#dream 8

I think I finally may have realized why its so hard to talk to people and explain my childhood to them and how it affected me

its much much harder to conceptualize a lack of something than a surplus of something, as something that is existent in your life, as something that happened to you, when logically that it didnt happen is the problem

for instance, a person who is abused is more likely to realize the abuse if there was something tangible and negative done to them, so like the stereotype abuse

they were hit or molested or screamed at or constantly devalued, its easier to make the mental connection between “person hit me/traumatized me, now i have an ingrained trauma reaction when people raise their hands to me” and that sentence is readily understood as a logical cause and effect process by people who havent been abused, so its easier to get other people to understand the direct effects of that kind of abuse, ie its easier to talk about and conceptualize with and expplain to people who havent experienced it

but whats harder as a victim of it, is conceptualizing neglect as abuse, and the effects that that sort of abuse has on you because of it

its just, so much harder to explain to someone that because you were never shown affection as a child, you never had healthy emotional expressions directed towards you in any sense, you couldn’t do the “monkey see monkey do” thing that children and their brains are built to do, because people think of these intangibles things as inherent to humanity, they just assume that emotions and their expressions and emotional regulation is a skill people are literally born with, no matter what kind of parenting you have

they talk about babies first smile like they are born knowing how to smile, they dont realize a baby only knows what it has been shown, if youve never smiled at your kid, they dont learn to instinctively smile when theyre happy, sometimes they even fail to recognize that they feel happy in the first place because they never to make the instinctive connection between smiling and being happy

like when most people feel things, the emotion shown in their body language is instinctive, you dont choose to actively smile, you just do, you dont choose to cry, you just do, you dont choose to blush, you just do. because theyve been able to observe those reactions healthy in the people around them

and its even worse when the more tangible abuse is thrown on top of it

when youve been directly trained to not display emotion for fear of physical abuse, when any sense of self is actively cut down and snuffed out by the people who should be encouraging it to flourish, when you are actively denied and isolated from opportunities to observe anyone who can do these things in healthy ways, when every genuine emotion is pretty much gaslighted out of you or back at you so you constantly question even the ones you can identify if they truly what you are feeling or if youre just putting on an emotional front to get something from someone because thats the only function emotions ever had for your or your family for a solid 20 years so you cant tell if your genuine or manipulating

so its so frustrating to try to answer the question “well what did they do to you? if you dont live with them anymore then how are they still affecting you? they cant get to you”

cuz yeah they're not doing it now, but they did, they did for a long time, and what they did over that long period of time had some permanent or at least some extremely long term effects that i cant just stop now that its not happening anymore, if i could put it into a simple cause and effect sequence thats easy for you to understand, trust me i would have done it a long time ago.

Asking them how the abuse effected “me” requires being able to define what “me” was “before” I was abused. If youve been raised from birth to think abuse and its affects on you was just how life was and there wasnt another way to live, how are you supposed to answer that question? the answer is not easily, and not easily conceptualized in your own head much less put into words for others. you only figure out that your doing something “wrong” when someone who knows the right way points it out to you, and after its pointed out its hard to remember all those times because your habit is and continues to be the ‘wrong’ way of doing

brains arent these magics thing that change on a whim because you want them to, they are physical organs that are constantly being affected by their environments just like any other body part, and they control somethings that are thought of as nonphysical but actually are, emotions are chemical reactions, memories are physical connections between brain cells, behaviors, habits, attitudes etc these are all things the brain does as a physical organ

but because the majority of people have magical beliefs in the concept of a soul, they think the magic soul does all these things instead, and dont really grasp how much of these things are in control by a heavily traumatized physical organ

tl;dr I had a dream i was being followed by a person who was questioning everything i did or said or remembered or thought or felt, every reaction i had they wanted to know why, and if i couldnt explain it to them quickly enough they denied that it was real or genuine and that i must have been faking it, they specifically asked me about my ‘weird’ reactions to things as well, and if i couldnt explain the weird way i was feeling that wasnt like how normal people do things i must be lying, i wasnt actually abused/wasnt feeling like that/wasnt actually thinking my own thoughts