3/But after some time, I stopped doing that, because I realized I was trying to force a narrative. In reality, the experience I had as a child had very little, possibly no long-term adverse effects on me. The actual adverse effects came from other things - a sense of
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4/betrayal of adults who were supposed to had been more protective of me, and a serious awkwardness around the molester in later years.
I feel a bit of fear saying all this, because THE IMPLICATIONS. Did I want it? Am I saying it wasn't serious? Am I minimizing? Am I delusional?
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5/No, yes, no, and no. I'm being honest about my experience. I also don't mean other people need to interpret their experiences the same way - but I DO recognize that culture seriously pressured me, with partial success, into experiencing suffering I wouldn't have had otherwise.
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I think it's kinda funny that anyone would feel "pressured" to suffer in any way
seems like a horribly privileged thing to say
I think that's what really annoys me about some of your tweets
a little insensitive, a little nonchalant
because you are oh so lucky
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yes very lucky it seems she was raised in a culture that encouraged speaking out against abuse, where she was able to recognize the signs of it
instead of in a culture of guilt and shame, where abuse is hidden, where sex is taboo, where law enforcement is weak, corruption rules
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I wasn't raised in that culture? After it happened everyone was very hush-hush about it, nobody talked to me, nothing bad happened to my abuser (my mom just didn't allow me alone with him). We were raised in a sexually repressed patriarchal cult where I didn't know I had a vagina
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until I was about to hit bleeding age.
I had no idea what had happened to me was considered abuse until years later after leaving that culture, at which point I was encouraged by society to start viewing what happened to me as traumatic.
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I guess I'm annoyed at you being annoyed at being pressured by society into interpreting your abuse as traumatic (when it wasn't for you)
when in many developing countries especially, the culture/society does not allow for this interpretation at all
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Being pressured into viewing abuse as traumatic is bad. Refusing to acknowledge abuse as painful is also bad. I think our culture has the second class totally covered, but has issues with the first. Other cultures have issues with the first and are great for the second.
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I was raised in a culture which doesn't acknowledge abuse as painful, and then transitioned into a culture that does. For me personally, the second culture caused more damage in this regard than the first did.
but you could say that about any closed group, any cult
ignorance is bliss
when you don't have the words or concepts to think about your experiences as an "other", you think everything up until then is just "how it is"
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Yes, exactly. I suspect, for at least some people, taking a non traumatic experience (e.g., the type of molestation I experienced) and refusing to frame it as traumatic is actually an extremely healthy thing to do.
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