Domestic Violence Awareness Month

My heart aches deeply today…we have never lived in a world that does well at protecting its most vulnerable, but for more than half of my adult lifetime we seemed to be slowly and gradually moving in a direction of mutual understanding, empathy, equality and compassion. Yesterday, I sat listening to the latest administration condescend and gaslight their highest-level of senior military leaders. The narrative steeped in toxic masculinity where ‘asserting dominance’ is a show of strength and embracing a social justice lens is ‘ideological garbage, naïve, dangerous and a weakness’.

This is a COERCIVE CONTROL narrative.

With the ongoing stripping of all protections of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens; fragile, weak narcissistic men are fighting to ‘restore normed male standards’. This narrative centralizes the white male as the measuring stick and elevates violence, aggression, threats, humiliation, intimidation and gaslighting all in the name of protecting its status. This is psychological warfare and is at the heart of domestic abuse.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and it is more important than ever for us to understand the underlying culture as protections disappear, and violence is emboldened. Aggravated domestic assaults have increased the past decade and 38% of all murders of women in the US are committed by an intimate partner. I shudder to think of the children that are growing up in this climate and how these numbers will increase as they internalize the current cultural climate.

Today I grieve the countless lost lives and the trauma so many of you carry that comes from loving someone whose only currency was to control. You didn't choose the abuse, you chose love and there is nothing about you that asked for it or deserved it. It could happen to any one of us.