No More Silence!

Too many writing projects and not enough time! I guess it’s time to drag out another old chestnut from the storage trunk of thoughts and see if I can make a blog post out of it…

Have you ever noticed the tendency of people to feel bad for “telling on” someone else?

As survivors, of course, we have a heightened awareness of this feeling, since so many of us learned not to tell under threat of dire consequences, but it’s not a feeling that is limited to survivors. In fact, it seems like a pretty universal feeling.

People are worried that there might be some kind of backlash…
Or they worry that someone will be angry with them…
Or they want to protect someone by not breaking bad news to them…
Or they think it’s none of their business…
Or they just don’t want to get involved…

If you think about it that way, the threats that were used to make us all too afraid to “tell” were really only emphasizing a message that everyone is learning. But what a terrible message…

Why should the person who exposes wrongdoing ever feel like they did something wrong?
Why are we all bending over backwards to protect the person who actually did the wrong thing?

This is the kind of mindset that allowed many of us to be abused for years without relief, even if we believe there were adults who knew (or at least had an idea) that it was happening.

This is also the kind of mindset that allows crime to flourish at all levels – from the streets to the board room. Someone always knows what’s going on, what was done, who did it – but regardless of whether the justification is that “they’d kill me if I ratted” or “I’d lose my job if I blew the whistle”, the end result is the same. The criminals are protected by the conspiring silence of everyone around them.

It’s the kind of mindset that allows teenagers to bully each other until they commit suicide or go on murderous rampages, and everyone knows it’s happening, but nobody says anything until it’s too late.

It’s the kind of mindset that causes us to teach our children that “nobody likes a tattle-tale” and end the lesson there, so that we can raise another generation of people who are afraid to “tell” on anyone, for any reason.

It’s also the kind of mindset that allows someone to present themselves as a hero for daring to “tell” something, even if what they’re telling is lies. We’re all so impressed with the strength it takes to tell, that we don’t bother to question the content of what we’re being told, and we certainly don’t bother checking it out to see if it’s true. Society at large is so conditioned against “telling” that we can actually be manipulated through a false show of courage.

It’s so ingrained, so habitual, so taken for granted by absoutely everyone, that it doesn’t even stand out as odd or unusual to hear someone agonizing over whether to tell something… we never even ask why they’re hesitating. It seems obvious.

But as survivors… we also know what that hesitation can cost. We know how much damage can be done, while the world is protecting perpetrators with a shield of conspiring silence. We know what it is to suffer through what the silence hides, and how desperately we wished that someone, anyone, would have the courage to help us, by daring to break the silence.

And is the situation always that serious? No, of course not. But if nobody dares to “tell” in the small situations, then is it any wonder that nobody dares to do it when the situation is that serious?

So it all matters. Small or large, every conspiring silence causes damage somewhere, to someone – if nothing else, by simply reinforcing the idea that silence is preferrable to speaking the truth.

I can’t change the world. I can’t change everyone’s perceptions or change how everyone does things.
But I can change what I do. My complicit silence, and the complicit silence of everyone around me, stole decades out of my life. The complicit silence of society allows crimes large and small to be committed with impunity every day.
I am speaking, not only in defiance my own history of secrecy and silence exacted by threats and torture, but also in defiance of the social malaise, the mindless willingness to protect the criminal at the expense of the victim.

My complicit silence has come to an end.

I will not let someone else’s wrongdoing be hidden and protected by my fear or my indifference – I will not hide the truth with my silence.
And the more of us who join together in speaking the truth – about anything, large or small – the more we change the currently prevailing perception that the criminals and the perps and the liars have the power, and that the truth should not be spoken, about anything, anywhere, because nobody dares to speak it.
I dare.
How about you?

Imperfection Deserves Forbearance

Today I’ve been considering this contradiction:

On the one hand, people tend to have this idea that their therapist’s life is “perfect” — perfect kids perfectly raised, happy marriage, everything organized, no crises, no trouble, no trauma. Some people believe this to such an extent that they can’t cope with any evidence proving that the therapist is actually human. They feel betrayed and angry if their therapist’s imperfect life interferes in any way with their idealized vision of who the therapist is and how they live.

On the other hand, many DID people are drawn to enter the “helping professions.” (I’m putting that in quotes because, although there are a few exceptions, the vast majority of DID people I know who are or want to be mental health professionals have absolutely no business being anything of the sort.)

Sometimes the people who can’t tolerate disorganization or personal crises or anything more than the most minor imperfection in their own therapists are the same ones who believe they are (or would be) fantastic therapists themselves.

hmmmm…

Am I the only one who thinks that doesn’t make sense?

How can any person whose own life is complicated by the ups and downs of DID (in addition to the random vicissitudes of life) imagine themselves as a therapist — and yet be unable or unwilling to tolerate it when their own therapist is not constantly available, constantly supportive, constantly attuned to them, constantly able to meet their needs and wants regardless of what might be going on in the therapist’s own life?

If someone is already feeling overwhelmed dealing with their own marriage, job, children, or life in general — if sometimes the chores and errands don’t get done, the bills don’t get paid, the kids aren’t attended to as well as we might wish, or the crises and emergencies and troubles are just piling up faster than we can handle them (and anyone who says they don’t have those periods of time would be lying, it has nothing to do with being DID, it’s just how life goes sometimes) — then where would a roster of needy clients fit in to all that?

Would we make a good therapist if we allowed any other demand to take priority over our own families or our own health?

Would we want a therapist who didn’t make their self-care or the care of their families a priority?

My answer is a definite no…

But then… is it fair to be unforgiving or intolerant when our own therapists need to put their priorities somewhere other than on us for a time? Or is it fair to expect that their personal troubles can always be left at home and never interfere with our schedule or our time or our wants?

I don’t think that’s reasonable.

Therapists are human. They are imperfect. They have lives, families, marriages, children, which are no more perfect than anyone else’s, and they are as likely to have a personal crisis as anyone else on the planet. They are subject to the same universal laws of humanity as the rest of us.

So when it happens — I think it behooves each of us to extend to our therapists the same grace, understanding, and forgiveness that we want them to extend to us when we make our inevitable mistakes or have our own inevitable family crises.

This is still true when our therapist’s crisis inconveniences us, or when it means we don’t get what we want, or even when it means we have to weather our own crisis of the moment all by ourselves. Most of us who are in therapy somehow survived the last two or three decades or more without our Magic Helper of choice, so we can probably make it through a few days or even weeks without said Magic Helper now.

It is basic courtesy and respect, and I think it is part of what we owe to our therapists — because being a paying client does not entitle us to have unreasonable expectations of perfection met by our therapists, any more than we would be entitled to expect perfection from anyone else. Including ourselves.