Now we've had a couple of people in the past who were upset or bothered because they had gotten the impression that we, and the empowered plural community as a whole, were 'anti-survivor'-- that we think badly of or don't support people who have experienced past abuse or trauma, or who consider their own system to be a result of trauma, even if it's healthy and functional now and they aren't trying to integrate. But it would be pretty hypocritical of us if we were to claim to not support people with trauma in their past, wouldn't it be? We live in a traumatizing society. American culture, and Western culture in general, has a long and rather inglorious history of generally brutal treatment of children, and of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it. Too many people in our society suffer alone because they have no support network, because technology has isolated us so much from each other. We have never claimed anywhere that our own histories have been nothing but sunshine and lollipops. The difference is that, for most of us, we consider those kinds of things to be private-- to be worked out on our own or with the help of trusted friends/therapists, not something to be talked about on a public forum. We understand that for some people, talking about it is cathartic, and we honor that if it's done responsibly. But that's just not how we are. We support any form of taking a good, honest look at oneself, and to try to identify whatever crosses we may still be carrying from the past. We support any form of trying to change and move beyond things which are causing you pain or holding you back. If anything in your past is keeping you down, we support anyone who is trying to work it out and live a happier and less fearful life. It's probably our mentions of what we don't support which have caused some people to think we don't support survivors. So it's probably better if we clear that up now and be explicit about what we DON'T support. We do not support using "healing" as an excuse to sit around waiting to have a life. We do not support people becoming so dependant on their therapists that they absolutely HAVE to be in their office three times a week and can't work out things on their own if they come up-- if you're not being taught how to resolve things on your own, your therapist isn't doing his/her job. We do not support it when people run off wobbling and panicking every time they see something on TV that upsets them, thinking that just because they got "triggered" by it then it MUST be indicative of some unrecovered trauma in their past. Just because you don't like to see people getting chopped up with chainsaws does not mean that you actually did see someone being chopped up with a chainsaw. We do not support it when people speculate on every imaginable form of trauma existing in their past and then refuse to try to verify or confirm whether any of it actually happened, claiming they're 'too afraid to find out,' while basically asking everyone around them to accord them status for having supposedly survived all of this. (Conversely, we also don't support parents who respond to any accusations of abuse by claiming that the child MUST have false memories, whether RMT was involved or not, but that's a rant for another day.) We do not support using an unhappy past of any kind to sit around and do nothing with your life, to indulge in self-destructive behavior, to refuse responsibility for your actions and making everyone else be responsible for you, to whine constantly to everyone around you, to ask for any kind of special attention and special privileges, to focus on it so much you can't get anything else done. If you aren't doing any of this, if you're being responsible for your life and getting help when you need it-- if you're basically following all the principles listed on In Essence-- then we support you, regardless of your past. We support that and we support responsibility. It's the fact that so many trauma-focused plural groups do so many of the things listed above that irritates us; it has nothing to do with their actual pasts. But if you're responsible for yourself and your group, and working on your issues actively? That's great. What bothers us is the fact that it's the people who DON'T who've set a terrible precedent for plurals, and for abuse survivors in general. Back |