Two Pieces (Peggy)

I tried to explain “survivor mode” to my sister the other day. As a “non-survivor,” it took a bit for her to understand. Survivor mode is a frame of mind, developed over time. What do I have to do to stop or minimize the oncoming explosion? What has worked in the past? What has made it worse? It becomes an automatic response to an impending explosion.

As the years went on, I was more and more in survivor mode. My guess is that the last year that I was with him, I was always in survivor mode (as were the children). This is the example I gave my sister:

I had just come home from work. I was tired and had to make dinner. I walked into the kitchen and there he was, proud as punch—he had cleaned the sink and the stove. He had done this once, maybe 10 or 15 years before. I knew the drill. I praised him up and down, over and over again. 

He pointed out how dirty it had been. (It was not. I am a meticulous cleaner. I am the type of cleaner who takes the stove apart, moves furniture to get behind and underneath, cleaning anywhere there may be dirt hiding.) His remarks on the “filth” he found hurt me deeply. He went on and on about how dirty it was and how hard he worked. I swallowed the hurt I was feeling and just praised and praised him. I thanked him over and over. 

Then I told him I needed to make dinner. He looked at me and told me I could not use the stove or the sink. I panicked—he always demanded homemade meals—how was I going to make his dinner? I tried to reason with him and finally, he told me that I could use the stove, but I had better not make it dirty. Then he told me I could not use the sink. 

I took a deep breath. We had a bathroom next to the kitchen; I could use that sink. I made dinner.

When my therapist heard this story, she asked me, “Why didn’t you just say, ‘okay, we can go to McDonalds instead’?” I looked at her like a deer in headlights. My first thought was he would have been furious if I said that. And yes, it just never occurred to me that I had an option other than making him a home-cooked meal. By then I was well-programmed. Now when I look at this story I think, wow, there are a number of things I could or should have told him, such as, “Great, you can clean the sink and stove from now on. Thanks!” Why didn’t I say that? Why didn’t I just take the children to McDonalds?

In survivor mode, your brain does not stop and think rationally; it immediately goes to frantically trying to figure out what to do to stop the oncoming explosion. What do we need to do to minimize the damage? To keep them from exploding? To keep the children safe? That is where our brain goes. 

Our brain relies on the history that it has been fed. For years, they pointed out how wrong this or that person was for speaking back to their spouse, for not making a home-cooked meal, for daring to use store-bought tomato sauce, etc., etc. For years we watched the veins in their neck thicken and their face get red when someone else did not do what they thought they should do. We did not want that visceral anger aimed at us. For years, we and the children endured explosions out of nowhere. So, what does our brain tell us? It tells us to do whatever they ask. It tells us what to do to minimize the explosions and anger.

When you’re in this kind of situation day after day, it wears you down. You just want to have a quiet evening without explosions. Of course, that is not possible, so you do everything you can to minimize it. I protected the children the best I could, and when he would say crazy things, I spoke up. Like the night he said we should just drop a bomb on Africa and get rid of “them” all. There were topics where my daughter could not stay quiet, especially when he criticized people on TV about their looks, race, weight, whatever. My daughter would speak up, even knowing it would be bad if she crossed him. My son never understood why we spoke up. He would say, “Just agree with him. Tell him he is right.” But there were some things we just could not swallow.

The other piece to the survivor mode to keep in mind is who you are speaking with—we are often speaking with a narcissistic sociopath who is wound-up, angry, and ready for a fight. There is really nothing we can say in that situation except to praise them and tell them they are right. Our antennas get really good at sensing when they are ready to explode. We go into survivor mode and try to placate them before they explode, for the children’s sake.

So many times, we heard, “Why didn’t you just…,” or we would hear on the news that “she could have just left the guy.” It is not that easy. That reporter forgets that we are with “that guy” because we loved him and we are trying to make it work. That reporter also has no idea what “survivor mode” is and what the brain is telling us to do. Again, when you are in survivor mode, your brain is reacting defensively, looking at your “history” with this person and using that history to guide you and advise you. It too wants to minimize the damage, so it feeds you what to say and do to avoid another explosion.

The development of my brain’s survivor mode started in my youth. My father suffered from manic depression and alcoholism. We never knew when he would explode. We thought that we caused the explosions and were taught to do whatever we could to minimize them, or the evening would be ruined and my mother would suffer. We hated seeing that sad look on my mother’s face, so we would do whatever we could to make my father “happy.” So, you might say I was well on my way when I met my abuser. Only it is a lot worse when you are the adult in the room, trying to protect your children.

After I left my abuser, the “Why didn’t you just…?” comments hurt and confused me. Some of my “friends” made me feel like a dope, a failure, weak. But once I educated myself on what domestic violence is, I realized I was none of those things. I was strong and courageous. I was just trying to keep my marriage together and everyone safe. But when the children started modeling my behavior in their relationships, I realized I had not only taught them to be kind, compassionate, empathic human beings but also that it was okay to be belittled, disrespected, yelled at, manipulated, and abused. I knew I needed to model something new. I needed to model that when a relationship is unhealthy and unfixable, it is time to leave, so I did just that.