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that young man off and just say he’s a
nasty bad person and have him sitting
in a room with die hard, nasty
controlling blokes who have been
doing it for years, it would have done
his head in.
Min: There would be no commonality,
he wouldn’t be able to properly engage
and he would just feel shamed.
removed from the house and put on
bail. We thought he was going to go on
a Perpetrators Programme with some
really hard core perpetrators. When
she told me about her partner’s
childhood, where his mum was a sex
worker and drug user. He had seen
possibly, even suffered abuse as a
child. I couldn’t believe he had
managed to make a relationship with
someone who wasn’t damaged.
Somehow his resilience was that he
had made a relationship with a person
who was whole and the fact that he
had made this relationship with this
whole person indicated that he was
amazing, but also, under stress, he just
reverted to his default position. He’d
been beaten up as a kid and when he
was stressed, he didn’t know what to
do and didn’t have the verbal ability to
say, so he thumped and what he did
was wrong.
What he did was very, very wrong. He
could have hit that baby and it could
have been dreadful but we can’t write
Sue: He would be so shamed to think
that the world thought he was like that
and I think that someone like that
deserves an opportunity to be educated
about how you can be different. And to
be educated on how you can manage
that emotional regulation in a different
way, so that he can make that work
and he wasn’t getting that. I never
forgot that couple and I think that
Inspiring Families was written partly
because of them. So that’s my stuff.
I think there are a core of mainly men
out there who, through toxic
masculinity, through developmental
trauma, because of the rubbish they
have been through as children, need
some help as adult males to
understand that they can have
relationships that are not about
violence. It won’t work if there is
control and coercion, I’m not
suggesting that, I think that some of
that is so embedded for some men that
it’s not going to change, but I think
that we can at least think of some of
them being treated differently.
We worked with this Polish couple. He
had punched her at a wedding
reception, pissed, and police were
called, he was arrested, bail conditions,
but she would sit in a group and she
was clearly saying ‘I’m not frightened
of him, he doesn’t control my money I
do what I want. His issue is alcohol.’
Making The Invisible Visible