hussyknee:

The thing for us survivors of child abuse is that being Wrong about anything is the most terrible thing imaginable. There is stage in personality development where kids are allowed to get things wrong and mess up and correct themselves with minimal penalty, which was denied to us. Instead, we lived in a world of conditional humanity.

This means that the acceptance of our basic physical and emotional needs as humans were all conditional upon our behaviour – Bad-Wrong or Good-Right.

For us, the world was a minefield of things we could get Wrong and the punishments would always be unpredictable, random and disproportionately severe. Everything from small embarrassments, accidents and mishaps, other people’s breaches in social protocols as well your own, misinformed political opinions, lost arguments all seem equally catastrophic because all Wrong is Bad, and to be Bad is to literally not be seen as human anymore. Right and Wrong are seen not as something we do but as something we are.

In adult life, I’ve been trying to come to terms with merely being wrong, a simple non-catastrophic thing one can easily flip into right, and the fact that Wrong, if it exists, lives very far from me. This is doubly hard to believe when I am in pain. Because all pain is punishment, and all punishment is the consequence of being Bad-Wrong-Monster.

The most painful thing for a survivor of abuse is acclimatizing to a world where punishment is not deserved. It’s a fundamental truth of our universe turned on its head. It requires one to the acknowledge the power of chaos and chance. The concept that chaos and order live side by side is such a natural and easy thing for most people to understand, but so utterly terrifying for us to grasp. It feels like the world is still a minefield but now there are no Rules anymore, and we can’t comprehend where Safe is without The Rules. Even when The Rules never did keep us Safe in the first place. The Good-Right-human/Bad-Wrong-monster model is also important because it would mean that not only did we deserve our punishments but also the people who abused us would be due theirs. A cyclical hell driven by vengeance.

Humans are able to function because we are socialized into an illusion of safety and justice which is integral to psychological and social order. For abuse survivors to move forward, we have to first give up the illusion of order that we have constructed for ourselves and enter into a world where consequence is not yoked to morality. “Right” is now not the place where it doesn’t hurt, but the place where we refuse to hurt those we perceive guilty – including ourselves. It’s the very painful place where we can’t assign monstrousness to anyone who breaks The Rules. “Wrong” is now denying humanity to anyone on any grounds. “Wrong” is trying to plant The Rules in new places and rationalizations so we know where to feel Safe again, pretending it is the same as healing.

We won’t ever be safe unless we heal. We can’t heal without compassion. We can’t find compassion if we are focused on vengeance i.e finding the Bad-Wrong-Monster, in ourselves or in others. The monster is not a tumour we can excise but an open wound we have to stop gauging.

It’s okay to be angry. It’s not okay to stay angry. We deserve to heal.