The Responsibility of Healing

response to a Twitter thread

Author’s Note: this essay is a response to a Twitter thread that a reader emailed me, asking for my thoughts. I link to it so you can read it for yourself, and will use a few screenshots to comment on specific tweets. I am explicitly and directly asking that no one badger, harass, mock, or otherwise negatively interact with the people in the thread. If I had not been blessed with a brilliant therapist and better friends than I deserve, I would likely agree with the thread. A younger version of me absolutely would’ve agreed with it, and there is nothing any internet stranger could have said to that version of me that would have made me grow up even one second faster/sooner. Drama for the sake of drama helps no one.

A Twitter Thread Expressing Typical Sentiments

This twitter thread was brought to my attention by a reader. They asked me to respond based on previous essays I’ve written about surviving long-term child abuse, including abuse by a pedophile.

It begins with this tweet:

As I write this, the thread is taking off, so it may look quite different by the time I publish this. But as I write, a few people in the thread have offered mild pushback and for the most part people agree with the original tweet. They see healing from trauma as either impossible or as a “collective” responsibility, something that requires a community:

The “we” in the latter response made me curious, so I checked out the profile. This individual believes themselves to be over a hundred people, including fictional characters, sharing one body:

I point this out because self-diagnosed Disassociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) is one of the many heavily socially rewarded dysfunctions, and it mostly spreads by social contagion on TikTok. Some of the people who believe themselves to have this disorder regard integration into one whole personality as a form of murder. The primacy of the trauma that, they believe, caused the splitting is therefore quite literally something on which, in their view, lives depend. (Not sure if this is true of the person in the screenshot; just contextualizing where trauma recovery stands in some parts of our culture.)

Where They (Sort of) Have A Point

There are aspects of healing that happen much more quickly and easily in community. This is true, and undeniably so. I will give you an example.

A month or so ago, I lashed out in anger, and hurt someone I care about, without any conscious intention to do so. I learned a lot from this: about myself, about the other person, about how to work through difficulty in a relationship, and about being forgiven.

About myself, I learned that I am capable of being downright nasty without intending to—that I have not one but two “modes” for being passive-aggressive, conscious and unconscious. I didn’t at first see this, because when I am trying to be passive-aggressive, I am in fact quite good at it. When I flip my Bitch Switch, I know that I have done so. I know that in that state I am downright terrifying, capable of inflicting real and serious harm. My parental modeling for dealing with anger was abominable, and learning healthy skills for managing anger as an adult is an ongoing process, with much work left to do.

Because I hadn’t flipped the switch—hadn’t come close to it, hadn’t considered it, didn’t even feel the emotions of wanting to and deciding not to—I truly did not realize (until my loved one was brave enough to express having been hurt by my words) that I had another passive-aggressive mode.

This was a lesson about myself and my flaws that happened because I was in a community of sorts—a real and authentic relationship with another human being, who matters to me. And it did promote some level of healing for me: I see myself more clearly, have changed into someone I like better, and as such am less affected by the abuse that shaped both of my passive-aggressive “modes” in the first place.

But it was still a responsibility—in fact, a bundle of responsibilities—and they were mine, and mine alone. I had these responsibilities: to be open to seeing my fault, to accept responsibility for what I did, to apologize and seek to repair the relationship, to integrate the new understanding and seek to control my impulse towards passive-aggressive lashing-out in the future—both the sort that requires conscious engagement (and is thus easy to resist) and the sort I will need to watch out for in the future—now that I know I have it.

I am certain that, without the authenticity and importance of the relationship this occurred in, I would’ve had a much more difficult time learning this important lesson about myself.

I am also quite certain that, if I ever find myself married or otherwise sharing living space with other human beings who love me, who I love in return, and with whom I have healthy relationships, there will be many lessons and types of healing that will be much easier to achieve than they are right now, when I live alone. Thus, to an extent, the people in the thread do have a legitimate point about the importance and potential help of community.

Where I disagree is that they seem to regard community as both mandatory and a prerequisite, something trauma survivors are owed and without which they are at least in part relieved of their responsibilities.

None of that is true.

They also seem, for the most part, utterly blind to the fact that this works both ways: there are many lessons about trauma recovery that one can only learn through self-reliance, through having to get through a bad PTSD day or a panic attack and get the bills paid and the errands run anyway.

The key is to maximize the opportunities presented by the situation one finds oneself in, not to waste time pining for another situation.

What Is Responsibility?

Here are the dictionary definitions:

Is healing trauma a responsibility, per the dictionary definition? Let’s look.

A duty to deal with something? (In this case, the damage left by trauma.) Check.

Having control over someone? (In this case, myself.) Check.

The state or fact of being accountable for something? (In this case, my own life and mental health.) Check.

The state or fact of being to blame for something? (For what happened, no. For how I respond to it? Absolutely.) Check.

The opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization? (Looks around, notices that I am a free adult in a free country.) Check.

The dictionary is fairly political these days, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an extra definition added soon that reads, “….unless the thing you might be responsible for makes you feel bad.” But for now, yes, the word “responsibility,” per the dictionary, absolutely applies to healing from trauma.

The Responses That Stumbled Across the Truth

This tweet was part of the thread:

“You’re the one making you suffer.”

Yes. This is in fact correct, almost all the time.

If someone’s words or actions are in the past, especially the distant past, and you are still suffering as a result, you are the one making you suffer, to at least some extent—and probably to a much greater extent than you realize.

Another example: my shoulder is permanently damaged as a consequence of domestic violence inflicted by my father. I have healed from that incident, both physically and emotionally, to the fullest extent possible. I am no longer suffering over the emotional wounds inflicted in that confrontation. I am no longer tormented over the things he said that night. When my shoulder hurts, which is daily, I no longer waste time and energy lamenting that this didn’t have to happen. I take full responsibility for managing my chronic injury and minimizing my own suffering. And the fact that my shoulder injury started at my father’s hands is something that, these days, rarely crosses my mind.

The present situation, with regard to my shoulder, hasn’t always been true. It used to cause me daily emotional anguish, anger and rage and self-pity and righteous indignation. I suffer almost not at all now with regard to my shoulder.

What changed? One, and only one factor changed in the situation.

I did.

If you are suffering over a distant past trauma—and I include myself in this little sermon, as I am still suffering over a lot of things that happened when I was a little kid—you are in fact the one making you suffer.

Is that shocking? It shouldn’t be. Agency is a concept that used to horrify me, too, until I found freedom within it.

But agency is so strongly disincentivized in our culture these days that just asserting it exists can be enraging.

It does.

From the same thread, these tweets also hit across some truth:

The reply tweet there is interesting. I don’t think it’s a “healthier framing,” just a more palatable one. I think the two statements are equivalent. “Something that needs to be done that only I can do” is a pretty good working definition of responsibility, but I find it interesting that our culture is so allergic to discussing responsibility clearly and unambiguously, as this thread (again, at the time of my writing this) demonstrates.

Refusing to Try to Heal Is Becoming An Abuser

Once, in therapy, I said something to the effect of being very grateful that I hadn’t had children, and therefore could never be responsible for the kind of damage and pain that my parents had inflicted.

My therapist laughed. I gave him my “What the fuck?” look and said, “Why is that funny?”

He answered, “Because it’s delusional, that’s why. I have personally, in this room, on countless occasions, witnessed you saying things that were vicious and horrifying, inflicting emotional and verbal abuse of an extreme degree. And I don’t think that your victim having been you lets you off any kind of moral hook. You’re a person, too, and no person deserves emotional and verbal abuse—or do you disagree with that? And if you do, why are you so desperate to not be like your abusive parents?”

He was right.

Take it down a notch, and he’s still right. What if someone who had the power to try to help—to reduce pain, to clean a wound and at least give it a chance to heal—walked by and refused? Didn’t necessarily make it worse, as I had been doing to myself, but simply refused to do anything?

Would you call them a moral person, or an immoral one?

Would you applaud the morality of their decision, or would you be appalled?

Refusing to accept the responsibility to try to heal your own wounds is abusive.

Refusing to accept the responsibility to try to heal your own wounds is following directly in the footsteps of the person responsible for inflicting the wounds in the first place.

The House Metaphor

I love the metaphor of each life being a house, so I was pleased to see it come up in the thread. They’ve almost got it:

Yes, exactly! You have to clean it all up. Why? Because it’s your house. It’s your living space. You have two and only two choices. Live in a filthy, disgusting mess, or clean it up. You didn’t cause the mess, but you’re the only one who can clean it up. If you deserve to live somewhere clean and nice—and you do—then you have some work to do. Yes, therapists and friends and other loved ones can help, can suggest strategies, point out spots you missed, offer you the use of tools. But only you can do the work.

It’s not fair, but neither is anything else that ultimately matters! Other things that are not fair: the fact that talents and gifts and beauty and resources and luck are distributed unevenly, the fact that nobody asked to be born and we’re all going to die.

These things aren’t fair, but they are reality. As flawed humans, all we can do is work within the limits of reality.

Is Victim Blaming Always Bad?

One of the most powerful and important conversations I have ever had with my therapist was about being raped by a date. I did something stupid: I was alone with a guy—a guy I met online and for whom absolutely nobody trustworthy had vouched—on a first date. I went with him to an isolated place, a place where nobody could hear me scream. I got a little bit physical with him—kissing mostly, both of us fully dressed and standing. He wanted to have sex right then and there. I said no, and I said it clearly. I tried to soften the “no” by saying something like that he was hot and I was so far “intrigued” or “interested for sure” or something like that, but wasn’t ready for sex yet. I specifically said the words, “Not on a first date.” He pretended to accept the no. We started kissing again, and he used that physical proximity to get leverage to (seemingly playfully, at first) get me horizontal. I said “no” and “stop” multiple times. He raped me.

I did not report this, mostly because my childhood had taught me that nobody would believe me anyway. My choices, as I saw them, were to get over it either with or without a bunch of male cops accusing me of lying. I got emergency contraception from my doctor the next day, did follow-up STD testing, and tried to put it behind me.

Please skip the sympathetic comments. I know you’re sorry it happened; thank you. Your sympathy is appreciated but ultimately unhelpful and not the point of my writing this. Thanks for understanding.

In comparison to my childhood, this was not a life-shattering trauma. I understood it, for one thing. Still, it made my secret fear that I had been born unworthy of love and deserving of abuse—that I deserved for it to happen—much more difficult to challenge and question, so it came up in therapy.

My therapist, using my affinity for mathematics and logic to get through to me, told me that I was making an error in my syllogism.

Yes, it was undeniably stupid to go somewhere isolated with a human male I’d known for two hours and for whom nobody trustworthy had vouched. I had been stupid.

My syllogism was: “I was stupid, therefore I got raped.”

This was an error, he said.

People are stupid every day without being raped, often multiple times a day. Some people are stupid a vast majority of their lives, in fact, and are never raped.

This is true. And people are raped without having first been stupid, every day.

I had done many stupid things in my life without being raped. And as a child, I had been, in some respects, unusually bright—the opposite of stupid—and yet been raped.

This proved that my syllogism was false. Being raped does not logically follow from being stupid.

The correct statement would be, he said, “I was stupid, and I got raped.” He said that, more than once:

“Holly, you were stupid. And you got raped.”

Are you furious with him? Do you want to send him an email about what a bastard he is, how mean and uncaring, how cruel and victim-blaming?

You’re wrong. He was absolutely right.

If I had declined going to the isolated area with the guy, he might have played the long game and raped me the first time we were alone in his apartment or mine, a week or month later. Or he might have accepted a date to a public area and tried to talk me into going to the isolated area later, and I might or might not have agreed. Or he might’ve canceled the date and moved on to the next victim. There was, and is, no way to know this. It would remain forever unknowable.

That conversation, once I spent a few days really integrating it, set me free—but probably not in the way you think.

It didn’t make the memory stop hurting. It didn’t restore my lost trust (what little I had possessed) in the idea that men are human, not monsters. Nor did it cause me to stop fully blaming myself.

To the contrary, it caused me to blame myself a little bit more. What do I mean? I stopped blaming myself in a false and emotionally damaging way—wallowing in the idea that I was some sort of magnet for rapists, and had always been so—and accepted the appropriate amount of responsibility. It let me draw a neat and helpful line. On one side of the line was my responsibility—having made a stupid and dangerous decision. On the other side of the line was the rapist’s responsibility—for raping me.

The memory of that rape doesn’t hurt anymore. It makes me a little bit sad, and that’s all.

That’s freedom.

Exactly!

The Coming Wave of Trauma Survivors

Since the COVID school closures, about 230,000 children in the US are missing. They are simply gone, totally unaccounted for—not signed up for private school or homeschool, according to publicly available data.

Some are probably fine, just being homeschooled without the proper paperwork being filled out.

Some are dead, buried in backyards because they weren’t safe at home, and the eyes of the mandated reporters in their schools were the only safeguard protecting them.

Some are being sex trafficked by addict parents.

Some are languishing in bedrooms, surfing the web all day, being half-heartedly monitored by parents who’ve given up.

Some are working to help their parents pay bills.

Some ran away when they were sent home to stay in unsafe situations, and are making their way on their own.

Of the 230,000 missing American kids, many are in bad situations. And the ones who survived this monumental crime against American children are all going to be trauma survivors.

As they start to grow up and tell their own stories, it’s going to be ugly.

They are going to be justifiably angry about what our society did to them, robbing them of any shot at a normal childhood in order to protect adults—and mostly elderly adults, who’d already had a chance to live full lives.

All that any of us will likely ever be able to do for them is still not very much.

We will be able to affirm that they have the right to be angry.

We will be able to affirm that they see reality clearly, that they really did have their childhoods and future well-being sacrificed for the sake of adults.

We will be able to affirm that yes, it is brutally and horribly and disgustingly unfair.

If any of us find one of these survivors in close proximity to our own lives, we may be able to help in more practical ways—encourage them to go back to school, help them find a good therapist, etc.

But ultimately, it will be up to them to heal themselves. They will wallow and languish in their anger—or they won’t. They will choose to do the best they can with the terrible hand our society dealt them—or they will choose not to.

Closing Thoughts

The best way to cope with trauma is to avoid it in the first place—particularly for children. We all should take care to protect children from being exposed to inappropriate material and predatory adults, to guard their innocence, to ensure that they face only age-appropriate challenges, to be certain they know that their parents and/or other trustworthy adults will be there to protect them, love them, and defend them.

When trauma happens, the source of real healing is agency. The same agency that a rapist or other abuser takes away can be reclaimed by a survivor who chooses to do the (difficult, unfair, taxing, yes, all that) work to heal.

Our society is actively disincentivizing the agency it takes to heal. Things that an individual may not be able to do fully or perfectly on her own, but can still go quite a long way with, are being re-cast as a collective responsibility.

This is, for the most part, an excuse. If every trauma survivor waits for the transformation of society into one where healing community and high-quality therapy are available universally and for free, they will wait forever.

Trauma survivors who look around and see the world as a place that actively fights against their ability to heal have a deeper responsibility: to heal themselves and get busy making the changes they see as needed.

The Twitter thread this essay responds to started with a trauma survivor objecting to an “inspirational” quote, so it may be bad form to end on another one. But I believe it to be true, and important, and key to how trauma survivors can move through the process of healing themselves and make the world a place where what they endured is less likely to happen to others.

I am working on my own damage, speaking up about the societal incentives and disincentives that have made that harder for me to accomplish, and warning about the normalization of pedophilia. Those things are what I can do.

If something terrible has happened to you, the best question is not, “Who will fix this for me?” or “Why did this happen?” or “Who’s responsible for my situation?”

The best question is: “What can I do to help myself, and then to help others?”

(Hint: any answer that involves wallowing, whining, or waiting is probably not a helpful one.)

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