RISE

Juanita wrote on many notebooks, and this is one such example. This is another draft of RISE. Note: check back often if you like this post--I intend to type out a little at a time and add to it--this is about 50 pages of handwritten text to transcribe.

Introduction

I am well aware even as I began to write this book that the things I am about to say as a beginning are things I must show you all through the book. The first thing I am saying to you is a BIG thing, an overall thing, a thing that pause before it sinks in because it is a very loving and compassionate thing--even tho to the abuser it SOUNDS mean, it FEELS mean, and it TASTES mean...like defeat.

This loving thing is called Understanding, and it defeats the batterer by making him small.

There. It is said; I have shared it with you. But just a wee bit more about it to show how it works. For a great many people, the Dark is scary. See, but Understanding is like LIGHT. Batterers hide in the Dark, and do damage, so we need Understanding to allow us to see them. Suppose you are in a dark room. Complete dark. You can see nothing. Yet if you can have the tiniest of lights you will be able to see something. And the more light that gets turned on the more and more you will see. In dim light you can see outlines and the shapes of things. In brighter light you can see things behind other things, and so on. But in that dark room you can trip and fall and get hurt because you cannot SEE that which is right in front of you and so it becomes a trap to you.

Also in that Darkness the fearful things seem large, much larger than ourselves and so we blow them up inside our heads til they are just about big enough to swallow us. Well, I'm here to tell it that Understanding does away with all of that. And now I'm done with the first thing I wanted to tell you.

The second thing that needs saying is this: the man who beats his wife has little or no respect for her! Is this surprising? Think about it. Remember your schooldays and the differences that there were between teachers? Some teachers had very few classroom problems with the kids, which others had daily nightmares in their classrooms. Kids ragged them half to death! Well. It was a matter of Respect. People tend to be on their best behavior when around someone they respect. But look out--if they don't respect you they don't much care HOW they behave. This is especially true of kids. Folks will watch their p's and q's out of fear, too, and Respect carries within it an element of fear. If given a choice between being liked and being respected, choose respect. Know why? Because self-respect allows others to TRULY like you, for yourself, not just tolerate you because you lower yourself in vain effort to get "friends." Friends are EQUALS. Respect is mutual. Way to go.

The next thing that must be mentioned in these opening pages is something that is very special, close to my heart, and up jumps the boogie--mindblowing! It is a way of thinking, feeling, and behaving that surrounds you with protection from the abuser. Included here is self-discipline (you taking on the responsibility to see that you do the right thing). Then--a vital and immediate part of this self-control stuff is taking care of the LOOSE LIPS problem. Don't look at me crazy--you know what I mean. "Mouth" is one of the main routes that lead to a beating. Ole Boy loves pulling you into an argument--short road from words to blows. More on Mouth later of course. But that mindblowing thing that self-discipline is a part of is called BLAMELESSNESS. Woof! I can't hardly stand knowing it cause it is SO fine and lovely.

Alrighty. I've handed you Understanding, Self-respect, and Blamelessness--all words that are key to stopping a little boy pretending to be both a man and generally a husband--from jumping on you. Let's look into HIS backpack now and pull out some of the tools he uses to intimidate and mistreat. Now, I've already mentioned the fact that the batterer HIDES. And where did I say? IN THE DARK. We'd best get clear on what is meant by Dark. We can do this by naming some of these areas of Dark that are so plentiful in everyday life. This area: he hides behind the woefully misapplied title of "Man." Man he is not. I've told you already what he is.

This area: he hides behind the battering ram of religious laws and traditions, built on, til the husband gets counted as a god over the wife.

This area: he hides, so to speak, inside his wife--filling her up with first his fear, then his inadequacies. In trade, he pulls from her all her good feelings about herself. Before there is a battered wife there is a battered male. The world he lives in batters him, makes him feel lesser. But now he can despise himself from a distance--by despising his wife. ALL of these areas contain pockets of DARKNESS. (Darkness is present wherever Understanding is absent.) Look out! Look out! --here the batterer commmmmmmmmmmes....

But. He has way more in his backpack than hidingplaces, and don't think that we've talked about all of them cause we haven't, we're just going on to something else now. NEXT!

Okay, it's this: excuse and and and BLAME. You will not find one without the other. They are both necessary in the scheming of the batterer. Excuse and Blame are hallmarks of the Child. He is at his boyish best when excusing his cruel behavior by blaming his wife or his wife or his wife for it. Course, sometimes he blames other [things] for things he does, but he particularly chooses her as the scapegoat. She's ready-made. One size fits all.

It would be bad manners to not include mention of the one item in his bag that weighs MORE than all the others put together. And that my dear is his gross CHILDISH dependency upon his wife. It is the very childishness of this dependency that shames him so that he denies that it is there. And he uses all the other items in his backpack to help him PROVE it. How we like that?

Well, I see that these few lines have served as some sorta introduction, so that's what we'll call it. You see it called by that name at the beginning of this section of writing, but it was not seen as that til just now. So in closing this section let us be reminded that the whole cause for communication between the covers of this book is LIGHT.

P.S. And when we get 'light' enough, we .....RISE.

Chapter 1

Now this is a record of the learning and growing I did during my six months of training in Understanding while I lived in the house with S.O.B. ["Saved Open-hearted Brother"--how she referred to her abusive husband in Womansearch]. The first thing I had to do was face the truth about myself and the situation I had gotten into. It is not easy to stand toe to toe with truth that pulls your clothes off you (S.O.B. NEVER got the hang of it). After I managed to face up anyhow I saw that my reward was a kind of strength. A strength that S.O.B. did not have. A strength that was STRONGER than S.O.B.'s awesome physical strength! WOW! This difference between the two strengths meant that in actuality S.O.B. was truly weak--he only appeared strong. I began to Understand the true definition for strength, and also, for the first time I deeply Understood a thing the old folks used to say: "Appearances LIE." Sure you' right.

I began to lose my fear of S.O.B., and of course, with THAT gone, he began to panic. A lot of the things he did that used to terrify me began to be funny. HE became comical to me, but all that's getting ahead of my story.

Neediness
A riddle: the needier you are, the less you will settle for. Does that sound crazy? --Well, it is--backwards. I mean, the way a child reasons; it makes sense to a child, which is what I was reduced to at the time I first met S.O.B. (It occurs to me now that if you are reading this and you have NOT read the first WOMANSEARCH book, then you need to have read both the Foreword and the Introduction to this book before starting to read chapters.) One would think that the needier a person is, the MORE to settle for, but the very essence of the problem makes good sense impossible to enact.

In my case, coming out of divorce, with four stairsteps strapped to my leg, and with responsibilities weighing upon my lone shoulders for the first time in my life--

Girl, I mean to tell ya, I was NEEDY. So needy I was desperate. Driven by that desperation, I took the first thing that appeared to offer a solution: enter S.O.B. Well, he entered and refused to exit, becoming like a fifth child strapped to my leg. It was the FEELING of this more than any real perception of this essential intangible truth.

But the Joker that brought down the house was in my later Understanding that S.O.B. and I were both nothing more than needy children. My Needy was out in the open (financial); we both knew of it. His Needy was indirect (emotional); he HID his behind mine. See, you just gotta Understand this for the truth that it is: batterers are HIDERS--they hide every which way. What are they hiding from? TRUTH! The truth about themselves terrifies them.

S.O.B. was no exception to the rule. His inability to face the truth about himself made him a coward of the worst kind-a coward whose other side was BULLY. Whew--that smarts!

He could not admit his needs--even to himself--in fear of being less than a man. So, of course, his fear made him less than a man. That's what fear does you see, when it is allowed to rule your life, the decisions you make. Fear is a robber, and a close companion of Neediness. I mean, get a grip.

You know how needy little kids are; it is their RIGHT to burden others with their time- and energy-consuming care. But imagine this same void existing in what appears to be an adult, especially a male, who is further burdened with--God help us--male EGO, and boy, he becomes a bottomless PIT! A dangerous person.

The real child is situated to be supplied with a protective covering (parents) to keep him/her well-hidden in their acute needy stage. Well, the big overgrown kid wants this same set-up, especially the hideout part, so he latches onto some hapless female to tend to his Baby Needs: enter, Mommy! The real Mommy/Baby protection has its set time and is natural and positive. the Overgrown Mommy/Baby protection is forced and negative--for both parties.

It was when I gained the Understanding that S.O.B. was needier than I that my good sense began coming back to visit. I saw the difference also, between our Needy--he was full of BABY needs that overwhelmed me and imprisoned me--I had adult needs concerning support for my children. S.O.B. needed "mommy" protection for himself from himself. I got really exhausted playing that role, before I Understood that my playing the role upon demand (his baby behavior) was the thing that EXCUSED his role of "Baby."

Well, I guess I just said a mouthful there, didn't I? But, I'm telling you, since catching onto that I see women doing that all over the place. You should know, that the Mommy role is a primary choice in the batterer's scheme to support himself through the inner "goods" of his woman, since he lacks them himself. In this, he follows the natural pattern of the real child, that is, should the needs of the child not be met, then the child will seek to get them fulfilled himself, and being a child, the ways open to him are negative. Yeah, right. But what does he know or care? He's a CHILD. Got it?

The grave thing about neediness is that it makes females woefully vulnerable. There is no balance. Take me for instance; when my fear-driven neediness shoved all my good sense over the cliff I had no defense against bad judgment. The truth to be told is that somewhere inside me I knew S.O.B. was not a good choice even though he had the solution to my predicament.

My predicament at the time counted above all else. And S.O.B. zeroed in on me as if I were prey. Which in some way, I was.

There's something about neediness that seems to give out signals to predators. Ever notice that? It's like a silent telegraph. I speak of it was "insides talkin' to insides." And with other situations too. One person picks up on where another person's insides are, even before anything is said. There's more to this--we'll save it for later. But we are done with the neediness thing now. We'll probably bring it up again somewhere else.

The Mommy and the Girl

There's a lot to be said for the many many roles people play, just getting along from day to day. The less adult we are, the easier it is for us to slide right down into a role assigned us by whatever master button-pusher. Batterers become master button-pushers cause their "success" in their intimate relationship requires it. How else can they get their invalid needs met? Now, if their needs were VALID they wouldn't have to resort to trickery and worse. But, it's their game and boy, do they know how to play it. See, the important word here is play. And if the other player (the victim) don't want to be that, then she gotta learn how to NOT play and be NOT guilty of NOT playing. Whew! Another mouthful. See, if it seems kinda like I'm talking in circles here believe you me that is NOT so, and you know it because down inside your gut you've somehow known about this underbelly wicked, behind-the-scenes AGENDA that makes up the world of the batterer and his Kingdom. YES! He has a kingdom, and is set to protect it against all comers; is set to not allow ANY interference from ANY source--be it vegetable, mineral, or animal--which in some cases he becomes very much LIKE. Have you seen it?

We want to scope this out some here so what we're gonna do is take a brief look at both sides of ONE role. Just for fun, I call it "roleover." It fits, cause the moods of the batterer can have his victim jumpin' from one side of the coin to the other--the better to PACIFY him. See. We gettin' it already. It is babies who need the pacifier--see