The gang's all here

You shouldn't feel like your struggles don't matter. Your feelings are important.

Sometimes I remember the sheer scale of evolutionary alterations that coelacanths have muscled their way through

the weight of eons of change and incremental improvement on a cellular level that have been concealed under, to what our eyes, an ossified limb configuration that’s remained stagnant in its antiquity.

So if you know a survivor, and you tell them that they “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be angry, that will almost certainly be triggering, and it’s really cruel. 

Telling survivors that they need to “get past” their anger or to “be the bigger person” or “holding onto anger is like holding onto a hot coal” or “anger is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die” or that “healing is only possible with forgiveness” or that “forgiveness will set you free,” or that “being angry means the abuser still has control,” or that experiencing anger makes the survivor as bad as the abuser, or whatever else– that’s culturally imposed abuse apologism and if you want to be an ally, you need to unlearn resorting to those platitudes when trying to comfort survivors. 

I CAN DO HARD THINGS.