How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel.
When you are in the early stages of your healing process, that’s going to feel horribly invalidating. It feels like someone is ‘blaming’ you for the abuse you experienced, which is unfair.
ESPECIALLY SINCE WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S ABUSE OF US.
A lot of the self-help stuff at this point, in general, is just going to be hugely triggering:
- “You define your own self-worth!”
- “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
- “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
- “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
- “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”
Like hot damn, NO, guys. No.
We say this shit to people who are just figuring out what’s happening to them, are in emotional crisis, and (it can feel to them) like we are telling them that they are responsible for their own pain.
Meanwhile, they are struggling with all the pain and hurt they have endured, all the confusion they’ve been dealing with, and often reconstructing their sense of reality and what happened.
This is the wrong tool for this stage of healing.
What someone in this early stage of the process needs is emotional support and validation. We really need to honor that this is a process, and that we all go through it at one point or another. Now, it is completely fair to not be able to support someone at this stage of the process. Truly this is what a good therapist is for, to support someone as they go through their emotions and thoughts and triggers, and exhaustively discusses the minutia of everything that happened.
Recognizing where we are at is so important.
ESPECIALLY since there’s a point where all of this becomes empowering. THAT’S when you know that you are farther along in your healing process. When stuff like this no longer makes you feel pain but power:
- “You define your own self-worth!”
- “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
- “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
- “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
- “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”
Like, YES, I get to define my own self-worth! I get to be the person whose opinions matter most to me! I get to choose and create my own reality! Often starting with who else I allow in with me. I get to decide I don’t want to live this way anymore, that I am over it, and I get to walk away! I can shift my emotional state by focusing on awesome stuff! I don’t have to be sad anymore!
Suddenly it’s response-ability instead of responsibility.
It doesn’t feel fault-oriented!
I totally get why we respond to in-crisis victims with this.
Because we’ve reached this place after going through so much pain and hurt, and we so empathize with someone else who is going through it. But we have to respect that healing and recovery is a process. We go through the experience so we can make our own internal shifts. Our growth happens in stages.
Being goal-oriented doesn’t respect the process.
There is so much value in experiencing the validation of our pain experience. That, yes, we were victimized and it was not okay. And maybe we begin to allow ourselves to experience anger on our own behalf, which maybe we haven’t done until now. That’s so, so important. We need our anger. It lets us know something is wrong. And for many of us finally begins to allow us to center ourselves in our own experience.
Which is so important, because a lot of abuse is about centering the abuser at the expense of ourselves.
And then someone blithely comes along with “being angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”. Knock. it. off. self-help. people. It’s well-intentioned but comes from a lack of understanding of the healing process.
Can someone get ‘stuck’ in being a victim? Absolutely. Is that necessarily our business? Probably not. And will they ever be able to grow past that stage if their experience isn’t validated? It’s more unlikely.
Some people do use the ‘victim’ phase to meet their emotional need for attention and caregiving from others.
And they get stuck in that stage. And it’s perfectly okay to recognize that and not want to be coerced into providing that. That’s good boundaries! Recognizing where we are at and what we want to consent to participate in!
But we also don’t get to dictate to them their healing journey.
It’s hard and there are a lot of factors and nuances, definitely. But the core piece of healthy behaviors and choices and actions is recognizing that we all are living our own lives and on our own journey.
I really do feel like the process is the point.