4:10pm August 4, 2013

“A violated woman is expected to fall apart, and not just privately, either; she must disintegrate publicly, in front of friends, in front of professionals, in front of Starbucks. It satiates our craving for arena-style pathos. We want to cheer our gladiators for bravery while they hack themselves to bits in the ring. If a woman chooses not to play, but to find her own private way back, we say she’s ‘in denial.’ If we don’t see her fragment, we say that she’s not ‘dealing with it.’”

—

Vanessa Veselka, “The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse,“ Bitchfest

And, in fact, forcing trauma victims to “process” what they went through by talking about it and re-remembering it has actually been shown to be bad for them.

(via brute-reason)

I was molested as a kid and people pretty damn well FORCED me to fall apart. There were the people who tried to convince me I had multiple personalities and that my every abuse fueled nightmare was a memory in disguise. And that was spectacular enough, done to a gullible kid.

But the part that harmed me the worst. Which both those people and the actual therapists did.

Was the part where they tried to convince me that because sexual abuse is ~the worst kind of abuse~, and child molestation was ~the worst of the worst of the worst~, then I must be feeling all these things I was not feeling, and all these unrelated things must be reactions to it, and if I simply was not reacting constantly in spectacular ways, and was not blaming my every problem on it, and did not ever go through the stages they expected, and did not ever even one consider it my own fault, then I was just in denial. After all, my main abuser fully confessed, most of my one-off assaults had multiple witnesses, the abuse was real, and all molested children react like this. So the only answer was denial and the only solution was more useless therapy talking about feelings I didn’t have.

Honestly the way my primary abuser hurt me worst wasn’t the fact that he rubbed his private parts where they didn’t belong and threatened to rape me and treated me to lengthy explicit descriptions of his love for anal sex.

It was the way he taught me misogyny and made me apply it to myself. It was the ways he taught me to view my disabilities, some of which resulted in me not getting help for years and still having trouble getting those habits out of my head. And the worst side I’ve ever encountered in general came from the same psychiatric system that claimed to be healing me.

The psych system, and some budding psych students with questionable ethics, is also what taught me that to be taken seriously I had to fall apart publicly and dramatically. Which caused me nothing but trouble.

Also in many cases taught me that it was wrong to reconcile with abusers because abusers never change. And that if I reconciled with any of my abusers it meant I was a poor deluded battered woman who couldn’t be trusted to know what was for my own good.

Except that I’ve reconciled with two of my abusers - my brother and my ex. That’s because they’ve changed. Most of my other ones I stay far far away from because even if they fool everyone else, they can’t fool me. They have not changed.

I do have actual abilities to discern things about people.

Funny thing is other people can’t discern things. They’ve spread rumors far and wide exaggerating my abuse at the hands of my ex, and at one point convinced me I’d just repressed the memories. Meanwhile the people who still fry to abuse me from afar have put on a fine act as upstanding citizens concerned about their wayward friend. I’m the only one, at least the only one saying it publicly, who seems to be able to discern that my ex doesn’t abuse girlfriends anymore, my brother doesn’t molest children anymore, and my stalkers will likely never stop enjoying lying and hurting people for the feeling of power and to enjoy the drama.

Notes: