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MyPTSD Pro
yeah and i have a big problem with this in general, like i've mentioned a couple of times, "victim versus survivor" is such a useless f*cking distinction anyway. we went through trauma and it was bad, and it had long lasted, permanent effects on who we are as people and our brains and every thing else.I believe a parallel would be the folks who don't want to use the word victimized.
but on top of that, many of us have trauma that happened in childhood, when we were helpless, that was done to us by other people. like, if i identify as someone who is the victim of a crime (my abuser went through the legal system) does that mean i'm like, looking for attention and wrong and helpless and what ever else? if i'm not a "survivor" or whatever-like, it's absolutely semantics.
and for some people it is helpful but i'd be very careful about broadly painting "victimhood" in a bad stroke because it does put down a significant portion of the population who are severely traumatized, who have helplessness responses, and who aren't bad or healing wrong because those are their responses.
those responses may not be useful to you (general-you) but at some point in everyone's journey you feel helpless, hopeless, despair, blah. all that. and you can move back and forth along that continuum as people say, ptsd is a cyclical disorder. you can move from helplessness ("victimhood") to solid foundations ("survivor") and right back to victimhood again real quick.
that being said, semantics are useful. bc i've bitched about this for like a hundred f*cking posts, the language we have to use to describe some of these experiences, particularly when they involve actions that you have done-not just that your morals are violated because someone did something to you, but they are violated because you did things-
or the perpetrator trauma in particuler. that stuff is real hard to put into words and a lot of people today still do not understand what you're talking about. you can't google it effectively at all if you don't know the precise terminology (which i didn't, for years, even when i was making concerted efforts to research this and start to work through other people's testimonies and things from environments where i thought this was more likely to be occurring)
i still never encountered these terms. it was just people talking about the events that happened to them that in that clinical environment were "understood to happen often" but still weren't being even named that frequently. so not only are they not available to the general public, but even when they are made available they don't always describe everything that's going on or the different factors that can be relative and all of that.
having language to describe your experiences is very crucial. and when you don't have it, the search to find it, looks semantic. and meaningless to other people when what we have is "good enough." "torture" and "participation induced trauma" and "moral injury" are "good enough-" they're good enough for other people, but for us, they aren't.
and that may be a facet of being traumatized itself-i don't know. @One step at a time made a good point in one of my threads that a lot of the, "state" of being traumatized is being in a state without words. because trauma is defined by things that are difficult to put into words-not only for others, but for us to name everything that happened.
and also because when you try and talk about it your brain is misfiring and things are getting mixed up and things. and also because unless you are able to access a lot of these academic articles (which most people aren't), you just aren't even going to have a lot of access to this information in the fist place. i would love to find a bunch of resources on this, but they aren't there.
or the perpetrator trauma in particuler. that stuff is real hard to put into words and a lot of people today still do not understand what you're talking about. you can't google it effectively at all if you don't know the precise terminology (which i didn't, for years, even when i was making concerted efforts to research this and start to work through other people's testimonies and things from environments where i thought this was more likely to be occurring)
i still never encountered these terms. it was just people talking about the events that happened to them that in that clinical environment were "understood to happen often" but still weren't being even named that frequently. so not only are they not available to the general public, but even when they are made available they don't always describe everything that's going on or the different factors that can be relative and all of that.
having language to describe your experiences is very crucial. and when you don't have it, the search to find it, looks semantic. and meaningless to other people when what we have is "good enough." "torture" and "participation induced trauma" and "moral injury" are "good enough-" they're good enough for other people, but for us, they aren't.
and that may be a facet of being traumatized itself-i don't know. @One step at a time made a good point in one of my threads that a lot of the, "state" of being traumatized is being in a state without words. because trauma is defined by things that are difficult to put into words-not only for others, but for us to name everything that happened.
and also because when you try and talk about it your brain is misfiring and things are getting mixed up and things. and also because unless you are able to access a lot of these academic articles (which most people aren't), you just aren't even going to have a lot of access to this information in the fist place. i would love to find a bunch of resources on this, but they aren't there.
(and sorry srg this was not particularly in response to you but just piggybacking off of this.)
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