Posted by Racer on January 10, 2006, at 20:52:52
In reply to semantics, posted by antigua on January 10, 2006, at 19:04:38
Semantics, hadn't thought of that...
The trauma I suffered included a car accident in childhood that was pretty devastating, so it's not solely "abuse" issues, I think. Of course, I was young enough that mostly I never think of it as "traumatic" -- I think of it as something that happened, and it doesn't happen to everyone. Does that convey what I mean? Not traumatic, but something that other people don't necessarily understand, really. (And we won't talk about the first time anyone sees the scars on my belly from surgery, 'K? If you ever find yourself in bed with someone who has a scar you didn't expect? The correct response is NOT to leap away yelling, "Oh, YUCK!")
And a huge amount of the "trauma" we're talking about wasn't "abuse" -- it was growing up with a crazy mother who didn't meet my needs, and didn't understand boundaries. Yes, there was actual abuse. Not from my mother. Yes, there was sexual abuse. Again, not my mother. But most of it was a woman with problems of her own doing the very best she could.
That's part of it, too. Daisy, I think you have more of a sense of protecting your abuser. I will state, definitively, that the man who abused me was a Very Bad Man, with no redeeming characteristics that I'm aware of. Period. What he did to me was HIS sickness, and NOT my fault.
But my mother? I am very protective of her, so having to recognize her part in my traumatic background is pretty damned painful. (We don't have any enmeshment issues. We're EMBEDDED.)
It's made worse by the crap from the Agency From Hell, because their whole focus on "you MUST have a personality disorder, since you have a personality, and we'll call it borderline." As a result of that, I've submerged my anger even deeper, in fear that A.) they're right, and/or B.) other people will think the same thing. So, every time I think about something that happened to me as a child or adolescent, and I start to get angry, I suck it all back as hard as I can, because of that. Because it would look like "splitting" to someone watching. And it's NOT. I don't know many people I can make any definitive statements about, beyond that one man. Everyone else is somewhere in that grey zone, of mostly as good as they can be, and sometimes not so good. But I'm afraid that if I say that someone did something to me, it will LOOK borderline, and then they'll write me off. (That was something that my T and I talked about last night. She was asking, "So what if someone thinks that?" My experience, though, is that if they do, they stop taking me seriously. And you know what? I have enough difficulty with people not listening to me anyway.)
OK. Deep breath.
No, Daisy, I do NOT want this to define me. That probably is a large part of the problem -- if we can keep it quiet, and people would stop saying anything about how amazing that I survived, maybe that would help. I think, though, that Antigua hit on something, too: I don't want congratulations on how brave I am to face up to these things, because I feel as though it's shameful that I haven't fixed it all long ago. I SHOULD be farther along, etc.
Ugh.
Thanks for your responses, and I'm sorry for not responding to all of you individually, although I think that kinda clutters the boards, so I usually answer all in one...
poster:Racer
thread:597607
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060110/msgs/597744.html