Thread by @ECMcLaughlin

So I have been reading about PTSD and family abuse for this new program we’re running at @GaiaWomenLead. Yesterday I interviewed Stanford’s foremost researcher on this issues.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it explains everything about White women who vote for Trump.

In families where there is violent abuse of children, it’s a frequent phenomenon that one child (or more) will align themselves with the abuser to try to protect themselves. Over time, they can take on the qualities of the abuser, and play on their sympathy, to try to avoid abuse

These patterns continue into adulthood (this slayed me because I have it personally), where the adult siblings continue a repetition where one child is the victim and the other aligns with the abuser to continue to harm the victim, even in cases where the abuser is dead.

This is one of the ways that we get to intergenerational trauma, because then the siblings’ dynamic is reflected in their own children as THEY watch their parents play out the dynamics of their childhood abuse.

I got a lot of info in this interview on breaking cycles of abuse, and how it’s often the abused who have to refuse to continue the cycle, disconnect, shun and not replicate the childhood patterns, which sucks, but it’s self-preservation and cycle breaking.

Now imagine white supremacist patriarchy is the abusive parent. One child gets repeatedly beaten to a pulp. The other child decides, as a child and at a primal level, to align with the abuser because maybe it’ll help them to not get beaten.

Of course, everyone gets beaten anyway

but one kid decides to fight back and the other decides to take on the qualities of the abuser. These choices aren’t usually conscious.

(And here’s how the @MsPackyetti quote about whiteness not saving you from what patriarchy has in store for you rings true in the science!)

This choice plays through all the way to adulthood, where that 52% of White women choose to align with the abuser (WSP) because somewhere the unconscious choice is that they’ll be safer for it (NOT).

Now, if you’re a White woman, I want you to ask yourself how u deal with this.

In my own family, I have basically had to ignore and disconnect from a sibling who still aligns with my abusive parent. The dynamic is too toxic. And so won’t carry it forward to my kids, no matter what. They’re going to understand that we don’t tolerate abuse or abusers.

In the realm of power and whiteness, however: how many of us continue to engage with white women friends who endorse Trump or republicans without calling them out on their bullshit?

Without explaining to them that they’re aligning with the abuser, and how?

How many of us continue those relationships and just “decide” that we have the privilege to “set politics aside” rather than ending the replication and the pattern that allows white women who align with the abuser to get away with it and be tolerated nonetheless?

How many of us maintain those friendships and thereby enable the same patterns in women’s relationships to be modeled to the next generation, for fear of “losing a friend” or “not being liked”?

Worse yet, how many of us do that without even thinking about the impact of that tolerance on our POC and LGBTQ sisters and brothers, and therefore by default align with the abuser ourselves, no matter how woke we think we are?

White supremacist patriarchy is the ultimate abusive parent. White women who know this, and see it, and fight against it, ALSO have an obligation to collect our white sisters who align with the abusive parent, and to try to do that first with education and accountability.

But if that doesn’t work, and you’re not going to like this, we must REJECT and SHUN that white sister *for the sake of the next generatiion* and to break the pattern.

This may sound harsh, but it’s real and we MUST do it.

No more tolerating women who align with the abuser.

No more allowing them continuation of harm and complicity.

The healing we’ll do and provide for future generations will be immeasurable.

And by the way, yes, you have been abused by white supremacist patriarchy.

(PS. We all have, even men, and Black women most of all.)

We have to do the work to heal the trauma it’s done within ourselves. We have to consciously choose to reject carrying it forward.

Because the impact generations forward and generations back is noxious, repetitive, and harms our kids and their kids and so on if we don’t.

If we are going to be revolutionaries and change the world, we must also heal it, and that includes breaking cycles of abuse, and for white women in particular, refusing to tolerate white sisters who align with the abuser, period.

That’s it—some light thoughts on PTSD science, trauma and cycle breaking on a Tuesday morning— again written from bed before coffee so please excuse the typos.

/end