Some Lessons I’ve Learned V

The instincts that helped me to read abusive situations can also be relied on in non-abusive situations.

After the years of dealing with and surviving the abuse, my instincts and perceptions surrounding abusive situations were well-developed and pretty reliable. I could tell who was approaching me with intent to harm, get a sense of how bad it was going to be, and I learned to read people and respond to them in ways that might protect me, at least to a degree. And I’m not alone in that – I think this ability is one that most survivors develop.

But when I moved over to this new world, for a time it seemed that absolutely everything I had learned up to that point was irrelevant, inapplicable, and useless. I felt like I would have to start all over with everything, that even my familiarly reliable perception had to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch.

This left me feeling like I couldn’t trust myself or anything I thought I knew or anything I believed about situations or people – because in this world, what I knew, or intuited, or perceived, was all wrong. I had relied on perception and intuition for years as the one skill I possessed in my own defense, and now I had lost even that. I felt helpless and vulnerable and out of place, almost enough to stay in the life I was familiar with, just to keep that familiar ground under my feet.

And in a sense, the feeling was true. My perceptions were informed by a whole different set of circumstances than anything I was likely to find in the standard day-to-day world, and the conclusions I drew tended to rely far too heavily on suspicion and distrust – so of course my perceptions and intuitions about most situations were skewed toward the negative.

But in another sense – my abilities didn’t really have to be rebuilt at all. They just had to be fine-tuned a little to allow for a new set of parameters that hadn’t ever existed for me before. I had to learn to allow for the possibility that, if my senses felt baffled and I couldn’t see the potential problem looming or the impending craziness in the person in front of me, it might be because there was no problem, no craziness – no danger. Not every situation in this world will turn dangerous. So if I don’t see it, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m missing it – that might really mean it isn’t there.

But if I do sense danger – or if I don’t see it right away, but the feeling develops over time – I also don’t have to discount what my perception and intuition tells me just because I’m relying on senses honed by a whole different context. Even in this world, my gut will not always be wrong. There are dangers in this world – not as omnipresent as they were in mine, but certainly there. So if I sense danger, I can listen to my gut, at least to the extent of checking it out, doing some reality testing, and being careful of myself in that situation until I get a better read on it.

The important thing, really, was learning to tell the difference between a real danger and a chimerical danger.

Wanting to share my life with others who will appreciate me and my accomplishments is not a tendency of weakness or evil.

Actually – I’m not sure where I got the idea that wanting to share of myself with another was weak, or bad, or even just… abnormal.

When I was being trained as a child – and when I was being used as an adult – the concept of positive reinforcement was always used to great effect. If I did X, then I would get Y, which was perceived as a good thing. When I was young, that might mean three sips of water, or it might mean removal of some painful stimulus. When I grew older, the reward became less concrete – usually being allowed a sense of approval, superiority, specialness, and/or belonging. And when I began on the path to leaving that world behind, those feelings were some of the hardest things to leave. Where else was I ever going to get that? Where else would I ever belong? Who else would ever approve of me, make me feel special, make me feel like they cared? (A cold, distant, purely conditional caring it was – but it was still all I knew, and it still seemed a lot better than nothing.)

Wrestling with those feelings should have been enough to clue me in to the fact that no man is truly an island. Even people with very low social needs still have some social needs – everyone wants at least one person in the world who can appreciate them for who they are, celebrate with them when things go well, offer commiseration and support when things are going wrong, someone who will discuss things with them honestly but still from a place of caring… everyone wants at least one person in their lives who makes them feel special and worthwhile just for being themselves.

And expanding outward – everyone likes positive reinforcement. They like to be told they did a good job, or that their efforts are notice and appreciated. In fact, people like to hear those things so much that they can get pretty darn pissy if they think they should be hearing them and they aren’t.

So where I got the idea that, in this world, wanting or needing or desiring positive reinforcement was weak and bad, I don’t know.

Most likely, it sprang from the belief that I didn’t deserve any positive regard in this world. In my world, my job brought me a lot of status. I hated the job itself, but let’s be honest – I loved being that special.

The problem was, that the very thing which had made me so special in that world would make me an absolute pariah in this world. My whole feeling of specialness was inextricably entangled with that world, and it had not a single part of it that could translate beyond the shadows. In the light of day, I was ugly and cringing and evil. By this world’s standards, I knew I didn’t deserve to feel special for anything I had ever done, and nothing I would ever do would make up for that.

And besides that, I figured someone would have to be insanely stupid to accept the things I had done and still think I was a worthwhile person. It was just never going to happen, or at least not from anyone I respected enough to give value to their opinion of me.

And so I determined that, that being the case, I’d better just not expect anything. I’d better just assume that, in this world, I would have to learn to do without any of the positive reinforcement that every human being craves, and learn to go on without it.

Well, as it turns out – that’s really not necessary. As it turns out, there are some people in this world who can see past what I’ve done and still appreciate me for the person that I am and the person I am becoming – and they are not, in fact, insanely stupid. But I had gotten myself so convinced that such a thing did not exist that it took quite a while for me to see that I was wrong.