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How to exorcise the “demons” of abuse memory and shame

To begin, a disclaimer.

I don’t purport to know the cure to what ails you, though I kind of do. (That’s my brazen dominant confidence for ya.) I have no educational bonafides or professional experience to speak of. What I do have is personal experience with mental and physical abuse and a lifetime of experience developing the skills to deal with it. And deal with it I have.

Powerlessness and despair are overwhelming emotions that require incredible fortitude to master. Most people just don’t have the strength. But that’s ok, b/c its not necessary (more on that that later). First and foremost, I want to dispel the notion that learning to live with an abusive past is any different than learning how to ride a bike, whittle a piece of wood into a horse or blow a gum bubble because its not. Happy to say once you realize that you’re halfway there. Instead of trying to climb the mountain of nebulous overwhelming emotion, I prefer a more pragmatic approach. It begins with perspective.

ABUSE MEMORY
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Victims of abuse suffer from two ostensibly powerful and lingering consequences of their experience: abuse memory and shame. Think of abuse memory as a television show you have DVR recorded in your brain that you frequently play back, often times unintentionally and triggered by some kind of psychologically related stimulus. The medical term for this is post-traumatic stress syndrome, but I’d rather you not focus on the diagnosis as people tend to define themselves by their diagnosis which that stymies progress. I mentioned powerlessness and despair earlier. These are active negative emotions, and like all active negative emotions they need to be fed. One of the skills I’ve honed over the years is what I like to call starving the beast. Whenever I feel an episode coming on, I actively deny it sustenance. In the beginning, this manifested in the form of me yelling into a mirror, “NO. ENOUGH. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.” Over time, as the volume of these thoughts subsided,  I was able to accomplish this without the ritual. However you feel comfortable starving the beat is entirely up to you. Write it down, email yourself, whatever…but keep it SUCCINCT. Limit it to declarative sentences. No drawn out expressions of pathos. No poetry. You are not writing a journal entry, you are SAYING NO. It is an exercise in self-control, the goal of which is to recognize you do not have living breathing entity inside you (some people call it their demon) that is working you like a puppet. It is not a demon, it is not your diagnosis, it is not a defect of soul….it is just you, permitting yourself to despair (or not).

There is only one true crime in this world: VIOLATION. It comes in many forms, but you can always trace it back to that loss of control, that subversion of self-identity. Theft is a violation. Rape/assault is a violation. Murder is a violation. Violations cut to the very heart of us. Abuse memory keeps the experience alive. We relive these moments without recognizing that they have already transpired. Now this is important.

Whatever happened to you, that particular incident is in the past. Over. Done.

That being said, those of you currently engaged in actively abusive relationships must recognize the longer you allow it to continue the larger your catalog of abuse memories will be. You can still manage them in the manner I’ve been illustrating, but the larger the catalog the more daunting the undertaking of refusing to engage with them will be. (Leaving an abusive relationship is a topic I’d rather not tackle in this article. There are many resources online about it and I invite you to research them. The circumstances of abusive relationships are just too varied to address in a note on fetlife.)

Shame
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Imagine we didn’t live in a Judeo-Christian society that fears sex. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, just travel. Assuming you don’t have the resources, let me save you a couple thousand bucks and just tell you what you’re going to learn: the tenets we live by are completely arbitrary.

In this country, we call any sex that diverts from the mainstream “dirty” or “kinky”. We call women who enjoy sex with many partners a whore or a skank. We more often than not don’t apply the same standard to men. The reason is very simple: socioreligious programming. Those are our rules.

Now allow yourself a brief moment to ask yourselves why. Why is anal sex the act of a pervert? Why can’t a man have multiple wives or visa versa? If your answer smells even slightly religious, you’re back where you started. Morality is a tricky thing, b/c if enough people share the same definition of what is moral, it FEELS true. But we know from our own history this kind of thinking is fundamentally illogical. If we didn’t come to our senses about mass hysteria, we would still believe the earth is flat and boats fall off the edge if they sail too far.

People who don’t travel tend to believe the way their little slice of earth operates is how it is the world over. I must admit when I first realized this was not the case I was terrified. The truth that there are no rules but the ones we create, no prisons but the ones we build for ourselves can feel as overwhelming as those feelings of hopelessness and despair. Fortunately, with a little acceptance, its not. Why? Because its TRUE, and there is peace in truth.

Shame can be tricky b/c we often conflate and confuse the sting of the abuse memory with moral judgement about the action of violation.

Deconstruct a rape, for example.

I was raped.
Component: I was violated.
Shame Component: I had sex.
Potential Shame Component: I had sex out of wedlock. I had sex with a stranger. I had sex in an orifice considered inappropriate. I was too weak to fight back. I should have saw it coming.

Once you untangle the strings, the components and the morality you subscribe to come into focus. There is nothing inherently wrong about any of the shame components in and of themselves. There is only the value judgement you place on them.

“I should have been stronger.” - out of your control
“I should have saw it coming.” - out of your control
“I had sex/with a stranger/out of wedlock etc.” - not inherently wrong in and of itself, depending on the morality you subscribe to. The shame here is that it occurred without permission aka the violation. (also out of your control)

Acceptance and perspective are the greatest gifts you can give to yourself. When you employ these skills, you are better equipped to integrate your pain into your personal definition. You become a different person.

People sometimes ask me, “But what about the person I could have been?”

Acceptance.

“What if I don’t like the person I become?”

Acceptance.

“What if it happens again?”

You know where I’m going with this. Life is a series of happenings, some we can control, some we simply cannot, no matter how diligently we prepare ourselves. Sure, you can bunker down and live a hermit’s life, but is that living? Does that kind of life guarantee us freedom from the random chaos of existence? I think you know the answer.