What to Do When Something's Not Right
Author/Speaker Wade Mullen weighs in on how to combat abuse.
Last night I attended a talk by Wade Mullen at The Row House Forum—a talk I had helped bring about by recommending Wade to The Row House’s Founder, Tom Becker (whom, full disclosure, I copyedit for). I have followed Wade’s newsletter, Pellucid, for some time, and I’ve also read his break-out book, Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse—and Freeing Yourself from Its Power, which I recommend to anyone and everyone who has ever been touched by abuse dynamics in any way.
This is because Wade’s book occupies a unique position in the genre: while most self-help or otherwise prescriptive books on the topic of abuse focus on the psychological angle—either the effects on victims, the motivations/incentive of the abuser, or both—Something’s Not Right tackles the problem from the sociological angle. It examines solely external, observable, quantifiable patterns of relational behavior that amount to demonstrable evidence of abuse. Wade doesn’t bother concerning himself with why bad actors do what they do; instead, he simply teaches us how to identify spades in the wild: how to discern, see, and know when abuse has indeed occurred—the lack of which skill in the general populace is, in fact, one of the greatest barriers to abuse prevention and victim recovery that I know of.
Wade’s book is especially helpful for all of us because it gives lots of nuanced, explicit answers to the question, “What can we do about this problem? How can we help?” Whether you’re a victim of abuse or a bystander—and, discouraging newsflash, I’m sorry, but statistically speaking ALL of us have been a bystander at one point or another—abuse is just that common—but regardless of how your life has intersected with abusive behavior, Mullen helps all of us recognize what has happened to ourselves or others and how to see it coming down the pike a lot more quickly in the future (which, again, is super helpful for the sole fact that abuse is just that common).
Wade gave his talk at The Row House the same title as his book, but he expanded on concepts within it in very helpful, specific, and directly applicable ways that supplied me with a better grasp of my own story and what to do with it moving forward. He also gave me a great answer for the question I posed to him during the Q&A section—but I’ll get to that in a minute.
For the conclusion of his speech, Wade offered two key observations of what victims of abuse need most (this is my paraphrase, as I do not have access to his slides):
We need others to rally around us in the light, people who will take a stand against darkness and tell the truth with us, publicly, no matter the cost.
We need comfort and solace from a supportive environment, one free of abuse, in which we can safely tell our stories and, in so doing, heal.
Number 1, in particular, is a tall, tall order.
After all, most bystanders of abuse are usually good friends with the abuser or benefit from the abuser’s actions, identity, or the ideology the abuser represents in some way. Abusers, by definition, occupy a position of power and influence, oftentimes a high-profile communal position, which they have naturally, organically gravitated to over time and used to benefit the people they like: people who make them feel good, support their various agendas, agree with their opinions, trade favors with them, follow their instructions or advice without question, routinely praise them for their good deeds, and so on.
Perhaps you have a trusted, beloved friend of 20+ years who has been through thick and thin with you, and even if they have maybe kinda screwed you over a couple times and never really apologized for it, they’ve been so generous and solicitous and attentive in other ways and at other times, the handful of bad incidents don’t really matter—or else they’re too uncomfortable to talk about, probably even to think too much about (isn’t it ungrateful or bitter of you to dwell on such things when your friend is just SO kind and giving the rest of the time?!)—and if you ever did bring the handful of problems up to try and sort them out, you somehow know your friend is going to manage to avoid actually listening to you or addressing the lingering issue(s), anyway.
So you drop it, you let it go, and you revel in your friendship with this remarkable, wonderful person.
Until somebody else, out of nowhere, suddenly claims your very dear friend hurt them. Badly.
Even repeatedly.
And this new person goes so far as to claim that your incredibly generous, self-giving, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly friend must be called to account, must repent and apologize and make restitution for the wrongs that your friend insists never happened.
Instantly you feel threatened. You feel defensive of your friend, whom you believe this third party has no right attacking; you feel your sense of reality swirl and come unhinged at the edges as you think, how could these claims possibly be true, right before recalling that, oh, shoot, you have experienced something eerily similar from your friend—but but, it was so long ago, and it wasn’t that bad, really, was it? And you feel what you had believed was a rock-solid relationship tremble under your feet, you feel the sudden, shocking risk to your wonderful decades-long friendship as you actually do start to ask a couple of probing, startled, disoriented questions—and are met with aggressive absolute denials, or scoffing dismissal and deflection, or shifting stories mixed with dismay and hurt and blame of you for ever thinking of doubting or critiquing your best, best friend who has always been there for you.
Your mouth goes dry as a dessert. Your tongue shrivels up.
No strain of truth-telling in the world will grow in such a desolate, arid climate.
Who would risk losing someone so familiar, so dear, so trusted, in exchange for a new, terrible reality devoid of that vital friendship and support—and, quite possibly, devoid of the whole loyal community the abuser has wrapped around themselves like a cloak . . . the community you have, for a long time now, also identified as your very own?
Who would do that?
My question at the end of Wade Mullen’s presentation revolved around this very problem: if, as Rachael Denhollander has famously said, the metric for whether or not we truly care about abuse is not how we respond when it happens out there, but what we do when it occurs within our very own homes and communities—how, then, can we prepare ourselves for allegations to arise? How can we brace ourselves for an encounter that is, ultimately, inevitable, given how common abuse truly is? If it really is going to happen sooner or later, and if it is so hard to see, admit, and align ourselves with the truth when it does—how the heck can we actually do the right thing?
Wade admitted to me, in so many words, that there really is no way to truly prepare to face abuse. It is just that terrible.
However, he did suggest two practical measures that people can take:
Seek outside perspective. Find someone you can trust completely outside of the situation, far from the influence of your compromised community, and ask for their take. They will see things you just can’t and tell you if something’s not right, not good, not normal or defensible.
Take some time apart and skewer yourself with this soul-searching question: Will I stand in the light of truth when the time comes? No matter what it takes? Do I value righteousness and goodness and justice enough to ally myself with them at the cost of my whole world crumbling?
I can hear most people answering to themselves—sincerely—“Gosh, I don’t know. I hope so.” The same sort of answer we give each other when posed with questions regarding hypothetical violent martyrdom. Which is to say, in reality, “Yeah . . . probably not.”
Because when you can’t detect what it takes within you at even a hypothetical prospect, how will you ever drum up the courage when the real thing happens?
But this isn’t the only problem.
I truly appreciated Wade’s answer and thought it held a lot of merit. Yet, as I confided to him at the time, I ask the question from both sides of the issue: not only have I been the victim of abusive tactics, I have also been the long-time defender and enabler of abusers. I know what it’s like to feel a complete and binding obligation to defend the guilty party—no matter how much I dislike or resent him or her, no matter how much I personally suffer from the abusive behavior, even—I know what it’s like to believe, falsely, that I have an absolute duty to uphold the power and authority of the abuser. To believe that righteousness and morality and what God truly actually wants all call me to support something that literally turns my stomach, clouds my brain, constricts my airwaves, keeps me up at night—and utterly devastates the main target of abuse who has been, the whole while, crying out desperately for help.
Her world had already completely, utterly fallen apart. Could I have had the courage to join her, to give up what little benefit I still enjoyed from allying myself with our abuser—because, as previously discussed, they are so often nice and generous and even kind to the people they like, the people who benefit them, despite readily throwing their favorites under whatever stray bus comes along at any random provocation—could I have let my world fall apart, too, in order to stand with her in the truth? Could I willingly have chosen what she never had a choice over, for her sake? Even sheerly for the sake of what was right?
Maybe.
I didn’t, though. I didn’t know what was right. I couldn’t see the truth even when it was standing there bleeding out in front of me.
I’m not the only one.
I write this because I come at this problem with a lot of compassion, a lot of empathy. I’ve been there. I was there for a long, long time. Much too long.
And then I got out. I learned better. I did better, very slowly, with lots, LOTS of mistakes.
Yes, standing in the truth has an immeasurable cost. Most people, I think, are unlikely to pay it. Most people, I think, don’t realize that kind of price tag denotes immeasurable value.
We lose sight of the value of truth, of the pure goodness that real truth contains and multiplies, if embraced, because we are so panickedly fixated on all else we stand to lose in exchange.
It’s understandable. I’ve done it.
I have lost a great
great
deal.
And on the other side, I wouldn’t trade it back for the world.
That truth has given me life in a place where before I sheltered and hoarded a shallow counterfeit. A ghost of a life, dead girl walking.
Enter: resurrection.
As I was speaking with friends after the forum last night, something struck me. We can spend so much time avoiding joining victims in the light of truth out of fear that we will never recover from the loss it requires: but victims, themselves, have so often given us astoundingly inspiring examples of hope and recovery after losing just about everything.
I think of Lori Anne Thompson. Rachael Denhollander. Nate Postlethwait. Tara Westover. Natalie Hoffman. Sarah McDugal. And all the other survivors I know out there who are setting the tone and the example for what a safe, nurturing, abuse-free culture and environment looks like.
These people are in the business of terraforming arable land for truth to grow.
But no one person can do it alone.
In his most recent Substack post, Wade Mullen writes,
The sources of hope with the most potential for effecting change are those who matter to you and are in a position to do something about your situation.
People who matter to you. Can do something about your situation. He goes on,
This might be a leader within the system who finally stands up for justice and begins to advocate for the truth - someone with influence who is willing to say, “I will join you in suffering. I will be a light in the darkness.”
Or this might be someone outside the system who can help enforce accountability . . .
And he goes on to describe the voice on the other end of the phone, someone he finally contacted after “nearly two years of suffering in silence,” as she responded:
With compassionate anger in her voice [she] said, “You shouldn’t have to live like that!” . . . [She] named the injustice and was upset by it.
Compassionate. Anger.
His post finishes thusly:
So, whenever we are in a position to help and we choose to listen, affirm, and act justly, we help another become re-hoped. We open the possibility for there to be some way forward. We become a source of light in a darkening and decaying environment. And while there has been progress, there is much work to be done, particularly among people who are in positions of power and could use their influence to shine light in the darkness and provide a source of hope to those who suffer in their midst. Such sources of light must continue to grow and expand for there to be a safer and more just future. We all should be able to look up from whatever situation we are in and see stars in our garden.
I do recommend you read the whole thing for a life-giving account of the causes Wade has found for hope, even in the midst of the work that he does.
And I hope his call to action stays with you, gently beckoning you to join me where I’ve now found I can stand, in the light of truth—and hope.