My Abuser?

[Bonsiren]

I once had a therapist who hounded me for saying "my abuser." She would interrupt me every time I said it. She said using that phrase meant I was letting those people own me. I don't know if she was right, but her distinct lack of tact made me stop seeing her. It's hard to open up when you're feeling guarded and attacked.

Words have power. But I've been living with PTSD for a very long time now, and I've gone through a lot of (mostly sub-conscious) effort to make myself feel invisible. Small. Silent. It was difficult to trust myself with those sorts of words in the beginning: abuse, rape, sexual assault, scene of the crime. In the beginning, those words seemed to describe an entirely different and significantly worse situation. I was almost in disbelief that those words could be used to describe anything that happened to me.

 

[MissKB]

Justmehere: "To me, I don't like that it implies he belongs to me or something weird in my own head. YOUR abuser. "

At first I wasn't getting your post until the very end. It was the word YOUR that bothered you not the word abuser. I see how I would say, "He's not MINE!" I get completely what your saying. I try to say things more like "my father is an abuser" . But unfortunately we can't get rid of the "my father" part. He will always be MY father. He just isn't MY abuser, though he abused me, I just say he's AN abuser. Actually, I say he's an ass! lol