OH, PSSHAW

July 25, 2016

noctis-nova:
When you say you’re the victim of abuse you are supposed to, by the common understanding, be able to bring up very specific episodes of that abuse in order to “prove its really abuse”.
But a lot of abuse just doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes they just wore you down constantly. Sometimes you couldn’t put your finger on it, but felt all of effects none-the-less. Sometimes its so plain awful that you’ve repressed it. Sometimes it was so damn insidious that you normalized it until one day years later you mention it and someone gives you a look of shock and you realize it wasn’t normal.
All of you. Any of you.
You are all just as valid as someone who wrote a whole damn memoir on the thing.
Related, and in some ways worse: You’re also supposed to prove how broken you are in order to prove the abuse was bad enough.
And you have to be broken in very specific, socially-accepted ways, as well.
All of which puts pressure on abuse victims to:
1. Act as broken as humanly possible, regardless of how we actually are.
2. Act broken in very specific ways that may not pertain to our lives at all (triggers, flashbacks, etc.)
3. Continue to act broken even if we recover or were never particularly broken in the first place (see “post-traumatic growth” for a little-understood phenomenon where people respond to trauma in unexpectedly positive ways, as just one example of another way things can go for abuse victims).
4. Deliberately sabotage our own ability to recover from whatever scars the abuse did leave, for fear nobody will believe the abuse was real if we don’t constantly act as if we’re permanently and forever and horrifically broken by it all.
5. Begin to, internally, doubt whether the abuse was real, because #1-4 require us to do so many things that may be fake or exaggerated compared to how we actually are (even though the original abuse was in no way fake or exaggerated, it’s tied in our minds so closely to how we behave that if our responses to it are fake or exaggerated, then the abuse must be as well).
6. In response to #5, do #1-4 more intensely to try to prove to YOURSELF the abuse was real, which only intensifies #5 in the end, setting up a vicious cycle.
7. In general, fail to develop any actual resiliency, or fail to show any resilience you do develop, for fear someone will take your resilience as showing the abuse wasn’t real.
8. Point at other people who are not hiding the fact that the abuse they endured did not break them or did not break them permanently, and claim that you were more abused than they were because you’re (whether really or in the way you act or both) more outwardly broken than they are.
9. Tell other people not to bother developing any skills to recover from abuse or develop resiliency in other areas because real abuse victims are shattered for life in ways that nobody can ever fix.
10. Behave in ways that are incredibly destructive towards other people or entire communities, and blame it on being permanently devastatingly broken by whatever abuse you’ve endured. Refuse to stop because nobody will ever be able to fix you.
Substitute “oppression” for “abuse” and you will see one thing wrong with a lot of oppression-based communities these days. But it definitely happens in the area of abuse as well, and the two overlap a lot. And it’s destructive to everyone it touches.

Seeing an abusive person react with relief upon finding out that someone wasn’t acting like a “real victim” is one of the ghastliest things I’ve ever witnessed.

Acting the role feels like survival, but you never really get a break and you never really win. It’s a full-time job– an emotionally-intensive one, where you’re deathly scared of every client and what they think of you. If you wouldn’t keep a job that makes you miserable, you shouldn’t craft your trauma into your main identity. You can make money elsewhere. You may not feel like it’s true, but you can make friends elsewhere.

Also, anyone who says you’re wrong to be happy, angry, or okay should have their intelligence and compassion put into question.

(Source: daggers-drawn, via opha)

11:36am

(Notes: 79,274)