TORCH

TORCH is a VAV reality-checking practice: a deliberate interruption meant to distinguish a person’s account of their experience from an abuser’s version of it. In the book, it is both a tool Soo-Lin Lee-Segal uses to challenge Elgin Branch and a discipline later applied to Soo-Lin, shifting the focus from naming harm to taking responsibility for her own decisions.

Definition and Use

At a VAV meeting, TORCH stands for Time Out, Reality CHeck! When someone slips into what the group identifies as an abuser’s story, another person can interrupt and invoke the practice. Soo-Lin explains its purpose as separating an individual’s reality from that imposed account, a first step toward halting an abuse cycle. The interruption is not merely a label: it breaks the flow of a familiar explanation so that the speaker can reconsider what has been presented as normal or deserved.

Soo-Lin also stresses that VAV uses a deliberately broad, esteem-positive definition of abuse. She recognizes that its terminology may be uncomfortable, and notes that she herself initially resisted thinking of herself as abused. The group’s distinction between being a victim and becoming defined by victimhood lets it name harm while also emphasizing movement beyond that identity. TORCH belongs to this framework: it challenges self-blame without treating a person as incapable of examining their own conduct.

Soo-Lin Challenges Elgin

During a staff meeting, Elgin tells Soo-Lin that he is questioning his sanity because of problems at home. Soo-Lin responds by describing how his account of Bernadette Fox would fare in a VAV meeting: she believes it would be interrupted before he could get far. She points to his position as a senior employee at a highly successful company, his having vested out three times, and his daughter’s academic success despite several heart surgeries. Against those circumstances, she sets his description of life with Bernadette, whom he portrays as isolated and destructive and as falling asleep in stores.

Soo-Lin’s intervention treats Elgin’s apparently enviable professional and family circumstances as facts that do not erase the distress he has disclosed. By telling him that he has been TORCHed, she recasts his description of home life through VAV’s language and asks him to question the account he is accepting. Elgin thanks her but says he needs to concentrate on the meeting and will read her message more carefully afterward. The exchange therefore shows the practice’s force and its limit: Soo-Lin can interrupt his framing, but the conversation does not establish that he has accepted her interpretation.

The Practice Turns on Soo-Lin

Later, Soo-Lin tells Audrey Griffin that she herself has been TORCHed at VAV and cannot return until she has completed WYP and read it. WYP, short for Write Your Part, is an inventory in which a member owns their part in an abusive relationship; the name is pronounced “weep,” rather than “wipe.” Soo-Lin reports spending three hours writing. The paired procedures make the intervention reciprocal: reality-checking is not only something she directs at Elgin, but something the group can direct at her.

In her inventory, Soo-Lin traces the closeness that developed while she worked as Elgin’s administrator. He made requests she considered impossible, she made them happen, and she experienced his praise as part of an increasingly intimate professional bond. Her first correction is concise and consequential: she had been falling in love, but she cannot claim that Elgin was doing the same. TORCH here interrupts not an accusation of abuse but a mistaken inference about mutual feeling.

She then identifies a choice she could have made when Elgin confided in her about his wife over lunch: because she understood that speaking ill of a spouse to a coworker crossed a boundary, she could have politely ended the conversation. Their children attended the same school, which had already blurred the line between work and personal life, but Soo-Lin’s written correction does not treat that circumstance as removing her agency. When Bernadette became entangled with Internet hackers, Elgin’s anger and confidences seemed to Soo-Lin like further proof of his love; in retrospect, the inventory marks that interpretation as hers, not as evidence of his feelings.

Consequences and Significance

Soo-Lin’s account continues to a night when Elgin planned to sleep at the office. She booked him a room at the Hyatt in Bellevue and drove him there, pulling up to the valet; Elgin asked what she was doing. The passage records the gesture and his question, but does not supply its outcome. Its placement in the inventory brings the relationship’s practical choices into the same reality-checking process as Soo-Lin’s earlier beliefs about love and reciprocity.

TORCH thus operates on two connected levels. As Soo-Lin first presents it to Elgin, it challenges a narrative of domestic distress that may obscure his own reality. In her later WYP, it challenges her interpretation of Elgin’s attention and helps her name moments when she could have acted differently. The recurring interruption does not itself settle every question about the relationship; instead, it makes assumptions examinable and separates what Soo-Lin felt from what she can claim about Elgin.