Years upon years of therapy I've struggled to throw off the yoke of trauma, and shame.
It is not a new thing that I believe that everything is my fault. During various events I knew in the moment it was my fault for not stopping whatever it was.
But yesterday I started talking about it specifically in context to shit that happened with adult men when I was a teenager...how anything that happened was my fault because I didn't stop it. About how I tried to figure out the dance of compliance: comply just enough to satisfy them and keep them from becoming angry and doing something way worse, and figuring out what my line is...how much can I tolerate, how much do I allow...how much is too much and then they think they can cross my line? And how terror kept me from just saying "no". How I didn't get to be traumatized because whatever did happen, I "allowed". And...how I'm not able to deny the trauma that pumps through my veins, and oozes out my pours anymore.
And I also realized during that revelation that it isn't just in the context of perverts; it's also all of the shit with my mom (her nervous breakdowns, her half assed suicide attempts), and really anything that goes wrong. I'm now editing a few weeks later, and this last week at work I had a migraine and could do nothing but hide my head under a pillow and wait for death or my sumatriptan to kick in, and while I was down and other people were in charge of my little lady she fell. And my first thought was, "it's all my fault...if I just would have been there this wouldn't have happened. I didn't stop it. It's my fault." Fortunately I recognized it as an old pattern, and yet, the hook is still there.
