Validate. Regulate. Celebrate!

A month on from the European Conference on Domestic Violence (ECDV) and I remain reflective about where we find ourselves in efforts to respond to men’s violence towards women.  I wrote THIS after the event, suggesting that we need a “Joy Quota”, in which at least 30% of presentations focus on how we make women’s lives better.

Research and practice in this arena involves elucidating the horror of men’s violence.  But is it possible to make that joyful?  For domestic abuse services, desperately hoping the Government’s VAWG strategy will come before they have to issue redundancy notices; where is the joy?  In education, literature, research and elsewhere, as we wake people up to the horror of men’s violence, how do we make space for joy?

In work on Interpersonal Violence, Professor Sherry Hamby (her new book can be pre-ordered HERE) identifies two successional  revolutions that have transformed our understanding. The first revolution, in the mid to late 20th Century, was Naming The Problem: “domestic violence”, “sexual harrassment”, “child abuse”, “bullying”, “gang violence”, “institutional and state violence”.  Then at the turn of the century, the second revolution was The Impact Of The Problem, or how trauma has a “dosage” impact.  The more types of harm, the more difficulties someone will face.

Sherry insists that we are in the midst of a third revolution; taking the “dosage” aspect of trauma and applying it to strength and resilience.  The Resilience Portfolio insists that research should explore which strengths have the greatest potential to build resilience.  Instead of simply saying how badly people are affected, what if we knew which resources would help them heal and move forward?

These are revolutions are not past epochs, they are the processes each of us must go through individually and collectively to understand and respond to men’s violence.  I propose we call them:

Validate. Regulate. Celebrate!

Validate

We must start by validating what has been done to someone (or to ourselves).  It was brutal, horrific and traumatising.  The abuser changed the course of our life for the worse; causing us pain, brokeness and loss. (This is where most of the work gets stuck.  ECDV was full of papers describing the problem and elucidating the horror; counting, dissecting and analysing the problem.)

Regulate

Our bodies are awesome and have in-built protection systems. The Five Fs of fight, flight, freeze, flop and friend reflexively act to protect us. We have capacities to dissociate or become hypervigilant, with sense-making skills to give our pain meaning. Yet, as our body protects us, we become “dysregulated”. The trauma revolution enabled us to learn that recovery requires that our body to feel safe and our system must regulate. This can take place through things like: deep breathing, nature, trauma therapies, mindfulness, community, healthy relationships, exercise, sleep, art, music, and safe touch.

Celebrate

This is where JOY comes in. We need to find ways to celebrate women’s strengths and capacity. Alongside this, we need to find ways to celebrate our work and the difference we are making. We need to sing, dance and make merry; not because the work is done, but because this is part of the work.

These three aspects of validate, regulate, celebrate are core parts of the Own My Life method.  We validate women’s pain and what he has done to her.  We give her the trauma literacy to work out how best to regulate her body.  And we consistently celebrate her and the sisterhood of women she is journeying with.

But what does validate, regulate, celebrate practically look like for those who don’t have access to Own My Life?  Here’s a brief snapshot of what it might mean:

For an individual woman: Sarah accepts that her ex, Mark, was abusive, she sits with the full weight of the pain he caused her. She takes more walks in the local nature reserve, begins journalling, and prioritises time with friends who support her. She notices the tiny things each day to be grateful for; sunshine, autumn leaves, fresh bedding. Sarah sees how strong she has been to make it through.

For friends and family of a woman: Sarah’s friends take time to read and learn about how abusers operate. They place responsibilty on Mark  and reflect on how, in the past, they may have colluded with him. One of them joins a community choir with Sarah, another invites her on dog walks in the local nature reserve. Each looks for opportunities to celebrate with Sarah; when she blocked Mark on all devices, when she begins to choose clothes she likes (not what Mark told her to wear), on the hard days just getting dressed and leaving the house is something to celebrate.

For the domestic abuse service: Each staff member is trained to understand abuse; to recognise the full range of perpetrator behaviour and the impact he has on his partner and children. Each worker understands the power of small acts to help regulate; a support work session that takes place while walking round the park, taking some deep calming breaths together, during the hard days having a workplace dance-it-off for ten minutes.  There’s also space for celebrating. Cheering for the woman and her babies who gets housed, honouring the small (and big!) acts of resistance women have taken, laughing loud and long together. 

It feels like much of this work is stuck in process one: validate.  If we get stuck there, we can only see her brokeness and the harm he’s caused.  We can’t see how she resists, how she powers through, how she tries so hard to get through the day.  Because we’re solely focussed on validating how bad it is. 

We need to simultaneously work to regulate and celebrate her too.  And the thing about celebration is that it requires us to focus on strengths; an individual woman’s strengths, our organisation’s strengths, friends and family members’ strengths.  Through this lens, we don’t see women as one-dimensionally broken. Instead we can simultaneously validate the awfulness, whilst also providing strategies for regulation and being constantly mindful about how we can celebrate each woman for her strengths.  Because every woman is already brilliant and badass and it’s our job to help her (and us!) to celebrate that.

✨If you'd like to learn for yourself how to integrate these three crucial aspects of supporting women into your work, why not book into one of our monthly online training events (details HERE). ✨

With thanks to Lyndsey Vaughton for helping me to arrive at validate, regulate, celebrate!