295 - Polyamory and Intimate Partner Violence (with Christy Croft)
Violence in relationships
Every relationship has the potential for domestic or intimate partner violence, but in LGBT and/or polyamorous relationships, sometimes there are different factors that affect how intimate partner violence should be dealt with. This week our guest is Christy Croft, who has over a decade of experience as a crisis hotline advocate, support group leader, and hospital and legal accompaniment for survivors.
Christy has been gracious enough to go into detail with their vast knowledge of relationship dynamics and intimate partner violence, and addresses the following during this episode:
Intimate partner violence basics, such as power and control patterns.
Parallels and comparisons to LGBTQ intimate partner violence frameworks.
“Polyamorous traps” or intimate partner violence issues that are unique to non-traditional relationships that can potentially lay groundwork for abuse.
The common cultural belief that polyamory is “inherently abusive” versus the equally common belief that polyamory is “more progressive” or “enlightened” and how those two beliefs can affect relationships in toxic ways.
Some common questions about intimate partner violence, such as how to distinguish abuse versus just a dysfunctional relationship and how to tell if an abuser is actually changing behavior or not.
Advice and support for other partners and/or friends, as well as resources and suggestions.
Be sure to listen to the full episode and find more of Christy Croft on their website, www.christycroft.com, email them at christy.croft@icloud.com, or find them on Twitter and Instagram as @christycroft or Facebook at @completeconsentculture.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Dedeker: Hey listeners, I'm jumping in with a quick content warning about today's episode. We are going to be talking about abuse, violence, sexual assault, and survivorhood. If you're in a place where you're feeling like you need more resources or if you listened to the entire episode and would like some resources after, there's a lot out there, but we highly recommend going to loveisrespect.org to get information and support.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast. We're talking about polyamory and intimate partner violence with Christy Croft. Christy is a violence prevention trainer with over a decade of experience as a crisis hotline advocate, answering hotlines, leading support groups and providing hospital and legal accompaniment for survivors. Croft's current work brings together their lived experience years of direct service and community-based consent and prevention education work as well as graduate study in social justice, human rights and gender theory. Wow, that's a lot. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast, Christy.
Christy: Thank you for having me.
Dedeker: Just to set the stage a little bit this episode is going to be coming out last week of October provided we don't mess anything up on our end with the scheduling and October is domestic violence awareness month or intimate partner violence awareness month, is that correct?
Christy: Yes. Most people call it domestic violence awareness month, and sometimes we use intimate partner violence just to make sure we're clarifying that could apply to people even if they don't live in the same home together. Dating violence would fall under intimate partner Violence.
Dedeker: All right, that makes sense.
Jase: When I hear domestic violence, I also think of like child abuse and things that, but when I hear intimate partner violence, I think of romantic partners. Are they a little different or do they all refer to the same stuff?
Christy: They are so domestic violence, frequently, when we think of domestic violence, we are thinking about partners who live together, but domestic violence is any violence between people who live in the same home. It can include roommates or children. Whereas intimate partner violence is specific to people who are in an intimate relationship with each other.
Jase: Got it. They overlap but aren't necessarily interchangeable. Okay, that's good to know. I never knew that.
Emily: Some Of our listeners might know you from our patron Facebook group, but for those who don't, can you talk a little bit more about yourself, how you got into these lines of work, things like that?
Christy: Sure, I started doing crisis work. Actually, I started doing crisis work on a suicide and self-harm hotline in 1994, but I did start doing specific to partner and sexual violence in 2009. I was a volunteer at my local rape crisis center. I did hotlines, answering those late night calls from people who were in crisis to listen to them, frequently did hospital accompaniment with them as well. I would go to the hospital while people were having rape kits done, so they wouldn't have to be alone. I could talk them through the process and keep them company when the nurses were in the other room. I'm also doing court and law enforcement accompaniments. Going to sit with someone and just hold space for them while they're giving a statement or testifying or having a court date.
I love doing that work so much that I ended up getting trained to facilitate support groups as well. The group I primarily did was the sexuality and intimacy after assault group, which was a group for survivors of sexual violence, whether it was child abuse, child, sexual abuse, or as an adult who wanted to get more reconnected with their bodies sexually and with partners and in a way that felt safe.
I did that for years and did some community-based prevention, work and consent education, sexual health education. Really loved doing that. While most of my work focused on sexual violence, that often happens in the context of dating relationships. All of us in both of those fields, domestic violence and sexual violence, get cross-trained extensively.
Emily: I want to highlight something because you mentioned, "I just absolutely love this work and have loved the work that I've done," I think to most people hearing your CV essentially be like, "Wow, sounds like a tough job and a drag maybe." In my own experience working with clients, I could probably make some guesses about what is about this work that you love, but I would love to hear directly from you kind of what the pearls have been here doing this kind of work.
Christy: I think one thing that I want to be clear about as is I don't come into this work to get my own healing. I come into this work to support others in their healing, but I'm also a survivor of every form of violence that I work in. That was a while back. I'm in a better place, healing is non-linear. There are still days when it doesn't feel like I'm at the advanced level for sure, but I feel like now that I'm in a reasonably stable place in my life, there's something about being able to be with someone during a really vulnerable and frightening time knowing what that feels like to be in that uncertainty and that fear, and not only not know what to expect in your environment but also be feeling a little out of control with yourself in the midst of that trauma. There's something about being able to be a grounding presence that is really fulfilling and feels good. There have been people who were there for me and still are on days that I'm struggling when I'm feeling especially raw and vulnerable. I know how much I appreciate that grounding presence of someone who's not in the tornado with me.
Dedeker: Gosh. We just got real deep, real fast and I love it. I love it.
Christy:
Dedeker: It makes me think of-- Oh, gosh. Who was it? I'm going to totally botch who it was. Was it Eugene Gendlin? Probably not. Probably not. Somebody said, somebody wise said that the definition of benevolence is when you've carved out a corner where you can get grounded and resourced. I guess, like you were saying, stepping out of that tornado where you can essentially offer that to someone who is in the tornado who is spinning, who is floundering or who is dealing with something just like so immensely disorienting, that is what benevolence is. I think it makes a lot of sense.
Christy: It's a nice gift to be able to provide that for someone. That's not to say that I don't have my own tornadoes. I want to be real clear on that. In talking to other advocates, we all laugh that I'll be having a tornado over the fact that I can't open the bag that my coffee beans came in. Losing it and then suddenly I get a crisis call and it's like you immediately drop-in because you've developed-- It's like a switch that flips when you do this work to where you're able to drop into a different presence. Then hang up the call, debrief for a little bit, and go back to crying about my coffee beans.
Dedeker: I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Christy: That flip switch.
Jase: Gosh. In getting into this episode and to start us all off with a basic foundation first, could we go over just some of the basics of intimate partner violence? Like what that is, what some of the common patterns of power and control are, just lay that framework, and then we'll go on to talk about that a little more specifically about non-monogamy, polyamory, queer relationships, things like that.
Christy: Sure. Partner violence, partner abuse happens anytime that there is a pattern of power and control that's used for-- Like a pattern of behavior, of manipulation, of threats and fear and coercion. Sometimes just subtle gaslighting that's consistent that one partner uses to maintain a position of power over another to make sure they're getting what they need and want out of the relationship and that their partners stays in the relationship and stays giving them what they need.
It's interesting because when we think about our criminal code for domestic violence, we tend to think of incidences. Someone hit someone, someone punched a wall, someone yelled at someone, someone blocked your freedom of movement and wouldn't let you out the door. Those are in fact harmful things to do to someone. However, one of the interesting things to come out of LGBTQ partner violence study and advocacy is recognition of the fact that sometimes even survivors engage in those incidences as part of trying to survive abuse.
That's something that keeps people from coming forward when they can look back and remember that time they punched the wall or that they wouldn't let their partner leave and are afraid of that coming to light or maybe questioning themselves. This is why it's really important to remember while an abusive incident is still not okay, that when we want to look at intimate partner violence and its dynamics, you need to pull back a little bit and look at the context in which it happens.
We're looking for a pattern of power and control. We're looking at things like who is making themselves smaller to avoid escalating their partner? Who is changing their life and their routines to avoid making their partner anxious? Who is cutting off contact or limiting contact with the other important people in their lives so that their partner will still treat them kindly? I think sometimes focusing on incidences, it can be helpful in some situations, but it can also distract us from the overall pattern.
Police don't come out to your house if they get caught on a DV call and say, "So tell me about the last six months of your life and your everyday dynamics, who talks in certain ways?" They come out and say, "Who did this one thing tonight that we got called here for?" When we're looking at supporting survivors and identifying violence and helping survivors to understand if they're in an abusive situation, it's important to remember the pattern.
Dedeker: It's interesting to look at this on a macro cultural level. I feel like in American culture, in Western culture, in general, we really gravitate towards things that are very black and white and we love black and whites. There's this sense of it's just so much more for some reason appealing or understandable to us if we can have someone who's abusive and violent and they're 100% evil, always abusive, always violent and we have like a 100% innocent victim on the other side, when in reality that's pretty much never how it goes.
It's like the person who is abusive and violent or controlling or gaslighting or manipulative, of course, has moments where they're also a good person or kind, or compassionate or affectionate or loving. Then same thing on the side of the survivor or the victim that, like you said, there's so many incidences where it's like, "Oh, well, I didn't behave well either.
I also yelled. I also screamed. I also punched the wall or pushed my partner away," or whatever.
I feel like that, I wouldn't necessarily call it the crux of the issue, but I do see that being such an obstacle towards cycles changing or people getting help or systems changing because we still-- I feel like we're still very much attached to this idea of the 100% evil abuser and the 100% innocent blameless victim when we don't actually have real-life examples of how that playing out that way.
Christy: That harms people on all sides of it. It harms people who are abusing their partners because they don't want to come forward to get help for what they're doing because then they have to take on this stigma of being a monster, but it also harms survivors because of users then turn around, people who are abusive or harm doers then turned around and weaponize that narrative against the survivor by saying things like, "You punched the wall, you're abusive."
Especially when there's already a pattern of gaslighting in someone struggling to really know if they can trust their reality, having a partner point to your behaviors and things you've done and say, "Actually, you're the one who's abusive," can be even more disorienting and confusing. That's where it's important. Another distinction-- I know incidences and patterns is a good distinction, but another one is harm and abuse. Not all harm is abuse.
All of us are capable of enacting harm or harming other people at different points. All of us are capable of, for a variety of reasons, slipping into our trauma and causing harm to someone sometimes even unintentionally. Sometimes just because we're being trauma babies. Everybody does that. I have a friend who I respect deeply, who was recently sharing with me about an experience with someone who was really giving her a hard time.
She told me, "As I was hearing him say this, I was feeling this impulse come up in me to like twist the situation and to say, 'That's not how it worked,' and to try to deny things. Then I realized that would be gaslighting if I said that, so I stopped myself," and that was mind-boggling to me because it's the first time I've ever had anyone who is someone I love and respect and don't think of as someone who's abusive at all discuss the fact that sometimes we have that impulse come up to be like, "Oh, you're wrong. That's not really how it went down," because we're defending ourselves.
Dedeker: Ever since you said-- Sorry to take this on this tangent, but ever since you said trauma babies, I'm hearing it with like the Muppet Babies theme song in my head.
Jase: Gosh.
Dedeker: But to bring us back, you talking about looking at isolated incidences versus looking at patterns, you said, came out of like our study of LGBTQ partner violence study. I am curious to hear a little bit more about why is it that studying queer relationships and partner violence, it happens in that context? Like what are the different things that we've learned from that that's different from looking at just like heterosexual relationships?
Christy: We know when we look at the history of the partner violence narratives, we have this assumed narrative that it is a woman who is being abused by a man. That's just the assumption that that's how it always is. If there's fighting and escalating, and again, we're looking at these criminal justice framings that then seep their way into our general understanding of an issue, when they come out, they know who they're coming out to help and who they're coming out to talk to or arrest. There's an assumption there.
What happened is once we started getting more information out there about partner violence in LGBTQ communities and in same-sex relationships, if they got called out, it's like, we don't know. We don't have a framework for understanding who's the harm doer because they're both saying the other one caused harm. They're both making these accusations against each other. How do we know how to navigate this?
Some states even at that point had mandatory arrest laws to wear as a cooling down measure. If they get called in some states to a DV call, they know they have to arrest one of them to separate them for the night.
Dedeker: Wow.
Emily: Oh, wow.
Dedeker: Oh, my goodness.
Christy: What happens when you come out to a same-sex couple who's having a domestic dispute and you need to arrest somebody, but you're not sure who, and in a lot of cases they would just arrest both of them,-
Dedeker: Oh my God.
Christy: -which it's not a trauma-informed, a realistic way to approach the situation. Agencies came up that are doing this partner violence and sexual violence work specifically in LGBTQ communities. I know the Network La Red in Boston is one, In Our Own Voices in Albany, New York. Then there's one called the Northwest Network. They have a full name that I can never remember.
The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Survivors. They started doing some research into it and had to dig into the issue of what do we do when two people who are in a relationship are accusing each other of engaging in abuse, because that's a common thing for someone who is, in fact, abusing their partner to turn around and level that- throw that accusation back. What do we do? How do we discern who is the one being abused and who is the one abusing their partner?
They develop these screening tools and had to dig in a little bit deeper. That's where we start to see things about incidents versus patterns. If you call an LGBTQ specific hotline and you say, "I'm being abused, my partner did this thing," then they're going to ask you, they're going to validate you. "That sounds like that was really frightening for you. Tell me a little more about how that happened, what was going on?"
They're going to give you a chance to share some context because sometimes when you get the context, it's a little more complicated and that helps you understand how to support that person, which also means we have to have a framework in which we want to support people who've caused harm in accountability and not just see them as monsters or throwaway people.
Dedeker: We'll get into that a little bit later 'cause that's also a whole conversation.
Emily: Let's move into polyamory specifically because I'm assuming that while people have looked at LGBTQ frameworks, it's less common to be looking at polyamorous frameworks and having an additional person or multiple people within this intimate partner violence, kind of what happens with that. Can you talk about polyamorous traps that are unique to non-traditional relationships and things that potentially can lay a foundation for abuse?
Christy: Sure. Some of the things that we have that are similar to LGBTQ partner violence situations is not all of us are out. Especially when we have people who have children involved or jobs or communities where they can't be out, that threat to out you can be part of the abuse. A partner can threaten to out you if you leave them or if you call them out on being abusive, they can say they're going to leave you.
Another thing that's kind of different in polyamory is people define their relationships differently. Especially when we're looking at situations where people are relationship anarchists in some form, what's a partner? Like how do we count who is and isn't a partner for understanding what's an abusive dynamic? We also have a lack of clarity in the movement about what abuse is.
That's something that comes up a lot is many of us when we're new to polyamory, especially, have that feeling of, "This is uncomfortable. My partner is seeing someone else, they're out on a date. I'm really uncomfortable." The standard dialogue in the polyamory community is to say, "Oh, you just sit with that discomfort and keep working through it and things get better."
What happens is sometimes people are experiencing discomfort that's coming from something a little more significant or a situation where their voice isn't being heard or they're being silenced or they're being controlled. They're not really sure how to frame it because abuse survivors don't always come forward and say, "I'm being abused," because, for a long time, you're in that gray area, that middle ground where in your mind, you're like, "Is this abuse? I'm not sure what's happening."
Then you say to your friends who are in the polyamory community, "I'm feeling uncomfortable or I'm really feeling like I'm not a priority to my partner." They're like, we all feel that way in the beginning. You struggle between like, how much do I need to normalize what I'm experiencing and desensitize myself to it? How much can I really name it as being harmful? It's really hard. We have polyamory--
Emily: And stigmas attached to that potentially as well with even coming out and saying that you feel bad or upset or like something's wrong.
Christy: Yes and then you're in that situation where you can't talk about that to your friends who aren't polyamorous because they think, "Well, the whole thing's abusive. Who would want to do that? That's just not a healthy relationship." They've got their own assumptions about polyamory, and then you reach out to your friends within the polyamorous community and they're like, "Oh, it's normal to feel that way. You just need to move past it." You can't really get the compassionate support you need on either side.
You might have guilt. That's another thing unique to polyamory is you might have guilt around opening an existing relationship and that make you feel like you're not providing your partner who's-- The relationship you're opening, you might feel like you're not providing that partner with their needs and what they want out of their relationship, which can then cause you to rationalize giving into them if their demands start to be unreasonable because you feel guilt. You want to try to fix that in a way that can then give them power over you.
It can make you fearful and like you said, a moment ago, that stigma, you don't want to say that you're hurt. You also don't want to acknowledge that you're hurting your partner. If you have a partner who you're in a situation, and they're saying this hurts, you kind of want to say, "No, I'm not hurting you." It's hard to tell how much are you holding onto your own stuff and holding your own boundaries and how much are you just not listening to a partner in a way that is harmful to them. It's just really tricky.
Then you add an external control if you have another partner, who's getting to make decisions about your relationship. That can be another slippery slope that leads to harm. Not just in veto power, there's situations where people who don't have veto power over whether or not you get to date someone might still have veto power over all sorts of little tiny things in their relationship from who gets sleepover when to other things in the relationship that then leads you to feel like you can't control what's happening in your own relationship. Like it's not even about what's happening with your partner which can--
Again, all of these sometimes can happen in healthy relationships because we're just navigating conflict and all of these exist across the spectrum that could verge into abusive behavior and abusive patterns. That's what makes it so hard is where in that spectrum do we know we've gone from harm to abuse and that's a confusing thing to tease out as someone who's inadvertently causing harm to a partner and as someone who's experiencing partner harm.
Dedeker: That starts to make a lot of sense as I'm thinking about it in that kind of patterns versus looking at incidences situation because I feel like both in us running the podcast and seeing what people post in the Patreon group and also other non-monogamy groups, and also in my own work with clients, it's like, you can have an incident. Let's say, it's an isolated incident of like, "Yes, my partner went out on a date and then said that they'd be home at 11:00 and then didn't respond to my text messages, turned off their phone, actually came back at six in the morning."
As an isolated incident, it's so hard to tell, was that just a flub? Was it like a newbie flub where they're extenuating circumstances? Was that something that happens all the time? Was that part of a much bigger cycle of toxicity and abuse? It's so hard to tell from just like that one incident that could be on like maybe on the positive side, somebody just really made a major mess up, stumbled out the gate and they can repair that. Or it could be just another symptom of something that's much more serious and toxic going on.
Christy: One thing I would say to that is, I think sometimes as survivors, we gaslight ourselves because we've been gaslit so much to where we think, "Is it abuse? If it's abuse, I'll leave. If it's abuse, I'll leave. If it's not, then I can keep working on it." When the reality is, we don't need it to rise to the level of abuse for-- If something's uncomfortable, you can leave. You don't have to get to the point where you have to label it abuse to give yourself permission to leave. If it's not good, leave.
That's where that pattern, maybe you aren't sure if it's a pattern that rises to the level to call it abuse but if it doesn't feel good, you don't have to stay. You can give yourself permission to leave a situation that doesn't feel safe or healthy or consistent if those are things that you need and want in your life.
Jase: It was interesting, what jumped out to me before when you were talking about this and you mentioned about boundaries and how something like, "Oh, well this is a boundary, so this is how I'm acting," can be just another way of exercising control over someone else, but using fancy words for it so that you're the good guy and they're the bad guy, or that--
It reminds me a little bit of something we just talked about recently on our episode about going to therapy about how couples therapy can actually sometimes do more harm than good if there's an abusive dynamic because the abuser just learns better tools for how to do it more subtly or how to justify it or how to use different language while they do it.
I think that within the world of non-monogamy where it seems like most people are a little more proactive than your average cisgender heterosexual couple about like, "I want to learn terms, I want to learn what's right and wrong, how you should do this," because it's new because we don't really have models for it. It's almost as if there's more opportunities to learn those things.
I would say that then to go back to what you were saying before about then we end up in this problem if we're trying to just say, "Well, if someone's abusing, then they are a monster. They're an abuser. They're terrible," is that we can end up in this situation where someone could end up being abusive by trying to use some terms or tools that they learned about without like setting out with that intention. We tend to think of abusers as coming from this like very sinister movie villain, like, "Oh, I'm going to figure out the best way to control them in this way," but it's often much more subtle, the slip into that.
I think just the tendency to paint people black and white, but then also the tendency to be like, "Well, if this thing fits this label, it's therefore good. If it fits this label, it's therefore bad." Like you mentioned too with hierarchy, like, "Oh, well, we're not hierarchical and we don't have veto. Therefore, we can't do any wrong in that territory." It's like, "Oh, no, you still very much can have veto like power by throwing a fit or whatever, when they're going to do something with someone else." It's just so not black and white and I think that can't be overstated. That's just so important from everything that you've been talking about here.
Christy: There's a book that's not a polyamory book, but it touches on that, what you just brought up and it's called The Revolution Starts at Home. It's a book looking at intimate partner violence in activists and social justice communities. In those communities similar to what you were talking about in polyamory, there's a belief that we know better. Like we have these tools. You cannot be polyamorous, at least not for long, without so much communication. We have so much good communication skills. None of us are ever going to abuse anybody. I go to non-violent communication workshops with my partners.
You assume that because you have these progressive values. That's one of the traps is believing that polyamory is inherently somehow more progressive or enlightened when it might just not be a good match for some people and other people might think that it's exactly how they want to live their life but when we put it on this pedestal and think it's more enlightened, then we're less likely to self-examine in ways that help us to look at our relationships and see them for what they are.
Mainstream polyamory discourse doesn't talk very much about abuse, it doesn't talk a whole lot about mental health. How do you navigate relationships when you have a massive trauma history or there's other stuff going on just because you are a feminist or polyamorous or progressive or don't have veto power or a non-hierarchical or relationship anarchists, any of these things can be tools of abuse in the hands of someone who is inclined and believes they can manipulate a partner into doing what they want.
A hammer is designed to hammer nails and also can do a lot of damage in the hands of someone whose intention is to do harm. Those skills sometimes do give us new tools for harming a partner if someone is abusive. Someone I mediated-- I didn't mediate but I facilitated some conversations in a local group where they teach non-violent communication and someone had experienced abuse and was highlighting the fact that someone who has training in some of these tools, non-violent communication-- What was it that you mentioned, Jase? I'm trying to remember these--
Jase: Like boundaries or--
Christy: These boundaries, a lot of language around therapy language around boundaries, if they choose, can then twist those in a way that it becomes part of the abuse.
Dedeker: That's such a slippery thing, that hammer analogy is really apt. I think that's part of the reason why we find ourselves repeating often on this show, the whole moniker of, "Don't weaponize this shit, please" because of realizing that it's a communication tool or a relationship tool can be an amazing, groundbreaking, fascinating, helpful tool that can also be used in really awful ways. There's no tool that you can just always default fall back on that's going to make a toxic, abusive relationship, feel less toxic and abusive.
That's just such a tricky thing. I do feel-- I want to speak just a little bit. We've kind of already covered this ground, but I want to speak a little bit to the stuff that you've highlighted already about, we have this cultural belief sometimes that polyamory or non-monogamy is inherently progressive or inherently enlightened and then the binary to that is the cultural belief that non-monogamy is inherently abusive, inherently destructive.
That also serves to become yet another further obstacle for people to get out of these kinds of cycles of these kinds of behaviors because-- At least, I've also seen something very similar in the LGBTQ community. There is this sense of like, I'm here having to be a representative for something much bigger than me, a community much bigger than me. If I'm the only trans person in my hometown that people know and I end up in a situation like this, then that's always going to be forever linked to my transness potentially.
I don't know, I know definitely speaking from my own personal experience, also being a survivor of intimate partner violence within a polyamorous context, that was probably one of the biggest things that held me back from getting help for a very, very long time, both in the relationship and after the relationship is just like, I'm going to go to-- My fear was that I'm going to go to some group therapy and everyone's going to explain to me how I brought this on myself because I chose to be polyamorous with a particular person and I'm sure that's something that you've run up against in your work.
Christy: Definitely, especially in people who opened. It can happen with anyone, but a dynamic with people who opened an existing relationship and then a new relationship turns out to be abusive. There's that self-shame, that fear that people are going to say to you, "You already had one healthy partner. Why did you need to do this? We don't understand."
Or you may question that this wasn't a real relationship. There's a cultural expectation that you've got your real relationship and then this other relationship wasn't even a real relationship. That's a similar dynamic to an LGBTQ and in same-sex partnerships to where you have this perception that people in your community might not even see what you had as a real relationship and that could keep you from being able to access not just services but also compassion and support from people.
You may have already been alienated from some of your family and friends because of being polyamorous. Again, another parallel to what we see in LGBTQ studies of partner violence. You may already have lost some of your supports just by coming out and so you have reduced access to support and if your primary support is in your polyamory community, then you have the added layer of fearing that conflict and that should you come out, is going to deprive you of access to your primary source of support and community.
I don't know about where you live, but where I live, there's not a ton of polyamorous people. We all know each other so you cannot navigate this in a way that doesn't cause ripples that can then cause fear about losing your community.
Who's going to get access to the community? What if the community doesn't believe me and my partner who abused me is the one that stays in community and I feel like I have to leave? Maybe I should leave in advance so that I don't have to deal with that fear of rejection. There's all sorts of ways that it can keep you from coming forward and a lot of service providers who do counseling, support groups, and shelters for survivors of partner violence may not have a whole lot of training or knowledge around polyamory.
They may not even know what they're dealing with. You go to get therapy from a therapist who may not know as much about polyamory and you spend more of your time educating them and saying, "No, that's not quite right," than you do actually getting support and it could be the same in a DV shelter or partner violence support group, for example.
Jase: Yes and then on the other side too, I know that there can be a hesitance to talk to your community about experiencing abuse if you assume that if the community hears that they are going to just destroy and tear down and vilify and maybe enact their own abuse upon that person thinking they're helping you, even if that's not what you want.
I feel like I've seen that pattern also play out many times where the person who comes forward is fairly clear about what they do and don't want to be done and everyone's like, "Oh, no, no, no, we'll take care of this for you. We're going to do what we think should be done." That ironically and horribly is in a sense acting another type of abuse or violence on that person who's already the survivor.
Christy: Absolutely. Then that causes us to limit who we talk to. I know when I went through my own partner violence situation, I didn't want to talk to anybody about it or tell anyone what had happened, who I did not feel could hold the complexity of the situation, which meant I had only a small number of people I felt safe talking to because if I told someone, this person did this to me and their response is, "What a jerk, I hate him," and they just go off, that, in that moment was not what I needed or wanted. I didn't need validation on that front. I needed comfort and that did not feel like comfort to me.
I did have one friend, a mutual friend who was lovely and they came up to me and they had a background working in DV. This is unsurprising, but they said to me how would you like me to support you? What I said was, I don't want you to stop being their friend but what I do want you to do is to hold them accountable. I don't want them-- I know that this person, in terms of their recovery and healing and ability to take accountability, they're going to need community support to do that because all isolation does is drive us deeper into shame.
We can't control whether or not someone chooses to isolate. That's not in our control, but I didn't want anyone to do that on my account and this mutual friend said to me, "I am not going to stop being their friend on your account, but I also do have some pretty strong beliefs about staying friends with people who are abusive and won't take accountability and so over time, if they lose me as a friend, that will be there doing that yours."
Jase: Wow.
Christy: That felt validating to me because I-
Jase: That's great, yes.
Emily: That's a great distinction.
Christy: -don't want to isolate someone.
Emily: Wow. Well, we're going to discuss even more, get into common questions, get into some advice and support but before we do that, we wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the ways in which you can support this show and keep it coming to you all for free. Lovely. We've talked about some of the dynamics that people can get into and sort of those feelings of "Wait a minute, is this abuse? Is this not? I don't really know how to parse that apart and figure it out."
Are there tools that are out there other than just maybe sitting with it and seeing the patterns over time? I guess maybe that's the biggest one but are there other tools that you talk to people about or that you yourself have used maybe just to try to tell whether or not it's an abusive relationship or just kind of a dysfunctional, shitty relationship?
Christy: The first thing that comes to mind for me is and again I've mentioned the shortcomings because I may not be super well-trained on polyamory but just talking this over with someone on a partner violence hotline, sometimes there may be a situation where there are polyamory dynamics that need to be explained because that's part of the abuse. But if someone is uncomfortable revealing that piece on their first call, they don't have to. You can reveal what you feel comfortable revealing to get support. You can always call ahead and ask if their case managers, shelter staff, therapists have experience with polyamory, if they know how to respond to that.
Those hotline people are amazing in DV agencies. They really do a good job of asking you the right questions and helping you talk through it. Making sure if you go to therapy, that you have a therapist who is not only competent with polyamory and any other identities you have but also competent with recognizing power and control patterns specifically in a therapeutic setting. That is one thing I'm glad to hear you mentioned, that you talked about how abuse, in therapy, can just empower. I mean therapy for someone who's in an abusive relationship can empower the person who's enacting abuse against their partner to have new language and frameworks for it.
Another thing that can happen is if a therapist doesn't have a whole lot of the backstory on this relationship and doesn't have a really fine-tuned sensor to abuse dynamics, they can abuse you right in front of a therapist by bringing up past stories and leaving out context and putting you on the defensive where suddenly you're starting to feel defensive in the therapy setting and hearing yourself talk and realizing that you sound like someone who's denying wrongdoing for harm that they've done. It can be even in the therapy setting that there's a spin.
So, finding a therapist who has a lot of experience with abusive relationship dynamics can be another really good support, to have someone to talk it through. Then having friends that know how to hold complexity and can just listen to you can be really helpful because a lot of times we talk our way to our own solutions. A lot of times people offering us solutions can kind of steer us away from our own inner knowing and our ability to find what's right for us in that moment.
So, having friends that you know you can lean into to talk about complicated things, who aren't going to tell you what to do, that can be helpful. Honestly, getting into a mindset to where you know we don't have to label it abuse in order to take actions to feel safer, to get ourselves out of situations that don't feel good. There may be a relationship that you just cut your losses and you're like, "I'm out." Was it abusive? I don't know right now. Maybe in another year or two, I'll have more clarity on that, but I don't need to stay somewhere that I'm not safe.
Then safety planning, safety planning for contingencies and that's something where the DV agencies are really good at helping you, safety plan, because we also know that leaving an abusive relationship is a time when you're at risk for escalated violence. So, making sure that in that discussion, that you have some ideas around safety planning, that you bring someone in who can help you think through what can keep you safest if you do leave.
Jase: You mentioned earlier on some screening tools and things that have been created through researching intimate partner violence in the LGBTQ+ community, are those things that only a therapist can do? Are there ones that people could use themselves? Are there any resources about those out there to help determine that?
Christy: The specific screening tool that was coming to my mind as one that they want to train providers on before they give it to you just to make sure that people aren't learning to game the system.
Jase: Yes, that makes sense, yes.
Christy: But there are several--You can go online and find checklists from reputable sources that give you just some red flags to be aware of and obviously a red flag doesn't mean that something is in fact abusive. It's just when you see enough of them, you're looking at a pattern again. Some of the things, "Just looking at how you feel when you're with someone, do you feel like you know what reality is when you're in a relationship with this person?" Is a really good self-check.
I will give the caveat that sometimes people with complex trauma, we can have trauma responses in relationships that are not abusive because that's something that we're still working on in our nervous system and in our body. So, having a trauma response to a situation is not always an accurate gauge of whether or not it's an unsafe situation if you have a high trauma history.
But looking at the overall pattern, "Do I feel generally safer with this person than unsafe? Do I feel heard and listened to? Do I feel like I am allowed my reality without them wanting to pick it apart every time I express myself to them?" These are all some things that you can look to. If the answer to any of those suggests that it's not a healthy relationship, then whether or not you can convince yourself in that moment that it's abuse.
Sometimes you don't know. Sometimes something feels abusive while you're in it and then you get out a few years later and you're like, "Eh, that was just kind of a bad relationship." It's pretty toxic all around, but I don't know that maybe it was abuse in retrospect now that I have some space and then there's other situations where you leave it, you just thought it was a bad relationship, really toxic. And over time, you start to look back on it and say, "Oh my gosh, that was abuse, and I didn't even realize it. How did I not realize that?"
Jase: Real quick, it's worth mentioning that in either case, getting out of that relationship is the right thing to do.
Christy: Yes.
Jase: If anyone is out there listening to this, going, "I don't know if it's abuse. I don't know if I should break up or end this relationship?"-
Christy: "Get out."
Jase: -just do it. It'll be better for both of you in either way.
Christy: Yes. That's the takeaway. I feel like sometimes we get so wrapped up in, like, "Is it? Is it not? Is it? Is it not?" If it feels bad enough that on a regular basis you're questioning whether or not it's abuse, you probably need to leave.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Right. Whether it is or not, yes.
Dedeker: I want to rewind just a tiny bit to highlight something that you said just for the sake of all our listenership, I know something that really held me back from talking to anybody, professional friend, whoever, is I made the assumption. For some reason, I also made this assumption especially if I call a hotline or I talk to a professional that the first thing they're going to make me do is break up and blow up my life with this person. Ergo, I cannot talk to anybody about this until I'm ready to blow up my life and leave this relationship.
I just want to put that out there to just tell people, "That's not right. That's not how it is. That's not correct," especially talking to a professional, like someone who has training in this, they're not going to be the person who's like, "Okay, you--" unless you're like in direct danger at that exact moment, they're not going to be the person who's going to be like, "Okay, you need to blow up your life right now." You mentioned that Christy, and I just want to highlight that and make sure that that gets driven home for all our listeners out there.
Christy: Anyone who works in this field or has training in this field is going to be able to ask you questions that help you figure out what's right for you and when it's right for you. If someone calls a hotline and says, "I want to leave, I'm ready to leave, get me out and help me figure this out," then that's what they're going to help you do.
But if you call and say, "My relationship doesn't feel good, I really just want to process this with someone," they're going to listen to you and process and ask you questions. Sometimes people are in the middle, where they're like, "I know that this is abuse, but I can't leave right now because of X, Y, or Z." And they're going to hold space for you to have that complexity and talk about it. That's good advice. I mean, as a friend, we all know what it feels like when you're dating someone, whether it's abuse or not, you're dating someone who's maybe not treating you great and your friend is like, "Leave, leave now." That does not work
Emily: Use the Triforce when talking to your friends about those. If your partner is trying to work through the abuse that maybe they're enacting upon you or if they are saying, like, "I'll change, I'll go to therapy, I'll work on this," are there ways in which to tell that something is changing, that something is working and moving in a more positive direction?
Christy: Yes, I would say a couple of things that come to mind very quickly. One is that while someone is working on it, you don't have to stay in the same kind of relationship with them.
Emily: True.
Christy: You can take some space while they do their work, and sometimes, it's easier, both of you, to do your work when you have that space. You might get that space and then decide you don't want to continue with the relationship. They may get that space and realize that given the history, they can't be in a healthy relationship with you and can't figure out how to, so you don't have to stay in the same kind of relationship with someone.
The other thing I would say is, "Show me. Don't tell me." Every person who's ever been abused at any point ever and brought it up to a partner has heard them say, "I'll do better. I'll do better. I love you. I'm going to change." Everybody hears that. That's so common, so "Show me, don't tell me. I want to see it, and I don't have to stay in the same relationship with you that I have been until I see that there's change."
There are very concrete things they can do to move into an accountability process with you. One of my favorite models is the pod model of transformative justice by the Bay Area transformative Justice Collective. I've attended some trainings by Mia Mingus who is wonderful. The idea with the pod model is you identify, not just who's your community, because that's so broad, but you identify who is my pod, who are the people that I as a survivor can call on to support me in my healing and be there for me when I'm having a rough time, support me without encouraging me to do irrational things that might cause harm to me.
The people who will pause when you say, "I think I'm going to write a letter to their boss and a public call-out on social media, and this and that." The ones that say, "What are you hoping to get from that?" Let's talk about that, "How do you think that's going to play out and can help you think it through."
Those are your pod people, but what's unique about this is that the harm-doer also has pod people who can support them in accountability while still loving them and holding them with compassion and can still say, "This is not cool." And can encourage you, can hold you to task if they see you engaging in that pattern again or talking about your partner in a way that's not cool. Can say, "I don't like the way you're talking about that." If you're doing a formal accountability process, your pod people can communicate with each other so that you don't have to communicate with each other. There won't be direct communication.
Your pod people can kind of help you proofread that communication before it goes out, to say, "You know, there's this thing you said that let's talk about a little bit before we send this letter," and it protects you from having direct contact. The other beautiful thing about it is, if you are someone who's caused harm of any kind, even if it doesn't rise to the level of abuse, having people who can be in your accountability pod for when you've caused harm while you're doing low-level things, means that you're building that muscle in those relationships that can support you in larger harm that you caused and you don't have to wait on a call to accountability to start your accountability pod for harm you've caused.
If you know you've caused harm, even if the survivor says, "I never want to see you again," you can still engage a pod of people for you to work through with community support. What it means to you to not repeat that. What you want to do, but it's definitely a show, don't tell situation and you need support. Very rarely are people successful, just saying, "I'm going to change." You need to be engaging with a therapist who specializes in this. Maybe attending a group that can help you talk through these issues of power and control. Definitely engaging accountability pod friends who are going to hold you accountable and not just tell you what you want to hear.
Jase: Yes, I think also something worth pointing out about the pod system is that it was never intended to be something that's done as a public show. I think for a lot of us, our only experience of accountability pods is it being in news articles or blog posts or on Facebook or something like that. That's not ever what it was meant to be.
I did just want to throw that out there that I think some people, it's like, "Oh God, maybe I'm worried that I do have some abusive tendencies or I might do these things," would think," Oh, no, I could never do a pod because I don't want all of social media to say that I'm a monster now" because of like we talked about before, and that's not what it is, right? This is just you and your people to help you work on this.
Christy: That's right.
Emily: That's interesting that it has become kind of a public forum in various ways, when it wasn't necessarily meant to be that
Dedeker: What it makes me think of is actually very, very, very early on in my healing process with one of the first therapist that I worked with, right out the gate, I've been out of this abusive relationship for months, and I was already just like, "I feel like, oh gosh, I've got to talk to people about it. I've got to make a post on social media and just tell people what's going on and kind of declare to the world what's been happening."
My therapist, he said to me, he was like, "You know, you don't have to have a press release for everything necessarily." I do think that it's just the nature of our lives and our relationship with social media, where we default so easily to, "Oh gosh, now I'm going to have to perform this on the public stage to a certain extent, especially if this is involved in my identity or how I move through the world and stuff like that." I do feel that that's kind of a symptom of that general tendency that we have of needing to do a press conference. Exactly, yes.
Emily: Everyone knows everything about us because we're all on social media, so that makes sense.
Dedeker: Don't get me wrong, sometimes press conferences are great but not always.
Christy: That does mean that for people who are doing their work behind the scenes and not making a public show out of it, we don't always know what's going on. That is something where we see more high-profile people who are engaging in public statements about it because there's community trust and a position of power. If there's a community leader in a position of power who's doing it more publicly, that might be because they've got a whole community to be accountable to, if they want to maintain any engagement with that community.
A lot of times with everyday people, it's not going to be public, and what that means is those of us as villagers with pitchforks, need to be aware that we're not always in the loop about what's going on behind closed doors and what someone is doing. Again, show, don't tell. We may start to see things that are happening, that are red flags, that there's not been real accountability, but it's hard for us to judge from afar when we don't know what's going on.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Definitely.
Jase: We're getting toward the end, I would love to take just a moment to talk about getting support for people who are friends or partners of people who've experienced intimate partner violence with someone else. This was something that like with Dedeker's experience, I found myself in this position of like, "I'm not sure what's the most helpful way to react to this. Like how to be the most supportive," and Dedeker's other partner, Alex, and I talk to each other and try to support each other a little bit in this about how do we react to this. We had someone to talk to about our own feelings of frustration or anger or just like not knowing what we're doing but then also to kind of work together.
To be like, "I found this resource, I found this other one. It seems like we should try to be supportive in this way and not this other way." I'm unaware, like, are there resources like that that are for the supporters and the friends and things? I feel like I've picked up little bits here and there from other places that I'm not familiar with a resource for that and I could have really used one. Probably still could
Christy: Frequently, because there's so little work being done on polyamory and IPV, you're not going to find great resources on if your partners, other partner is abusing you
Jase: That's what I found out.
Christy: We're not at that place . That would be great if that were the case, but we're not there. But some of the information you find for what we call secondary survivors, which is parents, roommates, friends, some of that, you're going to get some insights from, and a lot of that is broadly available online. I think that there's a distinction to just between being in a relationship with a partner who has an abusive partner currently and being in a relationship with someone who's experienced partner abuse in the past, especially if it was the recent past.
Currently-- I did a lecture on a graduate sexuality studies course recently on polyamory and abuse, and one of the questions someone asked me is, how do you navigate protecting yourself and your own boundaries if your partner is being abused? Is there a point at which you would feel helpless enough that that would impact your relationship? That was a really hard question for me, as someone who experienced partner violence in a polyamorous context, to consider what that was like on my other partners and what that put them through, that question brought up a lot of feelings for me and ultimately, you're going to do the things you can to support your partner. I love the fact that you reached out to someone else to support you because again, the-- I forget what the model is called, but where you have the concentric circles to where you reach for support to someone who's outside of the circle you're in so that you don't ask the person who's experiencing the trauma to also hold space for you and be your support about their own trauma that they are going through.
The fact that you had a metamour or someone else you could reach out to is a really beautiful approach because then you're getting support from someone who also cares very deeply about your partner and knows what you're going through and it doesn't put the burden on the person experiencing abuse to hold space for you during that.
Ultimately, it can be really disorienting and scary and hurtful to watch someone you love in a situation that they don't seem to be getting themselves out of and to see the harm that's being done to them. That's really overwhelming.
Ultimately, people have to make their decisions about where their own boundaries are, but I do like the idea of reaching out to people that are in your circle or wider but not in the closer-in circles for support. Then, being in relationship with someone who has a history of partner violence or has experienced that, especially recently, they're going to be a little bit jumpy, and you might want to take things a little bit slower and you might need a little more communication.
There might be moments when they're reacting to something that you know wasn't what you did. Sometimes it's not helpful to point that out in the moment Maybe that's a conversation for after things have cooled off and to say, "I really felt like that reaction didn't make sense in context and help me understand that more." That might be a nice follow-up once you're both a little more grounded, but there will probably be a little extra work that you'll both have to do in that relationship. In a lot of cases, it can be really worth it and beautiful and sweet and profoundly healing for both of you.
Dedeker: Yes. Well, we would love eventually someday to do a whole other episode that is just about navigating trauma and PTSD within a relationship and non-monogamous relationships specifically because just that's a whole other conversation to explore.
Emily: Well, this has been really lovely, Christy. I'm so excited to continue to talk to you in our bonus episode. For our audience, can you tell us where we can find more of you, your work, things like that?
Christy: Sure. I have a website, christycroft.com. I'm most active on Twitter though. If you want to follow me, I'm Christy Croft on Twitter. I do a lot of work on Twitter, a lot of education around partner violence, community accountability and sex worker rights and human trafficking.
Emily: Amazing. Lovely. We are going to jump into our bonus episode. In that, we are going to talk about things like current systems that need to change in order to better serve survivors from non-traditional relationships and traditional relationships and then also talking about Christy's community accountability workshops. So, lots more to discuss. We want to hear from you. We want to hear what you thought of this episode.