What Do C3PO and Abuse Have in Common?

I’ve been healing from abuse. I’m starting to see its lessons in practically everything lately, including Star Wars’ characters. I recently re-watched the classic second film of the first trilogy, “The Empire Strikes Back,” and the famous gold android caught my attention.

Specifically, there was a scene on which C3PO walked into an unknown chamber, believing to be amongst the familiar, only to get shot at and, therefore, dismembered. Arms and legs, and even the head, were removed from his torso.

How’s that for a metaphor on the crippling effects of abuse?

Eventually, another famous character, Chewbacca, discovered him, reassembled him as best and as quickly as he could and stuffed the dismembered droid into a backpack that resembled a fishing net, running around with the gold guy on his back as sci-fi adventures ensued.

I related to this fictitious scene in my own life when it came to the confusing, insidious characteristics that so often typify abuse. For many of us caught under its spell, we can be lulled into a comforting, serene, sometimes, uneventful-looking, sense of the familiar. We have found our Mr. or Mrs. Right. We believe we are with a loyal family member who loves us unconditionally. We trust a friend or a business partner who would never betray us.

And, like C3PO, we walk into this soothing, familiar chamber only to- WHAMM-O- get ourselves blown apart.

Sideswiped. Blindsided.

You get what I’m saying.

The thing we never dreamed would happen to us by this person…well, it happened. And it blew our world apart. We’re now hobbled: physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, legally. We cannot function. We cannot put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Lessons in Trust

This C3PO scenario showed me how I needed to learn the trust lesson, within the abusive context. Simply stated: you and I cannot trust “just anyone” we meet. Trust is earned. And some people choose not to earn it in the ways we need. Sometimes, it’s not even personal, although it feels exactly that. It just speaks to being careful with whom we share ourselves, our pain. If we are vulnerable with a person, the wrong, untrustworthy person, at that, we can, like C3PO, get blown apart.

Still, there is not permanent despair. For, if we look around, once the dust has settled, we discover a trustworthy soul who is worthy of us.

It’s not instantaneous. The old phrase, “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince” exists for a reason. People are learning lessons. And some of them hurt; some of them are painful and wrong for us.

Like many women out there, I experienced harmful relationships, both in friendships and in dating, before I fell in love with my wonderful husband. He, in many ways, has been my Chewbacca to my inner C3PO. However, he’s not perfect (don’t worry, I’m far-r-r-r from perfect, myself). Nevertheless, throughout the past twenty-plus years we’ve been married, my husband has had to learn, through trial and error, and yes, through arguments, the depth of pain abuse has wrought in my being. And, likewise, I’ve had to learn lessons, myself. I learned abuse doesn’t just affect the abused, but also the relationships the abused person sets about to form throughout his/her life. Abuse is painful; it doesn’t get healed with an easy fix.

And that leads to the next lesson…

Lessons in Discombobulation (In Need of Patience)

Yes, it’s all messy. The fallout of post-traumatic stress disorder, years, sometimes, even decades after the intense abuse I experienced, resurfaced in disjointed ways, like the dismembered limbs of Star Wars’ golden droid. I wish my issues and triggers could have been as neatly organized in the fishing net backpack Chewbacca used to haul C3PO around in. It wasn’t like that. And, over the years, it’s been a tossup who has been more frustrated with my abuse: my husband or me.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that my husband deals with this. It’s not fair that I was abused. Yet, life is not fair. We work with what is and what happened.

There are no violent outbursts, no throwing of things. It’s the quieter stuff of doing painful work within a relationship. Most of this recovery from abuse has been the tedious, uneventful and confusing hard work that often feels unrewarded and unsolved.

Furthermore, it’s bewildering to the “outsider,” my husband, who did not come from an abusive background. As loving and compassionate as he is, he still cannot fathom what it’s like to be abused, grow up abused and be an adult in situations that were abusive. He’s an observer, in a few cases, witnessing some of my toxic family encounters for himself.

Abuse, in its many forms, be they subtle and hidden or extreme and blatant, causes cognitive dissonance for the human being. Mainly, because no person should be treated like this. It’s hard to wrap our minds around it; it doesn’t make sense. With my husband and I, the whole thing is frustrating as I attempt to convey the powerless hostage feeling a person absorbs, and he attempts to understand it and, like a lot of men out there, “fix it.”

Fix it. There’s frustration built in to those two tiny words. Again, with abuse, it’s difficult to just “fix it.”

Lessons in Humanity

Suffering is a part of life. No one corners the market on it. No one is exempt from it.

I don’t have it as bad as some people. But my pain is not to be minimized, either. There’s no such thing as being disqualified for not being “abused enough,” no such thing as “it’s only this or that kind of abuse.”

Abuse is more widespread than we realize. It’s not always a black eye or a busted lip. Sometimes, it the psychological, quiet mind games another person subjects us to, creating our response of fear and self-doubt. Sometimes, it’s the neglect of a checked-out caregiver or spouse who refuses to see, hear and tend to us on a humane level. Sometimes, it’s the insulting name calling, in the guise of “just kidding” or “I gotta toughen you up; it’s for your own good.”

Being human means that, sooner or later, we’ll be traumatized, heartbroken and devastated. My husband, in his own way, has been just that with his life experiences. And that means that I, as an abuse survivor, sometimes need to get out of my own pain and recognize his. There is no game of “Who had it worst?” Nor should there be.

My husband, like Chewbacca, has carried me on his back quite often, as I endeavor to heal. I, likewise, do the same with his pain.

Each one of us is C3PO in life: dismembered, head screwed on the wrong way, helpless, vulnerable, dependent on someone to carry us. There’s no shame to that. This is life, not a movie, not fiction. For those of us dealing with crippling trauma, pain and abuse, we need to recognize, see and hear exactly that.

Let that realization inform our healing. Let it facilitate our healing.

And, to paraphrase a line from the film trilogy, let’s be the droids we are looking for.

Droids that are in the restoration process.

Copyright © 2020 by Sheryle Cruse