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Changing the World One Teen at a Time

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn. This is Rihanna’s line in the Eminem song Love the way you lie. The lyrics and video are hard because the pain and the romance is uncensored, as it should be.

If there were a way to have your body shut down when you’re in a relationship that’s all bad for you, we could all be better for it. But as it happens seventeen, possibly the age when Eminem met Kim, the most likely muse for this song, is about the time 1 in 3 teens say they know of someone who has been in a relationship where they have been hit, slapped, punched, or kicked.1 Of the teens in an abusive relationship eighty percent stay.1 They stay for years and when they finally get out if they are a recording artist they write a song called Love the Way You Lie.

You push pull each other’s hair/scratch, claw, bit ‘em/throw ‘em down/pin ‘em/so lost in the moments when you’re in ‘em/It’s the rage that took over/It controls you both…and it is very controlling. One might even say over powering.

The video has been called sexualized because after all Rihanna is standing there in only what Rihanna would be seen in -a pair of hot pants and Megan Fox, the girlfriend in the video, is terribly cute with pouty lips and long dark hair, but the fights are painful. They look real and when you are in a relationship like this you see the person as your sexual object not your abuser that is what Eminem is trying to tell you when he says, “I can only tell you what it feels like.” Ask the teen that was forced by her parents to file charges against her boyfriend for breaking her arm. She sits there welling up as she says, “I feel bad because now he has a record.” She didn’t feel that bad about her broken arm.

Cause when it’s going good/It’s going great/I’m Superman/With the wind at his back/She’s Lois Lane because unfortunately even when it hurts, hurts like the pain of when you touch fire, which should register to your brain that you never touch it again –the desire to be loved is so very strong. The hole in your teen that prevents them from feeling whole without this person or any person makes them go back, makes them stay. Makes them come to love the highs and lows and suffer the lows because the highs are absolutely intoxicating. If they did not have their father fill that hole, or their mother fill that hole and they instead took the drill and made the hole bigger, this type of love is absolutely intoxicating. No one understands looking in from the outside because it doesn’t make any sense to an outsider. No one can make them leave until they’re strong enough to understand that the pain is well, painful and furthermore unnecessary.

I laid hands on her/I never stoop so low again/I guess I don’t know my own strength, and teens don’t. Adults who still have these emotional needs never really got passed a lot of the emotional challenges of being a teen because lack of support stunts your development. Why people are in abusive relationships, why they stay and why they will see what they want in this video even if there were subtitles is so complicated that it could never be explained simply. What we can do is talk, talk, talk and challenge our sons and daughters to think more of themselves, think of how others treat them and consider always… consider that everything like everyone has a context, a history,  and nothing is as it seems on the surface. Otherwise, why after being so brutally beaten could Rhianna still say, “I love him.”

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Related posts:

1. Awareness of Teen Sexual Abuse
2. Domestic Violence Victims
3. Your Teen Will Be Happy (Eminem’s Cinderella Man)
4. Your Teen Will Overcome (Eminem’s Not Afraid)
5. Abuse Robs Your Teen of Self-Esteem