Docsplainin' -- it's what I do

Docsplainin'--it's what I do.
After all, I'm a doc, aren't I?



Sunday, June 14, 2009

There are no battered women,

Description unavailableImage by kalandrakas via Flickr

conceptually speaking; only battering men.

By which I mean that there is no one personality type of woman who gets battered, while men who batter all seem to have gone to the same school.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I always understood that most women who remain in battering relationships have many signs of textbook codependancy and depression.

Virginia S. Wood, Psy.D., Instructor said...

They do. But women are raised to be codependent, which leads to depression. As does battering.

Anonymous said...

I disagree. Healthy expression of intra-familial connectedness is different by degrees of magnitude from pathological codependance. Additionally, it has been theorized that there may be an evolutionary component to women inappropriately bonding to abusive men. Mainly, the idea of submission to abusive men is a trait that promotes reproduction and as a result may provide the vehicle for genetic predisposition towards depression.

Anonymous said...

Hi! Floated on over here - I totally agree, I've worked with both abusers and survivors since college, but let's broaden the scope! It's not just male abusers and female survivors, it's female abusers with trans survivors and male abusers with male survivors and genderqueer abusers with female survivors... etc. etc. Gender is not the thing that makes an abuser, but entitlement, which is often learned through privilege (including gender) is definitely one of them. If we broaden our analysis to include all oppressions, not just sexism, as root causes of abuse I think we can do a lot of work from there, and also this "evolutionary component" anonymous above was alluding to - bunk.

Virginia S. Wood, Psy.D., Instructor said...

"Gender is not the thing that makes an abuser, but entitlement..."

Bingo! We have a winner!

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