Lying liars
Robert1000
Registrant
Dear Friends and Family,
I just posted this in male survivors, but I'm re-posting it here because I get a lot out of your responses:
I just left a therapy session maybe an hour ago. Like many of you, I've been in therapy for years. In a lot of ways, I'm doing much better, functioning better, and a big thank you goes to this forum and many of the people on it as well as to a string of therapists and specialists, including people who do EMDR.
Anyway, in therapy, I talked about something that hasn't always been a subject. I'm talking about the groundwork that had already been done when a sick scumbag decided to victimize me. I'm not trying to directly blame my family members for abuses they didn't commit. I believe in directing blame to the perpetrator. Yet I also understand how shame and lies can create fertile ground for an abuser to hurt and hurt and hurt someone, and how that hurt can be hidden and colored by shame for decades.
One sad thing for me to think about is how that shame, at least in my family, seems to hide generations of sexual victimization. I suffered. My mom and aunt and uncle suffered. My grandmother suffered. All of us lived or live with the legacy of childhood sexual assault or abuse, but think about this: My mother always warned me about people who might try to touch me when I went into a truck stop bathroom. She told me what I'm sure she thought was an empowering story about a time she escaped abuse from the same man, her uncle, who abused my aunt. The uncle put his hand under my mom's shirt as he drove her somewhere in a car back when she was 12 or something. The way she tells it, she somehow blurted out that she was going to tell her mom, and he stopped. Thank God, she says, because she avoided the sexual assault, unlike her sister, who suffered years of abuse and who, later, actually told their mom, who then beat my aunt within an inch of her life with a stick of firewood.
Okay. Traumatic. To my knowledge, neither my mom nor my aunt have ever had therapy. Whew. Any wonder why they're so crazy? Whatever. Anyway, for me, the lessons were two-fold. First, I learned to be afraid of strangers, not of people close to me. That's a bummer, because I was abused by someone who was not a stranger. Second, I learned to redefine abuse as "not-abuse."
You see, my mother WAS abused. An uncle feeling her up and down in the car is abuse. Maybe she didn't get repeatedly sexually abused by that asshole, who I only remember as an old man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank much later when he was at death's door because of emphysema, God damn his soul to hell. Still, she did get abused, and she taught me--it was probably a survival mechanism of her own--that her abuse wasn't abuse, which may help explain why it took me so long to define my abuse as abuse. It took me until I was in my mid-30s, when my life was falling apart at the seams before I could say what had happened to me when I was a kid. When I described it, it was a little like how I described the abuse my mom suffered. I defined it as "fucked up" and "disgusting" but not as sexual assault, which is what it was. It wasn't until a therapist told me that what I described was rape that it dawned on me that I had been a victim of sexual assault. How crazy is that? Well, it's crazy, but it's also fairly regular, as SO MANY of us know.
So anyway, I left therapy and wrote in my journal--this stupid book with flowers on it that I carry around when I go to therapy and other thought-inducing places--that I come from a long line of liars. And then I wrote down all the kinds of liars we are. How some of us lie outright and steal things. Some of us as shame-faced about lying. Others brag about putting one over on people. Some of us might steal your banjo and deny it, even after you've got the slip from the pawn shop with our name on it. Others will tell the most confounding and stupid lies, lies that are demonstrably untrue right in front of your face, like that the tank is full when it's nearly empty. then there are the ones like my mom, who tell lies of definition, who say they've been getting therapy as they've promised, when actually they're just talking to a friend. Those liars might say, well, I call it therapy. You can call it what you want. I might say, well, I just follow the CPT code about what's therapy and what's not. If you can find whatever "session" and assign it a CPT code number, well, I'll call it therapy, too. But if the insurance doesn't accept it, I don't either.
Well, that's about it. I'm running out of steam. I wanted to vent a bit and, I don't know, just speak my truth for a little while.
God bless you, and when you find a bit of peace, enjoy it.
Bob
I just posted this in male survivors, but I'm re-posting it here because I get a lot out of your responses:
I just left a therapy session maybe an hour ago. Like many of you, I've been in therapy for years. In a lot of ways, I'm doing much better, functioning better, and a big thank you goes to this forum and many of the people on it as well as to a string of therapists and specialists, including people who do EMDR.
Anyway, in therapy, I talked about something that hasn't always been a subject. I'm talking about the groundwork that had already been done when a sick scumbag decided to victimize me. I'm not trying to directly blame my family members for abuses they didn't commit. I believe in directing blame to the perpetrator. Yet I also understand how shame and lies can create fertile ground for an abuser to hurt and hurt and hurt someone, and how that hurt can be hidden and colored by shame for decades.
One sad thing for me to think about is how that shame, at least in my family, seems to hide generations of sexual victimization. I suffered. My mom and aunt and uncle suffered. My grandmother suffered. All of us lived or live with the legacy of childhood sexual assault or abuse, but think about this: My mother always warned me about people who might try to touch me when I went into a truck stop bathroom. She told me what I'm sure she thought was an empowering story about a time she escaped abuse from the same man, her uncle, who abused my aunt. The uncle put his hand under my mom's shirt as he drove her somewhere in a car back when she was 12 or something. The way she tells it, she somehow blurted out that she was going to tell her mom, and he stopped. Thank God, she says, because she avoided the sexual assault, unlike her sister, who suffered years of abuse and who, later, actually told their mom, who then beat my aunt within an inch of her life with a stick of firewood.
Okay. Traumatic. To my knowledge, neither my mom nor my aunt have ever had therapy. Whew. Any wonder why they're so crazy? Whatever. Anyway, for me, the lessons were two-fold. First, I learned to be afraid of strangers, not of people close to me. That's a bummer, because I was abused by someone who was not a stranger. Second, I learned to redefine abuse as "not-abuse."
You see, my mother WAS abused. An uncle feeling her up and down in the car is abuse. Maybe she didn't get repeatedly sexually abused by that asshole, who I only remember as an old man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank much later when he was at death's door because of emphysema, God damn his soul to hell. Still, she did get abused, and she taught me--it was probably a survival mechanism of her own--that her abuse wasn't abuse, which may help explain why it took me so long to define my abuse as abuse. It took me until I was in my mid-30s, when my life was falling apart at the seams before I could say what had happened to me when I was a kid. When I described it, it was a little like how I described the abuse my mom suffered. I defined it as "fucked up" and "disgusting" but not as sexual assault, which is what it was. It wasn't until a therapist told me that what I described was rape that it dawned on me that I had been a victim of sexual assault. How crazy is that? Well, it's crazy, but it's also fairly regular, as SO MANY of us know.
So anyway, I left therapy and wrote in my journal--this stupid book with flowers on it that I carry around when I go to therapy and other thought-inducing places--that I come from a long line of liars. And then I wrote down all the kinds of liars we are. How some of us lie outright and steal things. Some of us as shame-faced about lying. Others brag about putting one over on people. Some of us might steal your banjo and deny it, even after you've got the slip from the pawn shop with our name on it. Others will tell the most confounding and stupid lies, lies that are demonstrably untrue right in front of your face, like that the tank is full when it's nearly empty. then there are the ones like my mom, who tell lies of definition, who say they've been getting therapy as they've promised, when actually they're just talking to a friend. Those liars might say, well, I call it therapy. You can call it what you want. I might say, well, I just follow the CPT code about what's therapy and what's not. If you can find whatever "session" and assign it a CPT code number, well, I'll call it therapy, too. But if the insurance doesn't accept it, I don't either.
Well, that's about it. I'm running out of steam. I wanted to vent a bit and, I don't know, just speak my truth for a little while.
God bless you, and when you find a bit of peace, enjoy it.
Bob
