MAID, a story about Emotional Abuse

First of all, I hope the title doesn’t trigger annoyance, given the over-use of the term: Emotional-abuse, nowadays.

Emotional abuse is understandably tricky to depict, understand and alleviate. It’s also very subjective, we rely on common-sense and common-experiences to relate to someone’s misery, which in this case, is internal and usually, unseen.

It is in most cases hidden underneath symptoms of depression, panic attacks or/and anxieties. And much more.

If you are interested in behavioral psychology, your social media feed is probably stacked with videos, quotes or texts about the subject. In fact, so much you’re probably now sick of it, and starting to doubt the legitimacy of these terms, now seemingly thrown anywhere.

I mean, some would point a bartender handling them coffee without a smile is a minor kind of emotional-abuse.

I’m only throwing a ridicule example to make a point.

How do we really assess if someone is emotionally abused or not?

I found a first track of a permanent answer after watching the Serie: MAID.

Maid is a mini serie, a story about an early 20 woman, living in a trailer with an alcoholic partner, sharing a daughter, the lovely 2 year old Maddy, and her precipice to secure a balanced, danger free life for her.

Alex (graciously played by Margaret Qualley), the protagonist is particularly smart and resilient. Before falling for her partner, she dealt with a hippie undiagnosed bipolar mother. Her sense of responsibility and self-reliance started early on, so it’s not surprising to see her navigating her way up from homeless to a scholarship student in a writing program (Yes, the story has a hopeful ending).

The serie is based on the memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land.

Now, to get back to that question about detecting and dealing with someone else’s emotional abuse (As I cannot provide answers to how to deal with it yourself, I haven’t yet experienced the tragedy of it happening to me).

First enlightening conclusion: Don’t ask for proofs.

Emotional abuse is proofless, it’s corrosive, it’s malicious. Why? because the abusers have different personas: the one you’ll see, and the one their closed ones deal with. An abuser could be the best seller and work partner in a professional setting, you have to be a real voyant to see through that.

Here’s how I* understand emotional abuse:

A situation where a person A exercise intimidating, degrading and morally fucked up behavior towards a person B, leveraging his/her power (person A) to sustain the situation of dominance upon the person B.

Second enlightening conclusion: What might work for someone B (a) might not work for someone B (b). We are different, our fight/flight systems are wired differently, depending on our sensitivities, character and history.

We’ve all seen this, in school, when there is a bully scene, we’ve seen plenty of them, and the reactions varies; responding with tears, screams, hiding or escalating anxiety (Speech block, Reddening, Sweating and sometimes even peeing oneself).

So to take a one procedure for all when it comes to helping or guiding someone out of their emotionally abusive situation is first and foremost a personal interaction. A one to one exchange.

Emotional abuse in the case of Alex came in the shape of anger-management problems with her partner Sean. Sean is a bartender, he’s also an alcoholic in denial. He started losing his shit when in an argument with Alex (which could be about anything). One time, he got angry and threw a ball of Chilli soup on the wall, right next to Alex’s head.

What is remarkable in the series, is the attention to details and frames’ focus. The camera is right where we have to be attentive; Alex’s reaction.

The scenes are so vividly portrayed, you can easily slip into the character’s shoes and feel what they’re feeling.

This is done so well in the show that there is almost no character left to despise or hate. Because that focus gives the exact amount of attention to grasp the inner-working of each, portraying thus the bad and the good.

Except for Alex’s dad, that one’s just an asshole in denial.

I know how easy it is to slip to the default biased question; Emotional abuse isn’t abuse, you just have to yell back. Or leave?

It does sound easier to deal with a situation where there is no physical harm, but when did we decide that physical harm is less hurtful than emotional harm? Why do we keep forgetting that a word can cut you in pieces and damage you more than any wooden bat could.

Emotional abuse is worse. It leaves space for a whole bunch of sneaky questions like:

Am I overreacting?

→ When your surroundings don’t seem to believe you, or make it less BAD than you’re describing it, adding to it the natural self-doubt and fear of change (because leaving an emotional abuser is forcing yourself into a change of scenery that’s hard to step into, like all changes when we grow up, for most of us)

Can I fix him/her? Should I be patient with her/him until this ‘phase’ passes?

→ Naturally, it’s the empathetic one that’s more likely to be abused. If you lack empathy, hurting someone won’t be a problem, in fact, one might do it without even being aware of it. Empathy isn’t just a cheesy way to say someone is nice, you can be empathetic without being considered ‘nice’. Empathy is like having this code in your brain, able to decrypt people’s facial and body expressions to conclude their psychological state. It’s just that. Acting upon your empathy isn’t necessarily empathy, it’s charity, agreeableness,..etc.

There is a podcast by RadioLab, it was about what makes a hero a hero? The definition of a hero is someone who puts him/her self in a situation of danger to save someone else from the danger.

The conclusions of long studies on this matter concluded that to be a hero, you can’t be too empathic. Meaning that, you can’t be the kind of person who allows emotional transfer easily (and I’m using allows because it really is a choice once you’re aware of it).

Emotional transfer is when you feel what someone else is feeling as if you are them. It can get to a point where sensory receptors are involved.

I used to allow emotional transfer (still do, only a bit moderately now). A few years ago, we went to the hospital to pick up our newly mother maid (funny coincidence hah!), and I asked her how did the labor go, she gave me a detailed descriptive answer, which involved the use of a metallic tool to widen the opening of her cervix.

We went from me holding her as a support to the reverse. I almost fainted, went through all the pale color palette. At the end, it was so intense that I needed 30min, a brownie and a juice bottle to regain myself.

In a situation of emotional abuse, there is a consensus that the abusers share the good cup bad cup character portrayed in different contexts.

When the abused decides to leave, speak up or fight back (through legal means), the abuser suddenly shifts to the defenseless victim of his own demons, that he himself is victim to his anger outbursts and hostile behavior.

What happens then? The person B (I don’t like using the word victim) is compelled by his empathy and emotional transfer to stick around and help the poor abuser out.

Why some of us might accept a situation like this goes beyond listing. For now, with what I’ve come to know and experience, the most important question to ask ourselves is: What kind of love-attachment do we have?

In most cases, and especially in acute ones, the abused is someone who grew up in an almost similar dynamic. Where abuse was somehow accepted. Any counter-reaction was silenced, for the sake of an illusion feel of peace.

Luckily for Alex, her mother did not. The father of Alex was abusive, not just emotionally.

Alex did not know that when she first encountered her father later on. She was too young when her mother ran away with her to Alaska. We discover that part of her past (darkened by her brain to alleviate the pain, and it happens a lot, when we don’t remember bad memories, non-intentionally. It’s a defense-mechanism operated by the brain to protect us). She remembers through a breakthrough scene, where after experiencing a panic attack as she got stuck in the attic of a house she was cleaning with a woman (dark and closed).

She didn’t understand why she suddenly had that panic attack. The woman welcoming them into the DV Shelter suggests she looks closer into that, as panic attacks is our body trying to tell us something.

And she was right.

Alex locks herself up back voluntarily in that attic to hear what her body is trying to tell her, and it revealed to her the memory of her as a child, hiding in a closed shelf of the kitchen, hiding from the scary man hitting and screaming at her mother.

Alex rides all sorts of problematic tides, you really feel for her as she can’t seem to get a rest.

I watched this story on the 2nd day of my PMS, I was down, tired and melancholic as fuck. Alex gave me a sense of power, a power I aspire to grow, a power that will surely get me out of future unexpected calamities.

However, it’s not that simple. Hah! Alex is human too, she had her momentary slip into the abyss (which is literally a scene of Alex in an Abyss!). After coming back to Sean, the familiarity, the illusion of hope from Sean’s efforts to stay sober and his romantic gestures to get them back (Alex and Maddy), only to slip back again when Alex and their daughter are in his trailer.

Alex was tired, so tired, she gave up.

It was her daughter, the responsibility and love for her that pushed her to get up back again, and run, this time, for the last time.

My take out of the show is this: Please, please, please don’t underestimate the gravity of emotional abuse. Listen carefully to what person B is saying, be patient, be safe, be reliable and trustworthy to access their full story, and don’t try to theorize it, intellectualize it or legalize it, all you need is your humanity and intuition to depict if the person is telling you the truth about how they’re feeling.

And help out, help out, help out!

Lovingly,

Emna