I recently had a disappointing experience where I got some disturbing clarity about a number of things.
It’s painful to realize that others have used you and your private expression over a number of years in order to support their own psychodrama, casting you, baselessly, as a perpetual villain while they get to take turns being victim and rescuer in relation to you. They never saw you as a person or with your own needs, just an object to be used for their own purposes. They have entirely taken leave of external reality, or the realities of their responsibilities and your needs.
It’s like lifting the lid off of the termite farm of someone else’s relationship and seeing all the grotesque, codependent, self-feeding paranoid ways it functions.
When we were children, sometimes my little sister would bite her own arm, leave bite marks, and run to my mother to say that I’d bit her to get me into trouble. This was the same sort of experience. Now I see that some women never grow up, they just need to be the victims. Even someone I never had anything whatsoever to do with has felt the need to jump into the victim basket and fabricate injury.
When all the while, because of their abuses, my own relationship has been stressed and has suffered. Supporting a traumatized partner is no joke, and not for the faint of heart. And I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that my partner of 15 years genuinely wanted and encouraged me to grow into my own integrity, to fight my own battles, to take responsibility for my own life and actions. I chose well: someone who had found these things for herself, and only wanted to see me rise and grow into myself. Someone who wouldn’t feed my fears, insecurities, or worst parts. She gave me encouragement to live with integrity, and I have felt so bad that she has had to deal with all the baggage that the injuries from the abuses I experienced entailed: trust issues, fear of groups (from the mobbing), fear of being used and exploited in relationship, despair, intrusive memories, or just not being able to be present as I wanted. These things at times kept us from creating the scope of world we both desired. She didn’t deserve any of that, but still hung in there with me as long as she could.
People who don’t grow up can spoil careers, jobs, lives, cause enormous and lasting injury through their abuses, and still, in the middle of retaliating when their victims complain or hold them accountable, feel that they are the victims who deserve to be compensated by their victims for the stress of being held accountable. There are just no words.
Academics lie, more than I had ever thought possible. They build whole formidable scaffoldings of lies, which they then pull out and push to achieve their agenda, making it seem like historical truth when most allegations are entirely baseless.
With the villianization, lies, and total disregard for my personhood, needs, boundaries, no wonder others treated me as they did. And I was blind to it all, I had no idea what was happening, or why. Because it was all behind my back. I was slimed.
To have some of one’s bravest moments and biggest steps into integrity contorted into how those people need to cast them for their own small world, a fear-based, paranoid world which does not grow and does not allow others to grow, really puts into perspective how much I had wasted on people who have no interest in changing or growing.
That’s no place to share one’s treasures.