Chapter 19: The Red, White and Dirty

Our summer is at its peak – heat, flowers, mosquitoes.  Madeleine has found her place atFort Frontenac where she is teaching Iroquois to the soldiers and French to the Hurons.  She is building her relationship with Robert.

But her complacency is shattered when one of her soldier-students, a bully by the name of Thomas, violates her.His motive: power and control, and revenge because he perceives that she has ridiculed him. Her reaction: humiliation and anguish, because her childhood trauma is revisited.Last week we have been talking about identity as an important part of human development.  I believe that weak or incomplete identity formation is at the root of our interpersonal problems.  And if I expand that idea, these same problems between individuals do extend to whole societies.Look at Thomas Bower, the man who molested Madeleine.  Look at the women who worked with Mat-tee and Francois in the kitchens.  Weren’t they all racists?  Did they not tend to view people, not as whole human beings, but as objects to be targets for their scorn or anger?People lacking an identity see others as objects – objects to oppress, to smoother, to be gratified by.  People with poor identity are motivated to be disrespectful,  abusive and intolerant.  To them, the Amerindian is just a red skin, a lesser being on the planet, not a whole human being in his own right.  This motivation stems from the fact that they themselves are not whole people, but fragmented and broken beings.  Author’s Tidbit As a therapist, courts mandate me to treat perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence.  I have observed this reality: that abuse comes from the actions and attitudes of people who have a poor sense of who they are. Generally abusers have limited self-respect. They view the people in the world as lesser than themselves, objects for their use and pleasure.  They project their own negative traits onto these victims.  Because of this psychological practice of projection, the abuser places all his “bad” parts onto the victim. In turn the abuser perceives that the victim deserves the abuse.