Taking back control......

In writing this I understand, and appreciate, that this can happen to men as well; men in homosexual relationships and men in heterosexual relationships; also to women in lesbian relationships.

There is no ‘boundary’ on what type of relationship or marriage or family suffers from this, not even ‘rich or poor’. But it affects the whole family, even children; even if they are not physically hurt they may still retain ‘mental scars’.

I write this from my own experience – but hope that you may see that ‘my story’ is not just mine and mine alone; it is a ‘story of many’.

I hate the term ‘domestic abuse’. The word ‘domestic’ makes it seem somehow acceptable; almost ‘cosy’; ‘’you can beat your wife as long as the cane is less than the thickness of your thumb’’; heard that?; the law NEVER existed in the UK or in Europe.

Besides, there is so much more to ‘abuse’ in a relationship than purely the physical. Mental abuse is just as bad; often the two go ‘hand in hand’.

I HATE it when people say to me ‘’if my partner hit me just once then I would leave them.’’  I hate it because they have never suffered abuse; they do not understand how insidious it is and how it ‘creeps up on you’ without you even knowing. Often, with ‘metal abuse’ one does not realise, no matter how clever one is, until after the event; until a counsellor might make one see, after the relationship has ended, that ‘abuse’ may have been happening on that score and lead to physical harm later.

It is also a ‘tabloid trash newspaper’ myth that ONLY the less bright or ONLY the lower-paid or ONLY the ‘coffee-coloured Mussie women’ suffer abuse. There are some ‘social groups’ who do not report these things to the police …… but hospitals, and so forth, KNOW about them…. to some degree. These people are ‘the white middle classes with decent incomes’. With respect to emotional and physical abuse, these people, ‘the white middle classes with decent incomes’ can sometimes be the worst offenders; worse in that they are not reported; worse in that it remains hidden under a faςade of ‘domestic bliss’. One always has to ‘keep up appearances’, you know; ‘What would the neighbours think?’

My dear friend, God rest her soul, had a husband who earned a quarter of a million, plus bonuses, a year. That is not ‘wealthy’, by today’s standards, but is more than comfortable. Nice house; nice cars; teenage children ‘well looked after’. Because, although I did not know it then, I was in a similar ‘abusive’ relationship myself I did not see the ‘warning signs’ for her; I saw nothing until she showed me an almighty bruise on her abdomen – which she only showed me because the black marks, completely all down one side of her face, were all too visible. She broke up with her husband the next day; but not completely. He came to stay with her, and slept with her in her bed, for many months ‘for the sake of the children’. It was not for their sake; children often understand, and readily accept, more than us ‘adults’ give them credit for. He did it so that he would not lose his ‘mind control’ of her. He did not ‘give up’ being ‘in her life’ even on the day of her funeral. I was at the funeral; I saw it. She ‘broke up’ from him the day after her 40th birthday; she died three days after her 46th birthday.

During those six years she HAD met another man. A man who adored her simply for who she was; warts and all; emotional baggage and all. He loved her; truly loved her; because that IS what love IS; accepting someone for their real self and allowing them to BE their real self ; smiling about a concert or film or book JUST BECAUSE the person you love enjoyed it, even if you do not think it was that good yourself. She was not kind to him; she shouted at him frequently; she smashed up their possessions; she ‘cheated’ on him sexually (only once, but that can sometimes break a relationship). But he understood what she had been through and stuck by her. They married, but less than two years later she was dead; three days after her 46th birthday.

Her new husband had cajoled her to see their doctor. The doctor could not find anything ‘obviously wrong’, probably because she was not honest with him and also because he had not known her for very long. She was thus not referred to a hospital, or clinic, until it was too late. She died within just over 48 hours of being admitted to hospital as an emergency. She died of bleeding ulcers, kidney failure and liver failure. She had been an alcoholic for decades, but, like her emotional and physical abuse, she had managed to hide it, even from those closest to her; friends, new husband, Mum, Dad, siblings, teenage kids. She had started drinking, it seems, to try to cope with the emotional abuse and control exerted upon her before any physical abuse had started, let alone became apparent by bruising.

I can write all this now because her new husband died of cancer a couple of years ago; and her family and (now adult) children have overcome losing her, in their own ways. Even after all this time, I still miss her; we used to talk every day, about pretty much everything…except what was happening to her. That was her ‘deadly’ secret.  It did not make the headlines in the tabloid trash; nobody wants to know about a comfortably-off, middle-class, white woman in suburbia who suffered decades of ‘mental torture’ and years of physical damage; nobody wants to know that she could not cope and turned to alcohol to numb her mental and physical pain. She died of long-term alcohol abuse, but she may as well have been murdered.

My own story is not too dissimilar… but, thankfully, I have not turned to ‘the easiest available tranquiliser’ and succumbed to alcohol addiction (although I do smoke more cigarettes than I should!) One day I will tell my tale in full, but even though it has been ten years, my ex-husband to this day is still exerting a modicum of control over my life by refusing to take my name off the joint-mortgage on what was our home, but is now his home. I wish I could win the lottery, pay the darn mortgage off (even though the courts gave the house to him) and be DONE with everything once and for all; finally get rid of his control over me. But for now I have to put up with a tiny bit of something that still hurts.

It hurts me because I am a very intelligent person, but insidiously, over the years, bit by bit, he took control of my life; he almost made me think I was going insane at one point. Then he wanted out because he had met ‘somebody else’; I actually knew her; she was much younger; she was lively; she was confident; she was ME when he first met me.  She left him after a couple of years. Apparently that was my fault, he said. How? The only way I know how is that everything was always my fault when we were together. I was not only his ‘punching bag’ after a bad day at work, but his universal scapegoat as well. And I went along with that because I had been made to think that he was always right and that is what spouses did for their partners.

He actually did me a HUGE favour by breaking up our marriage. Only from the ‘outside’ could I see what had killed the vivacious young woman I used to be and what had reincarnated her into a shadowy wreck.

I do not know if I can ever completely share my whole life with a partner or spouse again. I do have a wonderful ‘boyfriend’ of several years and he truly loves me ‘JUST BECAUSE’. I’m reasonably confident now and one day I will also learn to love my life again.

Breaks-it and a victory toast for the UK?

My brexfast was not very palatable; my toasted Dutch bread topped with Danish butter and washed down with Spanish orange juice stuck in my throat.

My own countrymen had voted against me, my child, my grandchildren and generations beyond. At best, on a personal level, I felt abandoned by my country of birth; at worst, on a global level, currencies were unstable and stocks and shares were crashing, without having yet fully recovered from the global crash of 2008.  Whilst ‘Brexiteers’, (as former UK Liberal MP Lord Ashdown, likes to call them; and he did feel for his country on that dark night) were toasting their victory; others were ‘counting the cost’ – not just financially and not just for the EU, but for the state of the Union that had existed  between England, Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland is an even more complex and fragile issue beyond the remit of this article and that county of the UK was also mostly dismayed by the result) for almost 310 years….England voted ‘leave’… England ‘breaks-it’.

What a breakfast for me and tens of millions of others…… Then I started to ask myself: Why did the government call a referendum whilst the country was still reeling from the ‘shocks’ of recession and why call it on that date this year?  ‘Conspiracy theories’ notwithstanding,  and not wanting to blame the current cabinet solely, as it takes a whole government to make such a decision, not just the Prime Minister or the Members of Parliament of the party ‘in power’, maybe it was simply due to a lack of systems thinking?

The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union is not as simple as it may seem – 52% versus 48% is not the whole story; nothing ever is. In the lands of ‘perfect economic theory‘ and ‘complete information’ maybe so, but who lives there? I don’t live on that planet and, I suspect, neither do you.

Of the estimated 65 million residents (of all ages) and estimated 2.6 million adult UK passport holders not resident in the UK – so a total of, perhaps 67.2 million people - only 17.4 million voters exercised their ‘majority’ opinion for the UK to leave the EU. The total of all those who were permitted to register to vote was about 46.5 million. In so as far as ‘the electorate’ is concerned this works out as approximately: 37% ‘leave’, 34% ‘remain’ and 28% ’abstention’ (i.e. non-voters).  I have written ‘estimated’ in italics because that is exactly what it is; unlike some countries in the EU, the UK government has no registration scheme for either its residents or for its citizens who live outside the UK. The number of resident and non-resident citizens are always a ‘guessing game’ for the UK until a census is appropriated, which is only once every decade and only ‘counts’ those resident in the UK on that specific date.

In the Netherlands, for example, each resident is required to ‘register’ their address with the Local Authority where they live using the ‘tax/social number’ (BSN) they were given at birth or when they first became resident in the Netherlands. Big Brother? In my experience, and that of my friends, who are of many nationalities, absolutely not! It helps to streamline ‘Government systems’ by linking each Government department together via the one number per citizen. In the UK we were given a National Health Service number at birth and a different National Insurance at around the age of 15 or so.  Some can remember and recite their National Insurance number verbatim, as it is needed for work and taxes, but practically no-one know their National Health Service number. A child’s National Health Service number used to be (and may still be) on the documents that any UK parent has when claiming child benefit (which is available to all at the present time). But nobody ever knows their National Health Service number.

Getting a bit closer back to the point: the Netherlands’ Government do not need to spend huge amounts of money every ten years to carry out a census because they already know. The Netherlands’ Government do not need to spend huge amounts of money to ask people to fill out forms and them post back, or go online, to tell the Government if they want to vote because they already know who of which nationality is allowed to vote in which Dutch elections. Dutch citizens just go to their town hall to renew their passports…. It’s so much easier for the citizen and cheaper for the Government. The Dutch system is not perfect, but at least there seems to be some sort of system that ‘attempts to look at the whole’ within the ‘boundary’ of their sovereignty and does not always allow each government department to act independently, flail around in the dark and then blame another department, or an MP, when money is wasted or if everything goes wrong.

Any person who likes to ‘analyse systems within a boundary constraint’ could probably see that the UK EU referendum was heading for a ‘big fall’ even before the first vote was cast. It was a ‘wicked problem’ even before the 23rd of June.

Less than two years beforehand, the Scottish people had applied their referendum rights to say that they wanted to continue the union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Some may be regretting that now and, indeed, Scotland seems to be in the process of mandating a further vote on the very same issue as soon as they can; they are also ‘in talks’ with the Republic of Ireland, who are not only EU but also have the Euro as their currency.

Did Westminster not think to analyse potential ‘systems dynamics’, to see either good or ill, when bringing forth the referendum? Were politicians, and their advisors, unware of strategic options development in the analysis of problematic situations? Or did their own greed for power make them totally blinkered to any scenario that was not good for them personally; and to hell with the country they are supposed to serve?

The first thing I take issue with, as a ‘systems thinker’, is the structure and rules of the ‘referendum voting process’ which I feel was flawed. Surely, a ‘safeguard’ should have been put into place that any decision considered (or enacted) by government had to be from a majority vote? After all, this is what usually happens in the UK House of Commons when MPs are considering and enacting legislature on their country’s behalf. Given the question ‘Should the UK leave the European Union’ 37% ‘Ayes’, 34% ‘Nays’ and 28% ’Abstentions’ would probably have never have got further than the Commons and, if so, would have fallen flat on its face in The Lords, with little debate, because the Commons had been unable to agree. The Queen would not even have known, let alone ‘rubber-stamped it’. Her Majesty, rightly so, tends not to opine on issues of even much less gravity than the EU referendum…. despite what some popular UK tabloids may say.

Without such a safeguard as a ‘majority vote’ written into the referendum rules, just one person could have swung the vote between ‘leave’ and ‘remain’.  On watching the results come in live on TV, I noticed that many of the declaring officers said that some ballot papers had been discounted from the vote because both the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ boxes had been crossed. This may have only counted for a few thousand ballots, but does that not in some way signal the confusion of those who actually turned out to vote? Were the 28% ‘abstainers’ even more confused by what is, after all, an incredibly complex, multi-disciplinary issue that not even one highly-trained expert could analyse solo?  Was the actual question or statement upon which to vote flawed? Psychologists seem to know that if people are asked ‘Do you prefer hot milk?’ most will say ‘yes’; the same people if asked ‘Do you prefer cold milk?’ most will say ‘yes’; But asked ‘Do you prefer hot or cold milk?’ the responses are likely to be ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ in relatively equal measure with a fair dose of ‘I don’t know’ mixed in. ‘I don’t know’ was not an option on the ballot paper. The only way to say ‘I don’t know’ was simply by not voting; thus leaving the on-the-fence citizens completely out of the picture and creating a calamitous two-horse race with a calamitous outcome that would have dissatisfied and disillusioned a great deal of the UK population no matter what the outcome had been.

Although this referendum was only, so-to-speak, ‘an opinion poll’ of the eligible electorate and is not legally binding on the UK government, the government should have taken greater responsibility for any outcome and, ergo, the care of its citizens; no matter in which country they reside or what their vote may have been.  Rats are now deserting the proverbial sinking ships of whatever party they belong to; The buck is being passed faster than a hand-grenade with its pin removed; no MP wants it to go off in their face; no MP of any party wants to even hold the poisoned chalice that is the result of ‘the 2016 UK referendum’ let alone sip from it. Ultimately, Westminster and Whitehall will admonish the proletariat; they believed the rhetoric; they cast the votes.

Social learning is ‘a many splendored thing’; it slowly taught the public about animal welfare, pollution, carbon emissions, organic farming and ‘Fair Trade’. But this time social learning was a big, two-pronged failure:

First, the tabloids, prominent speakers, MPs  et al had their influence on ‘the eligible electorate’ . It was as subtle as using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut and pretty much everybody could see it. But did the UK Government, and its advisors, think systemically about more understated forms of social learning that could have influenced an individual’s vote?

2016 was the year of not only Wimbledon and Le Tour de France, but also of Euro 2016 football, 2016 Olympics and Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday. 2016 could be seen as the most influential year, in many decades, to ‘national pride’ in the UK. So why not hold the referendum in spring 2017? Maybe government preferred to hold a vote shortly before the summer recess so that MPs could thence pretend to have ‘private discussions’ with other parties, whilst in reality making a hasty retreat to their holiday homes in the EU or in British overseas territory tax havens; no thought to the police force who cannot sip fizz and bask in the sun, even if they could afford to, because all merry hell seems to be about to break loose on the streets of Blighty.

Second, the repetitive use of a ‘phrase’ or ‘mantra’ can sway any person’s opinion. Systems Thinkers try to ensure that they are aware of their own innate biases before embarking on a project; every breathing entity on our earth has them in one way or another. It is, frankly, the way any individual species manages to survive. But bias is not always innate and is often learnt. The UK media picked up the latest portmanteau buzz-word called ‘Brexit’. Even good old ‘Auntie Beeb’ bandied it about with merry abandon both verbally and in written captions. For a supposedly neutral public service provider this could have been seen as reckless….. considering that it obviously contained the word ‘EXIT’.

The ‘wicked problem’ of a referendum now seems to have turned into  the reality of ‘an almighty mess’. Could this have been, at least in part, avoided if systemic thinking had been brought into play before ‘referendum day’? I shall not be toasting the result myself, because for either outcome the whole scheme lacked thought and planning from outset to, what might be a very final, bitter, conclusion. Maybe I’ll have either hot or cold milk tomorrow for breakfast, instead of toast…..

aDid D

I’ll leave the final comment to Streetband, who probably never gave a fig about Systems Thinking, don’t care what ‘colour’ or ‘nationality’ their bread is, and may have thought that referenda were stupid……