The heart of violence

Cancel culture, prisons, and all forms of punitive ‘justice’ that dehumanize perpetrators fundamentally abandon survivors and leave us alone with the question: Why?

The question repeated like a prayer, cried out as a heart-wrenching sob caught in the throat, circled around endlessly is: Why? Another variation of this question is: How could you?

We love to repeat the fact that most sexual assaults happen in the context of relationship, but we refuse to grapple with what that means. Politically, collectively, in our understanding of what this violence is and how it works, we turn perpetrators into monsters that can easily be disposed of. We can erase the problem all together by dehumanizing the perpetrators and getting rid of them (somehow).

This is not true for a great number of survivors because our perpetrators aren’t monsters, aren’t strangers, aren’t two dimensional caricatures of evil. These are people we love. People we loved.

My introduction to violence was incest. (My introduction to sexuality was also incest.) Any incest survivor can tell you it’s complicated. Home, love, belonging, threat, terror, impossible unspeakable horror. It’s all wrapped up together.

Like so many incest survivors I went on to experience domestic violence. Domestic violence repeats the same pattern. Someone I loved in the deepest parts of me (the parts of me that survived) put my body through a wall. Got on top of me and cut off my breath. Screamed in my face the most hurtful things he could think to say. Produced my submission.

Home, love, belonging, threat, terror, impossible unspeakable horror. It’s all wrapped up together.

We abandon survivors when we refuse to ask the question with them: Why?

How could you?

I have rocked my body on the ground, drunk and sobbing, shaking and splitting open at the very root of me, repeating the question over and over and over again.

Why?

This question has followed me all my life and at any given moment there is usually some part of me working away at it. Trying to figure it out.

Calling perpetrators bad, exempting them from humanity, cutting them out like a tumour: I get the appeal. It feels so soothing to be done with it. It feels so deliciously righteous to say that the problem is in them, some fundamental flaw or some essential error, something about them specifically that is just bad.

If it is their fault and their fault alone then we can punish them and get rid of them (somehow) and be done with it.

What a simple solution.

Anyone who has loved their abuser knows that it’s not so simple. Anyone who has been loved by their abuser knows it’s not so simple. Anyone who knows the full complex humanity of someone who has done horrible, violent things knows that the easy, appealing story of them being a monster simply doesn’t cut it.

People repeat to me that they shouldn’t have to consider the humanity of abusers. Well, I have to. I have always had to. Because it has always been completely obvious to me that the people who did these violent and dehumanizing things to me were, themselves, human beings.

I have always had to ask why. What leads someone to a place where they sexually abuse a child, rape someone, physically assault someone? What leads someone to violate and traumatize another human being?

People get extremely mad at me for asking these questions. People get especially mad at me for asking these questions while insisting on the humanity of the people I’m asking these questions about. But it is literally my experience as a survivor that leads me to these questions, and to my insistence that perpetrators are fully complex human beings just like me and you. I know they are because I have known and loved them.

The answer I have arrived at after sitting with this question for most of my life is: dissociation.

Dissociation is the mechanism that allows one human being to violate, traumatize, and dehumanize another.

Dissociation allows us to know and not know something simultaneously. It allows something to be experienced as both real and not real simultaneously. It allows certain information to disappear from sight completely. It allows us to cut off feeling, sensation, empathy, connection, memory, and many other things that constitute our coherent experience of reality.

We are always dissociating when we see someone as less completely real than ourselves. We are always dissociating when we inflict pain upon another without feeling it ourselves. And there are more complex and ellaborate forms of dissociation that any survivor of sexual abuse knows all about. Reality can literally be carved into pieces that never come anywhere near each other. This necessary skill that allows us to survive abuse is also the same thing operating inside our perpetrators allowing them to do what they are doing.

They may know and also not know. They may know and not feel. They may have flashes of feeling disconnected from knowing. The severed past may overlay the present in ways that make the present disappear. The horror of impossible things may be sublimated into actions that are acted out onto human beings who they cannot really see, know, or recognize here and now. Dissociation takes many forms and can operate in many distinct ways. It is, in many cases, extremely complicated.

But I am sure that all violence is rooted in dissociation. All of it.

And all dissociation is a skill that we develop when knowing what we know is too much. All dissociation is born from trauma and overwhelm.

What this means is that trauma and overwhelm produce dissociation which makes violence possible and then violence creates more dissociation which makes more violence possible. What this means is that we can follow the thread of violence back to its source. We can find the cause and we can take both personal (when necessary) and collective responsibility for it.

We can find ways to be with what is without dissociating. We can teach and build this skill in ourselves and with each other. We can build cultures that can be with the truth. We can build families where dissociation isn’t necessary. We can create collective and personal containers with the help of skilled healers to face what has happened.

We must face what has happened. All of us.

Our desire for a simple story of blame prevents us from understanding why so many people are dissociating like this. We see any suggestion that trauma may be at play in perpetrators as a dismissal of the seriousness of what they have done. But it’s quite the opposite.

Taking violence seriously means knowing that human beings are the ones enacting this violence. Dehumanization is a cop out and a refusal to take collective responsibility. It’s washing our hands of a problem instead of facing it.

I have been staring into the face of incest, child sexual abuse, physical assault, and rape for so fucking long. From that incoherent desperate repeated Why? has come a lifetime of deep introspection, reading, listening, considering, thinking, praying, and reflecting. I have never been able to turn away.

Whether or not you agree with my conclusion, I don’t want to be punished for my sincere attempts at answering this question. I don’t want to be punished and dehumanized for doing the work of facing the horrible things that human beings are capable of.

I don’t want to be left alone with this work either.

Cancel culture, prisons, and all forms of punitive ‘justice’ that dehumanize perpetrators fundamentally abandon survivors and leave us alone with the question: Why?

We know the answer is not inherent badness or lack of humanity.

The heart of violence, the profound betrayal of violence, is dissociation.

If we follow this thread we will find what we need to prevent violence, to transform violence, and to heal.

All of us.

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Announcements and new things

• The Stuck Places are Portals: One on One Generative Conversations (Now with sliding scale options)

• Talking Shit with Zachary Zane: Sex is a Huge Part of my Sexuality

• Talking Shit with Andrea Gibson: A Difficult Life is Not Less Worth Living Than a Gentle One

• riverbed (a new perzine)

• Bisexual Girls With Baggage

• Trauma Informed Polyamory Zine Preorder

• Evolving Love Podcast: Trauma Informed Polyamory & Breakups in the Age of Cancel Culture

• iWeigh with Jameela Jamil: F*cking Cancelled with Clementine Morrigan

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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