The Biggest Obstacle (18+)

The Biggest Obstacle that Survivors Face is Believing 

Once you have been told that you are not worth the time it will take to be good enough for anything, you believe, based on what you have already lived through, that yes, you are not a lovable person. I know this monster because I still live this hell. While I already know that this is not the truth of me, I also know the reality that is fighting the demons within, the ones that remind a person that there are people who, at one time in your life, were the very most important in your life, and when these people breached your trust, that is when the garbage in the mind became more believable than what the reality is, and the reality is that no matter what happens and no matter who is closest to you who makes you think that you are not worth the Love that you at least have, no matter how small it might seem, someone on this planet Loves you.

But it is not the idea that we are unloved, but the idea that someone would make us feel so awful about who we are and according to what is not the truth, and having that crap shoved in your face and down your throat, again and again - this is what makes it hard to believe that anyone else can or will bother to know that we hurt enough to need the healing light that is Love. All abuse survivors, no matter how long it has been since the last time anything horrid happened and no matter with whom, go through this. This is one of those things that no one will understand unless they have "been there," and is the paradox in Love because while we long for someone else to know, really know, what it is like, even though you know you are loved, it doesn't feel like it. After so much time of having been taught that Love is conditional, you begin to believe it. You begin to think that you have to prove that you are worth Love, and pretty soon you start to believe that what everyone else is saying is...IS your truth.

I will be the last one to tell someone that their pain is invalid, because that is another lie. No one who does not know what the hell it is that we have gone through has the right to tell another person what they should do, and more than that, those who really have no real clue of what it is like being someone else's constant pariah and who can only 'imagine' what it is like are the worst of all. They are not the ones who tell you that they wish they could help you, and they are not the ones who say nothing, preferring to not be the next asshole who tells you what should happen. It is the ones who like to start their overly opinionated and "I watched it on Discovery Channel" people who think they know what they would do who make you feel the worst, because these are the very same fuckers who seem to think that giving an abuse victim advice unsought is Love. It is not Love. It is control and it is conditional Love. I think I love it most when these idiots tell a survivor "That wouldn't happen to me...I won't allow it." I am sorry, but you are not the one who gets to choose who will and who will not give you the taste of what it is that I along with many others have gone through. You are the boneheads who have so much to say and know so very little about the truth of us and you are also the same bunch of people who, when you feel like you are not being heeded, and when you feel like your sorry advice which comes from a place of "if it were me..." is the only and the best advice.

No, dumb ass, it is not. It is so not, and you have nothing to say, because you really have no clue what it is like to be that scared - scared for your fucking life, and all your real sin was was to Love someone who you should have Loved, be it a parent or a partner. You have no idea. You can sit there ass hurt all you want, and you can sit there and think that someone like me actually deserves what she or he gets and you can make all the wrong assumptions about abuse victims your little tiny brain can think of, and no matter what, unless you have been where we have, you really do not know. You will never know, for real, the measure of fear, and no matter how many times you go and say shit to people who it doesn't matter to because they know less than you do, it will not matter because your gossip only makes things worse.

This is where the part where, as a victim OR a survivor,  you feel unloved and unwanted and it really begins to cement itself in your head, and unless someone who has been there comes along to clue you in on the fact that really, you are totally a loved person, that there is someone on this planet who cares enough to tell you so, and that you were never wrong for not leaving when someone ELSE told you to...you have nothing to make up for.

I got tired of hearing about how many people were tired of hurting because I hurt, and that gave them an easy way out. The last thing that someone you claim to love needs to know is that one more person does not think that they can handle their own emotional bullshit so therefore they simply wash their hands of you. This is what an abuser does, too. They get to that point where they are tired of talking, tired of telling you who you are, and you become so numb to the idea that you believe no one loves you, that you begin to behave as though no one does. This is the reality of the wake left by abuse. This is the energy left behind, and this is where we all end up - in tears, all the time, because we are hearing the things that we can never not hear again. This is what a lot of folks don't think about - the fact that while they were all well meaning, and while at the bottom of it all it was about Love, to sit there and without realizing it, blame the abused person for their inaction to make YOU feel better about what they are going through is SHIT.

SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! And yes, I am on a tangent and have been and I will tell you this much, and namely if you were once close to someone who you had the nerve to tell you could not be there anymore because you needed to NOT feel their pain anymore...You are a creepy asshole, period. The abused person already feels very isolated, and they feel isolated and  your isolation of you from their lives proves their attacker to be 'right' again, and if you think for one moment that said attacker will not use your words somehow against the person who you chose to bail on and who you KNOW would never leave you, you are fucking wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG !!! When you hurt, I am guaranteeing that they were there for you. The problem with people like you is that when this person comes to you in full faith that you will LISTEN and NOT ADVISE is that you also are so arrogant in your ways of NOT thinking about THEIR pain and only relaying what you THINK you have gone through "for" them and that comes screaming through, loud and clear. It is like telling that person again that if they had only listened to YOU and what YOU THINK you would have been able to do, they might not be in this situation.

Let me tell you something about a situation that is a maddening circle of hellish insanity....it is not nice, period. There are SEVERAL people reading this who are, right now, tsk tsking me, my words, my anger at the entirety of the whole of those who think they know what they would do, but I know they would not know what to do, and those who think they would, well, those are the very same ones who would seek out the advice of people like me - the ones who have survived, who sit in the seat of judgment STILL of those who have no fucking clue of what really happens in the minds of those who have fallen victim. It is not that we don't want to leave, but that we don't want to leave and have to keep looking over our shoulders, and believe it or not, that stupid fucking TRO that you THINK will protect a victim only makes the abuser madder and madder, and that is the part that no one realizes. A piece of paper cannot stop a married person from cheating on their spouse if that is what they do, so what the fuck makes a person believe that all abusers are going to behave because a judge told them they have to? I ain't saying that there are no abusers who do NOT follow the court order, but I AM saying that there are more who are so arrogant in their idea that they are above the law that they really don't care if there is an order in effect, and they don't care how many times the cops show up...they just do not care, and here is some fucking news for all you assholes who will sit there and blame the victim for not doing more....you can't do more, and the bitch is that it is because the abuser, whether your fairy tale bullshit in your head about what YOU would do has subsided, also has rights.

There's something all the people who knows for sure that they would never find themselves the clusterfuck of fear almost all survivors still have within them...yup...abusers have rights, too...regardless of what you think you would do, this is the thing that, when one of these morons who have said this TO ME come to me because yup...they have gone through it and now they want to know how I got out of the emotional mess that I still have the tendency toward being. They want to know how I made it through this, they want to know what they can do and they want you to help them because you know what it is like. And I promise you, I leave no one hangin, or at least I try not to, which means that given my place in life, it is my duty to at least tell them that no, they do not just get to leave and not be scared anymore, they do not just get to voice their sorrows to their attacker and expect the motherfucker to care, and most of all, no, it is not true that no one loves you, but it is true that you have to have a lot of self love to make it through this shit, and welcome to the reality that is this hell called healing from abuse.

Abuse survivors, even as we are as tough as we end up being, still need to be loved, and told that we are loved, because we have a hard time trusting love and being in love, and we have a hard time not getting mad, not only at ourselves but at everyone else for not listening to OUR words, that when it comes down to it, we are the prime example of what happens when a person loves too much. Abused people love so much that sometimes, we find ourselves in the miry goo of what has happened that we cannot bear to look at it one more time.

And then someone comes along to remind us that we are not worth a kind word, only useless and baseless advice coming from an idiot who, at that point, is worse than the abuser. Care comes in silence, too, you know, and sometimes it is that you need to shut your mouth and stop telling this severely hurt person in front of you that you would never be in their place, because you don't know that. You don't know if it will happen that one day, you know totally how they feel. I work with other abuse survivors, and yes, I work EXTENSIVELY with those who are stuck in an abusive situation, and an abusive situation is NOT always one where there is a couple and one of those in that couple is a big enough creep to put hands on the other one. Sometimes, that abuse comes in the form of being abandoned by family members who refuse to come to the mat with the truth, and the truth is that those family members hurt as much as the victim.

Problem is, arrogance and pride and the fact that not a lot of people KNOW how to deal with their own pain comes in to play, and what the hell are you doing advising someone about something that you are so god damned clueless about in the first place?

I mean really, YOU think you know BETTER than that person who came to you not for advice but only a shoulder and a pair of arms to hold them with? You don't. God help you and I hope you never do. Based on the idea that you think you know what you would do is telling of the fact that really, you have no clue what you would do, because as usual, you think you know what is best for them, and you don't. The best way that you can help that person who you care so much about is to just tell them that you will listen. Hold them as they cry, because that crying is not on the surface...

...no no no...that crying comes straight from the bones of that person's soul...

You don't know ...you really don't know. LOVE them, because that...THAT is REALLY what they need.
And STOP telling them that they "should just leave," because even though that is the truth, there are steps that need to be taken before they can just up and bail, at least the majority of victims, that is. There is such a thing called stalking, harassment and homicide, and all of those things CAN happen to a person if they do not plan their escape. There is NOT ONE advocate or shrink who will instruct an abuse victim otherwise, because those people KNOW the truth of an abuser.

You do not.
No matter what - you do not. And how creepy are you to have left that person who believed that you loved them enough to not be one more asshole who chose to judge them?

Where the hell was your Soul then? ...oh, that's right...it was busy being scared while your big fat ego was busy telling the world how you would never let that happen to you...

Haha!! dumb ass...as though anyone would ASK to have their ass kicked...

ROX

Rev. Roxanne Cottell can be reached via email at reverendroxie22@gmail.com. Please visit mapu70.wix.com/sisterhoodofthesoul today !!  Know that you are Loved...aloha !!