I'm very happy you stopped by and thank you! Your thoughts on the matter elsewhere, along with Emmie's were my primary inspiration for this. And I have so much love for your post here, I don't know where to begin.
I've never read The Gift of Fear, but I've read about it more than once in context of people - particularly women - being socialized to ignore our instincts about when people are threats.
I'd never even heard of that book - I assume it's a book - but the title tells me exactly what it's about. The line of thought is probably very similar to Dr Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger which I nearly quoted from in the meta (I could certainly do an entire series analyzing the show via Lerner's work.). This quote from her preface for the 1997 reprint keys in perfectly to this episode and the series as a whole:
"Anger is one of the most painful emotions we experience, and the most difficult to use wisely and well. Yet our anger is an important signal that always deserves attention and respect. The difficulty is that feeling angry doesn't tell us what is wrong, or what specifically we can do that will make things better rather than worse.
In RL whenever I've ignored those "gut feelings", I've regretted it otherwise, when I have the opportunity to make a choice. It's a bit harder to do as a kid, when you're dependent on your parents, have no income, transportation, etc. I could have made other choices - to leave the house, to tell someone, and keep telling someone until the situation changed, but I don't think I was aware that was an option. Your parents' house, you abide by their rules.
And then she's pretty perceptive - she picks up on his gaslighting, even if she doesn't know what to call it
I forgot about the term, "gaslighting" but that's a perfect description, I shall have to adopt it henceforth.
Even the purely emotional stuff that gets chalked up to jealousy, like her skepticism about Ted moving in too fast, actually hits the nail on the head with some red flags for abuse.
YES, this. Her perceptions are often doubted, right until the end of the series, but in part because of that anger - even in End of Days, her instinct are right but the ways she goes about it is wrong, and things escalate. In Living Conditions her sense that her roommate is a demon is dismissed because she's perceived as being bitchy and irrational. (Which is played for laughs - but her roommate is slowly STEALING HER SOUL. That's a massive violation, and one that gets dismissed or overlooked by the other characters and by the fandom because of the "comedy" aspect.)
Buffy knows, and the World According to The Patriarchy Ted keeps telling her she's just being a silly girl.
One thing that's been a particular struggle for me is being able to say "this is what I saw/felt", to speak my truth, because it's very easy for me to let others convince me that I'm wrong, my memory is at fault, I didn't see/experience/feel what I think I did. It's a real struggle; there's a lack of personal boundaries. (I once had a therapist tell me that most of the time she has to work to break down walls with patients, with me the problem was that I had no walls. I think that's inaccurate - isolating myself is certainly an effective way to build a wall - but it's certainly true that the boundaries are porous; it's easy for me to privilege someone else's perspective over my own, "oh I must be wrong here".)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-03-25 07:35 pm (UTC)I've never read The Gift of Fear, but I've read about it more than once in context of people - particularly women - being socialized to ignore our instincts about when people are threats.
I'd never even heard of that book - I assume it's a book - but the title tells me exactly what it's about. The line of thought is probably very similar to Dr Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger which I nearly quoted from in the meta (I could certainly do an entire series analyzing the show via Lerner's work.). This quote from her preface for the 1997 reprint keys in perfectly to this episode and the series as a whole:
"Anger is one of the most painful emotions we experience, and the most difficult to use wisely and well. Yet our anger is an important signal that always deserves attention and respect. The difficulty is that feeling angry doesn't tell us what is wrong, or what specifically we can do that will make things better rather than worse.
In RL whenever I've ignored those "gut feelings", I've regretted it otherwise, when I have the opportunity to make a choice. It's a bit harder to do as a kid, when you're dependent on your parents, have no income, transportation, etc. I could have made other choices - to leave the house, to tell someone, and keep telling someone until the situation changed, but I don't think I was aware that was an option. Your parents' house, you abide by their rules.
And then she's pretty perceptive - she picks up on his gaslighting, even if she doesn't know what to call it
I forgot about the term, "gaslighting" but that's a perfect description, I shall have to adopt it henceforth.
Even the purely emotional stuff that gets chalked up to jealousy, like her skepticism about Ted moving in too fast, actually hits the nail on the head with some red flags for abuse.
YES, this. Her perceptions are often doubted, right until the end of the series, but in part because of that anger - even in End of Days, her instinct are right but the ways she goes about it is wrong, and things escalate. In Living Conditions her sense that her roommate is a demon is dismissed because she's perceived as being bitchy and irrational. (Which is played for laughs - but her roommate is slowly STEALING HER SOUL. That's a massive violation, and one that gets dismissed or overlooked by the other characters and by the fandom because of the "comedy" aspect.)
Buffy knows, and the World According to The Patriarchy Ted keeps telling her she's just being a silly girl.
One thing that's been a particular struggle for me is being able to say "this is what I saw/felt", to speak my truth, because it's very easy for me to let others convince me that I'm wrong, my memory is at fault, I didn't see/experience/feel what I think I did. It's a real struggle; there's a lack of personal boundaries. (I once had a therapist tell me that most of the time she has to work to break down walls with patients, with me the problem was that I had no walls. I think that's inaccurate - isolating myself is certainly an effective way to build a wall - but it's certainly true that the boundaries are porous; it's easy for me to privilege someone else's perspective over my own, "oh I must be wrong here".)