Posted by Tamar on October 1, 2005, at 18:41:52
In reply to circle of babble....'trauma' term, posted by B2chica on September 30, 2005, at 11:49:13
> ...i'm scared of myself...i just want help. this day can't go fast enough, see pdoc tonight at 6:00.
I hope your appointment with the p-doc went well.
> what do you do when typical distractions don't work. i've tried treadmill, diving into work, journaling, painting. mostly i can't concentrate on any of them. i don't want S. but i can't stop thinking about it.When I’m finding it hard to distract myself it’s usually because my anxiety is worse than my depression. I find anxiety the hardest thing to deal with. I used to sleep a lot to deal with anxiety. More recently I’ve been trying to find comfort with my husband. Sometimes being held calms me down. It’s all about the physical warmth and contact. I don’t know if it would work for everyone; would it be worth trying?
> i have so many emotions about what happened. mostly i'm scared. i wish you babblers could make a big circle and i could just hide in the middle for a while.
I wish I could protect you and help you feel less scared. (((((B2C)))))
> i Hate the word Trauma. they keep saying that. i don't feel like what i went through was trauma. i think of trauma as a witness to a murder, being violently r@ped, living in a war zone, growing up around violent alcoholics.
It’s strange… I used to feel the same way. I felt I couldn’t call what happened to me ‘trauma’ because it wasn’t violent enough. No broken bones, no blood; what was I complaining about? I was just weak and foolish for minding so much about where a couple of guys put their hands and their penises. And I hated myself for being so weak. But… now I think, maybe I’m not weak. Maybe it feels so awful because it actually was awful.
I’ve read a lot of things about people who have gone through terrible experiences without feeling traumatised… and those people usually had good support at the time. But people who don't get good support at the time inevitably find things very difficult.
> i feel i don't deserve the term survivor and i especially hate the word victim.
There are no good words for this. It’s so hard to describe what these experiences do to our identities.
I’ve been thinking for a while about the way people talk about rape. They say things like ‘she was raped’ or ‘she was a rape victim’ or ‘her rapist fled the crime scene’ or stuff like that… and it means the focus is all on the woman; all the verbs centre around her as if she were the only character in the story, and the men fade into the background. I’ve stopped saying things like ‘I was raped.’ I prefer to say ‘A couple of men raped me.’ It puts the focus back onto them. *They* did it; I didn’t do it. It’s a small distinction in language, but it was the way I found of describing my experience in a way that makes sense to me. I think that’s a struggle that many people go through after experiencing something so very troubling.
I hope you’re feeling better soon.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:561254
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051001/msgs/561705.html