Why would psychologists focus on their clients’ lived experiences of psychological violence when many people show resilience and immunity in the form of ignoring or dismissing these experiences? In many circumstances the answer is a focus born from the recognition that just as sticks and stones break bones, names and words cause suffering. Psychological trauma can arise from psychological violence, which can be a singular event or a persistent hounding.
Psychological violence has not been well-defined as the tipping point between aggression and violence sits within the concept, although where remains debated. Broadly, psychological violence has been described as the systemic destruction of a person’s self-esteem and/or sense of safety (Follingstand & Dehart, 2000). There is no situation that is entirely immune to psychological violence. Think about the last time you wanted to go out to dinner while your partner wanted to go to the movies. If you ended up at the movie, how did that happen? Can you describe how you gave away your preference? Was it willingly, with an equal share in the decision process and with confidence to throw around ideas? Most people will apply psychological pressure to others at times to get their way, sometimes deliberately and sometimes instinctively. Doing so is not engaging in an act of violence, but it is using force. When does that force become violence and a violation of the universal and fundamental right to life, liberty and security?
Now imagine a situation where your client tells you their partner was so angry with them for not putting away the dishes that he smashed them on the ground and called them lazy. Your client tearfully told you of the shock they felt and the fear they now have as nothing like this had happened before. Being a party to a confrontation that includes yelling, swearing, threatening or deeply personal criticism is for most a trigger for fight-or-flight response. The anxiety of being confronted forcefully can result from the rarity of the event and the brain trying to interpret the experience. This can be paired with a reluctance to draw boundaries or confront the aggressor, especially when embodied self-awareness acts protectively providing a caution that confrontation is likely to escalate the risk. Occasionally, clinicians hear client’s habituation to such interactions.
Psychological violence is par for the course as it has become an expected interpersonal style. This emerges time and time again in circumstances such as family violence and toxic workplace cultures. As psychologists, we need to be clear about the strategies available to validate their lived experience, absolve them from the blame they may ascribe themselves, and support their healing journey to physical and psychological safety.
Persistent psychological violence
When clients have set a boundary and tried to separate themselves from their aggressors, the persistence meets the clinical threshold for stalking. That is, repeated and unwanted intrusions. In doing this, any communication can be seen as forceful and therefore defined as an act of psychological violence. To illustrate, applying to a court for a restraining order is asking the court to assist in sending a stop message. It is enacting the right to be left alone. When ignored, a phone call, email or text message (regardless of tone or content) can be defined as a breach of the order, which is a criminal offence. In this way, all stalking is violent even though many cases do not presage physical violence. Another reason to see persistent psychological violence through a stalking lens is the lived experience of many survivors who fear their stalker, something that can be exploited as a tool of control.
Being familiar with the particulars of stalking and what the behaviour can look like can help psychologists support clients who just want to be left alone. Consider the following case. Penny is referred to you from her general practitioner for anxiety due to workplace stress. You see Penny and in the initial session, she discusses feeling anxious at work with emails and texts from colleagues and friends triggering her self-doubts. In session three Penny discloses feelings of embarrassment and self-blame for her anxiety. She says this started after meeting Hamish
The case of Penny and Hamish
Penny met Hamish on Tinder and they went out to dinner and had a one-night stand. Hamish sent Penny a message two days later offering to take her out for dinner again. Penny politely declined the offer as she did not see the relationship progressing. The next day Penny received another message from Hamish asking if she had reconsidered his offer. Penny said she had not changed her mind and asked Hamish to stop messaging her as she did not feel ready to start a relationship. A week later, another message was received from Hamish telling her he understood but wanted her to keep his number in case she changed her mind. He added a smiling emoji and said he would remind her from time to time to keep his offer in mind. Penny did not reply.
Stalking and technology
To stalk is to seek relevance. When someone breaks into your home or physically assaults you, it is clearly recognisable as a criminal act and undoubtedly prompts a quicker call to action. Psychological violence, including stalking, is not so black and white. Contrary to how stalking was conceived in the 1980s, being thought of as persistent pursuit and harassment of celebrities by fanatic fans, stalking is now recognised to be the occasions where one person repeatedly intrudes upon another. This expansion is attributable to the recognition that most stalking, particularly the highest risk cases, stems from family violence.
Further, the creation of the internet meant accessing those you want to be thinking about you is much easier. This meant people could now stalk and perpetrate psychological violence from the comfort of their home directly to their target’s pocket. Whether it be in person, by phone, by text, by email or even by exploiting a third party, any repeated unwanted contact is considered to be stalking; an indictable offence in every state in Australia.
Though having anti-stalking legislation in Australia is an important step in the right direction, gaining acknowledgement for the psychological aggression remains challenging. Penny, for example, struggled to see Hamish’s behaviour as worthy of reporting to authorities. She instead hoped that he would lose interest and go away. When asked when she would see this as psychological violence if he persisted she was not sure. This is the common experience that Penny and many like her (including a range of agencies and authorities) face. What is the threshold and how does recognising the threshold for singular and persistent acts of psychological violence empower psychologists to support their clients?
The lived experience of enduring psychological violence is multifaceted and typically omnipresent, particularly when technology admits aggressors to every place you take your phone and computer. This omnipresence is often referred to as persistence in stalking nomenclature. The risk of persistence is the risk of prolonged intrusions against one person, which contrasts the risk of recurrent stalking, which is the resumption of stalking against the same or a different person after a period of cessation (McEwan, Daffern, MacKenzie & Ogloff, 2017).
The anticipation that the stalker will force another interaction feels impossible to escape. In Penny’s experience, unrelated texts from friends and colleagues became a trigger as she increasingly anticipated it would be yet another text from Hamish. In this way a text message, however polite on content, becomes an act of psychological violence where trauma arises from the sense of powerlessness to exercise the right to be left alone and vulnerability of being left in harm’s way.
Psychological interventions
Facing the impact of psychological violence elicits reactions ranging from resilience to denial to trauma. All require validation as understandable reactions to choices others have forced upon them. Clients such as Penny can try to make sense of the want for another person to attack their self-esteem and/or sense of safety by denying, avoiding, or absorbing blame for the psychological violence. Reframing as the confounding question “why would anyone feel the need to use any kind of force to interact?” can not only validate the impact but stimulate the realisation that “it’s not me, it’s them!” From this realisation the healing journey can stem.
Resilience is an important element, especially when our clients are ambivalent or at risk of further psychological violence as the interactions are ongoing, such as in cases of toxic workplaces. Seeking a civil intervention, such as an intervention order, or criminal charges neither guarantee the behaviour will stop. We have also seen several cases where aggressors like Hamish are told to stop by their target, then told to stop by police and courts when this fails. In rare cases even prison terms can fail to deter the most persistent. Seeing an end to persistent psychological violence becomes an increasingly difficult prospect for many survivors.
In this context, our work is more than trauma recovery. It is acknowledging that the trauma may never fit neatly into the criteria for post-traumatic stress, as the notion of ‘post’ becomes a mirage. Here some general knowledge about the motives for stalking can aid the navigation of persistent psychological violence and the inevitable question of “why do they keep doing that?” The world-renowned stalking typology, created here in Australia, provides us with a construct to formulate why certain people engage in stalking by understanding their behaviours, motivations and trajectories (Mullen, Pathé, & Purcell, 2008). The following is a description of each of these dimensions.
Three elements to help guide decisions about where the stalker falls within the typology:
- Establishing the nature of the prior relationship between stalker and target.
- The original function of the stalking (initial motivation driving the behaviour).
- The psychiatric status of the stalker.
As psychologists, recognising what stalking is and how it can present is one of the ways we can circumvent some of the survivor’s re-traumatisation as it offers validation and relief to our clients by helping them making sense of their experience. In Penny’s case, Hamish is a rejected stalker.
The takeaway message
Appreciating the impact of psychological violence, be that as a singular event or as an element of stalking, validates the range of reactions that ensue. It also opens the way to safety planning and trauma recovery as indicated. This is a substantial mechanism to support clients who have experienced this as their reality. We, as psychologists, can help clients label an interaction or circumstance they did not choose as ‘psychologically violent’. What may seem a simple strategy in fact has great impact. When a situation is persistent or escalates, high-level knowledge of the stalking field can help flag the entrapment, the risks and the need for specialist intervention via supervision or consultation from an expert in the field of stalking and threat management.
The first author can be contacted at [email protected]