When Love Hurts Reflections, News and Resources

Thank you for being a part of our When Love Hurts community. Karen and I are so grateful for all of you who are working towards a safer and more respectful world for women and children.

It’s been a four-decade journey to arrive here. I began my journey in 1983, when I worked at a women’s shelter on weekends while I was in graduate school. I was so moved by the courage and strength of the women we supported, anti-violence work has been a significant part of my work life ever since. After working at the shelter for 5 years, I joined a team at Family Services of Greater Vancouver who supported women impacted by abuse, and offered accountability groups for men who were abusive to their partner. I then spent nearly 20 years at BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre developing and delivering research, training and resources, assisting over 40 communities to deliver evidence-based services to women impacted by abuse. 

Karen and I released our book When Love Hurts. A Woman’s Guide to Understanding Abuse in Relationships over 20 years ago, now in its 3rd edition, and When Love Hurts: A Best Practice Guide and Curriculum in 2020. We are invited into communities to facilitate training and grow the capacity of communities to respond appropriately to men’s violence. We also regularly lead online training for professionals who want to advance their skills and knowledge so they can support women. https://www.whenlovehurts.ca/product/training-for-helping-professionals/ And since COVID, I have been facilitating women’s support groups again, after being away from that part of the work for over 20 years. 

Grateful and uneasy

I feel grateful for all the opportunities I have had. I do. But I am also uneasy with the industry that has grown around ‘family’ violence, which is often misguided, and worse, expensive and harmful. Far too many people are profiting from the pain of women and children who have experienced violence and abuse. We see cottage industries popping up everywhere for things like “family reunification” and “high conflict families” while advocacy and support programs that actually increase safety and promote healing for women and children struggle with a lack of funding. Many government services, such as child welfare, income assistance and legal and adjacent services, are ill-equipped to respond appropriately and provide women with supportive and safe services. Women are pressured and sometimes mandated to participate in many of these costly services, because not participating can be interpreted through a patriarchal lens as women being the ‘uncooperative or unfriendly parent’, or that women are attempting to alienate the children from their father. Women, already at a financial disadvantage, are financially jeopardized by these unnecessary and often harmful service costs simply for trying to protect their children.

Perpetuating dominant discourse – men’s rights

Among the most devastating institutional harms impacting women come from the legal system. The vast majority of legal services are focused on ensuring men’s rights (privilege), not on helping women and their children find safety, security and healing. We find it baffling that abusive men, who were totally fine to leave the parenting to women while they were together, and expose their children to his abusiveness, can convince the courts that she is unfit as a mother and is trying to alienate the children from him. How can the cadre of professionals involved in these cases fail to see the contradiction? There is no evidence that the legal professionals have any interest in helping women protect their children, but are steadfastly committed to upholding the unearned rights of men who are abusive. All this conforms to the dominant discourse that women are to blame for men’s abusiveness.

There are psychologists who are extravagantly paid to conduct parent evaluations for court, often producing heavily biased reports that ignore his abuse and favour the abuser. We have seen reports that have clearly used a ‘cut and paste’ approach, because they have left the names of children from a previous report, or kept in paragraphs that describe another woman’s experience or another abuser’s accusations. They use outdated psychological assessments that adopt a taken-for-granted gender bias, and the results are often used in court to further denigrate women’s parenting and risk children’s safety in service of upholding men’s rights to equal parenting time. 

There are divorce coaches and parenting coordinators who are so concerned about being ‘fair and equal’, that it aligns them with the abuser because they are ill-equipped to see and understand the cunning and manipulative tactics used by abusers. Mediators, ‘high conflict’ counseling programs, reunification programs, as well as all manner of counselors, coaches and social workers, all who declare that they are qualified to offer services to abusive men, or to women impacted by a partner’s abuse, often approach these couples with the idea that both parties have a role to play in the abuse. What?! The dominant discourse of equal responsibility in relationship problems serves the professional and the abuser, but it does not serve women’s and children’s safety. The heavily biased dominant discourse that both partners are responsible for his abuse persists – although both common sense and research tells us otherwise.

Broken system of interventions

In our recent research, we asked 60 women who have experienced abuse from a male partner about their experiences with counselors. The results are shocking. The findings that surfaced indicate that counsellors are deeply entrenched in the perspective that both people in the relationship are responsible for his abuse. You know: ‘it takes two to tango’. In reality, these counselors are not actually seeking equal accountability; they seem to always be looking to find reasons to blame women for their partner’s abuse. Why else would he be abusive, unless she did something, didn’t do something, wasn’t enough, was too much, etc…? The most concerning finding is that women remain in the relationship for much longer because their counsellors have failed to name the abuse of power, blamed her for the relationship problems, and placed the responsibility for change on her. They repeatedly convinced her, along with her abuser, that if she changes, he will stop his abuse. We know that they’ve been ‘honeymooned’ (manipulated) by the abuser, but they can’t see it through their gender biased training lens.

We have ‘trauma specialists’, which include those who have taken a short course to those who have graduate training, all viewing violence against women from a lens that holds many risks. Abuse is a social problem, not an individual one that can be treated by ‘working with the woman’ on her trauma issues (often described to us by women as ‘working on their nervous system or brain’). Trauma approaches centre the trauma, but women’s safety needs to be central to all the work we do. Trauma is only one aspect of women’s experiences of abuse, and cannot be adequately addressed until women are truly safe (which doesn’t simply mean separated from her abuser, because we know he can continue the abuse for many years post separation).

Harms of help

We have a broken system of interventions, and interveners who are unconsciously carrying the dominant discourse, deeply informed by patriarchal and misogynist ideas about women and men. In extensive research that our team conducted while I was at BC Women’s Hospital, we heard so many shocking stories from women about how flawed the systems and service responses to men’s violence are. We call this phenomena the harms of help, or institutional violence, as women sought help and support for their experiences of abuse, but were often further harmed, encountering responses that echoed or compounded the impacts of the abuse from their partners. 

What’s at stake

Of course, in a way, this makes sense. If we rely on conventional models that are predicated on ‘experts’ having authority over women’s lives, we run the risk of repeating the power and control dynamics of an abuser in services. We do this by disbelieving women and treating abusive men as credible; by discrediting women’s experiences of abuse while believing abusive men’s lies; by emboldening abusers and trapping women with their abusers. We disempower women with monitoring measures that control women (e.g. so many criteria and rules in women’s shelters and transition houses, child protection, court orders, etc.). By misjudging and mislabeling women’s emotional demeanour as deficits rather than seeing her struggles as the impacts of abuse, we undermine her credibility; and then we offer prescriptions and pills to treat the impacts of abuse, which further stigmatizes her. We block her ability to find support and safety by overwhelming her with systemic barriers, and the legal system threatens her with the most excruciating of all threats – she will have to relinquish her children to their abusive father for at least half of their daily lives. 

Most of this is impossible for women to navigate, as systems are often unintentionally complicit with the abuser, making it difficult to find financial stability, safe housing and the right kinds of support. And then, men are allowed to withhold child support, refuse to distribute the assets in a timely way, and misuse the legal system to drain her financially and emotionally. Litigation abuse, and using the children as pawns in his endless pursuit of control over her, has no legal limits. Egregious and frivolous use of the legal system costs women their children, their livelihood and their mental health. And no one is stopping this. Just recently, a woman was told by her new lawyer that she should let the father see her children, even though they had a protection order in place as a result of an assault where the children that occurred in public: she was told “the judge would rule in his favour if it went to court anyway, so why not just allow him access?” How did we arrive here, where we are not allowing women to protect and care for their children?

Building a network of safe and equitable services

So, am I feeling grateful? I am encouraged that so many people (still mostly women, and we need men to show their support) are using our When Love Hurts Best Practice Guide and Curriculum, and taking our training. Sometimes, at the end of our training workshops, as women are expressing how life-changing the material in the workshop has been, I find my emotions are mixed. How impressive and dedicated these professionals are. How motivated they are to make a difference. They are awesome, and they will carry the work forward. And they will struggle against the dominant discourses embedded in their agencies, communities, funding structures and policies. They may not have a community of women and men to continue to support their work in this feminist, women-centred, abuser accountability, and ‘safety first’ practice model. So, I am grateful for the many advocates working against systemic injustices. But, I wish we didn’t have to work against the flawed systems.

That is why we are writing this newsletter – to build a network of women and men who want to create safe and equitable services that support women and their children. And to share their work, successes, frustrations and opportunities for growth with a community which is inspired to make a real difference. So we invite you to join us, to be part of a legacy journey to make a difference. Thank you for being part of the solution.

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Best Practice Guide and Curriculum (PDF)

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