Victims in society are held to such impossible standards.

If we, as victims, are put in an impossible situation where it looks like abuse to one person and to us looks like a mental health dilemma that is unfair to ask someone to solve, even if we can then solve a resulting mental health crisis; then we find ourselves being blamed. Police forces don’t get that abuse is about control, power, and, most importantly, making sure that the victim isn’t getting any help. When they are called into victim-blame people, they do it, because it’s their job. They get the power to incarcerate victims of violence.

When I got victim blamed for witnessing the trauma of having to save my boyfriend’s life as he attacked me for it, I was so confused and angry at the system. People think that it was abusive for him to do all that to me, which was never my point. My point was always that this poor boy didn’t understand that I wasn’t needing his help before then; I was just needing space, and because it’s hard to override a desire to stop someone from potentially harming themselves, he didn’t leave me alone. He wins this one. Thinking I would hurt myself makes the action of not listening to me understandable. It was still ineffective, but it wasn’t abusive or mean, just kind of one of those, “WHOOPS,” moments.

People don’t realize that I understood within the immediacy of him hurting himself that he thought he was causing me distress; that he was creating the panic.

I actually was confused as anything because up to that point, I had assured the poor boy that I wouldn’t hurt myself if I were panicked. I understood his concern, though. It’s a fair concern to have when you see someone get that overwhelmed. I don’t fault him for only wanting to keep me safe to the best of his ability. Poor dude.

And I was traumatized from seeing him bash his head against a glass portion of a picture frame, effectively bloodying up his face and nose. I regret nothing I did, from grabbing him to pinning him down, to stopping him from hurting himself. And a reflexive arm swing when someone is fighting you in a feverent panic attack? That’s not assault. It’s barely anything but instinct. The police just gave a bogus charge to a panicked woman who they wanted to victim blame. They knew the court would support them first.

The court harms victims by blaming them.

They often refuse to dismiss victim blaming cases, firstly. The big thing now is to force victims into “Court Ordered Treatment” (COT) that is congruent with their charge. The COT organizations claim to give “patient rights” to select providers and proper treatment, but then throw absolute hissy fits at you that you need bogus certifications, like a “certified domestic violence treatment center,” which has never existed and should not. They claim it comes from the court, which only proves my argument that it’s not a real thing.

Forcing therapy onto victims is harmful.

Firstly, victims aren’t dumb people. They know when they’ve done something wrong and they know when they haven’t. They wouldn’t have been bullied by some dumb court into COT unless they first threw a big enough fit that the police abused their power in arresting them and giving them a bogus charge. Victims often get the support they need from spaces that listen to them and give them skills rather than demoralize them.

Secondly, treatment is client-led. COT programs like to claim they are supporting what the patients need, when, in reality, they are supporting the agenda of the police to criminalize mental health while offering low-grade support systems to people who may need more. As well, client-led treatment means the client shouldn’t be forced into treatment, or even told that they have to participate. Some people are in COT simply because they were able to get out of incarceration for it, and that’s an issue in its own right.

Third, depriving victims the power to choose how to grow and learn what to do next is further abusing them. Forcing someone into treatment to realize they’re being abused is ineffective because, well, the goal of treatment isn’t to tell someone they’re being abused, but is to help them better themselves. Supporting victims is allowing them to become empowered through their own choices and not by forcing them into submission.

Police are told that it’s the victim’s responsibility to change.

We hear a lot that “Hurt people hurt people” and that often is a way for people who abuse others to pretend that their abuse isn’t really harmful. I can talk extensively on how this is a very nuanced form of DARVO, and gaslighting. Healthy people who hurt people take responsiblity for hurting someone and work to grow, change, and learn from it. Unhealthy people are so stuck in the idea that they can’t have done anything bad to harm someone that they would never even consider working on themselves.

Telling people who have been hurt that they deserve help is valid.

It can’t come from a system that perpetuates the harm, though.

Police often think it helps victims of violence to force them into help, as it shows them that their situation was so bad that they wanted to keep them safe. But a victim – or even a survivor of violence – may be learning, or has learned already, that the police and legal system is built to protect abusers and villainize victims who have been really harmed.

A system that wants to help victims has to hold abusers accountable, not victims.

The victims are perfectly aware if/how/that they are imperfect humans. Being told by police that they are dangerous for these imperfections retraumatizes and restarts the cycle of abuse that many victims escaped in the first place. Courts defend police because it’s impossible for victims and survivors to win in court, and having a real, verified diagnosis from violence the police did not care about just proves their point more.

Plus, to make matters even messier, a system designed to hope that police aren’t called to retraumatize victims of violence fails at their job. It’s ultimately poor planning.

In a clinical sense, I would tell most clients coming to me who are worried about the worst happening, “Well, what would you do/would happen if that were to really occur?” Some people see it as egging on a spiral. But I don’t. To me, it communicates the idea that crisis management involves considering the actual outcomes. We can’t actually accomplish crisis management if we’re too scared/embarrassed/worried to say our current terrible coping skill to alleviate our crisis from getting any bigger.

To me, the solution to police getting improperly trained and responding to calls improperly and outside their scope of practice is implementing clearer guidelines, ethics, and boundaries around their job. It’s not making the court system bigger to fix the violence and unethical behaviors and power abuses of the police forces.

I do know that a lot of government funded projects assume that throwing money at a problem is going to fix it. But haven’t we done that enough?

Aren’t enough victims getting blamed for their violence, given bogus charges, and now being forced into COT “support group” type things – all while their abusers get charges dismissed and dropped because the courts yell “MUTUAL ABUSE” or use some other factual lie to evade responsibility for having to do their job correctly.

Because, in the chance that both people were in the wrong – and both people can certainly have done harmful things – the person who was harmed first gets to be the victim, and not the person who got the final victim title. Because “Hurt people hurt people” is a way to suggest that when people are being put in impossible situations, they do things not normal to themselves. They may act in ways unusual to who they are. And to say that’s them being abusive or violent when it is a known abnormal behavior and the person is knowingly embarrased/ashamed/apologetic for acting so differently, it is a clear indicator that the person is the one who is harmed/hurt/a victim. It does not say who is causing the hurt or is making the person a victim. It simply states that when a hurt person gives a less-than-perfect response, yelling at them for their imperfection is avoiding the point of why they gave the less-than-ideal reply to begin with.

This is not saying that people get to say, “I’ve been harmed” in retort to being called out for lying about being there for you or not following through on a promise. That’s downright abuse/manipulation/torment, and is part of the reason that COT has gotten me in such a head spin. COT exists to benefit a lot of people – including the abusers who throw a fit that they are really just misguiding their innate trauma at their victims. It does not really help the victims who get blamed as abusers for responding congruently and hurt by a legal system that may have caused the pain to begin with.

It doesn’t help the people, like me, either, who don’t respect criminal justice bachelor degree holders who try to pass themselves off as counselors. It doesn’t help the people like me who can see through their lies and arrogance. I actually understand what counseling and therapy are, and COT is a way to pretend to care when they don’t.

This is not to say counseling agencies who provide COT aren’t full of wonderful counselors and clinicians who care. I worked at one. I had many COT clients. I often didn’t want to spend weeks rehashing the trauma of legal nightmares when my starting point to my clients was always, “We’re here to work on what you want. Not what I want. Not what someone else wants. Just what makes you feel like you are being heard and seen, if nothing else. That’s sometimes the goal here – to be seen and heard by yourself.”

Because to me, a highly skilled (and trained by proxy) psychoanalyst, therapy to me was all about making sure the client was satisfied. Yes, we were a DBT-based agency. And, also, I often waited about six weeks before trying to implement DBT skills every session, and often they were more subdued than my clients realized. My supervisors and insurance were unfazed by my technique. But it’s because I knew, there’s not many clients who really want to walk into a therapist’s office and be immediately bombarded with skills and psychoeducation when they just want to know if you’re a safe landing ground for emotions. I can’t say I am that for everyone, but I think I did pretty damn good.

And COT (provided by court providers) is not a safe landing ground for emotions.

It often is about berating you for being there.

It’s so rigorous and structured, almost to a point of being useless to anyone.

They think their goal is teaching “emotional regulation,” which sounds really nice, until you come to understand that these are not trained clinicians and they don’t actually know what it means to allow for practicing skills. They have check-ins for most of the session and give a skill for five minutes before never mentioning it again. They pretend they care, but they don’t even know that clinical intervention includes following up on skills used.

With my clients, I would go through DBT skills, often not in order. You may think, “Wow, that’s really dumb,” and honestly, it wasn’t dumb – it was necessary. People don’t come across life in a neat little packet formula. I would also appreciate if my client came to me and presented a problem in a manner that the skills building methodology could go in order of the technique as designed. But people aren’t a manual. People just aren’t.

I would hear people spin out of control that a situation wasn’t making sense and I would start with A-B-C (action-behavior-consequence/result) before realizing the next time that although it helped resolve talking about the problem, most people weren’t stuck on not knowing that their behavior was faulty. They were stuck on how to have a discussion about it or communicate with people while highly activated. So I would jump ahead and teach skills over several sessions sometimes. Because often when people are in need of help and we are told we must teach a tangible skill, the clinical expertise is in knowing that we have the freedom to adapt the guidebook to the client’s needs.

COT frequently assumes that problems are structured.

I don’t believe in that. It’s just bad therapy, really.

Therapy is the idea that a problem follows a formula and the therapist can guide the patient to a resolution using and sticking to the guidelines in some handbook, and often therapy sticks to psychoeducation and foregoes the relational aspect, which is researched as the main determinant of successful outcomes. Psychotherapy or analysis is the idea that a problem exists within the realm of possible soultions, which can be taught as the client needs them, to the client’s liking, and sometimes not even at all, and that the guidelines are to offer tools in case clear psychoeducation is to be discussed – although psychoeducation is never seen as a requirement or a necessity of treatment.

When police force victims of their brutality into COT programs sactioned only by the court, these are then programs whose focus may mean well, but that will not attract the right personnel to make them successful.

Many facilitators I’ve talked to in my COT thing have been so confused that I’m there, especially when I explain what happened. “They really never should have arrested you, you did nothing wrong.” They even look at me so funny when I say police don’t understand mental health, “They don’t?” is the most common reply. Somewhere in me was the courage last week to declare to the COT program, “I don’t support what this program is doing. I’m a clinical counselor and this is not the right way to respond.” I was about to get on my soapbox, but I did shut up before people understood my whole gripe was I was angry at the COT facility for giving fake patient rights to me.

I can’t change the world.

But I will shout from the rooftops and say, “If you are going to allow someone the chance to be counselled because you believe they were victim-blamed, then you don’t get to give them patient rights declaring otherwise and a bogus assessment that allows you to check that they don’t need to be there and throw a fit that the court always says otherwise.”

Because having it both ways is violence.

Allowing the space to be infiltrated by abusers who got out of incarceration because the court couldn’t convict them is also a violation of the COT, in my opinion. It’s either a space for victims to have support or for abusers to vent that they were caught. It can’t be both.

Police, stop victim blaming.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.