I find it easier to be angry that other people were hurt than I do that I was hurt.
This is absolutely a protective belief, right? For a long time, believing this would have kept your world making sense, rather than feeling completely chaotic and unsafe and illogical and...
So much of this belief structure is like that. For a long long time, we survive what we’ve lived through by believing “It was me, I’m the toxic one, I deserved it,” etc etc.
Those beliefs helped you survive. Your brain did a really good job at finding a way to get you through your trauma without your world completely falling apart. So, thanks Brain for getting me through.
Now? Those beliefs are no longer necessary to survive, and actually, because they’re so far from the actual truth (which you’re ready to deal with, without your world falling apart), they will gradually make way for more rational truths: it
wasn’t your fault, and actually, you were an innocent victim that had no control over the unforgivable things being done to you.
It’s easier, while it’s happening and we need to find a way to survive, to believe that we have some kind of super-power that makes good people do bad things, or that “Yep, I’m the
only child, out of the 6 billion people on this planet, that deserved their abuse”. I’m still working my way out of those beliefs.
But the process has definitely become less distressing and frightening for me, understanding that those irrational beliefs served an incredibly important purpose, and actually helped me survive something unsurvivable.
Hope that helps, even just a little.