Since Google announced the new community feature for Google+, I thought creating a community for survivors would be a fun way to experiment with the feature, and see what we could make of it as a group. Not making any promises, but thought it’d be fun and interesting. We’ll see what happens!
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here
A couple of weeks ago I found myself sitting up late one night watching Good Will Hunting, and thinking about abuse survivors. If you’re not familiar with the movie, Matt Damon’s character is a survivor of abuse in a foster home who just happens to also be a mathematical genius. Only he works as a…
OK, so I changed my mind on the comments. Mostly, spammers changed my mind for me. Making the comments on all entries over 30 days old moderated kept the junk from hitting the live site, which I’m happy about, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But 350 moderated comments later, I’m…
Pin Last night, the wife and I were each doing our thing on our laptops, getting ready to start the work week off today, while we had the cable switched to the Palladia channel. This is something we do every once in awhile, as the live concerts they show become the background music to whatever we…
Michael left a comment and asked an interesting question: Question for you: in order to sort of immunize myself from being an abusive person (you know that victims often become victimizers — scary but common statistic) what are the best steps? I had been verbally abusive and nearly physically abusive to my ex-spouse and…
Pin Just like in sports though, sometimes it’s not about how the world works, or what mistakes we made, it’s about the other team. In our case, it’s the abuser. They did this. Healing is understanding that, and coming to grips with the fact that our lens is wrong. We’re looking at someone else’s actions and choices through a lens that only sees ourselves. We were abused, maybe when we told someone, we weren’t believed, or maybe even as adults, when we share our experiences we make others uncomfortable. But it’s not us. Other people get to make their own choices, have their own reactions, and choose who, and what, to believe.
What we need to do, is start untying other people actions and reactions, from ourselves. The abuser chose to abuse. The people who refused to help, made that choice, and the people who still don’t believe us, have their own reasons for doing that. None of it has anything to do with us, those are other people making their own choices, playing their own game. We can do everything right, live our life to the best of our abilities and still “lose” in these interactions. It happens. It doesn’t lessen us, it shows us who these other people are, and tells us about their agendas.
We learn from that, and move on. We do not blame ourselves for their agendas.
It does take developing a more mature lens to view life through, and that takes time, and work. Are you up for it? Or maybe the better question, are you tired of blaming yourself?
I was interested in a post by Cecil Murphy over on the 1in6 website, and as I was reading it, I was saddened by the first paragraph. Recently, I read an in-progress master’s thesis on male sexual abuse. The writer’s research said that most men don’t deal with their abuse until they’re middle-aged—late 30s to…
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