Abstract
This article describes a group for domestic violence survivors to help them move past a “liminal” state in which their social identity is characterized by being “victim” or “survivor” to one of “incorporation” defined by “thriving” and joy. Through the creation and use of healing rituals, blessings, poetry, art and music, the women in the group establish “communitas” and support each other in the work of self-reclamation and healing. The group, “Rites of Passage” is intended for women who have completed shelter-based crisis interventions, and uses a structured curriculum that integrates theoretical and philosophical concepts from anthropology, post-modernism, humanistic psychology, social work, and existentialism. Through the Rites of Passage group, women identify and traverse a healing trajectory to construct an identity founded on strength and fulfillment. Patterned after non-western sex-segregated rites of transition, those who go through the group celebrate its conclusion with a defining ritual that publically marks their change in identity and status.
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Notes
Since some data used in women’s shelters indicate that a woman may return to an abuser between 6 and 7 times before finally being able to leave the relationship only examining a woman’s behavior for 6 months suggests that we know little about stages-of-change past a post-crisis period.
Wozniak conducted ethnographic interviews with women who experienced domestic violence (DV) at two sites in the USA, during the summer and fall of 2007 with approximately 30 women. The study used a mixed-method ethnography, integrating participant-observation field work with structured and semi-structured interviews, to assess the possibility of healing resulting from an experimental group intervention. The first site was a privately owned and operated suburban sober house for women leaving prison or substance abuse rehabilitation. The second site was an urban transitional living facility run by a battered women’s shelter. The women who participated were all between the ages of 20 and 60. Based on intake data gleaned from the directors of the facilities all women had significant life experiences with chronic violation in their families of origin and families of creation. All of the women also received ancillary mental health or substance abuse related services.
Interestingly, if women lived in a psychic world where violence is still anticipated and accepted as a way of life and a natural occurrence in a romantic relationship, then the meaning of their stay at the shelter and at transitional housing, where women can often live for up to 2 years, may simply be an interlude between abusive relationships—a respite from violence. This may offer some explanation as to why women who don’t return to their previous relationship get involved with other abusive relationships.
Our data is consistent with finding from other studies. For example, Ham-Rowbottom et al. (2005) report that up to 75% of women who received extensive emergency or transitional living shelter continued to exhibit signs of depression, trauma, and life dissatisfaction. Additional studies of women up to 6 months after their shelter stay also suggest that depression continues to be a major problem (Campbell et al. 1995, 2002; Campbell 2002; Houskamp and Foy 1991). This suggests that the journey away from abuse and “survival” outside of an abusive relationship are not the same as healing or mental health.
Barbara Whitfield has conceptualized these stages as “victim,” “survivor”, and “thriver” and operationalized particular thinking about self, others and behavior in the social world that accompanies each stage (Whitfield 2003).
This points to a troubling double-bind for battered women’s support services. Because services to battered women are consistently driven by resource scarcity and a never-ending influx of new victims, most communities lack the resources necessary to develop additional support services to those ready to move to a new developmental stage in their healing. And most community- or shelter-based support groups emphasize women’s ability to break the silence they kept as victims by encouraging women to tell their stories and thereby garner support, validation, and companionship through their shared violence experiences.
Because we posited that repetitive disclosure about the violence and self-identification as a “victim” or a “survivor” may prevent women from “moving on,” in the group context we do not, as part of the curriculum, include a time for sharing women’s history with abuse. Moreover, no one is asked to tell their story of violation as a way to gain entry into the group. We define the group through our advertising posters and flyers as a group for women who are healing from domestic violence. When we meet face-to-face with women in an intake interview we explain again that this group is for women who have experienced domestic violence, have had a chance to tell their story and are in a place where they are ready to create a new and different future for themselves and their children. Thus group members know that a women is in the group because she, like themselves, has experienced some form of violence. All of the women we have accepted into the group have received support group services offered generally through the local shelters or received individual therapy.
Interestingly, within the group meetings conversation about being battered rarely comes up and women consistently show relief when they are told during the intake interview that they will not be asked about it. When a group member bring up the topic of their own violation they tend to refer to the violation in general terms or they tend to mention it as a comparison. For example, “when I lived with Ricky, and he would beat me I did….” In other words, women consistently showed that they no longer wanted or needed to talk about the details of their battering experience but may want to reference the way they thought at that time or the way they behaved as different from the way they do now. On one occasion, a woman in one of the Montana sites asked her group mates if anyone wanted to tell what had happened to them, that is, tell about their abuse experiences. All of the women in the group unanimously said no and suggested through phrases like, “that was then,” or “I don’t want to talk about it anymore” or “I am done with that time in my life” that they wanted to maintain a future oriented perspective—at least in the context of the Rites of Passage group.
We have also consistently found that while women at times have to maintain contact with the batterer, either through child visitation or divorce proceedings, a woman’s group mates keep her from being emotionally dragged back into a victim mentality marked by negative, fear-based thinking in which women feel responsible for the abuse and the abuser. For example, one evening in the Montana site a woman shared with the group that her ex-husband and father of her youngest child had been calling her non-stop on the phone to engage her in an argument about visitation. She shared that her new strategy was to put the phone down and walk away while he ranted. Over the course of the group, supported and encouraged by her group mates, she continued to develop increasingly agentive strategies for his verbal abuse that culminated in her divorce. Thus, we also routinely provide women with resources and referrals to legal and mental health professionals should crises or emergencies arise that involve their batterer and certainly women garner support from the group for exigencies that arise from their past relationship with the batterer—for example, these inevitably involve issues with children.
Our observations of sequential change were similar to Shamai’s findings (2000) which suggested that many of the cognitive shifts women made turned on a relationship or relationships in which women’s sense of self as independent, worthy, differentiated and whole was either restored or a nascent sense of self nurtured and supported. Experiences which supported women in creating an alternative life by offering them first the right and ability to envision change and then supporting them in their steps for change were also cited as critical.
Informal assessments of women’s progress after they leave the group suggests that indeed women on the threshold of creating a new self-text can shed their construction of self as victim or self as survivor, be escorted through liminality, and create positive life change.
Sharon Maynard, a Mohegan Tribal elder, who ran a support group for Mohegan tribal members in need of healing, based on Mohegan spirituality and sequential change and Susan Omilian, who created My Avenging Angel group in West Hartford Connecticut, both had some form of this activity.
This is an important point we wish to underscore. In Turner’s work whole communities embraced and accepted as changed, initiates who returned from their rites of passage. That is to say, the communities Turner wrote about received the newly changed initiates and incorporated them into society in their new roles and positions because it was members of the community who invoked the transition and who shared its meanings. This raises an interesting question about how the women who “graduate” from or leave our group fair when they enter a society or community that does not invoke the transformation and who may not recognize or understand it and who may not understand or know what a “thriver” is. Within Western culture major social position, role, or identity changes can be difficult to effect and integrate into one’s sense of self when there are neither institutionalized or formalized rites of passage and when the transition is not one necessarily marked by observable physical change or ceremony. In response, some mental health interventions turn on developing an artificial cultural community like that developed through Alcoholics Anonymous or through support groups like bereavement support for SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) or even in some residential treatment facilities. But none embed intervention within a sequential rite of passage based on facilitating and recognizing a social and personal identity change, or a healing. Thus, there is little data to suggest whether the impact of the ritual change shifts over time or requires supportive community. These questions point to an area of further research.
In our experience, we have witnessed women handle this potential disjuncture, i.e., the absence of a community with a shared meaning of the ritual change, in the following ways. First, we have witnessed and heard about ways in which women educate their families about the changes they are making in the group—and thus make a community for themselves. We have seen women bring their families to participate in the group and participate in the rituals. In the Montana site, for example, a woman came back to the second group meeting with her mother and three sisters. On the fourth group meeting she brought her teen aged daughter. She had thus, created a community capable of sharing her meanings of healing, around her.
We have also seen how women have enacted a changed thinking and a changed sense of self within their communities, for example their church or their circle of friends and seen ways in which communities have, in response, responded differently to women, reinforcing women’s changed position. But we have also observed women shift their friendships and communities because those groups could not support their changed thinking. Using what we termed in the group the “positive law of attraction” we encouraged women to find other like-minded women with whom they could associate. That is to say, find the community that could share their meanings of thriving.
Several women expressed the desire to start their own groups and thus enlarge the communities who can recognize and respond to them as healed or healing or thrivers. Perhaps the hallmark of women’s changed social position however is the absence of “victim” or “survivor” from their lexicon and the replacing those identifiers with strength-based identities. This too allows women to create around them a community that recognizes them differently even if these reference groups don’t recognize that this represents a shift.
Finally we want to create a community-based ritual similar to those that helped the survivors of rape and written about by Galambos (2001) in which women not only proclaim their new status but have an opportunity within a supportive community to acknowledge their work and changes. It is worth exploring for the future. However, this exploration is balanced against a sense that women’s healing rituals are uniquely their own and take on an aspect of the sacred, personal, and intimate.
Our ability to track women after they leave the group is limited as much by our own efforts as by group participant’s efforts. First, of the women who wanted to remain in contact with the group facilitators none has returned to an abusive relationship. This represents roughly over 50% of the women who have graduated from our groups. Second, while all women initially expressed an interest in staying in touch, we do not know, for those who did not, if it represents a change or heart or a change or living style or a change of address. This tends to be a highly mobile population and many of the women knew they were moving either out of transitional housing or to a new state for a new job. So unfortunately we have not been able to track every participant to find out if the intervention was successful at helping them change their lives in way the group supported. However, the group also operates on the assumption that once women have gained a new perspective and a new way of thinking, whether they were able to sustain it indefinitely and consistently forever misses the point. In our experience it is more plausible that women have a new way of thinking about themselves and the world around them as a tool in an expanding repertoire of tools they can use to make life changes. Thus rather than something that helps them create one final change, it is something they can draw on and build upon and come back to as they move through their life.
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Wozniak, D.F., Allen, K.N. Ritual and Performance in Domestic Violence Healing: From Survivor to Thriver Through Rites of Passage. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 80–101 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-011-9236-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-011-9236-9