Was This Reasonable? Need A Detached Viewpoint.

[Sandstone]

I don't know if you are aware just how incredibly hard you are working right now.

To me it feels like self-indulgence. I'm fighting incredibly hard against the desire to ignore it all, admit it is just me making a fuss. That phrase resonates throughout my life "Don't make a fuss, Sandstone". It was used over and over, about any time I was upset, specially in public. So I don't make a fuss, didn't make a fuss about being abused, assaulted, groomed, raped, didn't make a fuss though all those life pains and pangs. I still don't make a fuss when I'm so bad I'm suicidal. It is impossibly alien and WRONG to be dragging it out, and all the repeated struggles with the NHS keep confirming that of course all I am doing is make a fuss that is wholly unjustified and WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. As the Crisis Team said, they are busy with people who are really ill.

 

[UnKnown-Self]

@Ragdoll Circus
I don't think anyone was minimizing anyone else's experience.
I do see how some of the same things are just expressed differently.
For myself, I also see differences in how thought processes work at different ages. Anyone born in the 50's or 60s knew any talk of sexual abuse was taboo. The media was different and there was no internet. In my 20s, 30s & 40s my main focus was taking care of my children as best I could.
The net was around in my 40s and I was stuck in an abusive, loveless relationship but my hormones were raging so I acted out in chat rooms. When I was finally able to leave, in my late 40s I started dating via the net and met my husband. We shared the best 5 years of my life. He sank deeper and deeper into depression the last 3 years and unexpectedly died last May.
Two months after he passed I followed the white rabbit down to my Wonderland and basically sat in crazy for 6 months.
There were many other things going on at the same time but I just went back to work a month ago and I am trying to pull my shit together.
It's my time now, my children are grown and I lean on them and they lean on me and sometimes we have past shit to work out and we struggle but we don't walk away.
Since losing my husband I have not continued any relationships with my parents, siblings or anyone connected with my abusive past.
These are changes I wouldn't have been able to do at a younger age and if I did I probably would have processed it differently.
So when others mention different eras it's not negating anyone else's experience it's connecting with the similarities in the processing experience simply being in different stages of life. We all connect and understand the pain of betrayal and abuse regardless of our age or gender. Sorry if I babbled and went off track.

 

[Sandstone]

Anyone born in the 50's or 60s knew any talk of sexual abuse was taboo.

Not just unspeakable but im-speakable. There was literally no language, other than the impossibly graphic "x put this part of his body to this part of my body"

It wasn't until the 1980s that I began to hear on Radio 4 Women's Hour of "abuse" as a term I could use. Sadly my first attempt, telling my husband, was met with minimisation. Because of his own issues, his only response was " Well that needn't make any difference to us". At the time I didn't know he was keeping his own unspeakable secrets which would eventually end our marriage, so I accepted that it was just not a big deal for me, only for those other people I heard on the wireless.

 

[Sandstone]

Forgiveness - that is a big issue.
Bugger, now I'm shivering and have tingling all down my jaw and neck. A break and some food is indicated, but I'm coming back to witter on around forgiveness later

 

[UnKnown-Self]

@Sandstone
I really want to reply but I just got to work and duty calls. My train ride is 1 1/2 hours and I write during that time and after I get home or at lunch if I can but that is rare.
Look in the mirror today, grin at yourself and say "I Am Fabulous!"
Try it, just for a giggle.

 

[Nevermore]

Yes please I need to be clear in saying I do not think abuse that happened in the 70's was less abusivd than abuse in any other time! It was just confusing because - speaking for myself, even if I recognised I was hurting emotionally, I didn't really recognise I was being abused. And I saw that around me too.
and it was never spoken of in those terms.
but maybe that's how it happens, as @lostforgottensoul said, it was no different for her who was born later.
Maybe if just does take decades to realise - oh it's still hurting, maybe it really was as bad as I thought it was.
And then, having held onto it for decades, it's even harder to let the light shine upon it because your whole life has been a defence system of not feeling it or letting it show.
Just trying to say I understand. And it's hard to know what the true road to freedom is. Anything is worth it to find that road! I wish that for you

 

[Sandstone]

So forgiveness. It is a subject I've thought a lot about, both from the years I spent as an Evangelical Christian and in the context of the specific, deliberate harms others do to us. It is a sensitive spot for me as it has been misused against me.
I think my favourite definition of it the analogy that says real forgiveness is when you break my teapot, I forgive you and we can sit down to tea made in a jug without any awkwardness or avoidance of the subject of teapots. I think that is from a CS Lewis essay. Disregarding any Christian connection it reflects the big openheartedness that I see as part of true forgiveness.

Remember that forgiveness is for you, not the other person. Resentment just keeps you more 'inprisioned' if you will.

Now Ive always been inclined to the opposite view, that if I don't forgive, I hold the other person in some sort of spiritual/psychic 'deadlock". Many years ago I forgave my first abuser and spoke to him about it, and I have always believed that it was that which enabled him to start his own therapeutic journey and change. I'm not sure now about some of my other decisions around keeping his secrets: that has made my life much more complicated, but am sure that forgiveness was genuine and useful. Perhaps it was all easier because I could see him as a fellow victim caught in the family patterns.

I've grappled hard with not being able to forgive, having been told I was the cause of the end of my first marriage, because of my failure to forgive my husband when his promiscuous homosexual acts put us at risk of HIV. I asked repeatedly to be told the applied method of forgiveness in that situation, but it was never forthcoming. I thought for a while that the inability to forgive lay with the lack of repentance on his part, and his deliberate dishonest harming of me and our marriage. But then I look at Nelson Mandela, deliberately and wrongly imprisoned for so long, and his determination that the way ahead was through Forgiveness and Reconciliation, through recognising the truths of what had happened and moving on.

And I think that maybe there is some root of the difficulty there, that the truth seems to be unknowable. My mother's version of truths varies, it is ephemeral and fleeting. I can't grasp or identify what is the truth about my life and my own experience, I can't judge the magnitude of anything, and whatever I think is true must be Wrong, even if it is the opposite of the Wrong truth I found yesterday. So I'm never sure what I might be needing to forgive. I know that any attempt to discuss it would simply end up in me being to blame. I suppose fear gets in the way too. Can you forgive while remaining wary and defended?

 

[Sandstone]

Would you be as dismissive of it if someone else was sharing the same story here, a child the age you were then, or if it happened to someone you cared about?

That is a common question, and I understand the idea behind it. The problem is that I see so many accounts here of much, much worse things than I ever encountered. So yes, I think I do tend to minimise others who have the same level of experience as me. They may be suffering, but it isn't as justifiably bad as the suffering of some others. In real life, someone told me of her young cousin who had been abused. I felt my sympathy level drop when I realised she was 14, not 4, at the time. It does seem to put some accountability onto the victim. I know that isn't the PC view, but it is what I find myself thinking of her and of myself.

I faught the PTSD diagnosis

I don't fight the diagnosis, I struggle to accept that it is justifiable. I think I must be very weak to have developed PTSD from such relatively mild traumas. I have quantity, but that is a bit like saying you caught chicken pox because you were exposed to 100 people with it. It was that one batch of germs from one person that did it.

 

[Sandstone]

the sense that YOU were precious and loved, that YOU had special qualities and they were recognized, that you saw a smile of pride and welcoming joy in your mothers eyes when she suddenly saw you was not your experience.

Yet I could, and do, feel that for my daughters. I can say to them " I'm so proud of you because you have chosen to recognise your own skills and abilities and follow them. You've gone in different directions, but you are both living lives that are truly yours". I'm constantly bemused by the difference in what I feel for my children and what she felt for hers. From her there is only criticism. For my sibling "should have been at a senior level by now, doesn't try enough, no drive. no consistency" For me to my face "pushing yourself is stupid, why would you want to get on, you won't be able to do anything worthwhile", and goodness knows what behind my back. And endlessly critical of any and each relationship we might have, while I was so delighted when I met my daughters new partner, who was clearly good and right for her, that I couldn't sleep that night for excitement and joy.

I can't understand, whatever her past, that she can't express that joy in her offspring. If I could find it, why can't she?

UNLESS, unless, unless all my stuff is so trivial that it doesn't count

 

[joeylittle]

To me it feels like self-indulgence. I'm fighting incredibly hard against the desire to ignore it all, admit it is just me making a fuss. That phrase resonates throughout my life "Don't make a fuss, Sandstone". It was used over and over, about any time I was upset, specially in public. So I don't make a fuss, didn't make a fuss about being abused, assaulted, groomed, raped, didn't make a fuss though all those life pains and pangs. I still don't make a fuss when I'm so bad I'm suicidal. It is impossibly alien and WRONG to be dragging it out, and all the repeated struggles with the NHS keep confirming that of course all I am doing is make a fuss that is wholly unjustified and WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. As the Crisis Team said, they are busy with people who are really ill.

I just wanted to point this out - and suggest that maybe, when that voice comes up that says don't make a fuss, you can remind yourself that it was a thing that was repeated to you, and you absorbed it, so it's automatically where you go - but just because it's automatic thinking doesn't mean it's right.

I still hear "you'll always land on your feet", and it means that I either force myself to try and cope with the un-copeable, or I feel a failure when I don't land on my feet. It helps me to remind myself that it's an old idea that was given to me, I didn't choose it for myself, and it's not applicable to my current situation.

Now Ive always been inclined to the opposite view, that if I don't forgive, I hold the other person in some sort of spiritual/psychic 'deadlock".

I've never read this put this way, but it's exactly how I feel, too. There's a difference between forgiveness and detachment, I think. I can't forgive many things - but holding onto them takes so much energy, and it means they never go away. Letting go of that energy is hard, because I want to hold up my end of the 'deadlock'.

But remember - the other person isn't actually experiencing what you are. They may have moved on, they may have their own deadlock with something else, or any number of other possibilities. When I visualize taking my anger and resentments and putting them down and walking away from them, it helps a little. I can go back to them if I need. I'm not erasing them (that's what forgiveness feels like to me), and I'm not 'letting them go' (which feels like they fly away in the breeze in some lovely fashion) - I'm putting them down and walking away. There's one thing that happened about 5 years ago, that I put down and walk away from and pick up again. But I'm noticing, writing this, that when I look back on what was done to me then, it feels far away. I've put it down and I don't need to run and go pick it up again.

Don't know if that helps, any.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

So yes, I think I do tend to minimise others who have the same level of experience as me.

Maybe a way to minimize you're own?

Everyone says my past was "horrible", i dont which is why I put in quotes, but the reality of the matter is (which i can see for everyone but me) is abuse is abuse is abuse, trauma is trauma is trauma, suffering is suffering is suffer, pain is pain is pain etc. There is not "this is worse than that" as someone with an emotionally absent parent but no other trauma can hurt worse and have more scars than me....or just as much. Its just not a good idea to compare trauma, whether to say "mine isnt as bad as yours" or "mine is worse than yours" as you never know the impact it has had on the other, better or worse.

And that sort of thinking can also pave the way to say "well if i do this and not that then its not that bad" in my opinion.

I don't fight the diagnosis, I struggle to accept that it is justifiable. I think I must be very weak to have developed PTSD from such relatively mild traumas.

Same thing in my opinion. And there is no such thing as "mild trauma" really. Its all trauma.

Im not sure if you said if you have a therapist, if not it would help, but even if you have to use google and do this on your own. Go to the DSM 5 and read the symptoms of PTSD and dont think in terms of mild or not, just think "do i do this or have this or does this happen?" That is how my therapist got me to accept the diagnosis, took months actually. And i still dont see my past as bad as being in war but i can say that when we discussed it (why its good to do this with a therapist that knows you well, someone without a "trauma filter" over their thinking) each symptom in great length, I had to say "ok yes, i do have flashbacks, ok i do have anxiety outburts etc". There is a "must meet X number out of X number to be diagnosed" in the DSM w/ any diagnosis.

that is a bit like saying you caught chicken pox because you were exposed to 100 people with it. It was that one batch of germs from one person that did it.

Not quite, unfortantly mental health isnt an airborn virus. I wish it were, then we could take a pill and be cured!

 

[lostforgottensoul]

Don't know if that helps, any.

It helped me! :)