One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.
I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.
It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.
I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.
I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.
Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”
Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.
important
In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."
I had this realization a while back:
Some kids who experienced trauma would react by becoming violent, disruptive, and rageful.
This is an inherently normal and natural response for a creature to have. Attacking and fighting for survival is inherently something most animals sometimes do, it's fundamental and will always happen sometimes
But children that are violent, disruptive, hateful of authority, or angry are labeled as "bad" and are punished for it, and the label of "bad" is not just temporary but lasts a long time, as though there is something fundamentally wrong with the child
So, I thought, a child's value in the world and whether they deserve to be helped is judged in this harsh, punitive way, based on whatever natural survival response happened to pop out of them
And I thought, that is grotesque. It means that a certain fraction of traumatized kids will not be helped, but instead be considered "bad," because of basically a biological thing that their body had to do to survive.
Also it is a good point about perpetrator trauma. People are very caught up in the idea that PTSD means the same thing as being a victim, or that you have to be "innocent" to be traumatized. And many people think that people that are not "innocent" are not really traumatized, they just act like they are to get sympathy.
But in reality people can get PTSD from killing another person or torturing them or harming them in another way. Committing that violent act against another person is very devastating emotionally and mentally.
And sometimes people think that perpetrators don't deserve help for their trauma, as if trauma is a punishment for doing something bad.
Society has to change a lot for us to understand these things and truly be compassionate towards all people.
I don’t want to take away from the main focus of the post. Your main takeaway should still be people who are angry/aggressive/lash- out/become very avoidant/etc. in response to trauma deserve far more focus and care than they currently get.
But I also wanted to point out that even for people who are “perfect victims” - i.e. learn to blame everything on themselves, become people pleasers, hypervigilant, etc. - where they already disproportionately scrutinise themselves, so discussions about how they harm others are frequently counter-productive… the current system is still shit, and still reinforces trauma responses.
To illustrate with an example: My trauma has made me hypervigilant around people. When there are other people in the house, I am constantly anxious that they’re increasingly resenting me because of whatever I’m doing/not doing.
e.g. If I’m trying to relax in my room, I worry that I’m being anti-social and a moocher, but if I come out and try to talk to people, I worry I’m trapping them in conversations and making them feel exhausted in their own home.
Being the “perfect victim” means getting a lot of reassurance. *“Don’t worry, you’re not annoying/you’re not being too much/people shouldn’t expect you to read their minds/they’ll tell you if something’s wrong/you’re doing everything right, you just have to believe in yourself/etc...”*
On it’s face, that should be a good thing. But as someone who’s been in therapy for a decade, despite the constant reassurance from everyone, my anxiety has gotten *worse* over the years. And it’s something I’ve been frustrated about for years. *“I know this is irrational, I’m getting direct reassurance, why can I still not calm down?”*
But I finally realised it’s because it’s NOT reassurance. It’s a false promise that actively prevents actual discussion of the reasons someone is struggling, and encourages a cycle of self-blame and shame.
E.g. having the fear that you’re constantly annoying others.
Being told: “No one finds you annoying. When you think that, you need to tell yourself that’s not true and be more confident,“… that’s not reassurance, that’s a false and dismissive statement that’s setting you up for failure.
It encorauges you to ignore your feelings and misread any signs that might be telling you someone is annoyed at you, without giving you ANY support for what to actually do when someone DOES find you annoying. Because that WILL inevitably happen.
To go back to my house example: Therapy encourages all this internal work. You’re told your anixety is irrational, so you function as if it is. *“My fear that I’ll be seen as anti-social for spending time in my room is irrational, so I’ll sit in the room, incredibly anxious, and repeat that to myself over and over again until I don’t feel anxious anymore.”* And that might even be working.
Then the inevitable day comes where it’s made clear that someone DOES find you antisocial. And because you’re never allowed to actually talk about where your anxiety is coming from, because the underlying assumption is that if you’re doing everything right you cannot possibly be upsetting someone, it triggers and reinforces your trauma. After being subtextually told over and over again that being annoying/antisocial/etc. is unthinkable, what message are you supposed to learn? When you did what you were supposed to and relaxed, you did the unthinkeable thing. So you’re encouraged to get stuck in this cycle of blaming yourself for being anxious, then blaming yourself for *not* being anxious and getting retriggered.
Where’s the discussion around expectations for others? How to negotiate the inevitable tensions and mismatched needs that arise living in a shared space? What your rights are? That there’s a MASSIVE difference between someone who’s just politely requesting to spend more time with you vs. someone who’s randomly blown up at you; and in either case their need for company is not automatically superior to your need for space.
TL;DR: The “perfect victim” mindset tells you that if you hurt someone else, you’re doing something wrong. So the “imperfect victims” are abandoned and labelled as villains, and the “perfect victims” are stuck in a cycle of being encouraged to disregard their feelings, then blame themselves for getting retraumatised when their guard is down.
