sorcyress | the subtle vise (Reply)

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When you said

I don't want anyone I know to be able to say "I don't know anyone who's been raped"

my brain said "Yes, this is important."

I was thinking that I shouldn't start talking about my past experiences lest I (a) make this all about me, (b) hijack your commentspace, (c) trivialize your experience -- but then I remembered you had said that you like it when people ramble about themselves in your comments. So here's the train of thought...

You said

my skin crawls, because I have so fucking few happy memories from that relationship, and that's not good.

...which immediately took me back to a certain prior relationship that, in retrospect, was rather emotionally abusive... because "so few happy memories from that relationship" very much describes it. I still cringe when I visit there, even though the separation was amicable.

I don't think the other person in the relationship was the source of the abuse; most of it seems to originate in the emotional dysfunctionality of one of their parents, and they did a substantial amount of work towards not passing all of it on... but still, some came through them and some got around them. (I could deal a lot better with the stuff that got around them, when they weren't trying to stop me from fighting back... for which I mostly don't blame them, because the parent's usual tactic was to punish them for my insolence.)

Most of the abuse was transmitted as a sort of quasi-passive defense of how the parent was behaving, because [in their view] the parent's beliefs about what one's obligations are were realistic, therefore the parent's demands of me and criticisms of my failures to meet the parent's standards were also reasonable.

"That's just how things are" / "That's life" / "That's just the way it is" should probably be added to the catalogue of abuse-phrases. Anytime someone advocates for tolerance of wrongness, without explanation or discussion, that's a form of abuse.

As you say, I think