Pain and humiliation, to ensure that I can fulfil my purpose.
I think this answer actually illustrates beautifully what you believe you actually deserve—because you qualify to say you were conditioned to believe this and you give the logical reason why you have this and why it necessarily needs to be left behind (“my recovery had a long way to go”). So where is it going? Where are you headed for with respect to the original question, or rather, where do you *think* the destination is with respect to what you deserve?
The belief protects me from having to deal with the reality that my abusers were lying to me. That there was no purpose to my abuse than their own sick pleasure. There was, in fact, nothing special or remarkable about me and my situation, and no higher purpose being served by my enduring what I went through.
Except for that statement of “my recovery has a long way to go.” Your purpose? [
Saving(?)] your very own self and surrendering to its … idk… value? Worth? Qualities related to what you can increasingly claim as yours as you approach that place where your recovery is taking you
Treating someone with dignity doesn’t mean approving of what they do. It can very well entail punishment.
I like this perspective so much. It reminds me of the tragedy and horror of the permissive parent, the effect of it on the child can almost be worse than abuse as there is no dignity, no belief in the agency of the child.
But oddly, the permissive parent tends to have an attitude of “the child deserves everything.” Which sort of brings us back to Friday looking at the newborn and telling them they deserve nothing as a kind of moral imperative.
There has to be a kind of middle ground right? There is a difference between Friday lovingly cooing to a newborn, “You deserve nothing so I will fight for your everything,” and a sinister Cinderella step-mom sneering, “You deserve NOTHING!”
Maybe the trick to overcome the semantics problem is clawing back from the edges of this dialogue toward the messy undefined center. Not to deserve nothing or everything—but where to start?
Human rights seems like a good signpost. I know the UN has the Universal Declaration on Human Rights that was created in the aftermath of the Second World War, which most countries agreed to. (Side note: there is also the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which pretty much all countries have adopted but only one
has yet to ratify
).
