The echo chamber got me.
I am a survivor of child abuse and an advocate for victims of domestic violence; the related social spheres are the ones I frequent online. All I had seen for weeks was joy over Harris/Walz and hope that America would cut ties with Donald Trump for good. It seemed we were all onto the ex-president-turned-convict; no one who cared about abuse victims would ever support him again. Right?
I was wrong.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but I quickly realized I knew a nonzero number of survivors who had. I saw their reactions as their heretofore safest community hurled rocks, prophesied fire and brimstone as the only possible outcome they could expect after what they had done.
Stephanie Gail Eagleson
Admittedly, I also couldn’t see at first how their choice could be rationalized. Despite understanding abusive power dynamics as well as anyone, these people had voted for an unrepentant felon credibly accused of rape. How?
But writing them off felt wrong on many levels — not least because I myself have a history of upholding a tyrannical regime.
The first election I voted in was 2008. My father shuttled me and two siblings down to the rural polling place in our old GMC Suburban. Our marching orders: straight red ticket. This was how my father would vote, and as subjects of his household, we were commanded to do the same.
You see, my father declared everything his children owned — our money, our personal property, our privacy, our major and minor decisions — belonged to him. And if we crossed him? I saw what happened to my siblings when they tried. Two were kicked out of the house; one ended up on the streets. They weren’t even legal adults.
So my reasoning was simple: Do what he wants. I had no means of escape, nowhere else to go, no other power or authority coming to save me. It’s not hard for me to hypothesize how others might find themselves in similar straits.
Listening to understand
Still, I didn’t want to make broad assumptions about the demographic I serve. I asked around to see if any fellow survivors would be willing to privately share their reasons for supporting Trump, promising zero judgment. A few brave souls answered; with their permission, I have anonymized their responses into a composite of reasons they gave:
- A pragmatism that disregards figureheads to focus on policies in hopes of getting serious personal needs addressed — like the struggle to feed one’s family and put gas in the tank. Basic survival is the goal.
- Similarly, a desire to uphold various political agendas integral to the voter’s social values, regardless of who champions them. Belonging in a safe community is the goal.
- A sense of being trapped between two evils and trying to choose the lesser one, sometimes only to doubt that choice later. Bewilderment and perceived futility are at the fore.
- A profound distrust of the establishment heightened by Trump’s show of strength, especially after facing multiple assassination attempts. A hope for a champion is at the fore.
I found I could relate deeply to each of these motivations. In fact, I see the majority of the survivor sphere reaching for the same things, one way or another.
On the other hand …
In the aftermath of the election, the word from fellow advocates ranged from silent grief and dumbfounded pain to aggressive vitriol. Some went so far as to target the people they’ve committed to helping, either lumping red-voting victims in with the monolith they characterize as idiotic and morally bankrupt or calling out the survivor quadrant specifically as traitors to our cause.
“We become the exact thing she needs most to get free from: another person controlling her life.”
“Haven’t you learned anything? Why would you go back? You’re throwing away everything we’ve worked so hard to build!”
Too many of us are familiar with these accusations, ones habitually leveled at battered women around the globe — sentiments that advocates, of all people, should know better than to volley. I even saw someone drop the term “Stockholm Syndrome,” a controversial pathologizing of behavior. While some say aligning with one’s abuser indicates unhealthy, brainwashed enmeshment, others decry this as victim blaming, an unjust interpretation of a survivor cannily protecting herself.
In my advocacy training, I was taught a survivor carries the most accurate and most important perspective on the threat she faces. No one else has to bear the brunt of backlash the way she will; no one else so well understands what is required to endure through the abuse levied at her. Survivor-led support is the baseline standard for this reason.
We are to take our cues from the victim, offering what options and insight we can but never telling her what to do. If she chooses something we never would — even something we are sure will go badly for her — we must stand back, let her decide freely and remain ready to offer assistance in whatever the aftermath is.
If we don’t, we become the exact thing she needs most to get free from: another person controlling her life. The goodness of our intentions doesn’t matter a hoot. After all, claiming we only want the best for her is a page straight out of the abuser’s playbook.
My job is to give the survivor a relational space she can differ and disagree in with zero repercussions. Until she experiences complete autonomy without punishment, she will struggle to conceive of a world where she does not have to orient her actions around either mollifying or supplicating a dictator — literally, from the Latin roots, someone telling her what to do. Otherwise, she must proceed as she always has: by throwing herself at the feet of the one who holds her chains.
This is why I cannot fault survivors who cast their votes for Donald Trump. Even if it was possible for me to vote for Obama in 2008 and get away with lying to my father about it, my survival instinct would not let me take the risk. I could not jeopardize my fundamental well-being over resistance to tyranny — resistance that wouldn’t help me in any practical way, either at home or nationally.
“To some degree the conflict hinges on people under duress just trying to save themselves the only way they see how.”
We may want to make this an argument about truth, character, good sense, right and wrong, but to some degree the conflict hinges on people under duress just trying to save themselves the only way they see how. Too many advocates have shot our cause in the foot these past two weeks by denigrating survivors who voted in a bid for help — the very thing we say we’ll provide.
We cannot mend desperate hearts or preserve democracy this way. Instead, we must validate and address survivors’ ongoing unmet needs, the ones they would entrust to a would-be tyrant, perceiving no better option. When he would condemn them for looking elsewhere for succor, we must not. If we wish to keep Trump-likes out of the White House, we must cultivate a greater immunity to coercion within our populace, and it must begin with our refusal to resort to it.
Dependency on power, on the whim and will of an overseer, can be both a harsh external reality and an imprisoning mental state. Our task is to undo both by providing a different way so that all can be fully free.
Let’s get to work.
Stephanie Gail Eagleson is a survivor of child abuse and certified advocate for victims of domestic violence with Give Her Wings. She also is a freelance editor and book coach specializing in novels and nonfiction on trauma, abuse and religious deconstruction. Find her at EaglesonEditing.com and on Substack at A Genuine Article. She is currently writing her memoir.
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