Was I complicit in my own trauma?

[Susan Jane]

Thanks. I know you're right. The ringleader was a nasty piece of work and was the driving force behind it all, aided and abetted by a bunch of second bananas. On another thread, I got the comment:



which is another angle I've never previously considered. Instead of endlessly sitting in judgement on my 14 year old self and what I might have/could have/should have done, it might help to detach from it and look at it as if I were an observer on someone else in that situation. If I were watching a tearful teenage boy trying desperately to keep it together while pulling on women's shapewear before dressing for school, would I be telling him as he headed off for another miserable day that it's partly his own fault?

I really, really need to make a big effort to stop beating myself up over this. I've only been on this site a few days, but it's been really helpful to get all these new perspectives. I've had tunnel vision on this for far too long and it hasn't helped me deal with it at all, even after all these years.

Good for you! It is not your fault. Have compassion for your 14 year old self

 

[Dave Ryan]

I've created (at the second attempt) a new member's diary.

 

[Friday]

That's the bit I'm struggling with at the moment - I've spent so long living with a fairly negative view of my part, it's hard to know how t

Do you need to turn it around?

Not liking the choices we made, and learning to do differently, speaks to who we are, as well as to who we will/wish to become.

You didn’t like how you reacted then… changes how you react now & in the future.

Not perfectly, don’t expect THAT. But the ability to recognise we don’t like A, so try B? Still don’t like B so try CDEFGHIJKLMNOP? Until how you react/respond lines up exactly with what you believe is right/just/yourself? Is part of the whole live & learn thing.

Almost everyone completely faaaaaawks up their first thousand goes at anything. 10,000 to master.

So, round 1, you don’t like your response?

AWESOME.

Go again. And again. Until you’re you, being your best / most practiced, you.

You reacted in ways you recoil from when you were a child, as an adult?

That’s most of us, man. We’re all learning. Shame only bogs down the process of rising above.

If it helps, at all? Most bullies go through the exact same process. Their MOM is dying. So they take out their anger/helpless on their peers. Or their being cut with a knife to facilitate their rape at night by the person who was supposed to be protecting them, so they lash out at peers in the day. EVENTUALLY? They hate how they respond, and so? Change it. And are wildly different people at 25 then they were at 15.

The overwhelming majority of people are ashamed, crushed, despising their pasts… To create better presents, better futures.

Am I intimating/implying your bullies should be forgiven, because they’re “just” lashing out from being sold to be raped at night & still expected go to school in the morning? Pfft. Nah. IDFK the backgrounds/stories of your bullies. Much less them, individually, as people.

What I’m saying is that YOU were a child. Dealing with a brutal thing, in the best way YOU knew how. So, FFS, cut the kid some slack for not being Batman/Jesus/Etc. Kid. Normal kid. Doing the best they could. Learning. And learning to do better. Equals ZERO shame. No matter how different your ideals & reality are/were.

 

[Dave Ryan]

What I’m saying is that YOU were a child. Dealing with a brutal thing, in the best way YOU knew how. So, FFS, cut the kid some slack for not being Batman/Jesus/Etc. Kid. Normal kid. Doing the best they could. Learning. And learning to do better. Equals ZERO shame. No matter how different your ideals & reality are/were.

Intellectually I know I was just 14 and struggling with a seriously f*cked-up situation, but there's always this critical voice in my head endlessly tut-tutting away on a theme of "You should have done this and you shouldn't have done that and why the hell did you do the next thing? Serves you right!"

Maybe when that voice kicks in, instead of listening to it or negotiating with it I just need to start telling it to STFU! Better late than never.

 

[Friday]

Intellectually I know I was just 14 and struggling with a seriously f*cked-up situation, but there's always this critical voice in my head endlessly tut-tutting away on a theme of "You should have done this and you shouldn't have done that and why the hell did you do the next thing? Serves you right!"

Maybe when that voice kicks in, instead of listening to it or negotiating with it I just need to start telling it to STFU! Better late than never.

f*ck intellectually.

The EXACT SAME THING will happen when you’re 24 or 54, in a new situation, responding badly. In a way you dislike.

You dislike how you responded.

You dislike how long it took you, to stop. (You could still be doing it, or maybe are, and are gathering courage to stop, IDK).

That will happen, again. In countless/myriad ways. Big & small, cutting deeply or annoyingly. You will respond badly, and it will take you awhile to make up your mind, about how to change.

The FASTER you learn to recognize it, and rubix a different way you like better? The better. In all ways.

 

[oh!theperspicacity]

Much as I resent the bullies for putting me through that, there's always a little voice in my head telling me I deserved it for being so weak.

Not weak, but scared. A totally normal human reaction to such a circumstance. Sounds to me like you did the best you could with what resources you had at the time.

Also, I haven't read all the comments on this thread so forgive me if someone's mentioned already...

You've heard of the fight or flight response, yeah? There's also freeze and fawn. Your response of 'being complicit' is fawning. I responded this way to emotional abuse as a child too and have since found it difficult to speak up for self and be assertive. These responses to stress help us survive, they are coping mechanisms that no longer serve us. You are a survivor learning to rewire your brain and that's bloody hard! You're doing a great job.

 

[megalocardia]

I've given some background on my childhood trauma in another thread. To cut a long story short, when I was a teenage boy, I was made to women's shapewear. Some class bullies thought it really funny to make the chubby class nerd wear a girdle. They forced me into it that first time, took pictures, then gave me the choice: start wearing it regularly or face public humiliation.

And this is the thing that's eaten away at me for all those years. It was a choice, and I chose to cooperate. I hated it beyond words - the shame, the discomfort, the fear of being caught. Yet every school morning I somehow managed to suppress my feelings of revulsion, pull my panty girdle on, and suffer through another day. I can honestly say there was no latent desire to crossdress, no secret fetishistic impulse. I genuinely loathed that thing - the sight of it (this was back in the seventies, where women's shapewear was heavy-duty stuff), the feel of it on me (it was very controlling) - and for the first few months I even dressed with my eyes closed so that I didn't have to look at it.

But every morning I could have said "no" and reported them, yet every morning I put it on. Every single day for my final four years at school, I chose to wear a panty girdle. Four years!

Exposure would have been humiliating. Telling my parents - especially my macho father - that I'd been forced to wear women's corsetry would have killed me. The other schoolkids would have had a field day, and I'd never have heard the end of it. But would that really have been worse than what I went through? Much as I resent the bullies for putting me through that, there's always a little voice in my head telling me I deserved it for being so weak. (And, as I explain in the other thread, it had lifelong knock-on effects.)

The Dr Catalyst AI engine here talks about "reframing my perspective" of these events, but I don't know how to start.

Fear can force our hand to do a lot of things. I don't think you were complicit if you were plagued with fear etc. Emotions (and the chemicals they emit) make actually making choices very hard to impossible. This was not your fault. <3

 

[Mach123]

Well I came across your diary and this now and it’s a lot . I deal with this daily or maybe I don’t .
But you can only do so much is how I feel now and if it’s not suicidal depression that’s pretty good . That becomes my default position often.
So is that good ? Idk depends on when you ask me . Some days are better than others . You are posting about it which I always think is good. Much better than trying to hold it in imho because that I think lethal.

 

[Dave Ryan]

Well I came across your diary and this now and it’s a lot . I deal with this daily or maybe I don’t .
But you can only do so much is how I feel now and if it’s not suicidal depression that’s pretty good . That becomes my default position often.
So is that good ? Idk depends on when you ask me . Some days are better than others . You are posting about it which I always think is good. Much better than trying to hold it in imho because that I think lethal.

I held it in for years. Now I won't shut up about it! (Online only, though - I'd struggle to talk about this face to face.)