9:30am August 5, 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.

(via youneedacat)

Unfortunately spot-on, IME, with psych system fail there.

The diffference in my case was, I was never sexually abused. But I got caught up in the late ’80s-early ’90s repressed memory craze, and people decided I must have been. When, in reality, I was autistic and did actually have PTSD mostly from ongoing emotional abuse and bullying that they didn’t even want to know about. (My body language and affect were “off", and no I did/still do not like to be touched without permission. That could only indicate the worst abuse they could imagine. Fuckwits.) Because early childhood sexual abuse was cooler, and the accused there was not paying their bills. I wish I were exaggerating. At least they never even suggested hypnotherapy which was very popular then.

But, yeah. Not having exactly the kinds of reactions, emotions, etc. that they were expecting meant that you were in heavy denial and might even become a dangerous abuser yourself if you were not pushed into confronting all of this shit that never even happened in exactly the ways deemed appropriate. Which meant pushing you into reliving shit that never even happened, with some horribly prurient and disgusting pushing of young teens through endless questioning about the past and their (nonexistent but assumed, in my case) current promiscuity and suggesting horrible “memory" scenarios that still make me want to puke thinking about it decades later. All for your own good, you know. Making clients have total nervous breakdowns was considered progress, and further proof that they were in serious need of more therapy like that. And, yes, threatening them and their families that they might become dangerous abusers without even knowing it if they didn’t process the abuse in the specified ways.

Maybe especially if you were actually abused in certain ways, that is extremely abusive behavior. Deliberately retraumatizing people is just not OK, and I really should not have to say this. That approach was bad enough for me, and it was not triggering and retriggering actual memories of abuse. (Just basically trying to create them, yeah.) I can only imagine how much worse that would be if they were playing off real abuse and purposely triggering you all the damn time.

ETA: Much less suggesting that you should feel dirty. It had never even occurred to me that I should feel dirty or that it was my fault if I really had been abused that way, but after a while of listening to some horrible attitudes and assumptions I wanted to bathe in Clorox with a wire brush. /ETA

I am not even able to go into much detail, but years of that crap left me messed up in a lot of ways, and it’s taken a lot of work to even partly recover from that. Problems with endlessly questioning my own thoughts, feelings, motives, interpretations of situations, etc. is only part of it. I was already getting a lot of invalidation and gaslighting, but this was something special, done by professionals who were experts at it and were actually convinced that they were doing the right thing by abusing kids.

This is also another reason that I did not tell anyone or seek any kind of help for years (and then “only" from understanding friends) after I was raped twice in college. Because I had been shown no reason to expect anything resembling respectful treatment, much less help with what was actually bothering me. What I did expect was more harmful pushing from basically everybody in my life, and fuck that noise.

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