They need to stop calling what happened to you tragic. They need to stop hinting, believing, treating you like, and spreading around that you are permanently destroyed, permanently limited or ruined, will never this or that. That you are "a shadow of who you were" or that you or your innocence "got permanently corrupted". No matter WHAT or HOW much awfulness happened or was done to you. They are acting as though what happened made you less of a person, caused you to lose humanity, caused you to become less sentient, or made you into less than you were before.
The reality is that no magic wand, no event, no nastiness or evil, has the power to turn something into nothing, more into less, matter into nothingness, as in sentience into nothingness or into a flea-infested, unsentient pile of dog shit. THAT is the real delusional magical thinking here... it denies the law of the conservation of matter!
You could never become less of a person even if you were literally lobotomized. The cure for trauma, for dehumanizing treatment-- no matter what happened or what the victim presents like-- that appears to "make you less of a person," is to do the OPPOSITE of treat you as less of a person. To treat you like a live, sentient person... not to mourn you like you're dead. Including by making sure you KNOW they see you as no less than they see themselves as. Otherwise, they are dehumanizing you all over again and traumatizing you all over again... and being dehumanized as a result of having been dehumanized is often worse trauma on its own than what the original trauma did to you.
It's no different from being punished for having been punished. Being abused for having trauma from being abused. Being punished or dehumanized as "therapy" to "discourage wallowing in self pity from being dehumanized in the past" or to "help you become more human after being dehumanized" or to "snap you out of being a vegetable"-- as though you aren't already human... as though you ever stopped being human... as though you ever are or were a "vegetable"... or a criminal as an overarching identity... or as "wallowing for no good reason due to pathology."
It triggers me to literal trauma whenever I see a TV show or movie in which a person is or becomes disabled (either from age, drugs, injury, mental illness, or anything else)-- especially if they appear "mentally disabled"-- and then others-- best case scenario-- treat them mildly condescendingly because of it, and worst case scenario make Godlike predictions about their future or lack thereof (and all those predictions are godlike, and so no human has any place making them) and/or treat the victim as less sentient, less capable, less aware, less able to analyze and question, and as having less valid logical emotional social spiritual situational reasons for their behaviors (with people instead preferring to pathologize their desperate attempts to communicate the fact that they are just as there as they always were).
I want to cry, and want to throw up, and I get extremely angry when I see movies and TV shows like this, or hear stories like this, where the person is seen as being less or not in need of or not desiring (or not being capable of desiring) being treated like a person and talked to as an equally human human... when they are seen as less (or not) capable of benefiting from that... as therefore not having the right, or as much of a right, to be treated like a fully sentient person... which they are, and never stopped being. Which no one could or can or will ever be able to stop being, or become less of. Often in these movies and stories about the decades-ago or recent past and sometimes the present day (and yes, it's making a comeback), the victim expressing desire to leave whatever facility or restrictive controlling family situation they are in results in them being pathologized more (and it being blamed on their "condition" and on the apparent less-than-humanness that that "condition entails) and it being seen as reason to keep or control them more, and for longer. So much for informed consent, and right to revoke it at any time.
It may be the most disturbing thing I have ever seen or heard about. Knowing it still happens in some (or maybe by comparison a lot of) places disturbs me so much that for a second I wish I could just distract myself from it, but that would help no one... knowing those people are suffering in and from these situations gives me a terrified, angry sadness that they aren't being allowed to enjoy a lot of the distractions I might use to make myself forget about it for a while... knowing that they weren't or aren't being allowed to enjoy anything in peace and in freedom and while being treated like the sentient person they are and never stopped being.
And I don't just feel this way because it could be us one day if we don't change things. This isn't about me.
Not mentioning it for fear of looking like a lunatic or wierd (or like "someone who needs a life") doesn't work. And it hurts and harms us all to not talk about very real dehumanizations going on in society.
The person who said society's punishments are small compared to the injury we cause our own souls when we look the other way was and is right about that.
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