Whiplash Through the Eyes of the Abused: Love, Hate, Trust, and Escape

I’d like to say something along the lines of, abuse – the nature of abuse, the experience of abuse, the trauma of abuse, etc. – has been on my mind a lot lately, but the truth is I never exactly stopped thinking about it.

I suffered from emotional abuse for the better part of two years. It began the same way I hear many people describe it: it seems like love at first. Someone who seems to know you at your core. Someone who promises to help you be the best version of yourself, to paraphrase a line from yet another of the great movies about abuse, Lady Bird.

It just doesn’t take too long for I can help you be your best self to become you’re no good as you are, you’re worthless, and you’re lucky to have even me.

I was talking recently with a friend of mine about the nature of abuse and abusers, and out of this conversation came an insight about abuse that I had never considered before – abusers are, in fact, highly empathetic people. It’s this empathy that allows them to see our buttons, see what will make us tick, what will hurt the most – that is, the things that allow them to sink their claws into us even further, that make us even more desperate for their attention as they continually up the pressure, the hate, the aggression.

The funky part of it is, they make us believe that we should be privileged to take their vitriol.

In Whiplash, this takes the form of our main character, Andrew (Miles Teller) and his awe of Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), who seems to suck the air out of every room he walks into. Fletcher is a presence. Yet, for every moment of screaming, of outright violence, of homophobic and diminutive insults being thrown at his students, there are scenes of Fletcher giving “well-meaning” advice in the hallway, saying, oh, don’t worry about the other guys, don’t worry about not having music in your history, don’t worry about this or that or the other thing.

Which is followed up by a chair being flung at Andrew’s head after messing up on a few technicalities, while on the drum set for his first time. Fletcher may say just do your best. And yet, the result of this is a violent reaction at the slightest imperfection or disagreement. Fletcher repeats over and over again, “not quite my tempo,” going over the same section, and alternating between  “rushing” and “dragging” and “rushing” over and over again. Later, when Fletcher’s decided he needs to make Andrew squirm a bit, he brings in another drummer from Andrew’s first band and lavishes the same praise on him that he used to give to Andrew. The honeymoon period never lasts.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. You cannot placate an abuser. The fact that Fletcher flips so quickly from “understanding teacher” to “violent aggressor” is an experience that every abused person shares. I remember being told that I didn’t deserve the good things that happened to me, that I deserved the bad things, that me and the people close to me deserved to die. I remember my abuser telling me, hey, I’m just here for you, I just want to help, to then turn around and use the trust I invested in them in order to “get back” at me. The moments  I dared try to walk away, or say that I deserved better than the way I was treated, they would scream at me, harass me, go after my friends and family to get to me. I remember trying to leave the room when an argument got heated, in order to give it time to cool down, only to have her first blocking the exit to her room with her body in order to trap me in there, followed by her chasing me down the street and yelling. I used to  It got to the point that their memory still hangs like a specter over me, my family, my current partner, and so on. Nor was their abuse limited to me. They came after me, yes, but they also came after my family, they also came after my friends, they insulted and harassed and attacked my new partner.

And always behind my abuser? A long, long line of enablers. In the same way that people cleared the path every time Fletcher entered the room, the same way that people explained away Fletcher’s behavior as “strict” or suggested that he just had an intense teaching style, my abuser had a line of friends that assisted her in harassing my current partner. She had people reach out to me and criticize my decision to cut my abuser out of my life. She tried to make it seem like I was the one that was guilty at the end.

A similar flavor of abuse came into my life recently, too. In this particular situation, I found someone attempting to gaslight me, as a result of her losing control over her target. Someone who tried to manipulate my past against me, use my trust issues against me, and get me to turn against people close to me because that was the only way I think they saw forward in reasserting control. Their target was someone I love dearly, and that’s exactly, I think, why they chose to try and chip me off: she knew it would do damage to her target.

I view myself as carrying away one power of sorts from my abuse trauma, and that is the ability to see abuse more clearly when it happens elsewhere in the world. It was this ability – plus the fact that this person blatantly lied in very easily disproven ways – that allowed me to see through this façade. But the amount of people who still buy into her façade remains somewhat of a surprise.

And can I truly blame those who are trying to placate an abusive person until they can extricate themselves? I was one of those people for a long while. I thought, let me just give my abuser a fifteenth, a thirtieth, a one-hundreth chance! They’re a good person deep down!

But I think a big part of the process of getting out of abuse is realizing that abusers don’t have to be evil, horrible, terrible people at their very core.

Abusers feel. Abusers are human. In my case, I truly believe that my abuser loved me and thought they were doing what was best, at least for a little while. I do believe that many factors contributed to who they became, and that they could improve with time and care. Lady Bird shows another instance of this, where Lady Bird’s mother does have a genuine affection for her daughter.

The thing that it took a while for me to realize is that love doesn’t justify abuse. There should be red lines. I don’t deserve to take hate and emotional/psychological abuse from anyone, no matter what the circumstances.

Just because Fletcher cried when he learned a student of his that he abused committed suicide doesn’t mean he wasn’t a factor in causing it.

Just because my abuser told me she loved me and wrote me page-long letters doesn’t mean she didn’t come after me, harass me, isolate me from those closest to me.

Just because someone’s been a friend for years and has been with you through the worst doesn’t mean that they won’t go after you when they get bored.

Fletcher yells “faster.” My abuser yelled, “more,” or “why don’t you care?” or “why are you so attached to x, y, or z?”

Everything is never good enough to an abuser, or a narcissist, or whatever you want to call them. They want to make you think it would be different if you had just done one thing differently, but that’s never true. Andrew got into a damn car accident and went to the performance anyway and it wasn’t enough.

But the truth is, you’ll always fall out of favor. Andrew was never going to last. My abuser was never going to all of a sudden stop calling me names, telling me I was weak, telling me I was worthless, telling me that I was dumb and didn’t deserve to be at my graduate school in the first place. She could apologize for every single time she blocked the door, called me until I answered when I said I needed space, demanded this or that or the other thing from me. But the next time she got mad, she would tell me those apologies were nothing, were useless, and would repeat the same stuff all over again.

“Why would you let him get away with what he did to you???” asks Andrew’s father, incredulous over his son’s protestations that anything happened at all through the abusive cycle. I heard many of the same questions over my abuser, and how I let her control me for so long, how I kept apologizing for her and telling everyone that no, she’s just misunderstood.

What I’ve come to realize is that no matter how much I believe that she’s capable of becoming a better person, her actions toward me were not misunderstood.

I neglected the warnings of my friends and my family. I saw what they saw, sure, but I kept rationalizing it, explaining it away. Andrew’s father may say “he’s out of your life,” but that’s not entirely true of abuse. My abuser is out of my life by now, but as I mentioned earlier, she still hovers. I’m sure she’s still out there, looking through my social media, scouring my info. Hell, I’m sure she’s probably going to read this and probably respond to it somehow. But I’m done being afraid of her. I’m done living my life like she’s watching and is going to try to harm me again somehow.

Despite all that, it’s a process that’s taken me months and months of hard work to get to this point.

Fletcher absolutely believes that what he was doing was for the good of these kids. My ex absolutely thought to herself that she was helping me be better through her verbal and psychological and emotional abuse. I believe that most abusers think what they are doing is justified in some way.

Doesn’t make it so, though.

The ending of Whiplash disturbed me when I first saw it. This was far before I became a victim of abuse myself. As such, I didn’t care for the ending which seemed to support everything that Fletcher had done throughout the movie. Yeah, he’d been an abuser, he’d fucked with every inch of Andrew’s being, and yet the ending seemed to justify every action of his. Andrew seemingly became an amazing drummer because of his abusive style, down to the approving glance at the end as Andrew finishes off his solo. Hell, after being through an abusive relationship of my own, I resented this movie even more. How dare it show abuse as some sort of means to an end? I was not empowered by my abuse – I was weakened by it. It didn’t make me stronger – my own effort to fight through my trauma did. Therapy did. Working on my relationships did. A new relationship that showed me what love could be did. But no fucking way did my abuser do so.

It was after watching this movie again that I realized I saw some of myself in the Andrew we see in the end of the movie.

It was not the me of today.

It was the me of the recent past.

The past when I was still stuck in the cycle of abuse.

Before I managed to extricate myself completely. Before I managed to tell my abuser, no more. Before I stopped fearing what lies she would spread, and before I realized, hey, she doesn’t have any power over me any more.

I understand why many other reviewers of this film have viewed it as a tacit approval of Fletcher’s techniques. This is because the movie seems to end at the conclusion of an abusive relationship, seems to cap off a journey of the main character.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Andrew has not escaped Fletcher’s influence – he has finally resigned to it.

He’s become what Fletcher wanted of him all along, but only after letting Fletcher humiliate him. He has bought into Fletcher’s lie.

I expect that if this movie continued on after the ending, we’d see the same shit from the first half repeating over again, in the same way Eternal Sunshine’s original ending showed the toxic relationship of the main characters repeating over and over.

Abuse is hard to get out of. Often, you’ll find yourself not believed by people close to you. Others will try to satisfy the abuser in order to protect themselves, not realizing that doing so only works so long as the abuser has someone else to distract them. Hell, even when you do manage to extricate yourself, your abuser will do their damndest to burn every bridge on the way out. I’m sure my abuser is out there to this day trying to slander me and tell the world how I’m a horrible human being. I can only trust the truth will win out in the end. I’m sure that I was not the last stop on the pathway of destruction that the abuser I mentioned earlier, who tried to gaslight me in order to get at her target, is going after others now. But part of getting over abuse is realizing that these people only have as much control over you as you give them. It was certainly easier for me to escape my abuser given that I had no particular financial obligation to them, no children, no marriage, etc. etc. etc. But fuck if it wasn’t hard nonetheless. They constantly threatened to post embarrassing things about me, or post outright lies, or that they would do harm to themselves, and so on and so forth.

They knew I cared, and they used that against me.

They knew I trusted, and they used that against me.

Abusers will take the best parts of you and twist them in order to use them to their own advantage.

I’m no longer afraid of my abuser. But that doesn’t mean she no longer has an impact on anything.

She dug her way so deeply into so many facets of my life that to this day, any number of people in my circles still fear her, fear what she’s capable of, hell, even fear me writing a piece like this.

But if we let an abuser dictate our lives, then we’re letting them win.

I have no interest in putting my abuser on blast, or outing them, or any of that. Their actions will speak for themselves, and I truly hope that they get better, and break out of their abusive behavior.

But this does not mean that I should fear discussing my own experiences. This does not mean that I was not abused, like she spent so long trying to convince me I was not. This does not mean that my experiences, my trauma, my pain, my paranoia, my anxiety, do not exist.

I’m not the same person I was before I faced her abuse.

I think I’m stronger nowadays.

But that has fuck all to do with her. She tore me down. She made me weaker. She made me afraid. She made me feel small, lesser, undeserving. Occasionally, when it benefitted her, she made me feel loved. And I’m sure she did love me. But she also hurt me. She changed me for the worse.

And if there’s anything I can do, it’s share my story.

If I can’t use my own experience of abuse to try and help others who have gone through this, try and make people feel heard, then what was the damn point of the whole experience?

I just refuse to stay silent about it any longer. It was through trusting others that I was able to start rebuilding from my own abusive situation.

And it’s through trusting my story, filtered as it is through the story of Andrew and Fletcher, out here on the internet, that maybe I can try to make the next step.

Your abuser wants you to believe that they have all the power.

They don’t. And they never will.