I was working in a therapy session with an insightful, strong woman who had survived long-term childhood sexual abuse. Years later, she was still suffering fallout from the criminal acts which had been perpetrated against her as a young person.
I always feel waves of intense compassion for my patients in these instances, layered with rage towards those who harmed them.
It’s quite common in early sessions that victims defend some aspect of a perpetrator, especially if it’s a family member. It can be hard to hear, but I get it. It tells me they may still love or want to love parts of that person, maybe who that person was to them before they harmed them, despite hating the abuse. It suggests grieving and inner dissonance over the many losses. These experiences are not black and white, but heavily complex and nuanced.
It might suggest to me that a part of the client understandably, still has not come to terms with the reality of what happened. They know, but some part of them is resisting accepting that truth emotionally. Understandable, of course. Survival. Strategy.
It’s just some of the common, savage layers of conflicts victims have to contend with in healing from abuse. It is something we can, and do, work with in therapy. We can find ways to come to greater peace with all the head-spinning complexity and suffering that should never have occurred.
One of the biggest hurdles we typically need to overcome in therapy is self-blaming and dealing with the shame of having been victimised, that many survivors feel. Over time and through good therapy, we can see the perpetrator more clearly and hand back full responsibility to them for their choices and actions. We can disregard any excuses, blame-shifting, or justifications they might have made. We can do a great deal. Survivors can and do thrive again.
With my recent client, I became quietly outraged at a particularly insidious ‘spiritual’ idea she’d taken on somewhere, that was working against her in a devastating way. We all have ‘stories’ we tell ourselves that can need debunking for our mental health and thriving. Toxic ‘spirituality’, sometimes even masquerading as pop psychology, or self-help, can add extra damage.
It should come with a warning label.
To cut to the chase, the idea that really pissed me off, because it had caused her such extra unnecessary suffering, was she had been told she’d ‘manifested’ the abuse as some kind of spiritual lesson for herself. The implication was she had ‘energetically’ brought abuse upon herself as a spirit, and had to work on herself to understand why, and what she needed to learn from it.
FFS. Give me a break. Deeply damaging stuff. Reject unhelpful ideas please.
That shadow side of the ‘manifestation movement’ is sailing dangerously close to victim-blaming, shaming and re-traumatising. I’m calling out that idea as unhelpful to mental health.
I put it down to a misguided attempt to feel a greater sense of control over that which one cannot control. In the case of my patient, she could not control the criminal choices and actions of an adult perpetrated against her as a child.
Of course our thoughts have power. They have a lot of power, but they only tend to manifest when combined with action, circumstances and other contextual factors, many of which we can’t control, try as we might.
The place where our thoughts have a great deal of power and we have a great deal of agency, is inside our heads.
Hold whatever spiritual beliefs you want, but for mental health, compassion for yourself and others, it’s important to ask,
“Is this a helpful thought or belief or is it only keeping me stuck, blaming, shaming and hurting me more?”
If it’s the latter, let it go.
Love to you.
The theme I used writing today’s piece is Get Free by Lana del Ray.
Totally agree, these types of views are quite alien to the cultures that DO have concepts as karma as key components. From what I know it took years for Tibetan teachers to even understand how an individual can hold such self destructive views, and that is when coming from a culture where ever single, tiny thing is ultimately traced back to ones own actions, but never in a self destructive way.
I guess it all goes back to getting the relative & absolute right. When living in the relative world hurting oneself needlessly is quite insane, but then while meditating deeply on things when delving into the parts of consciousness that are joined with the absolute this can be done the right way, and even have deep, therapeutic effects.
But for anyone not being able to get this perspective right the texts & cultures do have LOTS of serious warnings about never even trying to go down this path, along with corresponding advice on how to get the relative world right first!
And of course any system like those I'm alluding to are ripe for abuse, with well known, historic cases. Sussing out which teachers or groups that are worth delving into and which ones that are downright dangerous is very related to this too...