prosody context(e's List: Unsayable, Unspeak, Shh h hhh h,

• Alexander’s case speaks to a larger issue that requires careful consideration. The law’s failure to grapple with the cumulative impact of domestic violence on a survivor’s sense of fear and notion of threat is one such issue. In examining only a single moment, the law fails again and again to navigate the world of a domestic violence survivor. In that sense, Alexander’s individual case is symptomatic of a larger cultural issue: our flourishing economy of violence that is sustained by emotional terrorism—its primary weapons being silence, blame and shame.
• speaks to a larger issue that requires careful consideration. The law’s failure to grapple with the cumulative impact of domestic violence on a survivor’s sense of fear and notion of threat is one such issue. In examining only a single moment, the law fails again and again to navigate the world of a domestic violence survivor. In that sense, Alexander’s individual case is symptomatic of a larger cultural issue: our flourishing economy of violence that is sustained by emotional terrorism—its primary weapons being silence, blame and shame.
• Gray’s statement supports the statistical evidence that domestic violence is rarely a one-time thing and that violence almost always escalates.
• We almost always ask the victim, why didn’t you just leave? Our economy of violence has an emotional currency: a specific and deadly structure of weapons routinely aimed at women revolving around the tropes of responsibility, silence, judgment, blame and shame.
• Again, as women are so often held responsible for the domestic violence they suffer, they are also often charged with resolving that violent situation. If they don’t, they are blamed. If they survive the violence, they are judged. If they find a way to continue, their trauma is dismissed, negated or trivialized. We routinely excuse and exclude men from being active participants in the domestic violence resolution process. These are the politics of emotionality that shape our intimate relationship with violence.
• deadly force

• What qualifies a judge to measure actions taken from a space of trauma? The judge’s remarks reflect the consistent failure to recognize a crucial element within an economy of violence: the cumulative impact of escalating domestic violence on the abused and the legacy of multiple traumas.

  The law ignores such histories, and instead, chooses to spotlight single moments.
• In a 1991 survey of 223 appellate cases of homicide convictions of battered women in California, Holly Maguigan found that judges implement their bias through the exclusion of battered woman’s evidence, denial of self-defense instructions, and/or the repudiation of instructions to the jury on the relevance of that evidence. Their decisions to disregard the failure of law enforcement as well as issues of duress, violence or threat virtually guarantee conviction of battered women defendants. That’s what happened in Alexander’s case in Florida—the judge failed to properly instruct the jury regarding what is needed in self-defense cases.
• calls to revise stand-your-ground laws, including serial action by the “Dream Defenders.” Each action must be actively supported.
• bigger questions about our economy of violence and the ways it is protected, sanctioned and sustained by the law—and our politics of emotionality—that need to be addressed. We say in cases like Alexander’s that evidence alone is what counts, with no space for emotion. But the facts around domestic violence are supported by myriad studies. Those facts consistently reflect that violence is rarely a single act, it escalates, and too often it ends in homicide. Despite that evidence, that set of established facts, a woman’s accusation of feeling threatened, and in fear of losing her life when she chooses to defend her body from a man with a history of domestic violence, is routinely ignored or dismissed. The question of race combined with gender means black women are especially susceptible to being dismissed and denied justice in courtrooms that become a cauldron of discriminatory practice and where humanity becomes some elusive thing, somehow not applicable to black women.
• She is a woman, a mother, a human being. Her case has made national headlines. She has become the face of our flourishing economy of violence. On March 31, 2014, a new trial for Alexander is scheduled to begin. Marissa Alexander could become every woman who has ever faced escalating threat and violence at the hands of her partner and chose to take action in defense of her body and her life. She can be the face of an economy of violence in revolt, shutting down, standing up. Marissa Alexander could be the face of something radical and revolutionary—a legal system looking at a black woman whose actions were backed by a body of evidence and seeing her emotionality and humanity.

9 more annotations...

• help shift public attitudes to mental health’
• ‘Too often, too much is left unsaid when it comes to mental health’

• Several factors have been proposed to explain the gradual demise of psychoanalysis and depth therapy, including the prolonged treatment time inherent in the process, monetary considerations, the time constraints of managed care, and the increased medicalization of psychology. However, I believe that this demise is closely related to an implicit cultural movement to squelch serious inquiry into family dynamics and interpersonal relationships, particularly the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children. Clearly, this is a dangerous trend for society. How can we hope to develop a better quality of family life if we do not honestly scrutinize the dynamics of present-day family interactions? We must effectively account for the high rate of adolescent suicide, violence in our schools, the widespread use of drugs and the many other symptoms of emotional disturbance in our young people.
• The bulwarks of society, initially outraged by these new developments, gradually homogenized and integrated some of the ideology. This partial ingestion was more effective at undermining the progressive movement than a direct confrontation. At that time, everyone spoke in psychological terms, the jargon of self-help and self-actualization ran rampant, and people mouthed the platitudes of the freedom movement until they became banal.

• how noticeable
   do the silent need to be
   before they’re silent

•  

  Obtaining Evidence

     

       

   

     

  Taking Care of Evidence

       

   

     

  Showing Evidence

       

   

     

  Watching Out for Yourself

       

   

     

  Inspiration

• To find your voice — to speak up as your true self – cuts against these dictates.

• When you speak up, you make yourself vulnerable.

   

  And we’re not a culture that likes to “do” vulnerability. We are a culture of self-help, positive-thinking, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, slap-on-a-smile-and-get-on with-it individualists. (The fact that this isn’t working out so well for us – given how stressed out, addicted, depressed and debt-ridden we are as a people – would seem to be beside the point.)

   

  We’re also a culture that mistakes vulnerability for weakness. But the definition of vulnerability is to open yourself up to the possibility of wounding; it’s about exposing your heart, not having a weak heart.

   

  Vulnerability, then, is a high-risk endeavor. We don’t look on risk-takers as weak. We applaud them.

• Courage, as Brene Brown points out

   

  “is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’ Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences — good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as ‘ordinary courage.’”
  

1 more annotation...

• DXing means listening to far-away   — usually foreign — radio stations.

• That old sense of a tragedy going on
   Uncomprehended, at the very edge
   Of the usual, it never left me once….

  (“Known World,” Electric Light)

• Several thoughts shake out from this list. One, Snapchat fills a niche between nothing and texting. It's a test balloon for relationship development. Two, the point is to not necessarily to be spontaneous, but to appear that way. 

• To utter even one word may cause a person to smash your World.

   

   A small and fragile state.

   

   
  

   

   My Mind is a sensitive kind.

   

   
  

   

   Never telling in full report,

   

   the details of what haunts my Port.

   

   
  

   

   Each and every word,

   

   pours upon my wounds; It hurts.

   

   
  

   

   I feel left inside a Storm.

   

   Thrown the occasional Sail; It's torn.

   

   
  

   

   One day I will sew my mend,

   

   and understand that I can,

   

   start again.

   

   
  

   

   With my eyes I will shout my lore.

   

   I cannot find, but cease my more.

   

   
  

   

   Healing me,

   

   while staying safe,

   

   from those Nightmares that you state.
• Posted 15th August 2012 by Karen A. Placek     

          

    Labels: Abuse An Independent Mind Blame Child C-PTSD Christianity Cruelty Daughter of a Malignant Narcissist Dissociation Flashbacks Healing Knot Logic Neglect PTSD Religion Sadism Scapegoat