Five Things That Happen in Your Body in an Abusive Interaction
What happens if we view Biden's "performance" in Thursday's debate from the perspective of domestic violence?
I mentioned in yesterday’s Substack that one framework for helping us process and respond to the behavior of Trump and coinciding response of Biden in Thursday’s debate is through the lens of domestic violence.
Although I would say this is true for engagements with the six conservative Supreme Court Justices, as shown through their ruling yesterday (7/1) to expand Presidential powers, the Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025), and many Republican legislators.
Biden had a lot of violence to respond to in a short amount of time (602 lies in 40 minutes, among other atrocities, according to ). From our perspective, Biden’s “performance” at the debate had nothing to do with age, cognitive decline, or mental acuity, but was a natural physiological response to an abusive man in a context where the folks who were supposed to set parameters around the conversation (Jake Tapper and Dana Bash) did no such thing. Many 80 year olds, 30 year olds, and 8 year olds would have responded in the same way.
For more information about what this feels like in real time, ask someone who has survived and left an abusive relationship.
Or a couples therapist who has attempted to work with partners with high levels of abuse.
Or a person who lives in consistent threat for their lives because of racial, sexist, or homo/transphobic discrimination.
No really.
Please ask one of these three categories of people what this feels like in real time.
It’ll help give you language to understand what’s happening to millions of Americans (including you, likely) who are powerlessly watching the structural and physical violence that the Republican Party and Supreme Court are wreaking on the foundations of our political system.
(Powerlessly until November 5, 2024. Please vote for politicians that support democracy, including President Biden.)
At Relationship 101, Julia and I talk about the science of relationships, sexuality, and communication. Our communication and relationships are impacted by what’s going on inside of our own bodies, and through the bodies of others. We believe that knowledge is power.
And today, we want to share five physiological processes that happen in the context of an abusive interaction, both within the individual as they’re witnessing/bracing for their abuser’s version of Trump’s presentation during the Thursday debate, and during the relational encounter itself.
A huge shout out to Jason Whiting, Lisa Merchant, Angela Bradford, and Douglas Smith, who write about this and other important elements of family violence in their chapter “The Ecology of Family Violence: Treating Cultural Contexts and Relationship Processes” in The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy.
Diffuse arousal. As a reminder, our brains are designed to stay alive, and one of the ways they do that is through the fight/flight/freeze model, which happens when the experiences of fear and threat create stress hormones (cortisol) that result in an extreme state of arousal. Our heart rates increase, as does our breathing. Decisions become only about survival, meaning that rational thought goes out the window. Most of us move in and out of these states throughout our weeks, but when the fear or threat is especially intense, we stay in states of arousals for a longer period of time.
Chronic dysregulation. If diffuse arousal speaks to the intensity of a fearful/threatening experience, chronic dysregulation speaks to the duration that someone spends in a state of arousal. For instance, children who are raised in violent homes, either experiencing it from parents or witnessing it between parents, are much more likely to have challenges regulating themselves in later relationships. I would suggest that Trump administration, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, created four years of chronic dysregulation, fueled by 24/7 news channels and social media programs. I shudder at what four years of a Trump administration controlled by Project 2025 would create.
Neurodevelopment. Witnessing or experiencing violence as a child, either through direct physical violations or more discrete forms, has been linked to decreased gray matter volume in our brains, which impacts the areas of visual cortex. Violence literally impacts the ways that we see the world, making us hyperaware of the capacities for threats.
Emotional contagion. Our hearts send electromagnetic signals that can be detected in the bodies of others. One of the most notable physiological symptoms of stress is increased heart rate and blood pressure; when you feel emotional tension when you walk into a room, you are likely picking up on the heightened heart rate of another individual. (This is especially true in online spaces.) Emotional contagion is the physiological mirroring of another person’s emotional response, which is most evident when the emotion is connected to fear or anger.
Synchrony. If emotional contagion is the lining of two people’s heart rates and breathing patterns, and the ensuing behaviors that come from that, synchrony is the alignment of nonverbal or verbal responses, such as pitch, volume, or rate of speech, or scrunching of facial features, that are visually witnessed.
Over the next six months, it’s imperative that we are aware of these five principles in our own bodies, as well as the bodies of others. As we read in Project 2025, the Republican Party is planning to transform the government into an autocracy, a government system where an extremely small group of people make decisions for a much larger group. This is an utterly scary thing, one not helped by a mainstream media (looking at you New York Times) who is more interested in distributing fear than actually reporting the news.
This week, I invite you to practice three things.
Check your pulse from time to time. Check it after you consume the news, or engage in an IRL or virtual political conversation. A normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. If your heart rate goes above 100 beats per minute, give yourself permission to walk away from the interaction.
Or better yet, use a pulse oximeter! Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash Ask yourself, “How do I want to be mirrored?” If you initiate a conversation, you can set the tempo of the conversation through slowing your own breathing, speaking in a lower, softer tone, and opening your body posture (such as by raising your chest). If you are responding in a conversation, pay special attention to your breathing. Speak a sentence that gets progressively slower from the first word to the final punctuation.
Observe how people respond to the ways that people (i.e. President Biden) engage with Trump and others who are using volatility as a way to get or maintain power. If an online source uses an ageist, sexist, or racist comment to belittle the natural relational reactions to chaos, block them. Unsubscribe from them, and let them know the reasons that you’re choosing to do so.
Please share this with other people!
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Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia