Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.
The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.
Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.
I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised, battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.
Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.
At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.
I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.
You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."
Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.
In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.
This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.
Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.
So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.
Sadly, you earned it...
I Love You All
...Roxanne...
The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.
Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.
I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised, battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.
Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.
At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.
I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.
You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."
Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.
In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.
This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.
Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.
So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.
Sadly, you earned it...
I Love You All
...Roxanne...
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