Brigit, I didn't mean to seem as though I was
advocating the avoidance of other survivors' writings. If I did, I wouldn't have posted about my own memories here and elsewhere.
That opinion came from the survivor who found and woke me up, Onesmartrat. Whether she was right or wrong isn't known to me, but my own decision, after much thought, was that the good that can come from being open and honest outweighs the danger of contamination of our stories--and does so by a long shot. All the silent readers of this and other MC threads need details in order to begin to unravel the knotty mysteries that are their pasts.
That said, I carefully keep back any information that could get me accessed and possibly silenced by the powerful people who bought, sold and abused me. Finding the fine line between what to tell and what to withhold is incredibly difficult sometimes, but I believe it's always worth the effort.
Loved what you said about the trolls' probable attitude to threads like this:
Maybe the trolls can just consider this a cyber party where a group of desperate people suffering from "serious and persistent mental illness" (to be politically correct) enjoy solace in belonging to a community, which may actually be a good thing for them.
For me, finding other people who are trying their best to cope with extreme-abuse-caused-PTSD is a literal sanity saver. I'll probably struggle all my life to fully understand the negative reaction this provokes in so many otherwise decent, rational folks. It mystifies me, since it in no way impacts them at all, yet they feel compelled to interject their opinion of us and of our claims over and over again. A number of different (and possibly mostly subconscious) motives are probably at play, but the results are incredibly painful for us and, I would think, uncomfortable for them--at least the ones capable of empathy and compassion.
The only constructive response, I guess, is to do our best to not be triggered by their skepticism, to try to answer them as clearly and politely as we can and then to return to our conversation. And the fact that a bunch of PTSDed people have managed to do that here is a wonderful thing. It would have been so easy to have abbreacted into all the other times we've been invalidated and responded with a lifetime's righteous rage. But we didn't and look at the result--an earned place to talk to each other and to reach out to all the lurkers who may not yet be at the point where they're able to join in.
And I'm glad you brought up the difficulty of communicating openly with skeptical family and friends, too. With my probably-ADD husband, I've learned to feed bits of unwanted information to him in "sound bites" of about 15 seconds in length. That's just below his threshold to tune me out and the cumulative effect is to gradually build up a basic understanding of my PTSD and DID/MPD. It's working, too, better than I'd ever hoped.
But with most of my friends, I've given up even hoping for them to ever understand or validate me. With a couple of wonderful exceptions, they've been successfully mass mind controlled into knee-jerk disbelief. And at my age I hesitate to commit to conveying the massive amount of historical information on the mind control programs that they'd need to overcome their skepticism...life's too damn short for me to spend what I have left knocking my head against that particular wall. But I hope that other survivors of systematized abuse will be up to it, for all our sakes.
LilyPat
