Sticks and Stones, Victim-Blaming and Verbal Abuse

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
Mohandas Gandhi

If you’ve ever had your feelings hurt by something someone said to you, then you’ve probably heard some of the clichés and platitudes some people use to protect themselves from harm (see above). You know what it is: the “don’t let it get to you” defense. While there is a time and place in life to ignore the haters and the naysayers and “be true to yourself,” or whatever, but this mindset can cross a line into a kind of victim-blaming situation. When a person in my life has become verbally abusive in the past, I’ve been told not to let it get to me. That’s all fine and happy, but how many times can a person be called a bitch and a bad mom before it starts to hurt?? I’m not made of steel, and neither are most people. Human beings, individuals or groups, use harmful tactics like verbal abuse, intimidation, and manipulation because they work; they hit the other person where they know it will hurt. It’s not the victim’s fault that they are upset when they’ve been treated badly, even when it was only with words. Just because you or I are aware that we've been low-blowed doesn't mean it will forever stop smarting.

When we’re implored by society to “buck up” and “don’t let it get to you,” it can be an excellent way of suppressing feelings rather than dealing with them. I’ve learned that the hard way. I understand that other people don’t give and damn and don’t want to make your shit their problem. Typically, it’s a miracle if your friends want to listen to you be upset for longer than about a half an hour, if you’re lucky. So, eventually we stop complaining so much and pretend to have dealt with our feelings. Last summer I had to deal with some of that anger that I stuffed down in the name of not letting it get to me. I understand now that the people who spewed their inspirational quotes didn’t actually give a rip about how I was feeling; they just wanted me to be quiet. Not happy, not better: quiet. So, I did, and of course it was my fault when I realized I was still angry after all these years when I thought I’d put it behind me.

It’s rarely that simple. The breadth of human emotion is far more complex than that and, frankly, I think that when we’ve stopped allowing what others say to affect us, we can become too quick to dismiss criticism because we don’t want to feel the weight of its effects, and that is a pretty primitive defense mechanism. It takes a great deal of self-awareness and insight into the motivations of others to know the difference sometimes, because there are times when others are trying to hurt us and times when what others say about us can show us who we really are, or who we want to be. However, handing out the idea that what other people say doesn’t ever matter is to hand out a security blanket, a placebo. It’s basic human nature that we learn about how to be human beings by watching and listening to other human beings. If what people say is all a bunch of hooey, then where does that leave us in terms of how we interact with one another?? Does what other people think only matter when they’re agreeing with us, telling us how fabulous we are, or defending us?? It’s a funny joke to say yes, but if that’s the case then why do we have friends?? Why do we fall in love, have children, develop relationships of any kind with other human beings if what they think or feel only matters when it’s convenient for us??

I understand that some people like inspiring words and sayings, like one of my current heroes RuPaul is posting on Facebook today. As much as I love quotations, I think we need to stop making excuses for ourselves while we hide under the words of others. The wisdom of people we admire can get us through tough times and make us laugh, certainly, but at what point do we need to go out in to the world and make our own wisdom?? I suppose no one actually needs to do that, especially when they can hide under the tenets they’ve been handed.

“When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.”
~Miguel Ruiz

Seriously?? I get that he’s supposed to be some kind of New Age spiritual leader, neoshamanist folks, but really?? The person who is immune to the opinions and actions of others is usually called a sociopath. Another quote by the same individual:

“"But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally."

Way to remove yourself from any responsibility you may have in hurting another person, because that’s all that is. It’s a poor excuse for enlightenment when people actually blame the person they’ve hurt, without exception, for being hurt rather than the manipulative jerk who hurts another person on purpose. We all say the wrong thing sometimes and hurt people, and personally I find the ability to identify how what I say can affect others and being able to be sorry when I’ve hurt someone is a good thing. Personally, I think that the person who blatantly and purposefully insults me just to see me hurt is an asshole, and an even bigger asshole for trying to pass my feelings off as a character flaw. That, my friends, is a sign of a sucky human being.

A Time to Grieve.

About five years ago, I experienced a downturn in my life that was both scary and disappointing. No one died, but I thought I had lost a job I loved, a person I loved, at the same time as going through some personal turmoil due to a bad investment I had made. I had a counselor that I cried to; spilled my guts hoping to remove all the badness and come out on the other side. Instead, he completely shut me down. He told me that I was wallowing in self-pity and that I should concentrate on the positive side. To this day I’m still not sure what the positive side of losing one’s job, the man one thought one was going to marry, and one’s freedom in less than a month’s time is, but I suppose that just makes me nothing more than a Negative Nancy.

In any case, I was hurting, badly, and to have that shat upon, having my feelings invalidated by someone who was supposed to help me improve my situation, hurt even more. Mind you, all of this bogusness fell out of this man’s face within the first few weeks he was counseling me, so it’s not as though I had been crying on his couch for months on end. I was sad and depressed and angry and scared of what would happen next, and the Positivity Police were trying to get me to turn that frown upside down, as though it were that simple. Maybe for some people it is?? It’s a nice thought, but as time has gone on and I’ve experienced other, different losses in life and watched people I care deeply for lose friends, homes, loved ones, jobs, marriages, children, experience disease, disability and be diagnosed with life-altering medical conditions, it only makes me more angry when they are shut down, the way I was shut down, for expressing their hurt and anger.

Human beings experience emotions that other human beings do not like to have to deal with. Just because a person is angry or depressed because they are going through something does not make them an angry, depressed person. When someone experiences a loss, no matter how trivial it may seem to the eternal optimist, what that person needs may not be a shot in the arm of sunshine but for you to give a damn about how they feel, let them feel that way for a little while, listen to them and be there as they work through it. Then cometh the power of positivity. Shoving it down a sad person’s throat doesn’t help them; sometimes it makes them feel more alone. And telling someone who is going through something that their feelings are wrong is just a shitty thing to do to a friend.

Anger and sadness are parts of grieving whether a person is seven and their cat dies, sixteen and their first boyfriend turns out to be a dud, or thirty and their dream job just bottomed out. Grief is grief is grief. No one can turn it off or make it magically go away, though some people are better at hiding it than others. If you care about a person, do you have to agree with them 100% of the time?? Give them a hug, let them be upset. Get them through this. If it goes on too long, then by all means tell them that they need to either start helping themselves or find a professional because there is only so much a friend can do. But blaming a sad person for being sad isn’t going to make them un-sad. The school of “don’t let it get to you” is quite often nonsense, because the bad shit gets to all of us at some point in time or another. We’re human beings and we came with feelings, some of which are not fun or enjoyable for anyone. But we have them, and we need each other when we do.