I started with “Don’t spank your kids,” or, “why do we spank our kids,” and the first answer we all know, you have to teach them right from wrong, and if we will allow that adults hitting kids “accidentally” teaches hitting which may be wrong, then the next argument is strength. Right?
So I’ve been addressing that for a few years.
I detest the cursed “Strong” hashtags, the same bloody day, when are we supposed to cry?
The thing, my thing is, if you talk about resilience and strength, about growth from pain, you are not really fighting the trauma, you’re not really with the victims, I mean not in the sense that you’re actually opposing the trauma.
Desensitization is the social goal of much pain, and the usual result of pain anyhow, whether socially intentioned or not, and so strength and resilience are simply the fruition of the trauma, meaning in line, in spirit with the trauma. It’s been a process of evolution to get us here, all of this has been selected for, your strength is very much the evolved socially desired result of the trauma; your support systems after the trauma and your abusers or whatever hurt you have been partners in producing the stronger, more resilient you.
When you heal, and come back stronger, you are not breaking your programming, as perhaps we like to say, not at all, all of it is a part of human social evolution. The thing about the thing, my thing, is this is all of us, or almost all of us. It is a section of a logical mobius strip that part of the present human condition is that we exist in a ubiquitous state of group conflict and so we always blame some group of people for every problem and really cannot even see a problem that each and every one of our groups has in common. How could strength be bad, right? Resilience, survival – this is bad?
I’m saying, it’s enabling, it’s victim- wait, not shaming, not blaming . . . victim burdening, is what it is. Am I re-inventing this wheel, that’s the term, right? The victims are supposed to solve the situation, and my resilience is supposed to be the answer for my tormentors’ violence, for another’s abuse. There is pain and abuse in the world, and what is the answer, that the victims should complain but move on and accept whatever changes are forced upon them. This is gaslighting ourselves.
And – yes! Anything can be both good and bad! If we are talking about a thing that can’t ever be bad, we have left reality for the social world of taboos.
Which, yes, that could also be bad.
That is not being on the side of the victims, when we only care after the fact, and only enough to encourage them to strengthen themselves, and it isn’t looking after future victims to normalize that requirement. We talk about cycles of abuse, and that is it right there, in minimalist, bare as can be: trauma and strength, yin and yang. Cause and effect, action/reaction – I’m saying we should protect people, try to have fewer victims, that if we care, we should attempt to address causes, stop normalizing, even mythologizing the damage.
Jeff
Oct. 1st., 2021
Abuse with an Excuse 