Hello beautiful humans.

When I was in college, I underwent a horrific sexual assault that was further pushed aside by multiple religious leaders who were quick to blame me for trauma and not support me. My best friends ended up being irreligious and atheist, to put it plainly. I toyed with my identity in the queer community for a very long time.

I have come to terms with my sexuality and gender, and stand firm that a God of the universe has way more important issues to solve than gender and sexuality. In fact, I go as far sometimes as to claim that was not an issue even back then.

The litany of labels I took ownership of could have met each criticism I faced in teams of two, just to prove their point. I reclaimed power by owning labels of “slut” and “promiscuous” – claiming those weren’t offensive has done more for women’s rights than Susan B Anthony or Martha P Johnson could have dreamed possible.

In a Master’s program I attended (for only three semesters, but that’s its own discussion), there was constant talk that religious intervention triumphed over knowledge. And while that sounds mediocre, it’s painfully much more stringent.

Admittedly, upon seeing the program double down on this, I immediately exited.

Recent events in my life have led me to strongly desire to reform societal definitions of abuse and even how we respond as a community to allegations of violence. Many clinical studies reveal that about 1 in 20 men will experience domestic violence while at least 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence.

A quick search displays two alarming statistical notes in creating this: an estimated 70% of domestic violence is never reported, and there are presumed to be at least two incidents of child abuse not reported for every call that is reported.

That’s ignoring prosecution and law enforcement biases, of course.

Additionally, I have come to appreciate efforts to address harmful evangelical teachings.

My religious leaders in college and early adulthood vouched that men are allowed to sexually control women. They would use gentler language. Their exact words conveyed abusive notions that women should be expected to provide sexual pleasure.

There’s a gorgeous book (and accompanying blog) titled The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wray Gregorie outlining how things like the ogasm gap have been created by promoting a woman’s duty to pleasure a husband without also making sure she is pleasured or consenting to sexual acts.

If sex isn’t good, or my partner can’t please me, I’m out. I have bigger fish to fry. (This is not my only standard, but has become increasingly important as I have come to understand how unhealthy expectations of pleasure – from either side – can ultimately be the reason that marriages crumble or violence escalates.)

Yet, evangelical teachings provide a litany of double standards.

Talk about how women are destined to wait for a man to work through his problems are countered by how a woman with issues is undeserving of respect from a man. Pastors will throw in a woman’s face that she is “a crazy bitch” for not complying with abuse, while claiming in the same breath that a man “deserves patience for his pain” (of living with a mentally ill woman). Lastly, and most horrific, are the ideas surrounding sexuality. A man with multiple previous partners is more readily accepted by the church than a woman who was raped. The overarching view claims that rape makes a woman damaged while a man is empowered from sex.

There’s a sidebar somewhere in my rant about how claiming rape is sex misses completely why rape goes underreported. Maybe another post, though.

The other sidebar in this rant, which is relevant to this post, is mentioning how it’s unreasonable to expect that someone with a mental health diagnosis is going to think being frozen out or ignored are rational reactions to crisis states.

This is not me claiming that dating someone with a mental health diagnosis requires you to have crisis intervention training. Rather, the claim I make is that dating someone with a diagnosis requires you to know appropriate resources to utilize. Any search for mental health crisis lines produces a vast selection of phone and texting lines.

Guess what doesn’t (generally) appear in the search? Guess what resources won’t be (generally) given from a clinical mental health provider?

Anything related to police interventions. Even 911 doesn’t appear very often, if ever.

We understand as clincians that police training, if it even touches on crisis intervention, would include at most four to six hours of crisis intervention strategies. To be even clearer, these strategies center around how police should protect themselves from a person in crisis rather than actually help a crisis sufferer.

Clinical training, however, promotes client autonomy and nonmaleficence, as well as other aspects of client rights. All of these are in our foundations of ethics, often a hallmark in clinical training, and show up throughout trauma counseling seminars. Even couple’s therapy training promotes highest ethical standards, including when counselling is contraindicated to help. These trainings frequently include a minimum of formal coursework checkpoints (often a conclusory quiz) and at least a week’s worth of videos (counted by hours spent). These are no joke. Even the trainings on how to intervene in a crisis take years of supervison to finesse.

Yet police are given no more than a day’s training.

Why are we expecting them to assist in anyone else’s interest, including ones challenging their own beliefs of discriminatory practices?

If you are in a profession where there are touch points of competencies, you will be able to express to future clients/customers how your viewpoint will help inform their service expectations and goals. Likewise, discriminatory lenses couched in “lack of competency” frequently result in licensing issues or actions to rectify or change behavior.

Yet with police forces, all that needs to be done to traumatize victims of violence is a well skilled perpetrator who knows how to shift blame onto the victim through throwing a fit about what the victim has done incorrectly. These are violent perpetrators. A key element of domestic violence is the inability of perpetrators to recognize harm and their inability to identify responsibilities in creating that and even continuing the behaviors.

And not being able to take blame (or admit guilt) really means that the violence is ingrained in faulty values.

When there’s an issue of perspective on an event, police are quicker to victim blame. If you don’t fight back, you’re at fault. If you do fight back, then you’re also at fault. You will get the brunt of brutalized police both ways. They don’t care.

A victim is much more likely to panic, freak out, and even consider taking complete fault.

A survivor of domestic violence will certainly jump into taking the blame, not wishing for anyone else to be brutalized like they were. If you’ve ever experienced being tormented for your struggles in finding “the right” resolution, then there’s no way in the world you’d let anyone else be yelled at for being imperfect in their actions. Most survivors got brutally tormented in not responding “the right way” to their abuse. It’s a cycle of violence.

So when we look at domestic violence statistics, I often wonder if the reason men have such a high rate of victimization can be linked to how police are trained to handle domestic violence. I also wonder if women as victims being 1 in 4 represents successful convictions.

I’ll tell you, the likelihood that a woman who utilized all the advice given to her by police gets arrested for following their advice – it’s a high probability and police don’t care. They’ll throw a fit that they have to arrest someone who harmed you, and then throw another fit that they are acting in bad faith and throw angered comments that no one is pressing charges when they want those.

Anyone who has a brain would say that if someone chases you and scares you, you have the right to defend yourself.

Anyone who wears a police uniform says that only applies to men. Women are violent if they defend themselves rather than expecting police to torment them for asking help in their abuse.

Churches back this up, though.

Many church communities throw their foot down that women are held to a higher standard. They’ll reference that Mary was a virgin, as if that somehow defined why she was chosen. They’ll brag that she was perfect. Never do they really get at how Mary was so special that she only gets time as the mother of Jesus, and not really for who she actually was outside of that. She rarely gets the time of day in sermons.

To be relegated down to motherhood?

It’s not what I call loving women.

Women should be allowed to (and most certainly do) have value outside of marriage and outside of motherhood. But to many churches, loving women means seeing them as valuable only through their husband’s eyes. Women often don’t get to be individuals.

I got held to the impossible standards by so many churches.

They said they were supporting me by telling me the truth.

Saying things like, “I bet you feel guilty for being raped because now you’re not pure for your husband,” was their view of truth telling. Or even, “You should have known better than to think we’d let you volunteer with kids here at our church as someone who openly supports the queer community. We have no issue with that, but what about others?” As if I wouldn’t have the sense to defer the complex questions to them, or follow a fact sheet?

I recently closed out processing a lot of trauma from a school I attended.

Colorado Christian University, they are called.

They boast a “Clinical Mental Health Counseling” program.

And yet, they teach their students the same types of unethical, terrible, horrendous things that I was told when I was hurting and needed help. There are people there who wanted me to listen to them. And when I asked them to listen to me, they wouldn’t. And when I called them out on that being mean, they said I was being harsh. “I need to set better boundaries for myself,” they say to me.

A counseling program teaching students that being called out for lying is something you can say violated your boundaries? TF? YIKES!

My trauma was embedded in their program forcing students to talk about the Christian client and how they would respond to the therapy. I was so clear in my interview that I wanted to counsel queer couples. There was no desire to counsel anyone religious.

And Colorado Chrisitan lied to everyone, saying they were clinical.

They said it until they were blue in the face.

They don’t support women. They probably really don’t support most therapy.

But they support Jesus, for sure.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.