miss anthrope
The more I contemplate what I'm taking in and putting out in the world, the more I realize how many of my blog posts and anecdotes boil down to, "Other people are stupid and/or wrong."
I don't want to be that person.
I don't want to be that person.
i think as emotional abuse survivors, it's important to have a period when we learn to distinguish what we feel is intelligent, helpful, reasonable behavior from abusive behavior - behavior that has been inflicted upon us and is, by its very nature, "stupid" and "wrong." this of course comes up when we first emerge from a long-term abusive situation, but it can also manifest after dealing with something that echoes a past relationship. i've had it triggered by television shows.
learning the distinction is a coping mechanism as well as a survival skill. some people have been conditioned to tolerate abuse from such an incredibly young age they never learned what it is like to not be mistreated. then there's period of, you know, floodgates. "oh my god, there are people i know, people who are close to me and acquaintances i have contact with every day... and they can be wrong! not only that, they can be flat-out ignorant! maybe that abuse was wrong, too!" and boom, you need to talk about it, you've got to work it out, because it's crucial for your recovery. it helps identify situations where you are being directly abused or mistreated. so i vent. and sometimes i am smack-on in my venting, and working it out helps me grow and evolve.
and sometimes, not so much.
the problem is that my sensors can go into overload. other times, i just get stuck in the identifying phase and never work the whole thing through. i've ended up conflating general ignorance with abuse more than once. plus! talking about other people's wrongness or stupidity can feed the emptiness left by the abuse in this shallow and incredibly addictive way, especially when other people jump in with the YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!s. it helps me negotiate this PTSD issue of feeling perpetually threatened in even very innocuous surroundings; it's "protection" from becoming "one of them" - one of my abusers or one of my abuser's enablers.
i've caught myself judging people quite harshly or feeling attacked for very inconsequential reasons - feeling it somehow proved i was morally superior for not posting goofy quiz results on livejournal back in the day; getting intensely angry at people who send me game requests on facebook because DON'T THEY KNOW i don't waste MY time with that silly shit; disbelieving that so-and-so could get taken in by the latest hoax meme when all you really have to do is look at fracking snopes for three fracking seconds. just, generally, feeling aggression or attachment to the notion of my superiority around issues that are, ultimately, kinda trivial. which is going to happen. it happens to everyone. what we can do is identify the dynamic and what triggers these behaviors and catch ourselves, even if it is mid- or post-vent.
i'm thinking of you, c.
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