Slogging forward one step at a time.

 Dear Reader,

I wish I had good news for you. I wish that I had content that was interesting and delightful. Alas, I am still in the midst of dealing with some psychological issues that are making writing a very challenging problem. I will be talking with my doctor this afternoon and updating him on how things are going with the chronic sleep problem and the flashbacks. Growing up in an abusive household has long and lingering impacts that can erupt from seemingly nowhere and throw everything in to tumult as you try to track down what triggered the panic reactions. This is what I have been working on. It's exhausting and demoralizing, to be honest. 

Society has this habit of victim blaming and saying that trauma survivors are either exaggerating their experiences or putting them up on pedestals and calling them paragons of strength (provided the trauma they survived was the socially acceptable form). In my experience, there's a lot more victim blaming and accusations of exaggeration of trauma than there is placement upon a pedestal. There's a lot more 'You were wearing the wrong clothes/at the wrong place.' to rape survivors, for example, and less 'What happened to you is horrific, your feelings are valid, and I will hold space for you until you feel safe enough to talk about it.'

Society puts on blinders about trauma and assumes that if we do the 'right' things, trauma won't happen to us. And when trauma happens to us, society tells us that it is our fault. Even the various spiritual communities whom you would think wouldn't do that. They claim that we attracted our suffering with our 'negativity' and that the misfortune wouldn't have happened if our 'vibration' was higher. They claim that our suffering was a 'karmic lesson' or 'karmic consequence' of some ill deed done by another person in another lifetime where our soul resided (possibly). Both of these stances are victim blaming and just serve to make victims feel worse.

I get real angry about that 'vibrational' mindset when it comes to this stuff. I'm sorry, but a 7 year old who love everybody and wants to show the whole world beautiful things doesn't deserve to be sexually assaulted. A 5 year old who spills a glass of milk because they didn't have the strongest grip on the glass doesn't deserve to be beaten. And a 23 year old who is giving a friend a place to rest for the night, someone that they thought they could trust, doesn't deserve to be sexually assaulted at knife point with one of their own kitchen knives. These are not random incidents. These are things I have personally experienced. I can tell you right now, my 'vibration' wasn't the cause of the harm I have endured. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the people who harmed me.

If you think that I attracted these situations to me on any level, be it as a 'learning experience' or because I happened to be depressed at the time my false friend assaulted me, you can drop reading my work and fuck right off. I'm still processing a lifetime of ugly stuff and it's making it hard for me to write about anything other than it. I apologize if this post is distressing or disturbing. I'm working towards my usual optimistic, informational content. It's just been really hard going over the last three months. And it's hard to tell if that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, optical illusion, or legitimate light.