Ancilla L
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Contextualisation as a survival mechanism.
🕑 Added 2024-01-11 04:09:41 +0000 UTCYesterday, during a conversation about how we develop physical boundaries through life, my therapist asked me if I understood the difference between a good touch and a bad touch. Immediately, it made me laugh, because I felt like she thought I was five, but also because, it felt like such a simplistic question given what we had been previously discussing. Before I started to answer, she added something.
"I'm not asking you, as you are now, don't launch into a societal evaluation of the concept," she said because she's come to know me, "I'm asking the child that you were, did you understand the difference between a good touch and a bad one?"
Girl be blowing my mind with her questions sometimes. I've come to find that I face a serious challenge with therapy. I am quite reluctant to talk about myself. I know that seems suspicious, especially given the extent of the personal that I explore when writing, but let me explain. I will talk about myself, so long as my stories can be used for a didactic or supportive purpose. My world, my entire fucking universe, exists in structures. It's what I do, I contextualise human life until the deeply personal starts to become comprehensible as a feature of the political, human, social, legal and familial. When I use my life as the anecdotal evidence for the essay on how predators gain access to young girls in their homes, it doesn't feel like I am talking about my life, I am talking about a phenomenon. It doesn't feel personal at all. I've always thought of this as useful as a writer, and even in a personal capacity, as a child, when I developed the habit of contextual analysis of all subjects, I finally felt like I could understand my life and that helped get through it. It's really hard to tell why, you know, when you have no means of comprehension, you really cannot understand why you are being raped, abused, neglected or beaten. Context helps you understand.
None of which is to say it exonerates the criminal act on the part of the perpetrator. This is outside of that realm. As far as justice goes, I know who was wrong in these scenarios but that doesn't help you survive them, you know? When you're being abused, sexually or emotionally or physically, the most imminent plans you make aren't of escape, because it's not easy to get out of the home of your parents when you are ten (etc) nor is it imminent, first you make plans for survival. The habit of contextualising, for me, was my survival plan. I do *well* when I turn trauma into knowledge and information in real-time (especially if I can use it to inform my ethics or question the acceptable mores of society). Also, in a weird way, context and structures make you feel less alone. If you can understand yourself as a fixture of a noticeable pattern in society that inherently means, there are others. When I was going through all of it, this was my means of survival because it converted the *loss of control* to the *impossibility of control*.
When someone abuses you (and subsequently when it goes on long enough that you realise you cannot leave and you must find a way to endure it indefinitely), you *lose control* and that is difficult as a concept but much harder when you feel it every day. Control is gone. It's taken, you can't get it back and even when you make plans, it actively hinders your ability to follow through on those plans, it's hard to exist as a human being who feels absolutely no control. Helplessness is the most harrowing state of being I have ever experienced in my life, it's the sole and last feeling that I remember truly *feeling*. So you shift perspective. If what is happening to you is part of a socio-political pattern then it's, destined. Someone has to be part of the pattern, the fact that it is you and not your neighbour, is purely chance-based and over that *you cannot exercise control*. It's easier to accept that, it makes you feel like you have some power because you cannot fight the situation, but you can fight the pattern. You can dedicate your life to fighting it. You can make that choice. Or so I reasoned, anyway. I figured, you have this impossible situation in which you are stuck and cannot immediately fix, and as a result, you have an immersive look into domestic violence, abusive parenting, misogynistic violence, neglect, narcissistic parents and lovers, rape and sexual abuse, you can cry about it right now and just feel helpless about you situation, or you can understand it, evaluate the fuck out of it, postpone emotions and when you're out of here, you can use all of that information to fight the pattern and then you won't even need to have the emotions because it will be fixed.
I, to this day, believe this is a great plan.
I'm not saying it should be other people's plan or it is the right plan or it's healthy or anything. I'm just saying, it was a great plan (ie: I survive, I have the mental space to make concrete plans to actually get out, I learn the skill of analysis and I fix misogyny and abuse ultimately probably of course). And I really stick to my plans, it's a disease or something so I stopped feeling and I started structuring the world around me to the end of understanding it well enough to fix it. The only problem is that I actually have no idea how I feel about anything at all so I am deeply uncomfortable when I am the subject of discussion which, I am given to understand, is what therapy is. It's a place where you are the subject of discussion. Not the societal trends you have noticed. Not the concepts of sexual education imparted to children. No. You. The person.
I'm not sure I am a person.
I know, that's dramatic, but it is how I see myself, as a data-processing unit with a rampant sexuality and an affinity for overly drawn-out sentencing. I have a very hard time determining how I feel about anything or what I felt when something happened, I usually reason my way to the answer and then have the feeling as dictated by my reasoning. I didn't even realise how severe it was until I went to therapy. Apparently, when someone asks you: *And how did you feel when someone barged into your room without knocking and acted like it was their space?* they are not fishing for an essay about how turning privacy into a privilege makes children more unsafe, they want to know what feeling you experienced and I have absolutely no idea. My therapist pointed out that whenever she asks me a question like that, i respond by saying, "*I suppose I would have felt...*" and never "*I felt...*" and it's true, I don't actually know, I am just basing it on what I think this character within this demographic of people would have felt and then supplementing it with a lot of exact thought on the nature of the experience. I don't know what feels like what.
Which is why the question about good touches and bad as perceived by my child-self was so easy to answer. Of course I didn't know the difference. When you're a child, before you learn language, you learn touch, right? Inherently, some baselines are laid for what constitutes "good" or "bad" touch before you can pontificate on touch, but my baselines for touch are a bit warped. My family doesn't hold babies or children, so comfort, was a bad touch because it accompanied chastisement for being weak. Strangers have made me feel better, but my mother mostly touched me in violence so whose touch do I construe as good? The touch of a stranger? Or the violent touch of the person who birthed me? Contrarily, I could construe it all as bad, which means I really have no baseline for good touch. Or all as good, which means I have no way to know when something feels good. Except, well, sexual touch. It was the first pleasurable touch, the first touch that was also truly immediately comprehensible to me because I understood why I wanted it, but it occured during rape and then consistent raping so my body remembers it as desirable, and my brain remembers it as traumatic. All the touch wires are fucked.
Obviously, as an adult, I have a system. I know that a good touch is one I consent to and a bad one is one I don't consent to but that knowledge is not intuitive to me. If a random person puts their hands on me in a dark alley today, my brain will shut down and my body may like it. If you ask me how it made me feel, i likely won't know, i will probably describe my bodily response and then correlate it with a social trend and then estimate an emotion I should feel. I cannot help that and I cannot change the fact that I have tested that, so I know that I cannot wait for intuitive learning on this front. I just have to believe and protect myself based on a moral I learnt. I taught it to myself like morals out of a textbook. I just believe they are correct because I know there is something wrong in my system. And my outlook. I cannot see myself as a *person*, because it would be too fucking hard to start now. I stopped decades ago because I thought I had a great plan.
And it was a great plan. I dedicated my life to everything I said I would dedicate my life to. I was just never on that list and now if I were to put myself on it, I'd have to go back a could of decades and figure out how I really felt about things. Me. As a person.
How the fuck do you even do that?
(Don't answer that).
Comments
Kara Coryell
bahaha fucking enter key. ...But I'm not even sure why it would necessarily need to be a goal. It...it didn't make me a better person. In some ways, I think it made me worse, the learning to be a person. It's easier to see the ethics of a decision with perfect clarity when you're a piece of a larger. Um. spreadsheet. So I mostly still do that, too. I think maybe part of why therapy is such a goddamned roller coaster for the Club is that. LIke, every therapist I ever had wanted to focus on *fixing* the spreadsheet. Making me more able to interpret what I was feeling, in the moment. I finally managed that, to some extent. And...idk. Finding the tightrope over that abyss, for me, was a lot of work; dubious returns. One thing, though. It made my writing better. It doesn't make you more a person. You are already a person. You are a person who plans brilliantly, and sorts data in useful ways that let you live the life you choose, mostly. If you want to learn the thing about feeling, you will. You can. In whatever form you take. I know you can, because you make brilliant goddamned plans, and then you execute them, over the course of horrifying years if you must. This learning to figure out what you feel thing is just another one of those. If you want to, you got this. Same as you always got everything, if you really want to. You are a person. And you are fucking brilliant. So put yourself on the list, if you want to. And don't, if you don't. Either way, you are still a person. Either way. All the ways. <3
Kara Coryell
okokokok First? It *was* a great plan. It was a goddamned brilliant plan. It got you through that, and it takes absolute wunderkind processing powers to get any of us in the CLub through those years. HUrrah for your plan. I am so glad you made it. I"m not answering the rest. You said not to, and anyhow I can't. I've got years of writing on how I did, but I
