Posted by Tamar on September 12, 2005, at 17:54:14
In reply to Admitting someone hurt you versus whining?, posted by Racer on September 11, 2005, at 22:08:02
Hi Racer,
I wasn’t here last year… what you describe sounds truly appalling. I’m outraged.
I think the word ‘victim’ is used in quite different ways, which confuses the issue. People might talk about a rape victim as someone who has clearly been victimised. But when people talk about a victim mentality or a professional victim, I think they mean something else. I think they mean that people blame others for things that are (supposedly) their own responsibility, or for which they could reasonably take some responsibility.
Unfortunately, I think people who haven’t experienced successive abuses find it difficult to imagine or understand, and tend to react in a way that shows they don’t believe it. It seems that people are prepared to believe that *one* awful thing might have happened, and that the thing wasn’t your fault. But then when it emerges that similar things have happened on several occasions, people start to think you’re either making it up or that you’ve done something to deserve it or encourage it or somehow make it happen. People suggest that having low self-esteem may be part of the cause, with the subtext that it’s your responsibility to improve your self-esteem, which might perhaps save *you* from being a victim again but doesn’t address the question of how to stop people assaulting women. As long as the focus is on what the victims might be doing ‘wrong’, the abusers are absolved of their wrongdoing. It seems to me that the term ‘professional victim’ is effectively about a failure to believe that numerous bad things can happen to one person.Having been subjected to several sexual assaults in my life, I get angry when people don’t believe it happened, or when they assume I did something to invite it. But for a long time I wondered what I was doing wrong to cause all these people to assault me. Now I’ve come to believe that if people assaulted me, they were the ones in the wrong. I didn’t ask for it. Not once.
When I started therapy I told my therapist that I didn’t know how people could call themselves survivors of abuse or rape. The idea simply didn’t make sense to me. I said I was a victim because we live in a world where sexual assault is permitted (by social attitudes, low conviction rates, certain kinds of pornography etc.). But I think now I’m closer to calling myself a survivor. And I think the only way to move from victim to survivor was to begin to accept that in fact there wasn’t anything I could have done about it; that people really did bad things to me. At first, I found that harder than believing it was all my fault. For me the change was partly a question of being believed and partly a question of being allowed to be angry.
I don’t think it is possible for someone who has been repeatedly sexually harassed and assaulted to be a ‘professional victim’ about it. To be honest, I don’t think the term ‘professional victim’ is terribly helpful. As far as I can tell, it’s most often used by people who think we should pull up our socks and stop complaining about the difficulties of being women/disabled/poor/non-white/whatever.
(Here endeth the rant on sexual politics.)
And no, I don’t believe a six year-old can be ‘selfish’. My eldest child will be six in a couple of weeks. She likes things her way, but that’s completely normal for her age. The other thing is that kids that age are usually trying very hard to be good and at the same time they take comments about their behaviour very seriously. It seems to be almost an existential thing for them; if I told my daughter she was selfish she would believe she had a serious and possibly irreparable character flaw. If you were told that kind of thing regularly, I can see how you might have come to believe it.
(((((Racer)))))
I hope you can come to realise it wasn’t all your fault; that you really did experience some very bad things and that you are allowed to be angry about them.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:553954
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050912/msgs/554311.html