Torture Vs Abuse

[RussH]

don't think spousal violence, school bullying (since there is staff available close by), cyber bullying, emotional abuse is torture, since you can escape it.

I agree this may not be torture, but I disagree that you can escape it. I was bullied to the point of emotional abuse, the staff knew about it, and did nothing!
Also an abused woman is at her greatest danger when she tries to leave the abusive husband.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

That doesn't make it less awful thing people shouldn't have been put through.

Oh I know, I think Im just trying to get it right in my head. Less confused. Im not trying to make it fit the defintion in other words. Actually, id be happy if it werent defined as such.

My T uses the word, and I hate it.

Mine did as well to descibe my past and hate it too and dont feel as it was 'torture' but described it that way as thats the term he used so Im just trying to figure it out in my head.

In no way did I want this thread to be about me and thats why i took it to my diary last night so I appologize if I took this thread off topic of off course.

 

[joeylittle]

I can't help feeling like this is one of those really loaded conversations where it's easy to make people feel invalidated if someone puts forward a definition of torture that doesn't fit their personal experience.

I know what you mean. I don't know, it's something that I struggle with (the word), because - like you - I simply did not view it that way for the vast majority of my life. I also didn't call it kidnapping, in my head. Now, I've made peace with the kidnap part.

My concern about invalidation has more to do with invalidating people who have experienced it, in the ways that undeniably conform to the legal definition.

Because if it's hard conceptually for me to accept that term, torture - I wonder how hard it is for people who have truly, unequivocally, been held captive by a hostile government and made to severely suffer.

I fear that those individuals are invalidated every time they read about someone describing their experience as 'torture', when it actually wasn't.

Same as people with PTSD can experience invalidation when someone claims they have PTSD from being yelled at, or broken up with, or some other non-Trauma situation.

We have words, and ideally, use them to accurately represent meaning.

That shouldn't lead to invalidation, it should just lead to accuracy.

 

[Stickler]

During the 2 years that all the sex abuse was occurring:

1. I had a urinary tract infection that would not clear and set off my asthma, winding me up in the hospital.
2. My asthma became much worse in those 2 years; it may have been because I was being forced to interact with smokers...my memories are still not present.
3. I was being lent to guys my dad barely knew, being sent off alone.
4. I don't currently remember someone deliberately just causing me pain, but what they did hurt.
5. At one point I was drugged with ( probably ) Valium and given booze on top of that, the guys were trying to knock me out so I would be unconscious. Did not entirely work but I could not feel or move. I could have stopped breathing and/or aspirated my own vomit (I did vomit later).

So i was having damage done to my health and having my life actually put at some risk.

It doesn't feel like torture...though dad didn't need the money badly. I think it was as much or more about the power trip, as was him raping me himself.
There was a lot of pain and the possibility of death, though.

 

[Friday]

I fear that those individuals are invalidated every time they read about someone describing their experience as 'torture', when it actually wasn't.

That's the source behind my periodic rants.

Being tortured is different from being abused.

I can't keep this academic, can't keep my filters up, so I'm going to stop here.

______________________

ETA. Also, thank you.

 

[scout86]

I can understand the usefulness of definitions of terms, but also the idea that something might come off as "not bad enough" and that might be "invalidating". Except that that form of invalidation exists in your own head, really. And, maybe, someone who feels invalidated to be told that they were "just" abused, not tortured, needs to examine their own struggles with validation.

I'm thinking that all torture is abuse, but not all abuse is torture, correct? And, maybe, when most of us hear the word "torture" we kind of go to "worst things imaginable"? So we tend to think that "torture" HAS to be worse than "abuse". But what if that's not what makes the line between the two? What if it's not severity, or damage inflicted, but just the nature of the abuse?

I'm going to say right now that the story @joeylittle told meets both my personal concept of "torture" AND the criteria of "worst stuff imaginable". Also WAY worse than anything I've ever had to deal with. But the part of that story that makes the events "torture", to me is the systematic, calculated way the abuse was inflicted. There was time in between events to dread the next round, for one thing. And that "time to think about what's next" was part of the plan, not a coincidence. There was the continuing uncertainty. The actual physical part was really bad, but the part about being trapped, wondering what was going to happen next was bad too. And it was a calculated part of the situation. To me, that's where you cross the line. The intent isn't just to hurt someone, it's to BREAK someone, whether or not they succeed. And I don't mean "break" in the "I'm too broken for anyone to ever love me :cry:" sense. I mean it in the sense that I can best describe as wanting to kill someone's soul, regardless of what happens to their body.

What I generally tell myself, and what more or less works for me, is, it doesn't matter how you got to where you are, if it's a problem, it was bad enough. Go from there. Different things affect different people differently. You don't have to earn the right to have the problems you actually have, you just have them. But, I can very much see where it might be hard to accept "I was tortured". I still have trouble considering some of what happened to me as "abuse". Because that's something that happens to someone else and because minimizing is one of my go to survival tools. But, reluctantly, I can also see where it's useful to use the right terms and see stuff for what it actually was, what ever it was. Accuracy is a good thing, all the way around.

 

[Lionheart]

Due to several chronic illnesses, I have cognitive difficulty in reading long threads and posts, but I looked through this thread as best I could and saw no mention of Psychological Torture which is one of the trauma types that I suffered, so I wanted to add a link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_torture

I believe abuse and torture are both very damaging and there is no worse than or better than when it comes to trauma....it is all very harmful for the individual regardless of the form the trauma takes.

That being said, I wanted to add this link as it is often used in conjunction with physical and/or sexual abuse. I hope that by adding this link that I am adding something of value to the thread / conversation. If not, then please remove or disregard.

 

[Whyteferret]

I thought about this question a few days
I'm not sure if there is a clear answer

It seems that abuse is torture; especially where kids are involved. Or they overlap so much to make a clear difference

 

[Ronin]

Or they overlap so much to make a clear difference

Clear, no (since when is anything in the abuse land 'clear').
But there is a difference.

I'm still trying to find verbalizing & shareable concepts for this. Just because something was sadistic childhood abuse doesn't yet make it torture. On another hand, some forms of abuse are far more complicated / grey area because the person was a child, the age & vulnerability & the role children are assigned in societies mattering.

 

[zaniara]

I think sometimes people use the word torture to describe what was really close to what the harshest definition of torture stands for. (as for when a man rapes a young child with violence and show no empathy what so ever with the fact that the kid is crying - my father didn't, he said "oh, you like it so much you're crying!" - also getting off more if I was crying, making him a sadist)

But then there is the kind of torture that falls under that harsh definition.

My therapist only used that term when we worked with the memory of when I was being chained to both hand and feet to the bed, and psychopathic pedophile raped me for a long time, but also made me stay conscious(not check out as I did all the time the rapes I endured before him) and forced me with verbal threats to look him in the eyes so he could enjoy seeing me hurt, making sure he was inflicting enough pain, and also verbally talking to try to break my mind for real.

My therapist said this was plain and clear torture, ending with the man strangling me until I almost died.

It made something to my brain and soul that was way beyond the earlier abuse. It broke me into pieces, several, and after that life was really chaotic. Me not functioning. And not being one person anymore, but in parts. That what's torture is intended to do - it's intentionally trying to break down a person. When my father raped and abused me before he sold me to this pedophile-gang he actually wasn't trying to, intentionally, to break me. Even despite him being pretty sadistic. But in his mind I think he actually thought I was a part of him, and thus part of his sexual fantasies and "enjoying it".

SO the stuff before this torture was, in my mind, bad abuse, and 'tortures', and there is nothing "less" about that. It's bad enough. But the "real" torture destroyed me even more. Some victims of torture actually die, not because of the physical torture but from their minds not coping with the stress of it and life just being shut down. I'm one of the "lucky one's".. (who also later, much later, found a therapist willing to take the risk to work with me too)

 

[EveHarrington]

All torture is abuse but not all abuse is torture.

This is as far as I can get.

 

[Ronin]

I'd be inclined to agree with @EveHarrington's take (or as in a general principle), though that's where training & prior experience jumps in and makes me mess in a b/w easily comprehensible world.

(As in 'not all torture is abuse / some times, the usefulness outweights these concerns.' Trying to figure how to phrase that thing that's very clear in my head, in a way that translates.)