Tangent time: Bad advice

[Bermuda]

Is posting a tangent OK? I just kind of want to rant about bad advice from therapists, from social media icons, celebrities, or your well-meaning neighbour.

I just finished watching a deeply upsetting video from a trauma therapist online about changing your mentality from victimized to just being a victim.
Her advice was this very hip rhetoric that started with "You didn't deserve what happened" and ended with "but you can change how you feel and control your future!" I feel like most of us have heard this in some form before, so I won't elaborate on the idea.

This notion of simply controling your thoughts, visualising your future, trying harder, taking accountability, and just materialising your goals is SO terribly triggering for me. It plays perfectly into the CPTSD brain. If I could smile to make myself happy, than there wouldn't have ever been a problem to begin with. That would also mean that I AM responsible for what happened to me, because obviously I didn't WANT or BELIEVE hard enough.

The rhetoric: Work harder, do more, accept your problems, stop thinking about it, retrain your brain, positive intentions, visualise your goals, (make a vision board!), and move on. Yep, that one.

No, just no. That is EXACTLY what CPTSD tells me every day. It feeds into my hypervigilence, my not-good-enough, competitive, self-loathing(ness?), it frames my CPTSD as a weakness instead of as a natural self-preservation reflex. This rhetoric reinstills the NEED for CPTSD responses, which obviously is not beneficial in a non-victim setting.

So, just in case you are scrolling through social media, and someone goes on about how they achieved success and how you can too, just know that you ARE successful. That you are not LAZY. That you ARE worthy. You can be a victim and FEEL victimized. That's OK. That you CAN achieve most of your goals, but you CANNOT control everything. The future, just like the past, is wildly unpredictable. We are all vulnerable.

BTW, Wherever you are on your recovery journey, or even if you're not on a recovery journey, you're worthy. You're worthy when you're a sobbing ball of human mass, You're worthy when you don't meet your goals. Your worthiness is immeasureable. Victims cannot "play the victim". They simply ARE.

I feel like I opened the vent, let out all the air, fulfilled this tangent, and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't too much this time.

*Sorry if the occasional caps were too much though. I take full responsibility, positive intent, smiling rainbows, and lots of believing.

(*)Denotes use of sarcasm. 

[saylor]

Yeah, I find that kind of "help" to be facile and dismissive. It's an extension of victim blaming. It's also a reflection of society's basic maxim that there should be no "whining" and that the only noble response to life's difficulties is to trudge forth with a plastic smile plastered on one's face. I'm happy for anyone who can pull off that kind of thing—it just hasn't worked for me.

I'm all for trying to heal. I'm all for not burdening innocent others with my woes. I'm all for not genuinely malingering. But...

-I was abused, and it caused extensive damage that I'm still trying to undo, to the extent possible
-CPTSD is debilitating, and when I'm struggling, it's real
-I don't "choose victimhood" (hate that word/phrasing) any more than I chose to be beaten, molested, and degraded as a small child...I'm being who I am, because that's all I can do.

We're told that the way to tackle the Inner Critic and toxic shame is to practice self compassion, but then we're also chided into denying that we're victims of another person's cruelty.

Well, which one is it? I can't manage both to feel compassion for what I've been made to suffer and who I became as a result and also deny that I'm a victim of someone else's cruelty. They're incompatible in my mind.

I've decided that there are certain messages that I need to tune out as I best I can (and it's not necessarily easy). I've decided that, although I need to keep working on healing, I'm never going to dismiss my inner child, deny that I was seriously abused/traumatized, or discount how those early experiences damaged me (possibly permanently, in some respects), with all kinds of unpleasant outcomes. Refusing to acknowledge that we are victims (yes, victims) of abuse (and, at least in some cases, actual crimes punishable by law) is tantamount to gagging our inner child. Screw that. I was already (figuratively) gagged by my perp and his enablers and beneficiaries through gaslighting and minimization, which was bad enough.

I say: honor the truth (that you are the victim of someone else's reprehensible behavior) at the same time that you're doing your best to heal and being as kind as you can to the good people in your present life. What else can you do?

[saylor]

Here's a relevant article from a therapist (Beverly Engel) who actually gets it:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-compassion-chronicles/201504/when-did-victim-become-bad-word

"Unless we turn this thing around and make it OK to admit when we have been victimized, admit when we feel bad, and not allow other people to shame us for it, the cycle will continue."

"What do you think happens to all the other vets who lost an arm or a leg in the war and who can't move on to greatness? How do you imagine that person feels? Like a failure, of course. Like a loser. He thinks, "If he can do it why can't I?" He begins to despise himself for his weakness. He hates himself because he can't connect with "the hero inside" to overcome his disability in a grand way. He descends into a dark pit of depression."

"We not only ignore and blame victims but we expect them to recover from their adversity in record time. In our culture we are supposed to "get over" adversity and "move on," and many people don't have much tolerance or patience for those who don't. But this concept of "instant recovery" is an extremely unnatural and unreasonable expectation. It takes time to recover from adversity, and healing can't really take place until there is a complete acknowledgment of what actually transpired and how it made the victim feel"

I was tempted to post several more snippets, but the whole article should really be read—it's very good

[Bella]

Wow! Thank you Bermuda for starting this thread. And thank you Saylor for your comments as well! I needed that! I've felt so ashamed for a long time that I haven't been able to connect to my "inner hero". I truly admire people that seemingly rise from their adversity and become stronger. Beating myself up, asking why the * am I not able to do it? On bad days I actually feel jealous of such people and the recognition they recieve for their hard work and awesomeness... Off course they deserve it... it's just that many people struggle everyday, and have done for most of their lives, and the only thing they recieve is judgement and criticism from people that just don't have the slightest clue about suffering. Makes me so angry!

[Bermuda]

Wow, thank you saylor, that article is perfectly on topic. It covers everything! You are exactly right, those of us who couldn't speak try SO hard to learn to speak as adults. It's difficult and terrifying, but it's so important for our recovery. It's hard to imagine that it took me about 5-6 years after leaving the situation to even be able to call it abuse. When I think of that now, it's shocking. What an empowering thing to acknowledge.

Bella, thanks for your comment. I'm so glad that my tangent might have helped someone. I found it so critical to observe my inner critic and correct myself when I refer to C-PTSD as a weakness. Maybe it's not helpful now, I mean it's definitely not, but these behaviours potentially saved my life. They even saved me from at least one attack I had as an adult. C-PTSD is not fun, but it's not a weakness either. It once played a very important role in my life.

It's terrible that we face judgement for simply feeling, or being effected. It's also terrible that people think that we may have feelings only as a way to get attention. We deserve attention, like all people. We want to be validated, listened to, to be seen in our entirety. (And then also to hide under the blankets in a dark room afterward) There is no shame in any of that.

[marta1234]

Bermuda, I saw this thread and thank you for talking about it. Yesterday, someone who I had been following on social media said this:

TW: this might be upsetting to read
"I could pity myself over my traumatic childhood, I could use it as an excuse everyday, but I choose happiness"

I was shocked. And taken a back. This puts me back in my childhood, when everyone would say, "Why are you so down? Why are you so sleepy everyday? Why do you always have such a depressed face?". I usually don't listen to other's advice, but I opened myself to this one because this person started to talk about "growing up in a negative household", which I related to. I feel very strongly what Saylor said: I don't choose to be a victim/abuse survivor, I just am. I am what I am, what I have gone through. If I'm pitying myself everyday, if I feel sad for myself everyday, then that's what I am. Because at the end of the day, we all are on different recovery journeys, and we take it with different steps. Recovery length is not "one size fits all". No. For some people, recovery is life long, for some it's not that long. For some people, showing empathy, sadness, to their parts that were abused, takes years.

I might need to take a social media break. I hope I didn't go too far in a tangent, I just wanted to say this too.

[Bermuda]

marta1234, I really agree. You definitely didn't go too far. It can be so upsetting to hear people say things like that, and I think it's so important for us survivors in the "thick of it" to try to voice our experiences and struggles too. I'm so sorry that you have to read that. I know it can really effect ones day. Allowing ourselves to be sad, and to express that is so important to our recovery.

Someone I follow on social media who both lives with CPTSD and autoimmune disease as I do posted a couple days ago that she used to spend several days in a row stuck in bed unable to move, and that listening to her body and being able to fulfill its needs by resting immediated when she feels fatigued helped her recovery so much that this doesn't happen to her anymore. At the time, that was VERY triggering. I am currently in bed the whole weekend in terrible pain. Imagine having the sort of life luxury that you can simply stop what you're doing and rest whenever you need, so that you never become drained... Wow, what a life. It's just simply not attainable for me. 

I am sharing that story because although that was super upsetting to read, and also instilled some self-blame (am I responsible for my own suffering??), it has some truth to it. We have to live in our feelings. It's the only way. We don't have a choice. No one would choose to have CPTSD. No one wants to suffer, but ignoring our suffering is not the answer, and a lot of times it's simply not an option.

Maybe in this way our suffering can be a tool for our own recovery.

I never know if my thought train makes sense out of my own head or if I've conveyed things in a comprehensive way.  Oh well.