Relationship Violence and Research

This text-based course is an edited transcript of the webinar, Relationship Violence and Research, presented by Wind Goodfriend, PhD.

Learning Outcomes

After this course, participants will be able to:

• Compare and contrast different forms of relationship violence.
• Identify and explain several theories regarding the psychology of perpetrators and survivors of relationship violence.
• Describe steps toward escape from violent relationships and research on healing after relationship trauma.

Risks and Limitations

It is important to note that there are some limitations and risks, especially with a topic such as this one. For this course limitations or this webinar, most research focuses on heterosexual couples with male perpetrators and female victims and survivors. The research covered in this webinar is mostly from United States samples, so that is a limitation. Risks include: This course contains sensitive material, including physical and sexual violence, so take a break as needed and/or seek out resources for help if you have any adverse reactions.

Outline

What I would like to accomplish with you today is outlined as follows: We will start with an introduction to the topic. I would like to tell you a little bit about why I have chosen this area of research for my career and talk about why this is such an important topic. Then we are going to cover forms of relationship violence and how research has tried to describe relationship violence over the years. Then we will dive into the psychology of perpetrators. Why would someone do this to their romantic partner? Are there theories from psychology that can help explain the perpetrator's perspective or background? Then we will talk about the psychology of the victims or survivors, and when we get to that section, I'll make a note of the difference between the term victim and survivors and what that means. We will end with how people can escape from relationship violence and then a little bit on healing. There is a lot to cover today, and again, I encourage you to take a break if you need to. It is heavy material, but it is important for us to be talking about this not only in a research setting but in communities all over the world. It is equally important to discuss these problems and what can be done about them.

Introduction

I would like to start with this introduction. If we think about relationship violence, it is something that, in psychology specifically, we have only been able to study as a field for the past 40 years or so. I personally have been studying this topic for over 20 years. The reason that there was a delay in psychology addressing this issue is because it is such a personal topic, and the idea was we are not going to get people to be honest in studies about this. We are not even sure how often it happens. Maybe it is not our business to get involved in people's private affairs, and certainly, I can understand those concerns. But at the same time, as someone who is a social psychologist, someone who's interested in studying issues that we have in our home lives, and in our everyday interactions, relationship violence is something that we cannot simply ignore and hope it goes away.

It is something that is important for both basic and applied research. What I mean by that is, as a researcher, the basic research would be just understanding the phenomenon: Why is it happening? What are some theoretical models that we can use to understand it? But even more important will be the application, the applied research. What can we do with this information to actually prevent it from happening in the first place, ideally, or at least respond to it when it does happen? It is important across the board to be looking at the questions that we are covering in the next couple of hours together, as well as then thinking, okay, how can we apply this information to individual people in our lives, to individual clients, to individual students if you are an educator. Unfortunately, there will be people in all the contexts of our lives who are suffering from some form of relationship violence.

Regarding frequency, when we try to estimate the scope of this problem, it is difficult to understand exactly how big the problem is. Just one example of a statistic that we might be able to use is that the National Center for Victims of Crime (2018) estimated that 47% of people in the United States will experience some form of relationship abuse or violence or aggression in their lives. That is a significant number, basically half. Now, that number does include all forms of relationship violence, which is our next topic. This includes physical violence, sexual, emotional, and psychological. It includes the broad idea of what could count as relationship violence or aggression or abuse. That said, it is still a huge problem, in my opinion, and I assume the opinion of most people engaged in this webinar. One percent would be too high, right? We have to think about what we can be doing about this. Talking about it and understanding it are the first steps. I appreciate everyone who is here today and giving their time to this problem. One more thing about this is that the numbers of how often people are experiencing relationship violence is speculation at this point because many people rarely report these kinds of crimes to any kind of authority, or we might not be capturing them in our research. How often this is happening is still an empirical question. I will say it is happening too often and we can all likely agree on that. One time would be too often, in my opinion. It is a bit of background to help think about why is this such an important issue.

Forms of Violence

The next thing I would like to talk about is just forms of violence. I have already mentioned a bit of that now, but let us dig into that so we can understand more details about what this problem looks like. For years when people were first starting to look at this question from a psychological point of view, they were unsure where to start. The first questions that a lot of researchers asked are as follows: How often is this happening? What kinds of violence are out there? What do couples look like who experience this kind of thing? Basically, the questions focused on describing the problem. That led to the next questions: How are we going to do that research? How are we going to operationalize our variables? How are we going to define something like relationship abuse? Since these are abstract or subjective ideas, how are we going to measure that in studies? There were two approaches that early researchers used to try to understand and describe what relationship violence looks like in the United States.

The first approach was the archival data approach. Archival data in research is any data that was gathered for some other purpose, but we are now using that for research purposes to look at patterns or trends. Archival data related to relationship violence would be, for instance, "Who is calling the police in any given community for domestic violence incidents?" We can look at police reports, and we can look at hospitals where someone is coming in with a potential injury. Hopefully, the medical staff are asking questions to detect, "Did this happen because of relationship violence?" We can look at places like emergency shelters, which did exist when these questions were being asked in research. Questions such as: "Who is going to emergency shelters?" "How long are they staying?" "What are their plans after staying in the shelter?" "Are they planning on going back to the relationship or are they looking for a permanent exit from the relationship?" Using that approach, looking at these archival areas of data, led to a picture of relationship violence that matches many people's stereotypes about relationship violence. In other words, the picture looked like it was not all that common. When you look at the population of an entire town you wonder how many people are reporting this? It did not seem that frequent, although again, any frequency is bad. However, it did look as though the people who were experiencing it were experiencing very severe behaviors. Behaviors that were physically violent, leading to injury, and would require hospitalization. Overall, mostly high severity. Most of the data looked like it was in heterosexual couples with a male perpetrator and a female victim, which is what most people think of when they think of a typical relationship violence situation. At the same time, other researchers approached the question from a different perspective. This often came from criminal justice researchers who were administering, for example, national anonymous surveys of a wide variety of crimes. Relationship violence just happened to be one of the crimes on the survey. What they would do is get a list of people in a given city, randomly select people from that list, and then send them this survey. In the beginning, it was in the actual physical mail. You would receive this survey, and they would ask you, "Hey, do you mind filling this out, it will be anonymous." Some people did, some people did not. However, the surveys that they got back indicated a very different picture of what relationship violence looked like. From these national anonymous surveys, what we see is it is more frequent than we thought based on the archival data. It seems like people of any gender could be a perpetrator or a survivor or victim. I am going to try to avoid saying "both genders" because I am a Psychology and Gender Studies professor, and I believe there are more than two genders. We will say "all genders" are capable of perpetrating or being a survivor or a victim of relationship violence. In these national anonymous surveys, people would admit it is mutual. "I get into fights with my partner, and both of us can escalate to the kinds of things that might be considered aggression or violence or abuse." That is a very different picture from what we saw in the archival data.

All of that said, there were lots of debates going on in the psychology field, in the social work field, and in the criminal justice field on what are we even talking about here when we talk about the problem of relationship violence in a community. This led to many debates. There were people who were saying, "We should only look at heterosexual couples and male perpetrators" and "We only need shelters for women," for example. Other people were saying, "Well, that is leaving out a lot of people who say that they actually might need resources," but just imagine that you are the mayor of a town and you can only have so much money to throw at this problem. If I build a shelter for male victims, is that taking away a resource from a female victim? if there are statistically more female victims, would it not be better served to give my money to a larger population? These debates led to a lot of important pragmatic debates about how we can best address this problem and where our resources should go. This debate lasted for several years, and I will say that people eventually landed on the idea that all of these ideas and results are true. All of these versions of relationship violence are true. It is a bigger problem than just one type of issue. The data from the archives are correct, but so are the data from the national surveys.

Ultimately, this came to a head in the research world and in the academic world by a paper written by Michael Johnson. In 1995, Johnson wrote the first paper, then in 2007 wrote an update of his own ideas. Johnson says, "We need to acknowledge all of these forms of relationship violence and think about them as different problems that might need different kinds of resources or different kinds of solutions." What I want to do next is take you through these three kinds of relationship violence that Johnson has identified:

1. Situational Couple Violence

2. Intimate Terrorism

3. Violent Resistance

Situational Couple Violence

We will go through them one by one. We will start with situational couple violence. In his original paper, Johnson (1995) called this "Common Couple Violence." He changed the name of it in his later paper, but originally it was called "Common Couple Violence" because he was trying to make the point that this form of violence is actually more common than the stereotypical kind that we will talk about next. This common couple violence is the same as mutual violence that was identified in the national surveys where we have two people in a couple, and when they have a conflict, it escalates. Both people can do things that, from a psychological perspective, we would say are not healthy interactions or dynamics. For example, they might insult each other or they might push each other. But that said, while those behaviors are not healthy, they remain at a low level and are relatively stable. These behaviors are not intended to strike fear in the partner or control the partner as much as what we think of with that stereotype. He changed the name of it to situational couple violence because he explained it as violence as a result of the situation. maybe these people are not violent in any other context. It is the particular dynamics of this relationship that are causing this escalation to occur. It does seem to be relatively mutual. Any gender can be a perpetrator. Any gender can be a survivor or a victim. Johnson says, the people in this kind of relationship do not necessarily even identify it as problematic or something that would need to be reported or even maybe something that would need therapy because it is just how they fight. Again, from our perspective, we would not say that that is a healthy way to deal with your romantic partner, but from their perspective, it is a low level of severity, they do not necessarily identify it as abuse or aggression, and it is just how they fight. That is very different from this kind of stereotypical image of domestic violence that we think of, which he calls "intimate terrorism."

Intimate Terrorism

In Johnson's (1995, 2007) paper, he originally calls this "patriarchal terrorism" because he believes that this is far more common to happen with male perpetrators and female victims. He later revised this due to pushback from people who are saying that there are other kinds of gender dynamics. He now calls this "intimate terrorism," and I think this is a better name. The idea is that one person is the perpetrator, and one person is the victim or survivor. It is one-sided and no longer mutual. The intention of the perpetrator's behaviors is to terrorize their partner and/or to control their partner. We are going to talk about why that might be the case a little bit later today. The idea is that this includes more severe behaviors. It is very controlling, and it is very frightening. It is severe, and it is potentially very physical. It includes sexual violence, and it includes the psychological manipulation that we see portrayed in media. We perhaps know some people who are experiencing this or have experienced it. It is very frightening, and it is very, of course, unhealthy and inappropriate. This is the stereotypical relationship violence that we think of. Now, I mentioned that in this kind of couple we have physical violence, we also have sexual violence, and psychological or emotional violence. Something that we often refer to if you are working with people who might be current victims of this kind of abuse, is what we call the "Power and Control Wheel" (Pence & Paymar, 1993). This came out in 1993, and it was a tool that therapists or counselors or social workers could use to help their clients identify what kinds of violence they are experiencing. There is an update on this, see Øverlien et al. (2020). This is still a very common tool. Let me describe the Power and Control Wheel for you so that you can see what we are talking about here. The power and control wheel is depicted as a literal wheel. There is an outside, and then there are spokes or little pies, like a pie graph. The idea is that the outer part of this wheel, the outer rim, is the physical and sexual violence. The idea is that physical and sexual violence is so horrible to experience that it is trapping you, and it is the overall threat that you are always feeling. "I never know when my partner is going to use this physical or sexual violence against me." Within the wheel, these little pieces of pie or spokes are the different forms of psychological and emotional manipulation or abuse that your partner might be using on you.

• Coercion and threats

• Intimidation

• Emotional abuse

• Isolation

• Manipulation of children

• Economic abuse

• Minimizing, denying, and blaming (“gaslighting”)

• Male privilege

I will provide a few examples from this list to help illustrate the kinds of violence that someone might be experiencing. You can see things like "manipulation of children." That is going to be emotionally horrible for anyone if the perpetrator is trying to use the children against you. The perpetrator may say things like, "You know, boy, they [mommy or daddy] should have thought twice about what they did, shouldn't they? Don't you feel like they [mommy or daddy] are a bad person?" This is an attempt to get the kids to side with the perpetrator. They may also say things like, "If you ever tried to leave me, I would get custody of the children." These are examples of that manipulation of children. Another example is "economic abuse." Economic abuse would include, "I don't ever allow you to have access to cash," "You don't have a credit card," "I might not allow you to have a job so that you have no economic independence," or "You have no resources." If you do decide that you want to leave, you have no money, so you might not be able to get a job if you leave. You might not be able to establish your own household, and this form of manipulation is a way of keeping you here. It is a way of controlling you. You can imagine the different examples based on the names of the different pieces of this wheel. I encourage you to just do an online search for the Power and Control Wheel if you are interested in seeing more about this. You can see more examples and how it is used in settings like therapy or social work. When you think about the second form of violence that Johnson (1995, 2007) has identified, intimate terrorism, you can see how controlling one person is to another person in a relationship. I would like to mention a couple of updates to the Power and Control Wheel because there are several versions of this. One is that in the original Power and Control Wheel, one of the spokes is "using male privilege." It is the idea that if you are a heterosexual couple with a male perpetrator, he might say things like, "I'm the king of the castle," or "I'm the primary breadwinner, so I get to make all the decisions." That is a very traditional heteronormative type of relationship. If we wanted to update that, we might say using gender privilege. In LGBTQIA2S+ relationships, that might be something like threatening to "out" my partner against their will. You could imagine that this would have slightly different examples if you were not in a heterosexual male perpetrator type of relationship. There are also specific wheels for different kinds of populations, such as a specific Power and Control Wheel for college students. Here you can see things like, "My partner signs up for all the same classes that I do so that they can follow me around campus," or "My partner monopolizes my time, so I never have time to study," or "My partner won't let me sign up for clubs that I'm interested in because my partner's afraid that I'll make friends and have resources if they ever wanted to leave." It is interesting to think about the different forms of this kind of emotional manipulation that can happen in different kinds of relationships.

Key literature in this area includes Øverlien et al. (2020), Pence and Paymar (1993), and Stults et al. (2022).

Violent Resistance 

The third form of violence that Johnson (1995, 2007) identified in his paper was "violent resistance," which is interesting from a criminal justice perspective or a law perspective because it is the idea that if you have actually been the target of this kind of violence for an extended period of time, sometimes people start to fight back, maybe even physically. There have been cases where someone who was a victim for several years ended up actually killing their partner. The legal question then becomes, does that count as self-defense? As you can imagine, it is controversial. Some juries would say "yes," and some juries would say "no." There are people who have committed the act of killing a perpetrator, and some of those people are in jail for murder or manslaughter, and some of those people were found not guilty. Now, this becomes even more nuanced as an interesting legal question, because for a while there was actually a mental health diagnosis that you could get if you were the survivor of relationship violence for several years. The lawyer could argue that you "snapped" after going through all of this for so long. They called it "battered women's syndrome." Here again, we have the traditional gender violence language here. The idea was that women who had been perpetrated against for years and years, killed their husbands and they could be found "not guilty" through an insanity defense or a crime of passion defense if they could claim that they had battered woman's syndrome. There were all these criteria for qualifying as basically having a mental illness that led you to kill your perpetrator. That seems to help at first because several women were found not guilty of killing their husbands through this battered women's syndrome defense. It ended up backfiring though, because if there were children involved, and I just was found mentally ill to avoid being convicted of murder, my children may be taken away from me because the courts would not want to send children to a woman who is mentally ill. This defense is not used anymore because of the backfire idea that it might lead you to have a mental illness diagnosis. There is a stigma that goes along with that and legal ramifications. It is interesting to think about the history of how our legal system has dealt with this issue and how that has changed from decade to decade depending on the political or cultural context.

Psychology of Perpetrators 

All right, the next big topic is the psychology of perpetrators. From a research perspective, I find this topic fascinating and horrible, but the idea is when I think of a happy relationship, a happy romantic relationship, in my view, your partner is the one who should be the most supportive of you, the most loving toward you. In these cases of relationship violence, that's simply not the case. Often it's the person who's causing you the most psychological damage. We have to think about what kind of person is driven to these kinds of behaviors. There are lots of possible answers to that, so let's talk about that for a few minutes. We're going to cover three specific models that try to explain the psychology of perpetrators today. But one thing I want to make sure to point out is we often kind of vilify people who do these kinds of behaviors, and I absolutely understand that, I don't understand why people would do this. I find it horrible. I certainly blame people for doing these kinds of behaviors. At the same time, many perpetrators are actually survivors themselves. Many of them had childhood experiences where they either witnessed their parents in these kinds of relationships or they are survivors of child abuse. So we always have to remember, people are humans, right? They always need dignity and respect. It's interesting to think about why are people doing this, and the applied reason to ask that question is, could we have some form of therapy or treatment that would actually be able to solve this problem while still treating people with dignity, but holding them responsible for their choices, right? There are people who are survivors of child abuse, who are not perpetrators of relationship violence, right? We still need to hold people accountable for their behaviors.

The I3 Model

I want to talk about these three models that try to explain why are some people sometimes violent toward their partners. We're going to start with this first model. It's pronounced I Cubed. The I Cubed model comes from someone named Eli Finkel. He's a professor of psychology in Chicago. Finkel decided that he wanted to try to understand all the factors that might help us predict when is violence in a relationship more or less likely to occur. You can think about it almost like a mathematical model where it's sort of like algebra. If we have X, Y, and Z, can we predict the outcome? It's called I Cubed because Finkel identifies these three parts of any relationship situation that could help us predict whether violence is more or less likely.

The first one is called instigation. Instigation is the idea that at the moment that maybe there's a relationship fight, things are escalating, what is the perspective of the perpetrator? Are they thinking I'm jealous of my partner and I'm going to act in a way that sort of protects my partner from access to people who might potentially lead them astray? Have they, from my perspective, provoked me? I told them I like things a certain way, and they didn't do that, and so now I have to teach them a lesson, right, from the perpetrator's point of view. Instigation is what factors in that kind of immediate situation have made the violence more likely to occur? If you look at the original research, Fikel gives several other examples of this.

The second factor is called impedance, and that's the idea of sort of more long-term or distal factors that might be predicting relationship violence. It's things like, am I a survivor of violence myself? Did I experience this or witness this in childhood? But also my personality. Am I someone who's quick to anger? Am I someone who gets jealous very easily, just kind of as a person? Has a person, am I predisposed to violence? If the first one is sort of situational factors, the second one is more person factors, what about the people involved might make violence more or less likely to occur?

The third one kind of goes in the opposite direction. It's inhibition. Are there factors involved that might make the violence less likely to occur? This might be where things like therapy, and intervention, could be helpful. Is the perpetrator someone who maybe has been perpetrating, but they are now in anger management or counseling, or they're taking some sort of helpful medication, like an antidepressant medication where things have been cooled off or controlled more? There's research that argues that some of those things may be more or less effective. But the idea is are there any factors that might help the de-escalation of the situation? Are there factors that might help the perpetrator think about things from a different perspective?

Maybe try a different approach to this kind of conflict. Things like therapy, social work, any of those kinds of resources that we could provide a couple that might actually help de-escalate, prevent, or at least make things less severe. The idea is from this kind of big picture, what are factors that are contributing to the likelihood of relationship violence? This is a pretty interesting model, and it's led to lots of follow-up research studies looking at what are the different factors that matter, and how we could actually try to manipulate those factors to help any given couple.

Key literature in this area includes Finkel (2008, 2014) and Finkel and Hall (2018).

Pit Bulls and Cobras

The second model I want to discuss is one that my students always find fascinating because there's sort of a surprise ending. This research was done primarily by, you can see Jacobson and Gottman (1998). They were researchers in Seattle, Washington, and they were interested in just in general in relationship dynamics. They have a research lab that they called the Love Lab, and they weren't just studying abusive relationships, they were just studying all relationships. One of the things that they did in their research was they put up advertisements throughout Seattle saying, we're doing research on romantic couples, married couples. It's longitudinal, so this will take place over several years, and you'll get paid if you come in and participate in our study. They got a wide variety of couples to come into their lab. The research I want to describe to you for this purpose is people who kind of admitted in their intake surveys that there was some fairly severe violence in the couple. Both couple members agreed this is true. The couples that they had in their study, kind of narrowed it down. The research that I'll be describing to you today is all heterosexual couples with a male perpetrator and a female survivor or a victim. They asked them, after filling out these initial surveys, would you please get in a fight and let us watch? I find this procedure kind of fascinating because I always imagine if I brought my partner to a lab and I knew they were watching me fight, I imagine that I would, you know, be very kind and nurturing to my partner and say things like, you know, "Oh, that's a good point, let me consider that," but these couples did come in, and they got into fights, and they were not always very nice to each other in the lab. The fascinating thing about this procedure was they actually hooked the couple members up to a variety of physiological measures to see how their bodies would react while this fight was escalating, so it was things like, how quickly are you breathing, what's your heart rate doing? Do you have sweat on your palms? So galvanic skin response. A wide variety of these physiological measures, and they are looking at the results of these physiological measures while the fight is escalating, and then deescalating at the end, they made sure that would deescalate for ethical purposes. Their hypothesis was that people who are perpetrators of relationship violence would show steady increases in all of these physiological measures as the fight went on.

Essentially they would get more and more upset psychologically, but also physically, right? They're going to get angry, and they're going to start yelling, and their heart rate is going to go up, and they're going to start to sweat, and they're going to get red in the face, and that's what they were expecting. That hypothesis was confirmed for the majority of the men that they had in their lab. For 80% of the men, that's what happened. These physiological measures all shot up and kept going up while the fight was going on, so these men were yelling, getting red in the face, they were clearly showing anger. The metaphor that Jacobson and Gottman used for this particular type of perpetrator is pit bulls, now, I always have students in my classes who want to stop me. They're dog lovers, and they say, oh, pit bulls are stereotyped, and I agree with that. I love dogs too, but that's the term that they used in this study. I think it's very kind of a graphic term. It helps you understand immediately what they're talking about, right? Because if you're in front of an angry pit bull, you know it's angry, right? It's growling at you. The idea is that these men are clearly showing their anger, their frustration. When they did follow-up research with these men, they found that the triggers that made them the angriest were things like jealousy and fear of abandonment. That led to research on attachment theory, which is the idea that because of how you were raised, you might have sort of persistent low self-esteem.

You might always want validation from your relationships that you're worthy of love and attention. That seems to be a pattern in the majority of these men. It seemed like that was what caused the most frequent fights, and they would, they would clearly show their jealousy and anger. These relationships when they were followed over time were more likely to end in divorce because of these unhealthy dynamics. But I told you earlier that there was a sort of surprise ending to this research, and that's the part that I actually find the most psychologically fascinating, but also kind of chilling, is the what about the other 20% of men? What they found was that in 20% of the men in this study, as the fight started to escalate, their physiological measures showed that they were getting calmer. They would absolutely sort of relax. They would lean back in their chair, they might even smile a little bit. It's very frightening to imagine this happening. The metaphor that Jacobson and Gottman used for these men is the cobra because the idea is that the cobra sort of is very still, and then it'll strike at you in an almost unpredictable way. That makes it even scarier because you can't see it coming. It might even be a purposeful manipulation tactic of these men where they're trying to make it so that you can't predict so that they can constantly have you in a state of fear. I never know when this person's going to strike at me. These men tended to have more emotional and psychological abuse in their relationships in addition to physical and sexual abuse. They were definitely fitting into what we talked about earlier with that intimate terrorism kind of dynamic. But they were less likely to end in divorce as the relationships went on. Jacobson and Gottman said it's because their victims were much more afraid of what would happen if I tried to leave, their argument was, he might kill me basically. What was interesting though is that if you dive into their research, often the cobras would respond in an opposite way, which was basically like, well, good riddance, and they would immediately try to find someone else to replace you. It's a very different psychological perspective of these two different kinds of perpetrators and follow-up research has been done, some people have found the same pattern, and other people have failed to replicate what they found in their lab. But it's interesting just to sort of step back and think about what are the person's triggers. Why do they have those triggers? Once we've identified those, could we potentially do anything to intervene?

Key literature in this area includes Jacobson and Gottman (1998).

Personality Disorders

The last model that I think is interesting from psychology to try to understand the perpetrators, and again, there are more models that we could talk about today. This is just kind of a sampling of what I found the most important or interesting comes from a woman named Amy Holtzworth-Munroe. Her perspective was, are there mental illnesses that we could potentially use to diagnose perpetrators of relationship violence? That would be helpful because we could look at all the clinical and counseling research on these illnesses, and we could potentially get them inappropriate therapy or medications. Holtzworth-Munroe identified three different kinds of perpetrators and sort of affiliated each of those with different mental illness needs. You can see here that the first type is what she calls family only. Again, that's still bad. But the idea is that the people who are only violent in this context with this particular relationship, sometimes they don't necessarily qualify for an official mental illness or an official sort of clinical diagnosis. That tends to be less severe people. It maybe goes back to what we talked about earlier with Michael Johnson's model of maybe the common couple violence where it's low level, it doesn't seem to escalate, and maybe it doesn't include the terrorism and psychological abuse that we see in other couples. She said in that kind of situational violence, maybe there's not a mental illness diagnosis that's applicable. But she said in these other two forms of violence, maybe there is a mental illness diagnosis that we could use.

One is the idea of borderline personality disorder. I had a job for a couple of years in graduate school working at a mental hospital, a mental health facility, and I did encounter several patients there who were being treated for borderline personality disorder. The hallmarks of borderline are basically people who have a sort of emotional immaturity. They often want attention, they want validation. They'll often do things for that attention that we might consider unhealthy behaviors. Things like threatening self-harm to get attention and to get validation, tend to be emotionally volatile, as it says on the screen here on the slide, and impulsive. Holtzworth-Munroe has identified this personality disorder as one that might often go with being a perpetrator of relationship violence. The parallel there is probably the pit bulls that we talked about just a few minutes ago. It's people who very clearly show their emotions, and they have this kind of impulsive nature, this maybe emotionally volatile nature where they get upset very easily, they show that they're upset, and it's this kind of emotional rollercoaster.

Holtzworth-Munroe's third type of perpetrator is associated with antisocial personality disorder. This is the personality disorder that some people consider the most frightening, the most likely to be tied to criminals, and again, we're sort of stigmatizing people with disorders, and we're stigmatizing criminals. But the idea is that occasionally these two things will go together. Sometimes people who have extreme clinical levels of anti-social personality disorder will have a lack of empathy for other people and will have selfish behaviors. It's stereotypically tied to people who are maybe serial rapists or murderers or con artists. The idea is that they're very psychologically manipulative of other people in ways that will benefit them. This is probably more likely to be associated with the kind of person we talked about a few minutes ago who we labeled a cobra, right? They're actually going to have the outward appearance of being very calm. They're not necessarily going to show that they're upset because they don't have that lack of, or they don't have that empathy, and they appear to be very calm and collected on the surface, but they sometimes, because of that lack of empathy will be very abusive because it's basically I'll do whatever it takes to get what I want. What's interesting to think about the idea, is the big picture here is that there are lots of different kinds of perpetrators. They don't all fit into one stereotype. They don't all fit into one box. Because we have this variety, it means that resolving the problem of relationship violence is complicated because we can't just say there's one simple solution because every situation is going to be different. We have to kind of be creative and tenacious about the idea of doing this research and finding solutions that we can fit a particular issue or a particular person, because it is so complicated, not, there isn't one thing that will work for everyone.

Key literature in the area includes Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994) and Edhammer et al. (2022). 

Psychology of Victims/Survivors

Let's talk about the psychology of victims and survivors, a very important thing to understand. I have a lot of important things to kind of keep in mind while we're talking about this issue. The most important thing is we're going to try to understand the perspective of people who are going through relationship violence. The most common error to make when we think about people who are experiencing this is to say, why don't they just leave, right? This is the most common question that people have if they maybe haven't experienced this before, if they don't know anyone who has experienced this, at least they're not aware of that, the experience of family or friends, why don't they just leave, right? Well, I wouldn't put up with that. I would just leave. That's a problematic question to ask because it's basically blaming the person who is the target of the crime, for the bad behavior. It's important to think about this research because it's not going to be a simple answer. There are reasons that people might not be able to leave right away. There are reasons that people might legitimately need to stay, just as one example, maybe they are trying to protect children who are involved in this family. We're not doing this research that we can blame people for their choices, right? Often people who are the victims or survivors of relationship violence have already taken their choices away. So a common thing that we try to remember if we're involved in any kind of intervention is we want to honor the dignity of all people, and they have the right to make their own choices. They have the right to decide what works for them. We want to avoid trying to be judgemental or ever-blaming someone who's going through this. That said, I also want to mention just how I'll talk about this research today.

One is it's important to think about the term victim versus the word survivor. There are a lot of advocates in the field, academic researchers, and people who are involved in the community who would say, we should never use the word victim when we're talking about people who have experienced relationship violence. The perspective there is that the word victim makes it seem like someone is helpless, it takes away their agency. It's not a very empowering word, whereas survivor is, it's honoring what you've gone through, it's saying, you know, you've gone through this, and you've come out the other end, it's a more empowering, more respectful word, and I absolutely agree with that. I am going to occasionally use the word victim here because I'm making the academic distinction between: Are you still experiencing it? You are in fact being victimized by your perpetrator. You are in fact being targeted by someone, and that is not your fault, just as if you were the victim of any other kind of crime. Then "survivor" is going to be used for people who have successfully gotten out of the relationship, right? It's just to kind of distinguish what phase of the relationship you are in right now. I also am going to be referring to several research studies in this part of the webinar on understanding the perspective of victims or survivors. Most frequently when I talk about victims or survivors, I'll use the word she for my pronoun, because most of this research is on heterosexual couples with male perpetrators and female victims or survivors. Most of the papers do say she when talking about the victim or survivor. Again, I want to emphasize that I believe that people of any gender could be anywhere in this relationship. So I just want to make sure to point out that I think a common mistake that people make in this field is that they forget about other kinds of victims or survivors. I personally know several men who have been the victims or survivors of relationship violence, both in gay relationships and from female perpetrators. I don't think that they get enough attention or resources. That's one thing I always like to point out just as a kind of caveat before we move forward.

The E3 Model

I want to say that a possible review that you might find interesting is a book that I published just a few months ago, so you can see that here Goodfriend and Simcock (2022), we propose a model called the E3 model. It's kind of paralleling what we saw before with the I Cubed model, but the E3 model is from the perpetrator of the person who's being targeted. It's called E3 because in this paper, it's sort of like a short book basically, or a long article. It's the idea that when you go through this as the target, there are three phases of psychological experience that you might have.

Phase one is what we call entrapment. This is a term that we got from previous research, and it's the idea that when you're first starting the relationship, it's probably not abusive or aggressive or violent on the first date. It's probably quite wonderful on the first date, and that's probably because your perpetrator is not going to, you know, show these behaviors right at the beginning. They might sort of slowly try to seduce you in thinking that they're going to treat you this nicely the entire time. Then slowly over time start to test your boundaries, start to show their behaviors, and see how you respond to those. It can be very manipulative, but that entrapment phase is when they're kind of trying to get you to commit to them, starting to test your boundaries. It's not probably going to be violent right at the beginning. That first phase is one that most people don't even realize they've gone through until maybe they get to phase two, which is where they've identified this relationship is not healthy, the dynamics are not what I deserve or what I expected. Now I get to the escape phase. We will talk about ways that people can successfully escape and barriers that they have to escape here in this webinar. The third phase is called what we call elevation. This is once you've gotten out of the relationship and you now need to heal from the trauma that you have experienced. Elevation refers to building back your self-esteem, building back your confidence, and trying to go through the posttraumatic growth that we'll talk about in a few minutes. Our model kind of honors all of those phases that survivors go through. We point out that the phases are not mutually exclusive. It's not like stairs on a step, steps on a staircase. It's not like I was here and now I'm here, and now I'm here. The idea is that you can move back and forth among these phases. There can be times when I leave for a little while, and then I go back to my partner for a little while, and that kind of back and forth actually very frequently happens multiple times before someone permanently leaves. I can feel like I'm making progress in therapy after I've left, I can feel like I've gotten some confidence back and then something that can happen that maybe triggers me and makes me feel like, oh, I haven't made as much progress as I thought I had.

It's important to honor this journey and to acknowledge it's going to be different for everyone. It depends on all of the factors that we've talked about, plus many more. It's interesting to just think about how challenging this process must be, and how brave, how courageous people are who go through this and to honor that journey. That's what the E3 model is all about. We also then talk about policies, and government support that is needed to help people get through all three of these phases. It's something that you might look into if you're interested in it, but it tries to have this comprehensive look, and it reviews a lot of the research that we're about to discuss.

Cycle of Violence

In addition to the E3 model that I just described today, we are now going to cover three additional models or theoretical frameworks to try to understand what the psychological experience is like of going through being the target of this kind of violence or abuse. Let's start with the oldest of these ideas, which is called the cycle of violence. The cycle of violence was originally suggested by a woman named Lenore Walker (1979, 1984). You can see this is a relatively old model, you know, by our standards, but it's still a very interesting model, and it still produces a lot of research studies. Walker was trying to understand sort of the dynamic of you being a victim or a target of this kind of relationship violence and the idea that it's probably not violent or abusive all the time. There are probably times when your partner is nice to you or you know, relatively calm or loving, and other times when they're not. She points out that it's not this kind of steady constant stream for most people. She actually identifies this cycle where an individual level, this could take just a few minutes, this could take a week to go through all three phases, but she says that there will be this kind of roller coaster or up and down dynamic in many couples. The idea is that maybe things are going fine for a while. Things seem calm, things are loving, and something happens that starts to build tension. We could go back to the I Cubed model and think about maybe there was something in the situation, maybe there was something going on with one of the people. They were reminded of a trauma from their childhood, whatever it was, set this in motion. The tension builds potentially very slowly, but the person who's going to be the target or a victim of the violence often starts to sense this, right? My partner is starting to act in a different way. They may be sort of starting to be meaner to me. I'm starting to feel this pressure build-up. Maybe I'm starting to sort of figuratively walk on eggshells, trying to not upset them further, but I can tell that this is headed in a bad direction, right, so this tension sort of builds. Then at some point, it will get to the second phase, which is the explosion phase, so the violence now comes out. That could be in any of the forms we've talked about, physical, sexual, emotional, financial, or any of those kinds of forms, but something explodes.

Now, Walker suggested that often from her perspective, from the research that she had done, there will be a third phase, which she called the contrition phase. She said, this is basically when the perpetrator realizes, okay, I'm going to get in trouble, or you might be thinking about leaving me, and now I have to switch back into management where I'm going to manipulate you to forgive me or to not leave. Or I'm going to try to maybe say it wasn't as big of a deal as you seem to think it was. There can be an apology, there can be promises that this won't happen again. I was just temporarily upset because of something at work, or I was drunk, and I didn't know what I was doing. There are often excuses made for the behavior. There might be an apology, but it's controversial, whether that apology is sincere. Some people would argue that's just another manipulation tactic, if you apologize, but then you keep doing it, is it an apology? Other people have argued, that maybe it is a sincere apology, but the person has not learned how to control their behaviors. They haven't learned how to de-escalate in other ways. But Walker's point generally was that the contrition phase is very positive from the victim's perspective, right? My partner is saying all the right things. My partner is making promises that this is not going to happen again. The idea is that things seem good during this phase. So maybe if I thought about leaving during the other two phases, this would sort of bring me back, and maybe I do love my partner, Walker even makes the point that this kind of positive behavior for my partner is not constant, because it's only occasional, she even sometimes talks about, I can maybe even get addicted to the idea that if I just wait long enough, I'll get my partner back, I'll get the person I love back. It's almost like an addiction in her terminology, the idea that that's what I live for, right? Yes, I know I'm going through this hard time, but soon I'll get the person I love back. It's interesting to think about how long these phases have to occur for people to make certain decisions about staying or leaving. What kinds of explosion might factor into someone's choices? It's just interesting to think about the idea that it's not a constant negative relationship probably for most people, right? It goes through these phases, and it's important to acknowledge that that's going to be a factor in all of these behaviors and perspectives of everyone involved.

Romantic Myths

Karen Rosen (1996) has done a lot of interesting qualitative research that my students enjoy. They always enjoy qualitative research more than quantitative research. But I also appreciate Rosen's research because she wants to honor individual voices, which is often what qualitative research has as a big advantage. Rosen has published several studies in which she has done in-depth interviews of people who are either still experiencing relationship violence or have gotten out of violent situations, and she asks them interview questions, which are very insightful. What I want to highlight today is questions about that entrapment phase or that seduction phase, and what about our culture or the messages that we've learned growing up about what love should look like, factors into our perceptions when relationship violence occurs? She's identified what she calls cultural myths that have contributed to the perspective of potential victims or survivors, so if you look at her research, she's identified more than the three examples that I have for you on the screen here. But this will just kind of give you a nice sampling of the type of research that she does. Most of the people that she interviews are young women. Some of them are still in high school, and some of them are a little bit older than those in their twenties. She identifies what she calls these cultural myths, which are, the idea that we grow up hearing fairy tales. You can see Cinderella, Beauty The Beast. It's possible that some of the messages in these fairy tales portray messages that romanticize behaviors that in real life might qualify as being manipulative or abusive. She asks her interviewees questions like, "What attracted you to this person?" Can you describe the first time that he did something that you thought maybe even looking back was not an appropriate response, or how did you respond when these kinds of abusive behaviors occurred? What was your perspective? How did your family react? I want to just talk about sort of these three examples. The first is what she calls the Cinderella effect. So you're probably familiar with the story, right? But just to put it in context here, the fairytale of Cinderella is that, when her father dies, she's living with her stepmother and her stepsisters, and they're basically abusing her. She meets this charming young man and basically marries him after one date, where they don't even talk to each other, they just dance.

The idea is what if that were real life? She says many people who are in relationship violence situations, many of them have experienced traumas in their childhood, and maybe they are not particularly happy with their current situation. They've been taught a Prince Charming can rescue you. All you have to do is find a man who will take you away from all of this. Often perpetrators know that we've been taught these messages and they say, "Well, all I have to do is portray myself as Prince Charming and sort of love bomb you and sweep you off your feet, and now you're in my clutches," so to speak. The idea is that people in her interviews said things like, you know, he put me on a pedestal. He treated me like a princess. I was in a bad situation. When he asked me to marry him after three dates, I thought it was very romantic. So I moved in with him, I married him, and I cut ties to everything that I had known in the past. But the issue there is you are now basically under his control, right? So you're living with this person, you have cut all of those ties, you've maybe sort of lost those bridges or those resources, and you maybe don't even necessarily know this person very well, right? Again, it's important to think about how the perpetrator might have done this on purpose, right? The perpetrator might have targeted you and manipulated you to be in the situation. She said, you know, several of the people she interviewed described this kind of situation where I thought I was getting out of a bad situation and going with Prince Charming, and then it ended up that he was just controlling me too. It's interesting to think about what messages are we sending young people in these kinds of fairy tales, and whether are we romanticizing maybe bad choices from the idea that you can expect another person to save you, and maybe it would be more empowering to teach young people, especially young girls, how to empower yourself, how to save yourself.

The second one is what she calls "the Romeo and Juliet phenomenon," and again, you're probably familiar with the Shakespeare story, but it's not a good story, right? Juliet was 13, and Romeo was 16 I think, they fell in love against their family's wishes, again, after seeing each other at one party. And then they said, "We're doing this all on our own," which ended up badly, right? They both died at the end, spoiler alert. The idea is that when she interviewed people, they would say, I was more attracted to this person because my family disapproved. That's why she picked this Romeo and Juliet metaphor or analogy. The idea is that it's very common in young adult years to sort of have that rebellious phase. If part of your rebellion is dating someone because your family disapproved or because they don't sort of fit into your culture, that's understandable sort of from a teenage perspective. I certainly did some of that myself. But the idea is that maybe there are reasons that your family disapproved. Maybe they saw things that you weren't able to see, maybe because they were manipulating you, right? And so again, just like in the real story of Romano and Juliet, maybe that's going to end badly.

The third one that I'm choosing to talk about today, and again, there are more examples of this in her original papers, is what she calls the "Beauty and the Beast phenomenon." Again, we're romanticizing in the original fairytale the idea that, so the beast captures the beauty, or Belle, and locks her up. It's because maybe he has this curse, and all he needs is true love to magically end this curse. If you are just patient enough, you can magically heal someone who is exhibiting all of these beastly behaviors. It justifies the beastly behaviors, especially if the perpetrator can say things like, I've gone through hard times, I am a survivor. Which again, might be true, but if they're not taking responsibility for their choices, the idea is that we're teaching people, you can fix someone basically, you can heal someone, and all they need is your patience and your love. If you wait long enough, they'll turn into a prince, and then they'll be so grateful that they'll treat you like a princess for the rest of your life. It's the idea that it teaches you to put up with these negative behaviors because it's like testing your love instead of saying, I don't deserve to be treated like that, I want someone who treats me with respect. It basically keeps people in these relationships longer than they deserve to be in because of this cultural messaging that if you loved someone, you would stay and try to heal them when it's not your responsibility to do that. It's interesting to think about these other cultural messages. We have other research talking about things like the myth of love at first sight or the myth of soulmates. That these myths do more harm than good, especially in terms of teaching people to maintain sort of the status quo of patriarchy or sexism that's often involved in this sort of heteronormative type of culture.

Cognitive Reframing

I also want to talk about a psychological phenomenon that I personally find fascinating. I'm a social psychologist, and the idea of cognitive dissonance comes from social psychology research. Just to back up a little bit, the idea of cognitive dissonance is that we like our world to make sense, if I have an attitude, I want my behavior to match that. If I have the attitude that voting is important, I should always make sure to vote, otherwise, I'm maybe a little bit of a hypocrite, right? The idea is if you are someone who says, relationship violence is bad, I would not stay in a violent relationship, and then I find myself in a violent relationship, that might cause me some cognitive dissonance, right? I might not feel comfortable with the fact that I'm going against the person I thought I was or the principles that I've said I have. I can resolve that cognitive dissonance by changing how I perceived the situation, I could leave the relationship if I have the resources to do that, which we'll talk about in a minute. Or I could change my perception of what's happening. I want to mention some research that I did. I published this in 2018 with one of my mentors from graduate school, her name is Jimena Arriaga. We were interested in the idea that there might be people currently victims of relationship violence, who cannot leave the relationship for one of the many pragmatic reasons that we'll talk about in a few minutes. Maybe they're protecting children, maybe they don't have any financial independence. Maybe they are a religious person, and they believe that the marriage vows that they took are religiously valid, right? They made a promise to God. There are lots of reasons that people might not feel like they can leave the relationship, at least maybe right now. If that's the case, then maybe if I psychologically change my perception of what's happening, in some ways it's a coping mechanism. It's a way for me to sort of put this on hold while maybe I gather the resources that I need, or I need to sort of process what's happening to me. It's the idea that people who are currently in the situation might not see things the way that an objective outsider person sees it because they have the psychological motivation to change their perception for some reason. This ties into why maybe from an outside perspective, maybe you have a friend or a family member who's in a violent relationship. It's very frustrating from our perspective because you think, you know, you're not seeing things the way that I'm seeing things, but maybe it's a coping mechanism for them. That's what we were interested in. In this particular study, we looked into the idea that if you're in love with someone, if you're committed to someone, if you for some reason have decided for some potentially valid reason, have decided that I am not ready to leave, at least right now, you might sort of change your perception to maybe make an excuse for what's happening so that it's not your perpetrator's fault, or you might shift the way that you perceive it. This comes from this cognitive dissonance research.

There's another theory in psychology called balance theory, which is the same idea that I need to my opinions and behavior so they all align. We've summarized those psychological theories with this phrase that we used called cognitive reframing, which is just my view of the world in a way that protects my needs at this given time. The way that we did this research was we went to a local shelter for emergency shelter for women, many of whom were at least temporarily getting out of violent situations, and we interviewed them, we asked them several questions. Two of those questions were: "Can you tell us the most violent incident that has ever happened in this relationship? Describe that for us." Then after they described that, we asked them, "Why did that happen?" We left it very open-ended, but I want to know what is your perspective on why this occurred. Then we looked for patterns in those answers that seemed like evidence of this kind of cognitive reframing. Maybe they're viewing it in a way that an objective outsider would not. We found four patterns or themes that were across multiple perspectives or multiple participants in our study. What we found was that several of the women that we interviewed, several of them had perspectives or explanations for what happened that we thought qualified for this kind of cognitive reframing. The first was blaming themselves for what happened. Again, as I mentioned before, it's never the victim's fault for what happens, right? The perpetrator should always take responsibility for what's happening. But if your perpetrator is telling you over and over again that "this is your fault," maybe on some level you incorporate that, maybe on some level that sinks in, and you start to believe the perpetrator that this is your fault. This is heartbreaking, of course, from our perspective, because we know it's not their fault, but it's possible that they start to think that, especially again if they're being manipulated by their perpetrator. In the original article, if you want to look it up, you'll see quotations from our interviews that illustrate these four different ways of reframing.

1. It's me: Self-blame
2. It's him: Uncontrollable personality (alcohol, PTSD, etc.)
3. It's us: "For better or worse"
4. It's the culture: Redefining violence

I'll just read a little piece of one of the quotations from our article here. This woman said, quote, "Maybe there was something else I could have done. There must be something that I'm doing wrong if he's hitting me or beating me up." It's just this idea, what am I doing wrong? I should have done something different, right? Again, that's never the case. You never deserve to get hit or beat up or any of the things that we've talked about. The second pattern that we noticed was what we called "uncontrollable personality." This was the idea that I was acknowledging that my partner is doing these things that are not okay, but I'm shifting the responsibility to something outside of my partner. I might say, my partner does this only because he's an alcoholic, and when he drinks, he can't control himself. If we could just get treatment for alcoholism, then this problem would go away. Another example is, "My partner has a mental health need - my partner has a disorder, and that's what's causing this issue." So again, if my partner could get treatment for that mental health need, then this other problem would go away. We had a couple of women who were married to military veterans, and they had a very interesting perspective that the abuse was a result of their partner's military service. They had maybe post-traumatic stress disorder. Interestingly, two of the women we interviewed said, I can't leave my partner because the reason he's doing this is because he's a veteran, and so leaving would be unpatriotic. It's such an interesting perspective that I had never considered before talking to these women, right? Again, it's a way to just highlight the idea that we need to honor their perspective and do what is going to feel good to them and not make decisions for them, right? We have to always understand their perspective.

The third thing that we noticed was what we called for better or worse, and again, this ties back to the idea that if you are a person of religious faith and you married someone, and you took vows that you considered to be sort of religious vows. You might believe "I cannot break those vows." That's also an interesting perspective that we have to think about how we can approach this particular individual with respect and dignity by honoring their perspective and meeting their needs and not just sort of making the decision for them.

The fourth one, I have another quote here for, and so this is what we call "redefining violence." So this was the idea that people would say, "I'm not in an abusive relationship. My partner's not abusing me, right? It's not violent." But what they had done is they had redefined abuse or violence in a way, so they did not fit that definition, right? If I define it in a way specifically so that I don't match that definition, then I can tell myself I'm not being abused. I'm not in a violent relationship, right? Because it doesn't fit this definition. Here's a quotation that I always find kind of heartbreaking, but it illustrates this point. We asked this woman, "Why did that happen to you?" Then a little bit later, "So do you feel like your partner is being violent toward you?" And here's what she said, "The only thing he's done is push, he threw a lamp stand at me, but it didn't hit me. He knows if he hits me, he'll get his gun permit taken away. He's never used his hands on me. He hit my daughter, he's thrown several things at me, he's kicked me, but that's it. I've been lucky with him not hitting me." It seems like she's defining violence in this very specific way, he has to hit me with a closed fist, and anything else doesn't qualify or doesn't count. Again, that's heartbreaking because she's experiencing this awfulness as is apparently her daughter. But if the perpetrator finds out that this is her definition, potentially he could use that against her. So it's another way that he could manipulate her. The general point here, which I'll emphasize one more time, is we have to honor what's going on in their mind and make sure that any resources, any interventions, are going to serve their needs and meet their perspective. It might take time, and it might take resources for that perspective to shift, but we can't put a perspective on someone. We have to try to understand where they're coming from.

Key literature in this area includes Goodfriend and Arriaga (2018). 

Escape

Okay, we have two more things to discuss, and potentially they're some of the most important things to discuss, which is: How could people get out of these kinds of relationships? Then: How could people heal from these kinds of relationships? This is of course, our hope that we can offer these kinds of resources, whether it's friends and family, whether you're working in your community, whether you have clients or students who are in these kinds of relationships. Again, we're not going to be able to cover all of the possible options or resources or research on this from a psychological perspective today, but hopefully, this is a little bit of a sampler. Then you can look at the resources that I've provided at the end and that will again take you to additional resources as well. Just some things to think about, some ways to get started maybe today.

Psychological Steps

Going back to the same woman I mentioned earlier, Karen Rosen, Rosen in those same interviews, talked to people about what was your process of escape for the people who had gone from victim to survivor. You can see here that she talked about that escape process, and one of her important points was it's not something that can just happen easily, right? You can't just decide, "Oh, I think that this relationship is abusive, I'm going to leave now." That's just not realistic, often it takes a long period of time, and people might leave and go back multiple times. The psychological experience of deciding it's a time that I can leave or deciding, I'm going to label these things as abusive, is a step-by-step process. I find this paper interesting in that she describes these steps psychologically, that people can take, and she points out, that not every person will experience all of these steps, right? They don't necessarily go in this order, you won't necessarily experience all of these steps. You might move back and forth. But it's interesting to think about when you are talking to someone who you perceive might be a current victim, again, a student, a client, a friend, or a family member. It's interesting to think about whether you could identify what step they're in because that will help you to know what would be the most appropriate intervention at this step. Because maybe it's not saying, "Well, we need to get you out of the relationship right now." Maybe it's saying, "We just need to get you from step two to step three."

What are those steps? The first step that she describes is what she calls "seeds of doubt." This is almost on a subconscious or unconscious level, basically, where the person who's the target, the person who's the current victim might not even realize that they have a seed of doubt yet, but it's just a little tiny sort of hint of what might be coming in the future. This might be something that they see on TV. They might see someone who sees abusive behavior from the perpetrator in public and maybe frowns or asks, "Are you okay, right?" It can be anything that's these little small things, and they can be multiple at once. They can build up over time, and again, it's not necessarily that the person will consciously realize, I have a doubt. It's just sort of sitting there in the background, and even if they're not responding to that right now, maybe it will sort of germinate over time. Maybe that will change their perspective over time.

The second is what she calls turning points. This is when those seeds of doubt may move from the unconscious level to the conscious level, and you realize, "Oh, maybe I do have some doubts. Maybe this is not going to go away. Maybe this isn't something that was just a one-time thing." It's moving to this conscious realization that maybe the behaviors are not respectful, maybe the behaviors are not healthy. So I'm going to start to think about this a little bit more or name these things or realize from more of an objective perspective what's happening here. But even then, you're not jumping all the way to the end. She says the next step for many of the people she interviewed is what she called "objective reflections." Objective reflections are the idea that again, you're now seeing things almost like you're viewing yourself from a third perspective. In the past maybe you would have friends or family members or professionals say, "You know, that's not okay, what's happening?" You would sort of minimize it or disagree or say, well, you don't know the whole story, or you had to be there. Now you're actually starting to see things from that outside perspective, and you're starting to see more objectively maybe, okay, in the past, maybe I had these sort of frames or perspectives that were coping mechanisms that I needed at the time, but maybe now some of those are starting to lift. You are able to maybe relate more to what a friend or family member is telling you, or what a counselor or social worker is telling you about how you could potentially label what's happening to you and maybe start to think about moving on to the next step in the process here.

Number four is what she calls "self-reclaiming actions." I'm still in the relationship now, but I'm starting to label it. I'm starting to see that things are not necessarily healthy and I'm going to start building myself back up. If I've been the victim of this person for a long time, if they've been purposely manipulating me, lowering my self-esteem, cutting me down, insulting me, and having power over my choices, I might have lost my confidence and my empowerment and my agency. I might have given up hobbies that I previously loved. I might not have talked to friends who used to be my dear friends for years and years. Self-reclaiming actions are any of those steps, and they're not necessarily directly about the relationship, but they're about me, right? Things like I might start painting again. I might start reading novels again. I might wear something that my partner said that they don't like, maybe when they're not around, but it's just sort of my own joy that I'm bringing back to myself. It might be talking to a friend that I haven't talked to for a long time. It might also be things that are more directly tied to the relationship, so it might be things like imagining, "Okay if I were to leave, where would I sleep tonight? Do I have transportation? Do I have luggage? Can I start saving money in a place that my perpetrator does not have access to?" Even if it's just a little bit of change every once in a while. For example: "Any money that I consider my money that I have access to that cannot be taken away from me." This is a way to make them feel like they have a little bit of power back. There's an update on this that you can see in the slide here, which is the idea that often people who have been victimized have that very deep self-criticism and guilt and self-blame. That's an article about steps that people can overcome, that sort of internalization of what they've been told for years by their perpetrator.

The next step is what she calls "paradigm shifts." Paradigm shifts are important steps where it's like your entire perspective sort of clicks, and you do make the decision, I need to leave this relationship. You might not leave at that moment. It's just the decision that "Eventually I need to leave." It's more sort of an internal decision, and it might be framed in a variety of different ways. It might be, that "As soon as I save up X amount of money, I'm going to leave" or "I'm going to give my person one more chance. I'm saying very explicitly, if you do this one more time, I'm going to leave. I mean it this time." There could be a variety of different ways that this looks for different people, but it's this very conscious and sincere decision that "I will eventually leave this relationship at least if things don't change."

Then finally, Rosen identifies what she calls "the last straw event," which is the idea that something does inevitably happen for people who become survivors, where they do say, "Okay, I am now leaving." She describes that this is often when the violence is either so severe that "I feel like I might actually die if I don't leave" or another frequent example is "If the violence has been directed at me, that's different than when you now directed at my child. I am now leaving to protect my child" or "It's the first time that this has happened in front of my child and I don't want my child to have that exposure." Again, this is going to be different for different types of victims or survivors, but it's something that for them, was sort of the metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back, right? That's why it's called the last straw event. The idea is that all of these other steps that have been building up have given me the strength and the resources that I need to finally be able to feel like this is my choice, and I am in a place where I can now leave the situation. All of that said, I've been mentioning a few times today that we can't blame people for not leaving when we want them to leave, because there are lots of pragmatic reasons why people might not be able to leave right away.

Key literature in this area includes Rosen and Stith (1997).

Obstacles to Leaving

Kirkwood (1993) has an interesting paper, and I know that this seems a little bit old by our standards from 1993, but there is a lot of follow-up research that shows that what Kirkwood pointed out is still pretty true today. Kirkwood is establishing the idea that people need pragmatic resources in order to be able to have a safe way of leaving, so immediate things are finding housing. Finding housing was, according to Kirkwood's research, what the vast majority of survivors said was their most important and immediate need. "I need a place to sleep and live at least temporarily, right?" Housing was actually the number one priority for many of the people that Kirkwood discussed this with. After that, we have things like establishing economic independence and getting a job. "I might not have had a job for years. I don't have a resume, I don't have experience. I need an employer who will understand all of those things. I need to obtain medical aid and medical insurance so I can go get checked out. I might have sort of recurring chronic health issues as a result of being a victim. I might have, again, children for whom I'm trying to care and I need to be able to take them to the doctor." Those kinds of very pragmatic, immediate needs. Some people will want help from the legal system to get things like protection orders. Some people might want to sue for custody, right? Some people might want child support payments, alimony, or any of those kinds of issues. That kind of legal support is going to be very important. Then on a more psychological basis, resources to help me adjust to the change of life circumstances, right? Being able to go to the store and maybe my partner made all the decisions for me. Just trying to decide what kind of shampoo I want to buy, and what kind of deodorant I want to buy. In some ways, that can be very freeing, right? It can be very empowering to say, "I get to make these choices." Sometimes people find that very overwhelming. The idea that you're going to be experiencing a lot of emotions, some of them are going to be very positive, right? A feeling of achievement, a feeling of pride, a feeling of relief, but some of them will also be negative. Some dissociation, some numbness, some shock. Fear that my person, that my ex is coming after me, triggers in the environment. There's going to be a lot of psychological transition and making sure that people have the resources they need to process all of that in the healthiest way possible.

There's a paper that's a more recent paper that you can see here from Huerta (2022) that talks about all of these needs from the perspective that these are going to be more important for some kinds of people compared to others because of things like privilege or systemic oppression. If you're someone who comes from a population that has historically not had as much privilege, so if you're a person of color, if you're an immigrant or have any kind of stereotypes or stigma about immigrant status, if you're low socioeconomic status, any of those kinds of issues, that's going to provide even more barriers for you. So we need to especially think about resources for these populations that have been sort of systemically oppressed and make sure that we're providing resources to them, especially because they might not have the kind of resources if as more privileged people might have.

Key literature in this area includes Kirkwood (1993) and Huerta (2022).

Healing

Let's end on sort of a happier and more optimistic note. The goal is that all survivors will be able to experience this kind of healing at the end of their journey. There's a lot of research on this note that I did not choose to include in this presentation, research on the treatment of perpetrators. I will just point out at this point before we talk about the healing of survivors, there is a lot of research on how to best deal with perpetrators, again, this is a little bit of a political and academic debate. Some people believe that the best response to people who are perpetrators is to send them to prison. I can understand that perspective. There are some people who seem that they don't respond to any kind of treatment. There are some people who argue that if we have a prison system in place for perpetrators, it's sending the message that our culture does not find this behavior acceptable and that there are real consequences to this. It's basically instilling in the culture the idea that we will not tolerate domestic violence in any form. I agree with those messages. I think that we need to have this kind of authority figure in our culture saying these behaviors are not acceptable.

On the other hand, ideally, we are also helping people, and trying to resolve these situations so they don't continue again, the next time someone is in a relationship. Many perpetrators are survivors themselves. There is a lot of research on what might be effective treatments. There are things like anger management. The most common treatment for perpetrators is something that's called the Duluth model, as in Duluth, Minnesota. So that's kind of the feminist perspective model that we need to sort of treat someone holistically. There are a lot of group therapy sessions in the Duluth model. I'm not a clinical psychologist, so I don't want to get too detailed there because I don't have the experience of actually running one of those types of treatments. But I'll say that is probably the most common form of treatment in the United States as far as I'm aware. Several people tend to say that it can be effective, at least for certain types of perpetrators. But again, it depends on all those factors we talked about before. What kind of perpetrator are you, etc. I'll just mention a couple of those terms if you're interested in them, and invite you to look up that research on your own if you're interested. What I want to focus on again is the healing of the survivors and some interesting research on that experience. There's a lot of research on this, which is good. We need to be giving survivors our attention and give them as many resources as possible.

I've sort of chosen to go in threes today. We're going to talk about three areas of focus today for possible healing research with survivors of relationship violence, so that's going to be healing through storytelling, which is an approach that I've been involved with a little bit, post-traumatic growth, and then we will end on allyship. I do think we'll have time for a few questions at the end as well.

Healing Through Storytelling

The first is healing through storytelling. Telling your own story in your own voice can be very empowering and healing. I'll mention that there's a book by a researcher named Jamie Pennebaker, it's not on the list of resources, it's a little bit older now, but if you're interested, it's called "Opening Up." That research is about people from a wide variety of traumas, not just relationship violence, but Holocaust survivors, people who have gone through natural disasters, and any kind of trauma that you can think of. Pennebaker's research is about how often you don't talk about your trauma at all. You might feel a sense of shame about trauma. You might feel like, well, people don't want to listen to me complain. You might feel like I'll be able to work through it on my own, I don't need help. So often people never talk about what they've been through. Pennebaker's book is about how holding in your story and never sharing it can cause you a lot of damage, both psychologically and even physically. He shows that people have chronic health problems like high blood pressure, or potentially even issues such as cancer or hernias because you're holding in that trauma and you're not ever letting it out, so it's a physical burden almost. Again, the book "Opening Up," talks about he's got research where he brings people in and he asks them to tell their stories about traumas, and he then follows those people over time. The people who go through this experimental procedure of telling their story, especially if they're physically writing it down, often will have much better physical health afterward. Temporarily, their health might actually go down and get worse a little bit, because they're reliving the trauma. But long-term, getting it out leads to all sorts of benefits. I'll point you to that resource, but that has been translated into several therapeutic approaches that use storytelling in this kind of counseling environment to help people go through and process trauma. You can see here that narrative exposure therapy is just one example of that form of therapy, but there are lots of different kinds of therapies today that use this idea of storytelling. You can see that I mentioned just one example of a research-based article on why telling my narrative helps. This article pointed out three specific ways that sharing my story can help me heal from trauma.

The first is that by writing my story, telling it is okay, physically writing it like in a journal is even better according to research because it helps me slow down and I can maybe go back and edit if I want, if other things emerge, memories come up. But the idea is that by writing all that out or by sharing it verbally, I have to process it chronologically. I have to think about different events, what order did they occur in? I can take it maybe moment by moment, which helps it seem more accessible to me. If I just have memory and it's just this one big sort of ball of trauma, that can be intimidating for me to try to access. By telling my story, it makes it more accessible because I can just say, "What happened on this one day?" It makes it so that I can find that more approachable and take it in pieces and process each piece at a time. Again, it allows it to be accessible. That leads to me being able to have that awareness and insight instead of just sort of maybe being afraid or being intimidated to approach it at all because it's so massive. So I can talk, I have this insight into what happened, and how it affected other people. I can try to write my story from someone else's perspective to get that third-person idea of how other people saw what was happening to me. It's an effective way for me to process what happens to me in these more accessible pieces or less intimidating pieces.

Another important part of this is renewal and reconstruction. The idea that we go back to those self-reclaiming actions that we talked about before, so through this process, I can see times when I was brave, times that I decided I deserved better than this, times that I protected someone else, times that I stood up for myself. It's a way for me to honor my own experience. Instead of having that guilt and shame, to be proud of myself and to show ways that I am a survivor, ways that I have overcome challenges, and it helps me establish boundaries moving forward. I might be afraid to start a new relationship because I don't want to repeat what I've been through before. Now I can make sure that I establish healthy boundaries, that I can say very early on, I don't want you to tell me what to wear when we go out, right? That is not okay. It's this way of reclaiming that empowerment. It's a way of reclaiming my empowerment.

The last one here is transformation and meaning-making. The idea that I'm allowed to feel happy, I'm allowed to have pride in myself, that's okay. I encourage myself to feel proud of myself, I can say, "I'm awesome, I am smart, I am beautiful, I accomplish things, I'm a good mother, or I'm a good friend." Whatever it is that's meaningful to me. It's helping people find their joy again. That can be an important part of the end of the story. What is the end of the story? The idea that I can make the end of my own story. I'm the author of my own path. That ending can also be very powerful.

Key literature in this area includes D'Amore et al. (2018) and Volpe et al. (2017).

Post-Traumatic Growth

I also wanted to talk about something that you might already be familiar with. It's a very popular idea of post-traumatic growth. Just in case you're not already familiar with this, this idea of post-traumatic growth has been around now for about 30 years, and it's about the notion that people who go through traumas are certainly affected by those traumas, right? But it doesn't always have to be in a bad way. It's not saying "Yay, trauma," but rather that we can overcome those traumas and build on them in ways that show us how strong we are. It can renew our priorities and help us say, "I'm not going to take things for granted. I'm going to find my joy again." There's actually a survey by Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) that can measure these different areas of post-traumatic growth. They've identified five specific ways that people who have come through traumas and are now on the other side can become even more powerful because they have gone through this and have seen their strength to get through it.

You can see here the five areas of growth that are identified:

1. Relating to others
2. New possibilities
3. Personal strength
4. Spiritual change
5. Appreciation of life

I have the actual survey that they created, and I can read a couple of the items that they used to measure this just so you get an idea. This is available if you do an online search for it. It's a way to kind of measure someone's growth over time, so you could also do this longitudinally. You could have someone fill this out now, fill it out next month or maybe in six months or a year, and show them the change that they've gone through. I'll just go through a couple of these.

First off, we have "Relating to others." An example of an item on their scale that measures relating to others is things like, "I have more compassion for others," or "I put more effort into my relationships now."

"New possibilities." I think is an important one, having people be able to see all of these options that they have for their life, right? An example of an item on their scale for new possibilities is, "I have established a new path for my life," or "I'm more likely to try to change things that need changing." So, it's this idea that I feel in control, I have an internal locus of control, I can make decisions, and they matter.

The third one here is "Personal strength," which of course is going to be very important. Personal strength is about things like, "I have a greater feeling of self-reliance," or "I'm better able to accept the way that things work out." It's not saying everything always has to go my way because that's unrealistic, but it's the idea that I can sort of control the things that I can control and make peace with the things that I can't control.

Number four is "Spiritual change." This is going to be on an individual level depending on what the person's individual faith or philosophy is. But spiritual change for many people will be very important. Spiritual change items are things like, "I have a better understanding of spiritual matters." It's just that I've maybe gone through some doubt or some questions, and I've decided what is going to work for me.

The last one on here is "Appreciation of life." I think this is so important. The fifth factor here includes things like, "I have a greater appreciation for the value of my own life." I love that item because it's just saying "I matter, I'm important, I'm valuable, and I want other people to see that too." What are ways that I can make sure that I'm getting that validation in healthy ways? That I'm accomplishing my own dreams, my own goals. Post-traumatic growth is a good way to help people see that the effects of trauma don't only have to be bad things. They can help you realize your priorities or make you realize that you want to live life to the fullest.

Allyship

The last thing I'll talk about today before we get to some questions is the idea of allyship. Many people who are involved in research or community activism or therapy or social work or any kind of area of helping are people who have gone through something similar themselves, and they're now looking for ways to use what they went through to try to help other people. It's the idea that I can understand this perspective. I know what it's like to be judged. I know what it's like to go through this, and so I want to help other people have it a little bit easier than what I went through. We know that a lot of people who are survivors get involved somehow in trying to prevent domestic violence from happening or help responses be more educated or more sort of empathetic. That is a fantastic way for you to help your own healing journey. At the same time, it can be re-traumatizing because it can remind you of what you went through. You can sort of have that vicarious trauma with the people that you're helping. So sometimes this leads to burnout. There's an interesting article, for a qualitative study of people who are survivors who are now serving as advocates and sort of the pros and cons of working in this kind of field if you are a survivor yourself (Wood, 2017). Some of the challenges that people go through, such as setting boundaries and making sure that I'm not getting too personal with my clients or my students. That's a challenge for many people because they want to help so much, right? But you need to still create space for yourself to be able to go home at the end of the day. You need to be able to sort of set up your own self-care, but getting involved is a good way to continue that empowerment of healing.

Summary and Questions

I've created a list of some sort of frequently asked questions that I get from students here at the university. I teach a class on relationship violence, and I also often give lectures in the community or at conferences about this research. I've created a list of questions that I often get, and I'm happy that we have a few minutes for me to go over those with us, with you today. One is several people who are listening to this webinar are maybe educators. A common question I get is, "How can we talk about this in an educational setting without it being too much or maybe re-traumatizing people who are in the classroom?" It's important that whenever we're having conversations about this in public or with students, we're definitely going to be able to offer resources. So have a counselor on-site, if possible, have flyers for local resources, and anonymous national resources. That's always important. One of the ways that I like to talk about this issue in a way that is not ignoring it but is maybe a little bit more accessible to students is to show a movie in class that features some fictional relationship violence story, and then ask my students to analyze that movie based on the research that we've talked about in class. If you're looking for something like that, or if you just sort of want to go through that experience yourself of seeing these movies, some movies that I've used in class before: "Sleeping With The Enemy" is an early Julia Roberts movie that each shows things like intimate terrorism. That's an interesting film that my students usually respond very well to. There's a movie called "Enough," in which Jennifer Lopez actually physically fights back. It's interesting to think back to the very beginning of this webinar where we talked about the Michael Johnson kind of reactions. So that shows that sort of physical self-defense aspect of relationship violence. "Safe Haven" is based on a Nicholas Sparks book, so lots of students like that because it's maybe a little bit more modern. There's a film called "Till Death Do Us Part," which features an all-African-American cast. It's a nice way to show some diversity in the media that we're using in our classes. The last one that I sometimes use is called "Gaslight". In the power and control wheel that we talked about before, one of the psychological manipulation tactics is the idea of gaslighting your partner. People are using this term gaslight more and more, and it's the idea of someone trying to manipulate your perceptions of reality and saying, "Well, that's not what happened" or "You're blowing this out of proportion" or "You're exaggerating." That comes from a film, an old black and white film called "Gaslight," which was about a man who was trying to emotionally manipulate his wife to basically steal her money, and it came from literal lights in their house that were gas powered. He would go up into the attic, and he would manipulate the gas that was going in the lights into the entire house, and so while he was doing that, the lights in her room would dim, and he would come back into the room later, and she would say, "The lights were dimming what was going on?" He would say, "No, they weren't dimming. You're making that up, you must be crazy." So it's interesting to think about the historical perspectives on things like relationship violence. So you could have a conversation about how has our culture changed or has it? What kinds of psychological manipulation are important in addition to the more stereotypical physical types of abuse that we see?

I also often get a question from people about what we can be doing to educate people who are maybe not an academic audience about relationship violence. So I like to talk about a play called "Voices Of Hope," and it's free access to it if you are using it for educational purposes. It's only one hour long. It's manageable, and it is suggested to have no scenery. It features the stories of nine true survivors of relationship violence. It comes from research with qualitative research with real survivors, and it features a variety of different kinds of experiences. It includes both male and female voices. It includes people who have experienced adult relationship violence and child sexual abuse. It tries to show kind of a diversity of perspectives, and the play ends with all of them surviving and becoming empowered and healing, so it has sort of a happy ending, which makes it more accessible to audiences. The real reason that I like the idea of having a theatrical performance to highlight relationship violence is because people will go to that more, and it will maybe strike them emotionally in ways that are very different than saying, "Come to a lecture at the library about domestic violence." People don't want to do that, but they might go to a play. You could do it as a fundraiser for a local shelter. Now I'm educating the community, they're finding an emotional way to connect to the audience. We're honoring survivors, and potentially it's actually helping a local resource if we use it as a fundraiser. I encourage you to think about something like that. Again the name of this particular play is called "Voices Of Hope." You could email me if you want more information about how to access the play. But it's just one example of the sort of thing that you could do a little bit more creatively in the community to talk about the issue in ways that are not a traditional academic lecture that not everyone is excited about.

I mentioned earlier the treatment of perpetrators. I want to just highlight again, the idea that there's a lot of research on potential treatments for perpetrators. Some of them are things like traditional therapy, and some of them are things like anger management. There will also be some maybe pharmaceutical types of treatments, so there might be things like antidepressants, and anti-anxiety medications. The main point that I think I'll emphasize there is from a research perspective, there isn't any kind of one cure-all, of course, or would be using it, right? It's such a complicated issue. So many people involved in relationship violence from any kind of perspective, perpetrator, survivor, it's a lot of nuance. They've often gone through something themselves. So there is definitely more of a research need for effective treatment for perpetrators. If you're interested in the research aspect of this, I would emphasize that that's definitely a need that we have in the field, talking just about what we could do that's more effective, or maybe how we can modify treatment to be the most effective for the person involved.

One issue that I'll bring up that's important to communities is sometimes if someone is convicted of domestic violence or relationship abuse, there will be a fine. That in and of itself is controversial. Is a financial fine a good thing or a bad thing for the community? My perspective is often a fine is not great for the victim of relationship violence because that's taking money away from the family, right? That means you're also taking the money away from the victim if they're married if they share a bank account, now you're also fining the victim, right? That's punishing that person as well as the perpetrator. I've brought that up to many of my friends who are, you know, in criminal justice or involved in that aspect of the community and their perspective is the money from those fines goes to funding things like the emergency shelter. If we don't have those fines, we're now taking resources away from the community. That's an interesting perspective that I hadn't considered, and again, it just shows how nuanced and complicated this issue is. Everyone's going to have a personal perspective because we care about this issue, or because we have personal experience, or we have a family member. It's easy to get very emotional and to say, "You know, my perspective is the only correct perspective." But what I'll emphasize here is that anyone who's involved in trying to educate the community or provide resources or prevent this from happening or doing research on it, they're all contributing to helping this situation in some way, right? They all have a positive motivation, they all have a good perspective. So by fighting with each other, we're dividing, and we need to make sure that we're all allies, we're all in this together. We need to think of each other as one big team, and maybe we're coming at the problem from different perspectives, but we need everyone's perspective to get a full picture of what's needed and to make sure that we're solving this problem in the most comprehensive way. It's just a good example of how I need to remind myself of that sometimes too.

The last thing I'll mention is at the very beginning of this webinar, we talked about some limitations. One of the limitations was that this research is almost all from the United States, and also that most of this research is on heterosexual couples. I'll emphasize one more time that we need research that comes from other perspectives. There is more and more research on LGBTQIA2S+ community members and the resources that they need, the unique forms of potential manipulation or abuse that those kinds of partnerships can include, such as forced outing of a couple member, and the historical reality that people in that community don't necessarily want to rely on calling the police if they've been victimized by the police in the past or if they felt like the police don't have the training needed to help me or my relationship. We need more resources and more education and more research on that particular community, including male victims. Again, I'll say I have several family members who are men. They have been in physically abusive relationships with their wives, and when they've tried to seek out those resources, they've been told either this is just for women or they've been told we don't believe you, or, well, it couldn't have hurt that much, she's a girl, basically. I just want to emphasize something that's important to me is empathy for all survivors and victims, and trying to make sure that we're thinking about this as a comprehensive problem. This is a community problem. It's not just the particular victims or survivors or even perpetrators that we need to be helping. It's a community-level issue. If we think about that from this big picture, sort of macro perspective, even if you don't personally know someone that you think is involved in this kind of relationship, addressing this issue makes the entire community happier and healthier. This is an important issue.

I'm so glad that you've chosen to stick with me for the last two hours. I know sometimes it can be draining and hard to hear and hard to focus when we talk about issues that are so personal and so depressing in some ways. But it's so important that we don't stop talking about this, that we don't sort of bury our heads in the sand or look away or decide to think about something that's easier. Of course, we need to take breaks and have self-care, but we can't let this issue go away until we resolve it because it's affecting all of us. Even if you don't think it's affecting you personally, it probably is. You probably know someone who is experiencing this, and you just didn't realize it, and even on the community level, it's something that we need to think about the holistic nature of our community and the idea that our culture should emphasize respect and love in the healthiest way possible, and the idea that we should be thinking about our partnerships with this kind of trust and excitement that everyone deserves. If you have any questions other than the ones that I've talked about, you should be able to find me. I hope that everyone got what they wanted out of this, and I appreciate your time and attention. Thank you so much.

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Citation 

Goodfriend, W. (2023). Relationship violence and research. Continued.com - Social Work, Article 206. Available at www.continued.com-socialwork