Loy Young

See no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil

Most victims I came across were innocent believers in goodness. No matter what the circumstances or situations, they never heard or saw any evil. Because of their own naiveté they hung on the lips of brilliant and colorful villains, taking their every word as gospel while steadfastly ignoring any behavior that belied those eloquent phrases.

Over and over I saw victims who were naive to the point of endangering themselves by sharing with their worst fiends their innermost secrets and their best friends’ as well. Victims give their enemies all the ammunition they need to abuse them later.

It was incomprehensible to me that victims would detect good intentions in anything that happened to them. I had one client in Port Liberte, New Jersey, who considered her husband as a gentle, loving soul even when he regularly plundered her bank account down to the last cent.

Jean believed that her husband took the money for his aging mother, to support the boy scouts, or to help someone whom he had just met but needed the money more than they did. She could find a thousand reasons for what went wrong, and she never once blamed her husband. As a matter of fact, Jean seemed to relish in telling the stories of her kitty being emptied, of defaulting on her mortgage that month and of barely being able to put food on the table. Normally a rather placid and dull person, at such times Jean wallowed in misery, tearfully wailing with a fervor that would have done credit to the best of actresses.

She proved her worth by surviving in the face of such adversity. She found her own goodness in this triumph and in her ability to forgive her husband. I think all the Jeans of the world unconsciously set the stage for themselves to play believable victims. Once the curtain comes down on one deluge, the next and more severe catastrophe is already in the making, allowing for another performance with ever more intense feelings.

Jean is a classic case of a woman who has an image in her mind of the man she wanted to marry. When she met Harold, she simply projected her fantasy on Harold and throughout her marriage never knew her husband. Feelings not facts were the basis of their relationship. When the real-life Harold threatened to deviate from Jean’s figment of imagination, she explained the discrepancy away until, in her mind at least, her husband had again become the man she wanted him to be. Behind her back, Harold squandered her money on his drug addiction. Jean of course denied the fact, even when he was caught. Surely the police had apprehended the wrong man. Abundant quantities of crystal meth the officers had found in his car must have belonged to someone else, probably a poor person her husband had given a ride.

As victims can feel the potential goodness inside the villains, they almost always ignore the obvious misdeeds that everyone else sees. The victim’s sentiments trust that in the end, no matter how long it takes, goodness will triumph. And while the game of Goodness Triumphs Over Evil continues our emotional education, one day or one lifetime, the victim will eventually help a hero triumph over an abuser.