PTSDelicious
I want to scream when I hear someone describe event-based PTSD. It’s worse when they position PTSD as proof of how bad the event was. “I was raped once by someone I never saw again and I still have PTSD years later”. My brain singes with decades of resentment for what feels like privilege 1It is a privilege, from my very specific perspective. But it’s not a societal privilege, in the way that term is used more broadly. Being “only” traumatized by an isolated event is still a loss of personhood and still pain. to me, even though the speaker merely comments on their own terrible experience.
Most of the things that give me PTSD aren’t singular occurrences. Mostly they’re things that happened over and over again in the context of some unsafe relationship. I didn’t just build a PTSD fragment around the pain, I built a whole person to be in charge of it. I accepted being unsafe and learned to not react to that fear.
When I was young I did it without any perspective on what else might exist. When the only example in your life is pain it becomes normal. You can’t even wish for it to stop because you can’t imagine anything else. I couldn’t name sexual assault as unusual when I was young, and didn’t protect myself from it – didn’t want to – even when I was older. I knew I didn’t like it but even with same-age partners I often didn’t feel entitled to any control or even to express preferences.
I don’t have some old safety to find again once I am calm. It’s not there to remember, or at least it doesn’t mean what you think it means. I know how to be calm. I know how to act even when I am afraid. But I have never been safe, and I sort of can’t imagine what it would be like.
Honestly it sounds like a lie normies tell about the shape of their lives, and it can feel like I’m being punished for non-compliance when I point it out. I’m glad you have a way to feel safe, but I’m not sure religion will work for me, and I’m annoyed when I have to fake it to accommodate you.
Because it’s not like this doesn’t exist in their lives. I had a particularly unusual early childhood which makes the lie easier to smell, but lots of people are regularly raped by their partners or parents or other people with significant ongoing control over them, just like I was. Misogyny and racism and whatnot put people into similar recurring dangerous interactions all the time. This pattern exists in most people’s social circle, but it’s not a thing we talk about or offer societal support for.
I wonder sometimes if there’s a support group out there for like, people who were locked in basements and cult members and other folks who were super-isolated when they were very young. I feel sometimes like no one shares my culture, and like most (especially White) people can’t even see theirs to commiserate, and it’s nice to imagine that somewhere there are other weirdos who can see the way normies misunderstand the world.
I talked to my new boss today. I decided to voice some of my dissatisfaction in terms of disability. It’s super dissatisfying because it doesn’t address any of the underlying problems and labels me a problem, but it does give me a lever to pull to maybe change something. I immediately hate how this interaction requires me to take advise on managing my day job interactions from someone who thinks I’m untrained and unintentional, but that’s maybe a scam I can make cheaper over time. There are worse things than being underestimated.
ZiB
Stars for Later
| ↑1 | It is a privilege, from my very specific perspective. But it’s not a societal privilege, in the way that term is used more broadly. Being “only” traumatized by an isolated event is still a loss of personhood and still pain. |
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