Safeguarding

Filters, Not Armor

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  9 min read

A listening stick is a steel rod about the length of a walking cane with an earpiece on top, and the whole trick of using one is that you have to be still. Twenty past five in the morning, frost on the parked cars, cast-iron mains under a street of small brick houses.

There is a man with Thandi, on his fourth day, given to her to train because she is the one who does not shout. He has been talking since the van: an ex-partner who made things complicated, a supervisor who took against him, a story in which he is unambiguously in the right.

At the fourth stopcock she notices what she has been doing. She has a file. It took no effort, it holds an account with no losing version in it, and it belongs to a man whose surname she cannot spell.

Near the end of the shift he tells her why he talks. Everybody on the crew can hear the difference between a broken main and somebody’s shower. He cannot, and this is his third career.

The answer that works

The obvious response to eleven articles about people who treat other people as functions is not a foolish one. Become harder. Scan. Hold the warmth back until somebody has produced evidence. Never again be the person who did not see it. That works, and some of you can report accurately that the bad surprises have come down. Now the price.

Armor, said plainly: deciding once, in advance, to let nothing in. Picture a house in August with the storm shutters bolted. Nothing gets through — not the wasps, not the weather, and also not the light or the air. That house goes stale, then damp, then cold.

A filter: something that stays open and is choosy. Same house, one panel of mesh. The screen keeps the wasps outside where you can see them, which is the half that matters, and somebody has to go out with a brush in September.

Armor is a decision made once. A filter is a decision made continuously, at low volume, for the rest of your life.

Vigilance is not accuracy

Armor is indiscriminate, which is the point of armor: it cannot tell a person at the far end of this continuum from a nervous man on his fourth day. And a person who screens everybody has solved the problem by becoming somebody who cannot be reached. Your capacity to be reached was the asset. It is what got damaged, and the standard defense is to finish the job yourself and call it wisdom.

Scanning harder at four months does not buy what fourteen months gives away for free. What improves a decision about a person is duration rather than perception. Vigilance buys exhaustion, plus a sense of a sharpened instrument when the alarm has only been set lower.

None of which is a scolding: nobody bolts a house shut in a climate that never had weather. But the shutters are still up, and no announcement is coming that the weather has passed.

The second trap is this article

You have just been handed a vocabulary — false coherence, compression, a title claiming permissions it never earned, the reason that arrives before it is needed — and any of it can be used to end an inquiry, because a word that explains a person has finished looking at them.

Pre-explaining, said plainly: using a word you have just learned to settle what somebody is, before you have found out. Picture a man with a new field guide in a wood he has known for years, checking each tree against a plate until it matches. He is having a nice afternoon, and not looking at a single tree. Compressing a person into a function is what does the damage, and possible threat is a function like any other.

There is a grammatical tell, and it is the only one I trust. A description that ends in a noun has stopped being a description. He’s one of those. Set that beside the three sentences that work: what happened, how often, and what happened when you raised it.

Recognizing yourself here is not a verdict. It is the ordinary version — a file assembled without permission on a man in his fourth day — and if it stings, that is only what accurate noticing feels like on the way in.

Leaving, and not leaving

This article does not know your situation: your lease, your children’s ages, your immigration status, what happened in the year you do not discuss. It has not told you to leave anybody, and it has not told you to stay.

Leaving is not always available. One income does not become two households. There are children not going anywhere for eleven more years, a parent in a back bedroom, a country that will only have you on somebody else’s paperwork. And often the person is a father or a sister, and no procedure exists for ending a family.

Containment, said plainly: keeping your own life intact inside a situation you are not leaving. Picture a house on a floodplain, neither abandoned nor waterproofed: the furnace up on blocks, the documents upstairs, two ways out to the road, and nobody expecting the river to behave differently in spring.

Staying is frequently a decision made by a competent adult who has weighed things that do not convert into each other. That is triage, whatever the magazines say about denial.

So the distinction worth drawing is not between staying and going. It is between a decision and a drift. A decision has terms, and one of them is not because he will change. A drift has no terms — not shameful, simply unreviewable.

Loved for the feeling, or met

Being needed, being understood, being loved for the way you make somebody feel: each is lovely to have, and none is the opposite of being treated as a function.

Mutual recognition is the other thing — Jessica Benjamin’s term, and the least glamorous important idea I know. Said plainly: two people, each remembering at the same time that the other one has an inside.

Picture a radio playing in another room of your house, all day, on a schedule you did not set. Somebody laughs at something at twenty past four while you are in the kitchen. The room is not empty when you are not in it. That is a person.

Then the clause that carries the weight. Somebody who knows that, and behaves accordingly when it costs them something. Recognition that is free is evidence of nothing.

Here is that standard in one image. Two women have had neighboring garden plots, on a slope behind a bus depot, for nineteen years. Last summer one told a story about the other with a false detail in it, engineered for a laugh; it was raised badly, ten days later, and answered badly, and two days after that she came over and did it properly. Then in the spring, nothing new having happened, her neighbor raised it again — and the other woman put down the trowel and lowered herself onto an upturned crate, which at seventy-seven takes a while, to hear a thing she had already been told.

Nobody on that slope is counting, which is why nothing personal is true there in an entirely different sense. The same three words. One is an alibi. The other describes a healthy relationship.

Do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us? We do both, and the ratio moves with how tired we are. What separates the ordinary version from the thing these articles describe was never the ratio. It is what happens when somebody points at it.

Nobody has ever felt what you feel, in the way you feel it, for the reasons you feel it. That is not a poetic claim. It is the plainest fact about being a person.

True of Thandi, and of the man at the fourth stopcock. True of Lowell, fifty-one, who copies his partner’s calendar into his own planner now, so that he says no when asked rather than yes and then, later, the unarguable reason. One thing is different and a great deal is not, and you do not get to know which that means.

And true of you, which is the part readers skip.

Thandi closed her file — not by deciding the man was fine, which would have been the same operation with a kinder result, but by letting the mornings do it. Seventeen weeks in, she knows what he does when the van is late, and none of that came from an assessment.

The plot on the slope behind the depot is empty this evening. The shed is padlocked, the key hanging inside the door frame where the whole slope knows it hangs. Under the plum tree there are two folding chairs, still out, one with a cushion tied on with string.

Nobody put them away. Nobody is in them. They are out because Wednesday is coming.

Thandi, Lowell and the two women on the slope are composites. The patterns are real; the people are assembled.

One note, said without warmth because warmth would be wrong here. Where there is control of money or movement, sexual pressure, monitoring, somebody’s documents or medication held by another person, being followed, or fear inside your own house, none of the above applies and this is the wrong size of thing entirely. The right size is a person — a domestic violence advocate, an attorney, or a therapist who has handled it before. A first conversation with any of them stays between the two of you, and it decides nothing.