Life After Leaving

The Remains of Spousal Abuse

Sophie Tamas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781611320619
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315425399
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

After leaving her twelve-year marriage, Sophie Tamas went to the local women's shelter to ask if she had been abused. The result is Life after Leaving, a performative, arts-based journey into the aftermath of spousal abuse and the endless struggle to make sense of loss. We see Sophie's world—the academic lectures, the therapy sessions, the childrearing, the dealings with an ex-spouse, the house reconstruction—as she looks for answers in the literature and in the lives of other women. Both lyrical and theoretical, autoethnographic and analytical, her captivating story builds to a chorus of voices, as her study participants express the loving, longing, pain, hope, and frustration of their experiences after leaving abusive relationships. The text closes with insightful and surprising suggestions for reframing "recovery". An earlier version of this manuscript was short-listed for the AERA Arts-Based Dissertation Award and won the 2011 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology. Sponsored by the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta.

Act II
Asking Books

Scene One: Trauma

A hot pool rcpots, at the local community center. Sophie is sitting on the edge in a black lap suit. The rest of the cast rolls and lolls in the chlorine froth like poached fish.

Sophie: Why didn’t I DO anything about it sooner? Why didn’t I LEAVE?

Kearney: You’re committed. You want to save him, it’s under control, it’s not that bad, or it’s at least partially your fault. Maybe it’s tradition or religion. You can’t see any options. You rationalize it.¹

Metasophie: (adjusting her bikini) You’re a dependent idiot.

Krystal: Surrender to what seems to be inevitable, inescapable, immediate danger, initiates an affective process of paralysis of initiative, followed by varying degrees of immobilization leading to automatic obedience.²

Metasophie: (piling her curly brown hair in a loose bun on top of her head) Isn’t that convenient.

Swift: That’s a prejudicial question, Sophie. Your choices are not the problem here.³

Sophie: But why am I still such a basket-case?

Metasophie sighs, slides down to rest her skull on the pool edge, closes her eyes and lets her body float.

Herman: Ordinary, healthy people can become entrapped in prolonged abusive situations, but after your escape you are no longer ordinary or healthy.⁴

Caruth: It’s trauma, dear. A memory you cannot integrate into your experience, or a catastrophic knowledge you can’t communicate to others.⁵

Metasophie: (without opening her eyes) We’re a basket case because…because—

Ubersophie: (standing by the pool edge, overheated and barefoot, with her pants rolled up, speaking to Metasophie) You don’t know, so just shut up and let us think.

van der Kolk: You experience current stress as a return of the trauma.

van der Hart: Yes. Your ‘alarm bell’ is over-sensitive.⁶

Krystal: (while examining an air bubble in his baggy trunks) It causes cognitive constriction, episodic ‘freezing,’ inability to act assertively or aggressively, passivity or blundering, ‘surrender’ patterns when under stress, dread or avoidance of memories, numbing, hypervigilance, and the inability to feel joy or articulate emotions.⁷ (Smiles at Sophie and shrugs, spreading his hands.) You’re perfectly normal.

Ubersophie: Didn’t I say?

Tutty: Also anxiety, nightmares, sleep and eating disorders.⁸

Herman: (almost totally submerged, slowly bobbing in front of a jet) Disconnection, alienation, shame, doubt, guilt, feelings of inferiority, oscillating intolerance to and outbursts of anger, self-isolation and clinging to others, suicidality, and depression.

Sophie: Great. (to Ubersophie) I can’t feel it. Is it true?

Ubersophie: We’re perfectly normal.

Metasophie: (without opening her eyes) Pathetic.

Herman: Protracted depression. Your identity is “contaminated with shame, self-loathing, and failure.”⁹

Krystal: And despair, which, they’ve proven, can cause all sorts of physical ailments. Only a vestige of the self-observ-ing ego is preserved.¹⁰

Sophie: That makes me sound so broken.

Erikson: You’ve lost the illusions of safety that make life seem manageable.

Ubersophie: Life is manageable. It has to be.

Erikson: The laws of the natural world and human decency have been revealed as false. You lose faith in the good will of others, in reason and logic, and often, in God. The real problem is that, over time, inhumanity starts to seem normal.¹¹

Metasophie: Look around. Inhumanity is normal.

Kelly: Trauma also delays psychological maturation and memory integration.¹² So you’re a little delayed.

Metasophie laughs.

Kelly:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Act I – The Story Begins
• Act II – Asking Books
• Act III – Asking Others
• Act IV – Findings
• Act V – The Story Ends
• Notes
• Cast
• Index
• About the Author