The Little White Bird

In recent years I have had the privilege of speaking with a number of victim/survivors of Intimate Partner Violence and to hear of their own personal  experiences.  And while each person’s experience is unique onto itself, there are many common underlying factors replicated in each person’s experience with abuse.  I do not presume to speak for others, rather I speak from my own experience and my own observations but I hope this page may help bring some awareness to the issue of Intimate Partner Violence and how it affects the victims/survivors themselves.

Abuse is about power and control.  The term ‘morally  disengaged’ or ‘moral disengagement’ I believe can be used to apply to the behaviour associated with the perpetrator of abuse.  It refers to the cognitive processes individuals use to justify or rationalize  unethical behaviours without feeling distress or guilt, essentially allowing them to act immorally while maintaining a sense of worth within themselves.  When a victim is abused, the intention is to devalue the self-worth of the victim, it is about character assassinating and slandering the victim, blaming her and demoralizing her so it will affect her feelings of self-worth and other people will believe the perpetrator not the victim, who is helpless to defend herself.  Abuse is also about instilling fear in the victim because of emotional, physical and financial abuse.   In trying to recover from Intimate Partner Violence victim/survivors frequently suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, sometimes suicidal ideation, emotionally disturbing thoughts during the day, sleepless nights with dreams and nightmares plaguing their subconscious minds.  Does one ever recover completely from Intimate Partner Violence?  It is my feeling that no, they never fully recover.  Many will move on, hoping for a better future but there are still triggers that take them back to the hurt and painful issues they’ve experienced.  This is one example.

The Little White Bird is the result of a dream or nightmare that I had following my own experience with IPV.  This dream was so intense and vivid that when I woke up I was still living in the emotions felt in this dream.  I went into to my studio and with paper and pencil began drawing out sketches from my dream, the words imprinted in my mind as well.  I could see the scenes so clearly.   The first scene was one in which I opened my front door and found the perpetrator standing in my garden.  Fear came over me as I asked “what are you doing here”.  The next scene was one in which I went to the perpetrator and placed my hands on his arms, with concern for him I said “please leave” fearful that if the police were called he would be in trouble.  And in that same scene I saw two farm animals standing beside me, one a lamb with the word ‘sacrificial’ above it, the other, a goat with the word ‘scape’ written on its side.  They represented my feelings of IPV.  Another thing I noticed was that a little white bird appeared in all but one of my dream scenes. It was sitting on the roof of a building looking down upon the perpetrator, watching from a hill in the next scene.  When the perpetrator dragged the victim into the house where abuse happens behind closed doors, the little white bird sat on the porch beside my beloved dog.  A week after my dream this little white bird came back to me in another dream as though to say ‘please pay attention to me, I have something to say to you’.  And that is when I decided to make my dream, my nightmare, into cloth, to honour this little white bird but also to try and discover its meaning.  However, one thing that left me feeling uncomfortable was that my dream had ended at “Abuse Happens Behind Closed Doors”.  Which is where abuse always happens.  That is so the perpetrator is never discovered harming the victim and can deny it ever happened..  

 One consideration I had was wondering how I was going to create a design structure for this dream as I knew it was not going to be possible to utilize any principles of design.   Thus I decided to lay out this dream visually in a sequence of scenes starting at the top left corner of the cloth, as one would read a book.  I numbered each scene so that the viewer could follow the dream in sequence.  Still, the meaning of the little white bird continued to baffle me.

As it happened, during the process of making my dream quilt I was invited to speak to the victims/survivor’s group of my local women’s shelter and so I took my trilogy (seen here on this site) to share with the group, as well as my dream work in progress.  When I mentioned that I didn’t understand why this little white bird appeared in my dream or what  it meant, the group looked at my work and then thought about it.  Then they said:  “we feel that this little white bird represents your inner spirit’.   I felt  a wave of warmth flow over me, for yes, this little white bird did feel like it was looking after me,   It was my inner spirit.   I, too, felt this was the pupose of the little white bird…to look after me, to protect me, to help me see the reality of my own situation and so the next day, I began to work again on my dream piece with a new sense of direction.  And then, all of a sudden, in my mind’s eye, this little white bird flew high up into the air, its wings spread wide, excited, like it was trying to tell me something.  And that something was:  unless I did something about my situation, no-one else would.   After that this little white bird grew into a big white bird and it beckoned me to climb upon its back. I gathered up my precious little dog and together we climbed upon the back of this white bird who spread it’s wings wide and prepared to take flight.  This white bird then flew me into the sunrise of a new beginning in my life.  It scared me ,yet it came to me that I could look forward to the future with hope. 

Rather than ending my textile piece where my dream had ended, with abuse happens behind closed doors,  this new image allowed me to feel a sense of hope, hope that there can be a future for victims experiencing Intimate Partner Violence.

Design image (c) 2024 Sandra Small Proudfoot, AOCA ’89