Dancing Around the Cycles of Harm

Diddy's behavior is not an anomaly, it's the norm, we have cultivated an entire generation of abusers, it doesn't have to be this way.

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Evan J. Mastronardi

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Karina Maria

Write about patriarchy, politics, race, culture, music, and ruminations. The goal is to discuss important issues in a digestible and relatable way because nobody wants to read a Ted Talk.

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Trigger Warning: This article covers topics on abuse and intimate partner violence.

I still remember the first time I saw Diddy; at the time, he was a 20-something-year-old kid dancing like no one was watching in Stacy Lattisaw’s music video “What You Need.” Unbeknownst to my parents, I had stayed up late to watch my favorite TV show, “Video Music Box,” hoping they would play Biggie’s JUICY video, but this came up instead.  In the 90s, “The Box” was one of the only places a kid without cable could get their rap and R&B fix. The show played videos based on listener’s requests and did man-on-the-street interviews. As far as I was concerned, it was cutting-edge television and a barometer for who and what was bubbling.

After that late night, it felt like he was everywhere. And over the next three decades, the kid with the high-top fade would dominate the genre and culture I loved. I admired him as he broke artists like Total, 112, Mase, the Lox, and the Notorious B.I.G. In an industry where the artist bragged about being hustlers, drug dealers, stick-up kids, and gang members, Diddy was the approachable guy with an ear for great songs. I wanted to be just like him.

The last two times I’ve seen Diddy have drastically differed from my first encounter. Late last week, I watched video footage of him brutally assaulting his then-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, in front of an elevator of the hotel they were staying in. I won’t be sharing a link to this encounter because it’s far too disturbing, and I don’t want to redistribute content that shows violence against women.

For those who didn’t see it, Cassie, who’s in a hoodie and seems to be attempting to leave the hotel they were staying in, walks to the elevator and puts on her shoes. Moments later, Diddy is Sean bursting out of his room in only a towel and storms down the hall. He grabs Cassie and slams her to the floor, picking up the contents from her purse and then turning around to kick her several times. The video then shows him dragging her back to their room, where he then throws a vase at her. The ease with which he assaulted her lets me know that it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.

If you must, click here to watch the video.

The assault in the video is the same as what Cassie’s legal team described in her lawsuit against him Late last year. Despite stating that the accusations in her lawsuit were false at the time, Diddy and his team quickly came to a settlement with her.

The next time he was on my screen was less than a day after I watched him attack Cassie. This time, he’s by himself on what seemed to be a tropical island “apologizing.” According to Diddy, he was “Fucked up” and had hit “Rock Bottom,” but he made no excuses for what everyone saw. He then went on to say that he sought therapy and rehab after the events, claiming he “Had to ask God for his mercy and grace.” The video is like a “what not to do” tutorial from crisis communication firms. Despite his best efforts, I couldn’t bring myself to believe a thing he said, instead I wondered how he could go from that kid in Stacy’s video, to a person who assaults a woman he once claimed to have “loved.”

The news of Diddy’s brutal treatment of Cassie is shocking, but please understand that what he’s doing, along with who he has been to her and likely other women, is not new. The uncomfortable truth is that all of our social circles are full of men who we care for, admire, love, and respect who are abusers. There are far more Cassies than we would like to admit. “In the United States, “1 in 3 women have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner.” When 30% of women are likely to be abused or in an abusive relationship, we’re not talking about tragedies anymore; these are choices being made and cycles ignored. Still, It happens far too often to assume all these men are monsters. It’s clear that abuse is now a part of our culture; it’s in all of us. So how does it happen?

The difference between those who cause harm and those who don’t is not that big. You do not need money, status, or power to abuse someone, nor do you need an intricate network of supporters to hide that behavior. What it takes is an endless cycle of harm, a culture to socialize violence, a society that apologizes for the behavior, and a choice. We all make choices; here’s how I made mine.

A lot of people wonder what goes through the mind of the abused when things like this happen; some might even wonder why they don’t run or fight back. I can’t claim to know anything about Cassie or her experience, but as someone who grew up in a household where violence was often the response, I think I understand a little about abuse. I understand how the violence starts as a shock and then, after a while, becomes normalized, how you can go from being surprised to accepting the reality and believing that somehow you deserve what’s happening. I know what it feels like to ask someone for help, only for them to return you to the person whom you begged to be saved from, and as they use every source of force to punish you for speaking up, your biggest takeaway becomes that no one has, or ever will care. I know how all of the pain, anger, guilt, and shame from those days can set you on a dangerous path.

As a child, I was a victim of physical and verbal abuse from the people who loved me. The pain they caused stemmed from the harm they received in their lives. Before I go deeper, I must say that my father and Stepmother were not perfect, but they did their best. I will always love and cherish them; I am also working to heal from old wounds. That doesn’t make what happened to me, or anyone who has lived through abuse, ok. Instead, hopefully, it shows you that what we watched happen to Cassie and what’s happening to millions of people every day originates from harm and the refusal by people and society to break the cycle.

My Stepmother and father physically and verbally abused me in private and public. The violence was nuanced and left lasting damage. For example, when I was 10 years old, I was jumped and robbed by a group of kids from a different neighborhood. My father rushed home from work, saw me with a gash dripping with blood, and told me he “wished those kids would have stuffed me in a box so I could die” when he stormed out of my best friend’s apartment to return to work, his mother hugged me. She told me “he cared” and that his angry words came from disappointment that I went outside without permission and then let some kids “punk me.” I learned then that I needed to be a bigger monster than anyone else to stay safe and loved.

The person who made sure I got to the hospital and got stitches was my stepmother. A few months earlier, she beat me so viciously that she had to wash my blood off her fist while I tried and failed to stop the rest of it from staining our hardwood floors. We sat in the waiting room for hours, and after every few minutes, she would remind me that no matter how I felt about her, she was the only one who ever showed up for me. She was right; she’s also the person who cultivated my love for books and music. She gave me my first journal and encouraged me to write. I learned through her that the ones who love you, the dearest, can also do so violently.

I wasn’t allowed to react to the way my parents reacted to me, so from an early age, I learned that the best way to handle my big feelings was to intellectualize and eat them. If you could rationalize what was happening and then swallow the pain away, it would “disappear,” and for a long time, that worked for me. I built an entire ecosystem around the skill, and along with it came an ideology. It was simple: my feelings didn’t matter because I didn’t matter, and if I felt something too deeply, it meant acknowledging something that didn’t exist. Me.

For the next ten years, I spent countless hours in the mirror repeating a simple Mantre, “Erase yourself.” This mindset helped me rationalize why my father seemed like he always chose the women in his life over me. It helped me accept that sometimes when my stepmother was “in a mood,” she would call me stupid, bully me, and find ways to pick at me. It’s why I could stomach kids at school making fun of me; It’s why, in moments I felt broken or that the only emotion that made sense was anger, I could manage it. No matter what happened, I would turn myself into a black hole; everything would be nothing, and I could sink into the abyss. With time and healing, I now recognize what I was doing as dissociation. But that realization is new. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I started to figure things out, so when I graduated from high school and left my father’s home, hoping never to look back, I was a ticking time bomb.

I embarked into the world with a gaping hole in my heart, desperate to fill it. I Spent much of that time chasing after women who didn’t want me. I had the unconscious hope that I would be ok if I could convince them to see me. If they “Saw” me and loved me, I was real and mattered. I tried being funny, mysterious, dangerous, and coy, but that didn’t work. I switched tactics and started love bombing, and making big gestures to secure love, but that fell short as well.

After years of making believe I didn’t exist, I didn’t know how to handle rejection when it came, and it came in abundance. Every “no” or, “you’re not my type” landed as a personal attack, it felt like everything my stepmother said about me was being confirmed. It only took a few “heartbreaks” before I followed down the path of many boys before me. I became resentful and bitter. I blamed constructs like the “friend zone” on my failure to find love, I dismissed women as “stupid” and inferior, and I found fault in everything they did so as not to have to look at myself.

I started to convince myself that women loved “bad men” and were untrustworthy, and the worse I felt about myself, the more resentment I felt towards the women who didn’t reciprocate my advances. When I did find someone interested, I would secretly question their intentions and be paranoid that they were cheating on me. My insecurity during those days cost me some amazing partners. Thankfully, I was lucky to have a network of people who loved, invested and understood me. I also had a village of women who did the emotional labor it took to work with me beyond my ignorance; I don’t know where I would be without these people.

Then one day I discovered that someone I knew was in an abusive relationship with a close friend of mine. It scared me. He and I were as thick as thieves; I thought that I knew everything there was to know about him. We saw so much of ourselves in each other, but I could never have imagined what his partner told me about him. I didn’t want to believe her, but no amount of mental gymnastics could overlook the real bruises on her body or the fear that existed in her eyes when he was around. I tried to talk to him about it, but he saw no fault in his actions; according to him, “she had caused everything.” He wanted me to pick a side, so I chose hers. No matter what he said or how deep I thought our friendship was, I knew that look in her eyes. They were mine. And I had too many memories of casting those same desperate glances for help, only to be delivered back to my oppressors.

After that, I started talking to people I felt safe with about my feelings and tried to understand how things had gotten this far. Therapy and journaling have been deeply healing for me; they helped me to understand how the things I lived through may have brought me to the cusp of my humanity. It also helped me empathize with my friend; I hope he found himself. What’s been most surprising is that many other boys were also told: “Men shouldn’t feel.” They, too, had experienced trauma that was dismissed and trivialized. They may not have had the exact coping mechanisms as me, but we all understood the language of rage. Many of them eventually realize that you can’t swallow your feelings forever, so new ways of coping are needed. Many others didn’t, and as a result, spouses, children, and communities suffer the consequences of unheralded trauma. We should hold Diddy accountable for his actions. But before he was terrorizing Cassie, something happened to him, and the world told him to suck it up because he didn’t have feelings, and if he did, they didn’t matter.

It might be too late for Diddy, but it’s not four countless other people; if we have some honest conversations and agree to break the cycle once and for all, we truly can. If not, we will continue to dance around like no one is watching while people everywhere fall into the abyss.