Question:
That’s where I’m more fortunate that you and Raven I think, Spider. I know its silly to compare misfortune and tragedy and trauma – yours was worse, no mine was worse, etc. They’re all awful! But my memories only cover from around 11 p.m. one Friday night to sometime that Monday afternoon. And they’re effectively "gone" from my mind. I pulled them out once and handed them (in writing) to my therapist – just to prove I could I think (a control thing). But I don’t know if I could again. Even in that one time I wrote them down for my therapist, I couldn’t remember the guy’s name for any amount of concentrating in the world – and I’m sure I knew it because he’d been an acquaintance of a friend of mine, and I’d known his name. When talking to a colleague about my very negative opinion of the therapy tool called abreaction (reliving the past in the allegedly "safe" setting of your therapist’s office), she commented that the brain is a miraculous thing – and why on earth do we think it could be a *good* idea to override the brain’s miraculous programming of suppression, through our efforts to *force* memories forward into the conscious mind??? So I guess we all have the good fortune to remember what we want, forget what we need to, and move forward as best we can! :-) While we’re on this topic, I’d like to comment about another commonality I’ve noticed between short-term violent assault and long-term violent abuse. I used to be one of those judgmental folks about battered wives – I’ve never in my life permitted a man to hit me, and rarely tolerated any kind of verbal or emotional tirades unless they were rare and experienced in a joint moment of emotional frustration. Why do they stay? was my most common question – god, I was so stupid. Know how I finally learned to let go of my judgmentalness about that? I was ranting to my therapist one day about all the totally STUPID questions that people asked me about the rape afterwards. Why did I leave the sliding glass door unlocked? Why didn’t I try to dial 911? Why didn’t I try to run out of the house? Why did I stay there on Saturday while he left for 2 hours? How hard did I really try to fight him off – sheesh, I had a gun, why didn’t I shoot him? Why was it 6 hours after he’d left on Monday before I called for help? Why did I cause (i.e., want) this thing to happen to me? (That, of course, is the underlying question of all the other questions.) The similarity to this ranting and my own insensitive, stupid questions about why battered women stay hit me in the office that day. One of those epiphany things – "Aha!" – you know the kind 
That opened the door for me to see all of the commonalities shared by people who suffer violence and abuse from others no matter what the circumstances. Male or female. One hour or 30 years of suffering. Verbal battering, violent rape, the occasional slap or push, shaming children and yelling names at them. They all share a lot of the same awful things. Wow… this is not alt.support.abuse — sorry for going on so long! There seems to be a subset of the ASD group though who are bonding together through their similar abuse experiences. Guess I wanted to clarify my own experiences and ideas to that group. And this is still an issue deserving of support for the broader range of relationship issues. I hope those of you who might possibly think we should be carrying this on at alt.support.abuse will be tolerant of us and overlook the threads if you’re uncomfortable reading about it. (Just as Wildman helped me come to the understanding that I needed to do the same with the feud thing that was making me uncomfortable.) I think its great that those who are going through divorce and relationship issues that include an abuse component can get and give support here as well JMO, Janie The story you posted sent chills up my spine … thank you for posting it. Like you … I can relate only too well. Why did you stay so long? Why do any of us stay too long? I’m guessing we are human with human emotions. We are filled with fear … hope … guilt … I just wish that after it’s all said and done … I could erase the memories. But then half my life would be gone. Spiderweb
– Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cann be friends with anyone else in the world. To reply via email replace "JLT" with "janiet"
Response:
The story you posted sent chills up my spine … thank you for posting it. Like you … I can relate only too well. Why did you stay so long? Why do any of us stay too long? I’m guessing we are human with human emotions. We are filled with fear … hope … guilt … I just wish that after it’s all said and done … I could erase the memories. But then half my life would be gone. Spiderweb
Response:
For some real eye-opening discussions of the victim abuse-reactions, read the literature on concentration camp survivors and prisoners of war– In the thread on "Karma Free?", Dharma Troll describes a rat experiment where rats are conditioned to press a bar in the hope they’ll get a food pellet. First they get a pellet every time. But then at very infrequent and random intervals.
<snip – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -I got both, the intermittent reward and the uncontrollable illogical punishment. Like the rat, I became depressed and traumatized. Timmy, it’s a long hard struggle to get out of the private hells we’ve been living in. Many will offer naive advice about "working on your marriage" and "taking responsibility for your part in it", or suggest marriage therapy. People like me and Janie who have lived in it understand. -raven
Response:
For some real eye-opening discussions of the victim abuse-reactions, read the literature on concentration camp survivors and prisoners of war–
Which I think everyone should read up on. You can learn so much … and perhaps life would make a little more sense … the why’s become more clear … the understanding becomes more naturally. Excellent idea Mary T Spiderweb
Response:
- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – In the thread on "Karma Free?", Dharma Troll describes a rat experiment where rats are conditioned to press a bar in the hope they’ll get a food pellet. First they get a pellet every time. But then at very infrequent and random intervals. The intermittent random reward keeps the rat obsessed with pressing the bar. The doling out of scraps of affection and love keeps people in relationships that are predominantly abusive. Hoping for change. there’s another rat experiment…. I think I read about this is "Trauma and Recovery" by Dr. Judith Hermann. It’s one of the classic books on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. She talks alot about war veterans, and also about abuse, to children and in marriages. the experiment shocks rats with enough electricity (via the metal cage floor) to be painful but not dangerous. A light goes on in its cage before the rat is shocked. The rat learns he can avoid shocks by pressing a bar. Soon he’s over pressing that bar the second that light goes on. Life can go on normally. After he learns this, and gets used to it…..the experimenters disconnect the bar. The rat sees the light , presses the bar, but he is shocked anyways. He now has NO control over the shock. He is being "punished" randomly and cannot avoid it. There is no place he can be and not be shocked. What happens is the rat withdraws and becomes passive, huddled in a corner. It stops playing, interacting, hardly eating, becomes nonresponsive, even though there are long periods between shocks. It manifests what we would call severe depression and traumatization in a human. The rat becomes traumatized when it’s world becomes illogical and unpredictable. When I read that , I cried, I realized that’s what had happened to me over years and years. Once I filed for divorce, got out of the house, I thought ALOT about what had happened. I read bunches about emotional/verbal abuse. But there was one thing I could NOT figure out. Why did I let it go on, why did I stay? I experienced the same thing as the rat.. unpredictable punishment I had no control over. There was no logical connection between what was happening on any given day, and his rage. There was no warning, often no perceptable "trigger". I withdrew, saying and doing as little as possible, in the vain hope I wouldn’t "make him angry"…. since that’s what he would accuse me of. Sometimes he would totally denied he had been angry. Saying I had "made up" the vicious words, the threats. Leaving me wondering if I was starting to go crazy and hallucinate.
It sounds a lot like my ex-wife, however I stuck it out, not in the hope that it would get better, since the only change that made any sense was one within myself. Still kept trying. The best was asking what whas bothering her and to continually get the reply "nothing" and if I pressed she would get angry or shut up completely. Behaviour of that kind finally has you giving up or ocassionally getting angry out of sheer frustration. What I could never understand was the erratic mood swings that I had to watch. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I got both, the intermittent reward and the uncontrollable illogical punishment. Like the rat, I became depressed and traumatized. Timmy, it’s a long hard struggle to get out of the private hells we’ve been living in. Many will offer naive advice about "working on your marriage" and "taking responsibility for your part in it", or suggest marriage therapy. People like me and Janie who have lived in it understand. -raven
Response:
SPidey, you;ve been there? -raven
yes … as a child … and for 13 years of marriage. My father … my first husband … if that’s what you want to call them, and my girlfriends brother … I’ve only had about eight years of abuse free living … these past eight years … have been so good. That’s thirty one years of being knocked up against walls … rape … verbal abuse (and yes, there IS verbal abuse) … etc. Don’t want to talk about it now … tried to a while back and the world came crashing down around me. I’m not ready yet. Spiderweb
If you like this post and would like to receive updates from this blog, please subscribe our feed.