Feb 17, 2023·edited Feb 17, 2023Liked by Holly MathNerd
Well said, and I'll add this.
Yes, the victim does own the healing (or at least to start down the path to it, with assistance as necessary along the way). The verbiage is unpleasant, but that doesn't make it not true.
We have all been harmed by other people, and in most cases, LOTS of other people. I like your "big party in a small apartment" analogy. It drives this point home with a 24 lb sledge hammer.
I've mentioned before that I lost a son when he was only 6 weeks old. I carried around a lot of guilt for a VERY long time. It wasn't my fault that he died, not anybody's. He was born with some CV defects.
I had a few visits with a therapist probably 15 years after my son died. She gave me a real "no shitter" lecture. "You carrying this guilt around is an act of selfishness, bordering on narcissism."
WTF???
And I thought about that for a week or so and decided she was right. So I let it go.
I get what you are saying. But how do you change the voice in your head, the anger, the guilt. I felt guilty when I went off to college a year early for my senior year in high school and left my brother behind to deal with the breakdown of my family. How do I release that guilt? Using my intellect I can reason out that at 18 I was unable to take care of a high school kid, feed, cloth, and educate him. I know that deep down inside and have talked to my brother about it. It never occurred to him, to leave my mom and go to school with me. This was also late 1970s. Different times.
As I got older, and had a lot of therapy, what I want to know is how to disengage from the negativity in my own head. How do I understand and heal from these events.I got the trifecta of bad parents, changes in society and just general shitty life when I was younger. I just need the tools on how to accept what has happened and move on. To let it go, and not have it define me. I have made choices, no children, education, jobs and I have done well. I just wish I could forgive myself, but I expect too much of myself, I never had the power to make changes when I was a kid.
With 'simple' yet profound clarity you express the truth of human integrity, and in so doing implicitly clear away the tangles of self-defeating rationalizations. While it has long been my mantra that acquiescence to a victim mentality is one's own choice, your concise dealings with particular issues is stirring and challenging. I appreciate your serious work.
You have generous heart, and it comes through in your writing. In sharing your life’s lessons, you’ve inspired me to do a better job “cleaning up my own house.” I can’t find a good therapist where I live, so it’s much appreciated.
Fantastic piece, and I agree so much. The house analogy is apt.
Your therapist sounds honest and incredibly insightful -- much more so than any I've ever found. I'm currently without a therapist but am looking. If you don't mind my asking, do you know what school of therapy he primarily uses (like CBT, ACT, psychoanalytic, motivational interviewing, etc.)? Perhaps I'd have more luck with a different modality. (If this is too forward/personal a question, please, of course, feel free to decline or ignore.)
So timely coming at a time when I need the message your experience and perspective provides.
Some background....
My sister, who is also my identical twin, has had a life with far more knocks than anyone deserves, and it has left her a bitter and angry person. She was a victim of abuse almost from birth until the age of 55, when her abuser, our mother, passed away. At full term we were tiny, totalling just over 6 lbs. I was the heartier one, but my twin's frailty set her up for low cognition and epilepsy.
When I say she was abused, I don't mean she was physically, sexually or verbally abused. She developed epilepsy when we were about 7 years old, and from then on, because of extreme over protection she was robbed of her autonomy and never allowed to reach her full human potential.
Out of fear our mother refused to allow my sister to reach maturity levels normal to developing children and it got more extreme with each passing year. Yes, she was cognitively delayed but instead of encouraging and capitalizing on her natural abilities, she was schooled in special education classrooms which were little more than holding cells for kids with disabilities and behaviors much more severe than hers. Yet somehow, she learned to read and verbally express herself well within normal range. Math and logical reasoning were beyond her ability. Her IQ is 71, just under low-normal. Anyway, she was forced to live at home, cloistered away from any threats to her safety outside of our mother's shortsighted attempts to protect her from the dangers lurking beyond her suffocating cocoon. You see, it was all about my mother's comfort level, not what was best for my sister.
In the cruel way fate bedevils some, my sister had the ignominious disadvantage of observing her twin enjoying opportunities and freedom, a normal life she was being denied. We were close until I reached middle-school, and then my life experiences and growth exceeded the boundaries of hers leaving her behind in a prison built with walls constructed of smothering love, thwarted experience, and shackles of control stronger than steel. This is abuse of the sort that isn't easily seen from the outside. To add insult to injury, she realized she was being deprived of having a normal life, and yet she could not fight against the selfishly indulgent perversely overbearing and controlling behavior our mother imposed upon her. Constantly told she couldn’t do this or that, she might get hurt, or something bad would happen, she finally gave up and accepted what she was told.
I have come to believe that her epilepsy was exacerbated by the way she was forced to live, a virtual prisoner in a constant state of terrible frustration and the repression she endured. By the time our mother died, my sister had reached a point where her self-confidence was so low and her resentment so intense, she couldn’t be open to learning the life skills she would need to be on her own. For 2 years I tried to help her toward independence, but it was a losing battle. Her resentment against me couldn’t be overcome. To make it all the more complicated, I live an 8-hour drive one way from where she lives. My family and my job needed me, too. For 2 years I made weekly to semi-weekly drives to visit her to get eyes on her situation. I stayed in frequent touch with family and friends who I enlisted to help keep an eye out, too.
Finally, the only option was to find a state provided and Medicare funded agency to provide daily assistance so that she could live in her own apartment and have some semblance of autonomy. She needs a lot of help, but she resents and despises being treated like a child, which is how she regards the way the people who assist her treat her, and naturally that includes me, too. In many ways, she is intellectually a child and reasons like one. This isn’t her fault, but her anger and resentment prevents her from having any appreciation or gratitude for the help she is given, whether from me or others.
As her vision has deteriorated and her stability became more compromised, along with seizures several times a month it was no longer possible for her to live without full-time 24-hour care and supervision. For the past 2 years she has been living in a small group home with 2 somewhat more disabled women than herself. She’s miserable. She is hateful to the three daytime and 2 nighttime staff, lashes out at them verbally, orders them around and is generally just a nasty-tempered shrew.
She calls me several times a week, and still adhering to our mother’s admonishments to never tell her sister what’s really going on, she chitchats about the weather and puts a pretty face on everything. Once in a while she’ll let something slip, but when I question her, she gets defensive and hostile.
Sorry, this is turning into a novel. The point is your topic hit home because I received an hour-long phone call from the staff supervisor of her home telling me about my sister’s behaviors and the problems they were having. They have their hands full. My sister called this morning, and after a couple of minutes of idle chitchat, I mentioned that the supervisor had called me, concerned about her, and hoping I might have some ideas as to how she and the staff could help her. Immediately, my sister launched into complaints about how she is treated, insisting it’s all their fault, she is blameless and as typically happens reaching back to when she was treated the same way by our mother. I understand why she frames her life this way, but it is nearly impossible to help her understand that she is still letting our mother rule over and control her from the grave. She refuses to take ownership of any responsibility, and perhaps she really just isn’t able to. I’m not sure.
Next time she and I talk I’m going to be ready with the following, which I’ve stolen from your story:
"You have the right to be angry.
You really did have your childhood and
future well-being sacrificed for the sake of our mother.
Yes, it is brutally and horribly and disgustingly unfair.
But ultimately, it is up to you to heal yourself. You can wallow and languish in your anger—or you won’t. You can choose to do the best you can with the terrible hand you were dealt —or you will choose not to.
The same agency that mother took away from you can be reclaimed by you if you choose to do the difficult, unfair, taxing work to heal.
The best question is not, “Who will fix this for me or treat me the way I want to be treated?” 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?”
Maybe it will help. Maybe not. It really is her choice to make.
Thanks, Holly. You truly are providing your readers with a wisdom-filled but also humbly expressed point of view.
We find the American attachment to "therapy" baffling. When I've poked it I don't think I've ever found anything but BS at $Stupid/"hr". The wheat always turns out to be what I'd get from my Nanna or Auntie Fran freemans and unwrapped in obfuscating gobbledegook.
Wean yourselves off of it; pour the pills down the loo; and... "Clean your room!". ;-)
I think I understand why some people find the "healing is my responsibility" framing somewhat unpalatable. I understand that this framing is not meant to convey blame or shame, but it follows a pattern that is often used for blaming and shaming.
When someone says "You have a responsibility to do _x_," there is usually an implicit (or sometimes explicit) understanding that if you don't fulfill your responsibility, you'll carry blame. Even the phrasing, "You have a responsibility to yourself to do _y_" is often used in a shaming context.
I suspect that when people read the sentence, "Healing is your responsibility," they mentally append blame to the statement, maybe something like "...and so it's your fault that you haven't healed yet."
I understand that your usage of the word "responsibility" doesn't convey blame or shame. But I also understand why some of the Twitter users in that thread seem to miss the point and respond defensively when they see that word.
“Agency is a concept that used to horrify me, too, until I found freedom within it.”
It’s really cool when you share your journey. It’s a way of shining your light along what is often a dark and scary path. Hope is so powerful and the way you lend yours to the world is just wonderful.
One social contagion I'm desperate to see wane is this lame language habit of assuming that people are speaking in the positive about what they haven't said at all. In this example it would be the first response which asserts the quote is saying to heal completely alone. The quote neither says nor infers that to be responsible means to do so completely on ones own.
It's a gross arguing tactic that has overstayed it's welcome in the public discourse.
I'm so behind on your posts! :( Anyway I think it's awesome that you were able to draw the line dividing responsibility for what happened to you, because it is never easy. Especially if you're critical of yourself. As a hyper-pragmatist I love how your therapist broke it down. While sometimes I joke about how this hyper-pragmatism makes me incapable of love, in that I can dispassionately compartmentalize most things, it is useful in accepting responsibility for what I can and not accepting responsibility for which I shouldn't.
My own relatively tame comparison is when I friend/ex-girlfriend committed identity theft against me. I was in idiot for sharing my SSN with her back when we dated for three years, but she was the one who years later secretly opened a credit card in my name (to buy one expensive items, that's all. No other purchases.) To be fair we were still friendly after break-up. We talked often. I don't blame myself too much for being stupid and sharing that info, as I was in my early-20s and she was my first serious relationship and second overall. Of course I was going to trust her. Nor do I simply bitterly call her a greedy, immoral bitch--which she was--but if I had checked my credit history regularly like a person of self-ownership, instead of after four years and creditors calling my family, I would've noticed a strange card on there from the get-go. By the time it was all out there I was already over it.
And really, there was nothing to be done. It was a blot on my credit record that would stay on for another 3-4 years. I learned my lessons about trust, about her character, and being more judicious in the future. And about maintaining distance after you break-up with someone lol. Because I'm a mathematical, logical person I can bring past data to inform how I approach each new situation or individual while treating it as a separate encounter rather than a pattern in a chain. Separating the perpetrator from the rest of humanity comes easy to me. It would be easy to say, "oh I distrust everyone!" when in reality that's not fair and kinda awful. Despite our individual traumas one is basically saying "I'm going to prejudiced against people I don't know yet by what someone else did to me", which is incredibly shitty and shameful when you think about it.
As always I love your "please spare me the sympathy" disclaimers in your pieces. On a much less intense level I think I understand this frustration. I talk about myself and my past historically and matter-of-factly. What happened in a narrative sense, what lessons I learned. Friends who aren't as cold and logical tell me, "you must be hung up on this person", or offer sympathy. I am uninterested in ego so this is very confusing- "you're missing the point!" The focus is not me, it's what we can glean about life, humanity, ourselves, etc. I'm almost talking about myself in third person.
Brilliant as always.
Well said, and I'll add this.
Yes, the victim does own the healing (or at least to start down the path to it, with assistance as necessary along the way). The verbiage is unpleasant, but that doesn't make it not true.
We have all been harmed by other people, and in most cases, LOTS of other people. I like your "big party in a small apartment" analogy. It drives this point home with a 24 lb sledge hammer.
I've mentioned before that I lost a son when he was only 6 weeks old. I carried around a lot of guilt for a VERY long time. It wasn't my fault that he died, not anybody's. He was born with some CV defects.
I had a few visits with a therapist probably 15 years after my son died. She gave me a real "no shitter" lecture. "You carrying this guilt around is an act of selfishness, bordering on narcissism."
WTF???
And I thought about that for a week or so and decided she was right. So I let it go.
I get what you are saying. But how do you change the voice in your head, the anger, the guilt. I felt guilty when I went off to college a year early for my senior year in high school and left my brother behind to deal with the breakdown of my family. How do I release that guilt? Using my intellect I can reason out that at 18 I was unable to take care of a high school kid, feed, cloth, and educate him. I know that deep down inside and have talked to my brother about it. It never occurred to him, to leave my mom and go to school with me. This was also late 1970s. Different times.
As I got older, and had a lot of therapy, what I want to know is how to disengage from the negativity in my own head. How do I understand and heal from these events.I got the trifecta of bad parents, changes in society and just general shitty life when I was younger. I just need the tools on how to accept what has happened and move on. To let it go, and not have it define me. I have made choices, no children, education, jobs and I have done well. I just wish I could forgive myself, but I expect too much of myself, I never had the power to make changes when I was a kid.
With 'simple' yet profound clarity you express the truth of human integrity, and in so doing implicitly clear away the tangles of self-defeating rationalizations. While it has long been my mantra that acquiescence to a victim mentality is one's own choice, your concise dealings with particular issues is stirring and challenging. I appreciate your serious work.
You have generous heart, and it comes through in your writing. In sharing your life’s lessons, you’ve inspired me to do a better job “cleaning up my own house.” I can’t find a good therapist where I live, so it’s much appreciated.
Fantastic piece, and I agree so much. The house analogy is apt.
Your therapist sounds honest and incredibly insightful -- much more so than any I've ever found. I'm currently without a therapist but am looking. If you don't mind my asking, do you know what school of therapy he primarily uses (like CBT, ACT, psychoanalytic, motivational interviewing, etc.)? Perhaps I'd have more luck with a different modality. (If this is too forward/personal a question, please, of course, feel free to decline or ignore.)
So timely coming at a time when I need the message your experience and perspective provides.
Some background....
My sister, who is also my identical twin, has had a life with far more knocks than anyone deserves, and it has left her a bitter and angry person. She was a victim of abuse almost from birth until the age of 55, when her abuser, our mother, passed away. At full term we were tiny, totalling just over 6 lbs. I was the heartier one, but my twin's frailty set her up for low cognition and epilepsy.
When I say she was abused, I don't mean she was physically, sexually or verbally abused. She developed epilepsy when we were about 7 years old, and from then on, because of extreme over protection she was robbed of her autonomy and never allowed to reach her full human potential.
Out of fear our mother refused to allow my sister to reach maturity levels normal to developing children and it got more extreme with each passing year. Yes, she was cognitively delayed but instead of encouraging and capitalizing on her natural abilities, she was schooled in special education classrooms which were little more than holding cells for kids with disabilities and behaviors much more severe than hers. Yet somehow, she learned to read and verbally express herself well within normal range. Math and logical reasoning were beyond her ability. Her IQ is 71, just under low-normal. Anyway, she was forced to live at home, cloistered away from any threats to her safety outside of our mother's shortsighted attempts to protect her from the dangers lurking beyond her suffocating cocoon. You see, it was all about my mother's comfort level, not what was best for my sister.
In the cruel way fate bedevils some, my sister had the ignominious disadvantage of observing her twin enjoying opportunities and freedom, a normal life she was being denied. We were close until I reached middle-school, and then my life experiences and growth exceeded the boundaries of hers leaving her behind in a prison built with walls constructed of smothering love, thwarted experience, and shackles of control stronger than steel. This is abuse of the sort that isn't easily seen from the outside. To add insult to injury, she realized she was being deprived of having a normal life, and yet she could not fight against the selfishly indulgent perversely overbearing and controlling behavior our mother imposed upon her. Constantly told she couldn’t do this or that, she might get hurt, or something bad would happen, she finally gave up and accepted what she was told.
I have come to believe that her epilepsy was exacerbated by the way she was forced to live, a virtual prisoner in a constant state of terrible frustration and the repression she endured. By the time our mother died, my sister had reached a point where her self-confidence was so low and her resentment so intense, she couldn’t be open to learning the life skills she would need to be on her own. For 2 years I tried to help her toward independence, but it was a losing battle. Her resentment against me couldn’t be overcome. To make it all the more complicated, I live an 8-hour drive one way from where she lives. My family and my job needed me, too. For 2 years I made weekly to semi-weekly drives to visit her to get eyes on her situation. I stayed in frequent touch with family and friends who I enlisted to help keep an eye out, too.
Finally, the only option was to find a state provided and Medicare funded agency to provide daily assistance so that she could live in her own apartment and have some semblance of autonomy. She needs a lot of help, but she resents and despises being treated like a child, which is how she regards the way the people who assist her treat her, and naturally that includes me, too. In many ways, she is intellectually a child and reasons like one. This isn’t her fault, but her anger and resentment prevents her from having any appreciation or gratitude for the help she is given, whether from me or others.
As her vision has deteriorated and her stability became more compromised, along with seizures several times a month it was no longer possible for her to live without full-time 24-hour care and supervision. For the past 2 years she has been living in a small group home with 2 somewhat more disabled women than herself. She’s miserable. She is hateful to the three daytime and 2 nighttime staff, lashes out at them verbally, orders them around and is generally just a nasty-tempered shrew.
She calls me several times a week, and still adhering to our mother’s admonishments to never tell her sister what’s really going on, she chitchats about the weather and puts a pretty face on everything. Once in a while she’ll let something slip, but when I question her, she gets defensive and hostile.
Sorry, this is turning into a novel. The point is your topic hit home because I received an hour-long phone call from the staff supervisor of her home telling me about my sister’s behaviors and the problems they were having. They have their hands full. My sister called this morning, and after a couple of minutes of idle chitchat, I mentioned that the supervisor had called me, concerned about her, and hoping I might have some ideas as to how she and the staff could help her. Immediately, my sister launched into complaints about how she is treated, insisting it’s all their fault, she is blameless and as typically happens reaching back to when she was treated the same way by our mother. I understand why she frames her life this way, but it is nearly impossible to help her understand that she is still letting our mother rule over and control her from the grave. She refuses to take ownership of any responsibility, and perhaps she really just isn’t able to. I’m not sure.
Next time she and I talk I’m going to be ready with the following, which I’ve stolen from your story:
"You have the right to be angry.
You really did have your childhood and
future well-being sacrificed for the sake of our mother.
Yes, it is brutally and horribly and disgustingly unfair.
But ultimately, it is up to you to heal yourself. You can wallow and languish in your anger—or you won’t. You can choose to do the best you can with the terrible hand you were dealt —or you will choose not to.
The same agency that mother took away from you can be reclaimed by you if you choose to do the difficult, unfair, taxing work to heal.
The best question is not, “Who will fix this for me or treat me the way I want to be treated?” 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?”
Maybe it will help. Maybe not. It really is her choice to make.
Thanks, Holly. You truly are providing your readers with a wisdom-filled but also humbly expressed point of view.
The English reaction: "Well... Duh!".
We find the American attachment to "therapy" baffling. When I've poked it I don't think I've ever found anything but BS at $Stupid/"hr". The wheat always turns out to be what I'd get from my Nanna or Auntie Fran freemans and unwrapped in obfuscating gobbledegook.
Wean yourselves off of it; pour the pills down the loo; and... "Clean your room!". ;-)
I think I understand why some people find the "healing is my responsibility" framing somewhat unpalatable. I understand that this framing is not meant to convey blame or shame, but it follows a pattern that is often used for blaming and shaming.
When someone says "You have a responsibility to do _x_," there is usually an implicit (or sometimes explicit) understanding that if you don't fulfill your responsibility, you'll carry blame. Even the phrasing, "You have a responsibility to yourself to do _y_" is often used in a shaming context.
I suspect that when people read the sentence, "Healing is your responsibility," they mentally append blame to the statement, maybe something like "...and so it's your fault that you haven't healed yet."
I understand that your usage of the word "responsibility" doesn't convey blame or shame. But I also understand why some of the Twitter users in that thread seem to miss the point and respond defensively when they see that word.
“Agency is a concept that used to horrify me, too, until I found freedom within it.”
It’s really cool when you share your journey. It’s a way of shining your light along what is often a dark and scary path. Hope is so powerful and the way you lend yours to the world is just wonderful.
One social contagion I'm desperate to see wane is this lame language habit of assuming that people are speaking in the positive about what they haven't said at all. In this example it would be the first response which asserts the quote is saying to heal completely alone. The quote neither says nor infers that to be responsible means to do so completely on ones own.
It's a gross arguing tactic that has overstayed it's welcome in the public discourse.
In a completely non-religious sense: "Amen."
I'm so behind on your posts! :( Anyway I think it's awesome that you were able to draw the line dividing responsibility for what happened to you, because it is never easy. Especially if you're critical of yourself. As a hyper-pragmatist I love how your therapist broke it down. While sometimes I joke about how this hyper-pragmatism makes me incapable of love, in that I can dispassionately compartmentalize most things, it is useful in accepting responsibility for what I can and not accepting responsibility for which I shouldn't.
My own relatively tame comparison is when I friend/ex-girlfriend committed identity theft against me. I was in idiot for sharing my SSN with her back when we dated for three years, but she was the one who years later secretly opened a credit card in my name (to buy one expensive items, that's all. No other purchases.) To be fair we were still friendly after break-up. We talked often. I don't blame myself too much for being stupid and sharing that info, as I was in my early-20s and she was my first serious relationship and second overall. Of course I was going to trust her. Nor do I simply bitterly call her a greedy, immoral bitch--which she was--but if I had checked my credit history regularly like a person of self-ownership, instead of after four years and creditors calling my family, I would've noticed a strange card on there from the get-go. By the time it was all out there I was already over it.
And really, there was nothing to be done. It was a blot on my credit record that would stay on for another 3-4 years. I learned my lessons about trust, about her character, and being more judicious in the future. And about maintaining distance after you break-up with someone lol. Because I'm a mathematical, logical person I can bring past data to inform how I approach each new situation or individual while treating it as a separate encounter rather than a pattern in a chain. Separating the perpetrator from the rest of humanity comes easy to me. It would be easy to say, "oh I distrust everyone!" when in reality that's not fair and kinda awful. Despite our individual traumas one is basically saying "I'm going to prejudiced against people I don't know yet by what someone else did to me", which is incredibly shitty and shameful when you think about it.
As always I love your "please spare me the sympathy" disclaimers in your pieces. On a much less intense level I think I understand this frustration. I talk about myself and my past historically and matter-of-factly. What happened in a narrative sense, what lessons I learned. Friends who aren't as cold and logical tell me, "you must be hung up on this person", or offer sympathy. I am uninterested in ego so this is very confusing- "you're missing the point!" The focus is not me, it's what we can glean about life, humanity, ourselves, etc. I'm almost talking about myself in third person.