon as you will react you’ll be guilty of not behaving as his victim and toy anymore. And he will humiliate you and get even more violent, as much as he can, and then quickly and simply find another one to replace you. These people have a strong consciousness of who their next potential victim might be.

He is not helpless. Not even to comfort – no matter what he had to face in his life. An attitude to violence can be explained by previous bad experiences, but not justified by them. These are two different things. Nothing justifies humiliation, violence, insults, manipulations. This is not love. Such as being in love can explain why it took me so much time to get out of this situation, but not justify my stupidity in case I remained, repeating the idiot mantra “he will change, because of my love and care” (errare humanum est,perseverare autem diabolicum).

Differently from many other women, I soon got out of Stockholm syndrome, but it took me time not to be instinctively scared by a caress, and even more time to manage my feelings toward the next men properly. Well, I guess I didn’t reach this last point yet, and maybe I never will. I’m very envious of those persons who never had to face such violent relationships, because somehow they do better than me in this. But I know I will always be a careful person, and, even if not interested, I will be always honoured by being loved by someone – as falling in love with someone means to see some beauty in him/her. And I know I will be careful of my actions toward these persons, knowing the weakness caused by being in love, and will never abuse this power.

This is the only good thing I got from / in spite of that relationship, and I’m not grateful I had it – I would gladly avoid it, if I could. But I couldn’t. No, I correct myself: I didn’t. As I could choose, and I made the most stupid choice for a long time, thinking everybody was allowed to do to me what he wanted, as I meant nothing. Well, I mean something, as I am something. First of all I am myself, with my folders and backpack full of notes, pictures, experiences, feelings and past. I have an identity, and nobody can steal nor rape it anymore. When I wake up, my backpack is still there. And the guy? I have no idea – the last time I met him (10 years after our relationship and 5 years ago) by chance in the train, I went away ignoring him and not even greeting him (there’s no reason to talk, he does not belong to my life, by my choice, anymore – no way, ever!) and kept asking myself “what the hell did I see beautiful, to fall in love with him?” But no reason to waste time to think about it, anyway, anymore…

Let’s picture the citizen/state relationship, for the sake of discussion, as a marriage. You fell in love when you were young and impressionable and decided to get hitched. For the sake of linguistic convenience, let’s have you be the wife, the citizen, and the state the husband.

After your honeymoon and as time goes by in your marriage, you notice some things are decidedly wrong about your husband. For one thing, his history is really quite different from how he described it before you got married. The more you learn about what your husband did in the past, the more doubt you have in the notion that he is really a good person. How could the one you love have done such awful things? How could he wrap his past crimes up in fancy language and present them as virtues? You try to ask your husband about these things, and if you are not met with stony silence or cold dismissal all you get is a repeat of the same slide show and heavily edited home movies you’ve seen before, to the strains of triumphant music and accompanied by words that seek either to bury that terrible history or to change the meanings of the very words themselves. Sometimes you get slapped hard across the face. You have real doubts.

One day your husband comes home after a late night out with blood on his clothes. “What happened!” you cry. “Oh, I was handing out candy to the children in the neighborhood. Then I killed a man.” Why? Because the other man believed the wrong things, spoke out of line, failed to obey, resisted your husband’s commands and was trying to fight off your husband. “What was the fight about?” you ask. Turns out that your husband was trying to rob that other man, or force him into slavery, and he wasn’t too happy about it. It’s all okay for the moment — surely your husband wouldn’t do such things to you or your family now, would he? But still, the doubt grows: do I really want to be married to a robber and a murderer?

One day you realize that your husband in fact comes home every day fresh from killing and/or robbing someone. There always seem to be good reasons for the torture and the killings — or so dear hubby says — but there’s this nagging voice inside you that asks: how is he different from any other psychopathic mass murderer? Am I next?

You look back more deeply into your husband’s history and find and entire lifetime drenched in blood and clouded by lies. The horror runs so deep and is so pervasive! Sure, your husband may have performed a million good or neutral acts in his past, but there are thousands of incidents of such unrestrained barbarity that there never possibly could have been good intent behind them. You see a pattern.

And you wake up one morning — alone in your bed, as your restless husband never sleeps — and you realize you’ve been tricked. You recall, all at once, the times your husband has beat you, has tormented you about your own nature, has slandered you to the neighbors and has treated you as worthless. You note that he does no work himself, but regularly steals half of your paycheck before you have a chance to enjoy any of it. You see his bloody, murderous present in the context of his bloody, murderous history, and you wonder just what sort of monster you married. No matter: he is certainly not the man you imagined, nor the man he claims to be.

"I love you" by nubuck @ sxc.hu

You try to reform your husband, but he is recalcitrant; in fact, the beatings become even more severe when you do so. You try to enlist the help of neighbors and friends, but they all rebuff you, saying that your husband can’t possibly be an evil psychopath — after all, look at the millions of good things he’s done! You find few if any people that can see through the deception. You realize that your husband is the very embodiment of evil, and that you have been duped into believing him virtuous, duped into the marriage and lied to every day and through every one of his acts. You realize that your love was misplaced, as it was based on lies.

Clearly, it’s time for a divorce.

It is a sad fact of human existence that there are tendencies in our psychology where people who are victimized become bonded to and emotionally dependent on those who prey upon them. Battered person syndrome is one such, and Stockholm syndrome is another. I have known many people, largely women, who have gotten trapped in abusive relationships with the most despicable creatures. Worse than seeing their bruises or wounds, worse than crying with them, worse than knowing the agony of their pain is hearing them justify why they really ought to stay with the person closest to them and who causes them the greatest harm — for the children, for the house, for the money, to avoid looking like a failure in marriage, because what will the neighbors think, because a marriage is a gift from “God”, because they think themselves worthless, because maybe “this time” it will all work out for the best, etc. Trying to talk these poor souls out of such situations, especially when you care for them personally, is most often an exercise in bitter disappointment as you watch them again and again return for more and more abuse.

The one thing they really must do in order to save themselves is to sever the abusive relationship immediately: pack your things, leave the house, start a new life, get a divorce, never look back.

I’ve done the first few of those things, now it’s time for the next step. It is my intent to divorce the criminal enterprise which calls itself “The United States of America”. I will not remain bonded to evil voluntarily through the exercise of citizenship.

Experts may argue over if the Stockholm syndrome really exists. One needn’t go to the experts to ascertain a plainly visible phenomena. Human beings tend not only to accept life within oppressive social structures, but to love and cherish it. They invent fanciful reasons justifying their subordinate position and go to the extent of punishing those who refuse to accept their assigned position. Such a person is generally considered “well adjusted” in human society. Human society as we know it is Stockholm syndrome at a gigantic scale.

Well worth a read, and even more so for the Cthulhu bonus.

Read: Stockholm Syndrome Society