We’ve all scrambled to make sense of last week’s insurrection. The media has brought in constitutional experts and policy wonks to discuss impeachment, the 25th amendment, our federal insurrection laws. But if folks want another way to process the events of January 6, 2021 and consider how to prevent further escalation, talk to an abuse expert.
What abusers all have in common is how they prioritize their own desire above the safety, peace, and autonomy of their victim. Sometimes, the desire itself is to take away the other’s safety, peace and autonomy.
Last Wednesday, when Trump unleashed his mob onto the Capitol, we saw abuse happen in real time. The insurrectionists forced their way into a sacred building that belongs to us all during an important moment that also was ours. While chanting that it was “their house,” they ransacked rooms, smashed windows, busted down doors, and smeared feces on the walls. They came armed with guns and zip tie handcuffs, brandished Confederate flags, and planted bombs in buildings outside. They screamed, yelled, and banged, smashed, shattered, and stole. They filled the air with mace and gas. Some deftly staked out the place in tactical gear with military precision, while others seemed there for the chaos and cosplay, selfies and souvenirs. Some offenders say they were just going along with the crowd, there to witness a historic event, while others proudly reported that Wednesday morning they’d bid a final goodbye to their kids and were ready to “die for country.” They were there to terrorize the elected officials and staffers in the building with all of us watching. And they did so successfully.
By all accounts, it was pandemonium and true terror in the Capitol. Staffers barricaded the doors in the Senate and House, elected officials were crawling through gallery rows of chairs, ducking in the balconies. They lost shoes, had panic attacks, made distress calls to their families. Three hundred escaping lawmakers, some refusing to wear masks at the height of the pandemic, packed into a tight room, with access to one shared bathroom. Already at least three representatives have tested positive for COVID-19. Speaker Pelosi said her staff cowered in the dark under a table for 2 ½ hours as people stood on the other side of the door, in her pillaged office, banging ominously like some big bad Camp Auschwitz wolf. No doubt many thought they were going to die. And let’s be clear, it was luck—and not the temperance of the mob or law enforcement—that limited the number of deaths to five that day. There’s no telling what would have happened if the offenders had crossed paths with their chosen prey, Pelosi, Congress Members Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris or even Vice President Mike Pence, for whom a noose hung outside.
In law, we sometimes talk about pre-impact or pre-death terror. It’s the physical and mental experience of perceiving imminent fatal danger—think being inside a falling elevator or being tied up by an assailant who says he’s going to kill you—or, in this case, hearing, smelling, and watching an out-of-control mob dispatched by the head of state coming to kill you. The emotional experience of pre-impact or pre-death terror is one of mental distress, high anxiety, fear, hopelessness, helplessness and manifests in the body’s biomechanics: a racing heart, the inability to breathe, and profuse sweating. This dread and terror is an experience that victims of intimate partner violence, child abuse, and sextortion know well.
I don’t know how many participants in the insurrection are abusive in their personal lives. But it’s easy to fathom that individuals so willing to annihilate the safety and security of the terrified people in that building, not to mention all of us around the world watching in horror as the safety of our democracy was also under attack, were not novices to committing acts of abuse and non-consent. They were, after all, acting at the behest of a well-documented serial abuser, a man who fetishizes abuse for the sake of abuse.
Those of us in the field of domestic violence recognize the behavior of the insurrectionists. We recognize their need for power and control, their sense of entitlement, their appetite for destruction, their false sense of victimhood. We’re unsurprised by their unwavering preference to believe fanciful tales that the election was stolen over the inconvenient truth that their cruel, impulsive, immature leader was less desirable for over half of voters than the moderate guy who won. We’re reminded of the ex who believes they could only be dumped if cheated-on, ignoring the fact that they’ve been an abusive fiend for months and aren’t an appealing option.
Getting ‘revenge’ on the liberals by putting them in fear for their lives and desecrating the Capitol is not unlike how abusers act in retaliation for a breakup: hindering law enforcement, threatening far worse consequences if the victim of their abuse tries to get help – it’s all too familiar.
Click HERE to read the full article from Carrie Goldberg
