Does anybody else obsess with their trauma?

[Scarlet13]

I relate totally. My fix is to write it out and write it out. It takes about three days to work through w...

This is great advice. Thank you! The journaling is a good tactic, however my psychiatrist (who does CBT, ACT) banned me from it or well she gently yet firmly suggested I not journal because I was doing it too much. I love the idea about letting thoughts rise. I am using that. I am going to share this with my trauma t tomorrow. I think the way to do this is to allow myself to still process trauma, but in more healthy, gentle ways.
I just realized that I obsess with trauma because I was always a hard worker/overachiever. I do not know how to take a break. So I am over working myself in trauma therapy. I am the sort of person where binge watching netflix is a good thing ( but I get into triggering shows sigh).
I also read an article about art and how it can put you into a creative stupor which is sort of a form of a healthy disassociation. I need that a break from reality from the memories yet I desperately need to process them. Doing art can be triggering because I did art all the time to escape abuse and then in college I shut down creatively when I was majoring in art!

 

[Hooper]

I think when things like abuse or sexual assault are swept under the rug, it is so much harder to heal.

I don't obsess over my traumatic childhood when my parents divorced, Dad got custody of me and my brother and then my Mom had my Dad prosecuted for embezzlement over money from the family business that went into a joint account. I've really pushed that aside. What I do obsess over is my wife's rape at 13. My T thinks the 2 are related. My wife thinks I am taking on her trauma vs dealing with my own. I knew what happened to men in prison at a young age so there might be some truth in it but I never thought about hurting my Mom. Since my wife's rapist got away with it as do 994 out of 1000 rapist according to Rainn.org the quote above ring so true. It wouldn't be so bad if it were not constantly in the news. College campus rape, Bill Cosby winning his he said vs she said (while there are 56 other she saids out there) and any other story that pops up on the news. All the while her rapist is walking around out there. 2 years of therapy have not helped. I have come to the conclusion something would be wrong with me if I just accepted rape as just one of those things that seems so permissible in our society. At least by the rate of conviction stats. So yes I obsess over trauma just not my own.

 

[Scarlet13]

I don't obsess over my traumatic childhood when my parents divorced, Dad got custody of me and my brothe...

You do not have to accept rape as a thing that just happens. Your obsession with your gf's rape could be more from the fact that you get trauma and can show empathy. She probably appreciates your anger and the injustice of it.

 

[Hooper]

You do not have to accept rape as a thing that just happens. Your obsession with your gf's rape could be more from the fact that you get trauma and can show empathy. She probably appreciates your anger and the injustice of it.

It was my wife and not my girlfriend but it really doesn't matter who it is. Actually my wife doesn't appreciate it. She sees it as her issue that she has successfully dealt with and I should not dwell on it. I've got a whole thread on it "just found out the details of my wife's rape" and a lot of women were critical of the way I handled it. I'll admit I didn't handle it well. She didn't want me to know who he was but I took bits and pieces of information over the years and hunted down his identity. My therapist thinks I have a serious problem with injustice and I do. There is no legal way to seek justice if the victim doesn't prosecute. With a 6 out of 1000 conviction rate I can't say that I blame them. Apparently I have anger issues. It was a date rape and 100% premeditated. I've told few people with significant others in the same boat. They think I'm a little off. When I ask them what they would do if someone raped their 13 year old child all of a sudden we are on the same page. A former girlfriend thinks I'm a radical feminist. I don't see myself as radical at all. If people took it more personally it may not happen as much. The legal system is a failure for rape victims and victims of domestic violence. If you took a vigilante approach there would be far more convictions of people who assaulted rapists as there would be convictions of rapists. I just don't get it, never will and after 2 years of therapy am accepting the fact that I've made little to no progress. The irony is if I did make progress and rape was more acceptable to me and I don't lose sleep over it I would consider that the opposite of progress. So $2k plus later here I am getting more out of anonymous strangers than I do professionally.

 

[Scarlet13]

I dont think the issue is rape becoming more acceptable. It is not, nor should it ever be acceptable.
The issue is that your wife disaproves of the way you deal with it. You might be triggering her. You might be displacing your own internal need to process your own trauma onto her story and processing her story. I obsess with other trauma as well.

 

[Hooper]

You're either very perceptive or lucky. That is exactly how my wife feels. No one will stand up and say rape is acceptable. As you say it is not , nor should it ever be acceptable. The problem is when you look at the raw data only 6 out of 1000 do time. What message does that send? The victim is blamed. How does something so unacceptable and heinous as far as crime goes convict .6% of rapists and blame over half of the victims. Something is seriously amiss. 2 years of therapy have yielded no acceptable answers.

 

[Muted]

My therapist thinks I have a serious problem with injustice and I do. There is no legal way to seek justice if the victim doesn't prosecute. With a 6 out of 1000 conviction rate I can't say that I blame them. Apparently I have anger issues. I

Thank you, I also have a problem with injustice. Especially when the sick perpetrator is someone with social power and thinks they can threaten them and then get away with anything.

Unfortunately, the odds aren't good and so no one will take a stand and fight for the victims anyway. This makes it a community/society issue and a cycle that continues to repeat and few care until it is their wife, daughter, mother etc. And people wonder why we're f*cking pissed.

For the first time a few months ago, I didn't encourage someone close to me to report her sexual assault. It's a million times worse to constantly beg for help to protect others and have it fall on deaf ears.

 

[Hooper]

Unfortunately, the odds aren't good and so no one will take a stand and fight for the victims anyway. This makes it a community/society issue and a cycle that continues to repeat and few care until it is their wife, daughter, mother etc. And people wonder why we're f*cking pissed.

This is what I don't get. We may not all have sisters but we all have mothers. The numbers are disgusting. From what I've read it's 1 in 5 women are raped. I've been on a jury. It was 6 men and 6 women. There's a damn good chance 1 of the women was raped or 1 of the men's mother, sister or daughter is raped. I said happy birthday yesterday to my beautiful 12 year old niece. When I asked her how old she was my heart sank. I hope it didn't show. Her mom sits on a board of 3 who deals with sexual assault on the college campus she works on. The college is dealing with it which is great but do you know why the college and all others are dealing with it? If they don't they lose any potential student that has to get a student loan. They did it for money not for the right reasons. She goes to conventions on the issue and the average college rapist rapes 10-15 women. They walk on the fringe of what is acceptable and creep over the edge. The stories are so similar and her panel decides who to expel and who not to. My therapist suggests I take my anger and turn it in to something positive like volunteering at rape crisis center answering the phone. It's not that I don't want to help it's that I would get even angrier. I guess you could say I have some issues. As far as I'm concerned America elected a rapist. I'm at a complete loss.

 

[Scarlet13]

Being in therapy will not give you answers as to why so many rapes happen and why there is injustice. It is actually 1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault/abuse.
Therapy will not assuage your anger at society, but more help you to tolerate or accept your anger so it does not eat you up. Obviously, acceptance of your anger is not acceptance of these crimes. Yes, I agree do something productive with your anger. I hope your obsession with your wife's rape is not hurting her. Life sucks sometimes. There are terrible, shitty people who do terrible, shitty things. I will never understand that. All I can do is find some peace. My obsession with my trauma is about trying to understand it in order to gain control over the pain. Like if I can understand why my mother abandoned me, then I will be better. I cannot do this on my own. I think that understanding will come with time and I may never understand why NPD is a thing or why a mother can have a child and hate that child or why abuse even happens at all. Understanding these evils may not be the path to healing the pain. I believe processing the trauma and making sense of it in therapy in my own brain will go a long way, but understanding wrongs on a societal level may not ever come to fruition. I do believe though that trauma and abuse and even micro hurts all can come from denial, the cycle of not dealing with and looking at your own shit. So, I am trying to find that balance of looking at my trauma, but in a more healthy, measured way. Not sure if I am there yet.

 

[Muted]

Have you ever considered going into law enforcement? I think speaking with other victims of assault would make me feel even more hopeless. There was once a detective that helped me get justice and it had a profound on my life. I will never forget him.

 

[Hooper]

Have you ever considered going into law enforcement? I think speaking with other victims of assault would...

My friends that know me well would laugh at the thought of me being in law enforcement. If I were in law enforcement I'd end up getting in trouble. Would I advise a victim to play the 6 out of 1000 lottery all to be victimized again at trial? Speaking from the US system there are too many moving parts. If I did a great job as a policeman I would have to persuade the victim to prosecute a crime I know 99.4% of perpetrators get away with, take it to a prosecutor where most of the cases die, the ones the prosecutors take have to get past the grand jury and only then does an indictment occur where all 12 jurors must be convinced for a conviction. Look at Bill Cosby. A serial rapist with 57 known victims and who knows how many unknown. The job would depress the hell out of me or turn me into a predator who went outside the law and become a criminal myself. If I were to guess if a suspected rapist was violently assaulted were caught they would have a much higher conviction rate for those who assaulted rapists. I used to live in a university town where the editor of a well known magazine was known to be a rapist. There's no telling how many victims he had. His name was in men's and women's bathroom walls as a known rapist. Did anything happen to him? He was fired after over 15 years in his position but never successfully prosecuted. I'd end up being a cop with an excellent chance of going to jail and I'll never put myself in that position. I've posted before in my experience the law benefits these groups of people:
1. Those that write the laws.
2. Those that administer the laws.
3. Those that break the laws.
4. The rest of us and I do think we are on the bottom of the list.
No system is perfect but victims of sexual assault are at the bottom tier of the US justice system. Rapist are at the top of criminals who are most likely to be successful at never spending a day in jail.

Therapy will not assuage your anger at society, but more help you to tolerate or accept your anger so it does not eat you up.

You are correct. Therapy has not helped me assuage my anger but it has helped me in other areas. It's the combination of anger and hopelessness that is so toxic. It's been 2 years since I knew everything that happened. I'm hoping time will whittle away at it but in the mean time my nieces and my closest friends daughters are growing up in a dangerous world. I'm glad I have sons but they still have a 1/33 chance of sexual assault. The subject is omnipresent. I can't listen to NPR, watch the news, record an old movie I remembered thoroughly enjoying or read the paper without the subject of rape pop up. Again the very few friends I have discussed it with think I'm off. In some ways I do as well since it didn't happen to me but I'd prefer something bad happen to me as opposed to the people I'm closest to. I'm just hoping as time passes things will get better. I've got too much to lose to do anything about it. I'm going to just have to live with the fact that bad things happen to good people. It's been a tough few years so I just keep going to therapy and coming here hoping something will change.

 

[Scarlet13]

I think your answer is to practice acceptance of your anger. I appreciate your passion for this, that is nice. I think it make since that it hurts so much when its trauma to someone we are close to. But I am still sensing an avoidance and a displacement of anger. You need to deal with your own stuff.