I survived a long time by anticipating the feelings and the actions of others.
When you are born into and grow up in an environment of violence and unpredictability, you quickly learn the advantages and the disadvantages of putting the needs of others before your own.
What about me? Is a question screamed in silence and soon enough, you stop asking because it’s no use.
Even now, after much distance, both geographical and psychological, after all kinds of therapy, reflection, and resolution, I am always putting myself in my abusers’ shoes, imagining their needs and motivations, trying to understand and sympathize with their failings.
Having long been gaslighted by authority figures, I tend to gaslight myself, invalidate my own experience and point of view because this is what I was taught, this is what I have learned. Only my abusers had rights and credibility. I was negligible. I was nothing.
But damnit, I am done. Healing after gaslighting, I am no longer going to worry about my abusers, protect their self-esteem and their reputations and their welfare at my own expense.
Just as I have learned to listen to my body, I am also going to learn to trust my mind, to allow myself to see the world through my eyes, to voice my own truth, to honor my own feelings and my own thoughts and the evidence of my own senses.
Believing myself, defending myself, and respecting myself is not just healing, it is health.
I grant no one the power to take that from me.
Comments