3. Men have logic-based brains. Men can’t always meet angry, hurt women in that subjective, poetic emotional floaty realm of intense emotionality. It’s just not how the male brain l, in general terms, is wired. Men can feel basic emotions like shame, regret, and other firms of “whoops I fucked up.” But it’s not going to be achieved by swirling around in emotional sludge for six straight hours (the amount of time they were texting). To ask this of a man is to ask the impossible - and to suffer.
4. She keeps going to an immature. guilt-trippy place: “I’ll just die then. You’d love that.” It’s overly dramatic and can’t possibly lead anywhere good. When he says “I want to hear you, you aren’t a burden, let’s figure this out, etc” she says “I don’t believe you.” Where is there left to go from there? If she could have just stated facts: “I feel traumatized by these sex encounter A B and C, I think he would have heard her. Because he was not ghosting her at this point. In fact, he was indulging her, texting on and on for pages. While with his kids, even. He even asked for a “cool-down period” (reasonable) and she would not agree to it.
5. This is a master-class in co-dependency. “ I hate you, don’t leave me.” Spinning around and around after it’s clear that the relationship is toxic and that every day you remain in it is detrimental to your mental health. I understand that Effie was in real distress. I get it. I’ve been there. But when you look to your perpetrator to also be your healer and source of comfort, you ARE going to suffer. A person that could hurt you so badly, that you feel permanently fucked up now, is not going to possess the skills to navigate that trauma with you. People with those emotional skills don’t inflict trauma on others in the first place. She needed to go “no contact” with him at a certain point, and instead seek other sources of support that were not him.
The co-dependent cannot let go though, even though the clinging causes as much suffering and feelings of powerlessness, as the original offending incident. Clinging to a married man with children, who you have determined has raped you physically, and has invalidated your integrity, is your personal mistake. It’s a rough lesson to learn. But part of growing up is taking accountability for all the ways we abandon ourselves. For acknowledging when make bad choices that end up not serving us.
Taking accountability for the part you play is not victim-blaming. It is EMPOWERING. It is part of what we call “adulting.” The child blames others exclusively. The adult has the integrity to say “I made some really bad choices - some really bad judgement calls. I did not listen to my inner voice which was screaming at me to walk away. I will take these lessons to heart, listen to that still small voice in the future, and never put myself in that position again.”
Trauma accumulates exponentially as long as we are maintaining a helpless victim stance. Effie must take actions to reclaim her power. Maddeningly,, she has a fewer options to reclaim her essential worth and integrity now than she had before she went public. She should continue intensive therapy to trace, face and erase the root causes that led to her maintaining a destructive four-year relationship with a married man and father. She needs to learn the why’s and the hows of how she came to find herself in such a terrible situation.
She could have asked Arnie to pay for her therapeutic costs at one time. I am sure that option is off the table though now that he is uninsurable for work and will be heading off on his own rehabilitation journey. She could still get the authorities involved. The fact that she has not, even now, seems to indicate that Effie would rather garner attention, throw tantrums, and maintain her victim stance, than to seek true justice and move forward.