breakinglight11 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
breakinglight11) wrote2013-05-16 09:52 pm
breakinglight11) wrote2013-05-16 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
Abused mentality
Cliff Pervocracy, a feminist writer I like, once wrote an article about what it was like growing up in an abusive home. How when that sort of life is what you’re used to, it becomes normal. You fall into bad habits without questioning them. You make choices to keep yourself safe or to avoid pain that to an outsider seem awful because you almost don’t see the awfulness anymore. Because you’ve forgotten that decent people don’t act this way, that this isn’t an acceptable thing to take from the people in your life, because you’re just so damned used to it. You do these things because you’ve forgotten that life just doesn’t have to work this way. I didn’t grow up in an abusive home, but it sounds to me like all forms of long-term abuse tend to work out this way.
It’s shocking how much you can get used to, when you think about what you’ve been putting up with. When you realize that you made choices to minimize the pain you were going to experience—and in making that choice, you basically gave permission for someone to do bad things to you, because it was the lesser of two evils that you’d have to endure. I’m lucky in that I was never warped into believed I deserved it, that I wasn’t a worthy person, or that it wasn’t sick. But fearing being in so much more pain I’d be non-functional kept me putting up with it.
It’s almost miraculous when you get reminded that decent people don’t act that way. That yeah, no one’s perfect, but there are people who would never hurt you like that. Who respect your needs and feelings, who don’t ever run you down or use you, who care enough about you to work at treating you right. And that is how it SHOULD be.
It’s shocking how much you can get used to, when you think about what you’ve been putting up with. When you realize that you made choices to minimize the pain you were going to experience—and in making that choice, you basically gave permission for someone to do bad things to you, because it was the lesser of two evils that you’d have to endure. I’m lucky in that I was never warped into believed I deserved it, that I wasn’t a worthy person, or that it wasn’t sick. But fearing being in so much more pain I’d be non-functional kept me putting up with it.
It’s almost miraculous when you get reminded that decent people don’t act that way. That yeah, no one’s perfect, but there are people who would never hurt you like that. Who respect your needs and feelings, who don’t ever run you down or use you, who care enough about you to work at treating you right. And that is how it SHOULD be.