[TriumphOverTragedy]

It is heartbreaking. To hear her explain her family history of abuse, to justify Chris Brown's earlier abuse to her as not abuse because she was not swollen, black, blue, or bleeding. To say that she was taught domestic violence is humiliating and hidden in the home. She also said she was embarrassed that she loved someone so much she took him back after he beat her..she speaks about being in denial and lying to yourself after the fact. I think she is amazingly strong to do this interview. It is honest and real.

[michigan_mom]

It has become the norm I think. It is hard to find someone who hasn't experienced some kind of abuse in their life...so sad..........But it is good that someone young is coming out and telling these young girls what to look for and to not justify it. I allways made excuses for his behavior because I thought he was such a good provider, and he really loved me, so it must have been a bad day, or I really was the person he said I was. So it must have been my fault.

[Kilroy]

TriumphOverTragedy, on 06 November 2009 - 10:39 PM, said:

It is heartbreaking. To hear her explain her family history of abuse, to justify Chris Brown's earlier abuse to her as not abuse because she was not swollen, black, blue, or bleeding. To say that she was taught domestic violence is humiliating and hidden in the home. She also said she was embarrassed that she loved someone so much she took him back after he beat her..she speaks about being in denial and lying to yourself after the fact. I think she is amazingly strong to do this interview. It is honest and real.

Yes, she was very honest to do this interview, and to talk about her family history as she did.

Yet nobody should be surprised at the facts she revealed. Tendencies to abuse are passed down through families this way. What's more, to many people it's as if there are two separate worlds: one where people abuse one another and one where they don't. One world doesn't really know how the other world lives.

On the one hand, people in normal families where there's no significant abuse do realize that abuse happens in some families. But there's plenty they don't know or understand. For instance, they don't know how "normal" many abusers can appear to people outside their own families. They're astonished if they discover someone they knew as "friendly, kind and generous" has been abusing a spouse. They don't know how inconsistent and irrational abusers' behavior can be. They don't understand all the effects of abuse on a partner. They don't understand why so many abused partners keep going back--another matter touched on in the Rihanna interview. And so on.

Meanwhile, those from abusive families like Rihanna's are in one sense or another likely to see abuse as "normal," because it's what they experienced in their own earliest environment. Mind you, there must be a lot of confusing doublethink involved for anyone raised in a violent family. About her own family, Rihanna did say "Domestic violence is not something that people want anybody to know." So in one way she must appreciate that violence is not the norm. If it really was, why wouldn't everybody talk about it as freely as they talk about disobedient children or other problems? But some, because of their own experiences of abuse, literally do believe that "everyone behaves this way."

And almost magically, people like Rihanna from one abusive family are far more likely than others to end up partnering with someone from another abusive family! (Chris Brown's family background was abusive too.) Unless they succeed in changing the way they relate, by pairing together this way the partners unwittingly perpetuate what I refer to as an "abuse subculture" that has a secret existence separate from the mainstream.

These families raise most of the abusers AND most of the eventual victims of abuse. The only variable is which way a child is likely to turn out. If they've learned from their childhood experience that "abuse is normal" in one sense or another, does that mean "it's normal for them to be abusive themselves," or "it's normal for others to abuse them"? (Or sometimes both!--depending on how they process the childhood experiences they've had.)

In this light, what Rihanna had to say about her own childhood experiences and reactions was highly significant. After saying that violence occurred "on numerous accounts," she added:

Rihanna said:

It was... it was like... I don't want to say "normal," but it wasn't a surprise when it happened, like... I just always anticipated it happening, and that's why at night I wouldn't want to sleep because I was too afraid that it would happen. I just would pull away, I would be beating on my dad's leg the whole time, just trying to stand in the middle... breaking glass bottles so that they could hear something else, and snap out of it.

Clearly her main reaction was one of fear. Though she expected the violence to happen, she frantically tried to do everything she could to stop it. She took on the role of desperately trying to fix the problem between her parents by any method possible.

This shows how abuse in the home, even when it's not targeted at a child, is still something inflicted on a child. The child suffers because of it and is driven to develop some "strategy" (functional or not) in an attempt to cope with it. Rihanna here was clearly adopting a "codependent" role even as a child. She took on the responsibility for "fixing" other people's problems--serious problems--that she was never the cause of. She was doing her best to "make peace," and just hoping and trying to "make it all go away."

Later she "took on" Chris Brown as well, whether or not she was aware of his problems. And if violence "wasn't a surprise when it happened," at some level of her mind, however unwelcome, it may not have been such a surprise when it happened to her too.