stoicmike:After a breakup you should either say only good things about your ex, or never speak of th
stoicmike:After a breakup you should either say only good things about your ex, or never speak of them again. — Michael LipseyAhaha no.Someone hurts you, abuses you, fucks you up, don’t feel like you have to hold your tongue about that shit.I grew up in an abusive family, and while that’s not an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend situation, abusive relationships share patterns and dynamics. It is very, very similar.As abuse victims try to tolerate the abuse we can’t escape, as we try to survive, we develop this sick defense mechanism where we tell ourselves that the small good things like “he brought me flowers, he cooked me dinner” are enough to offset the big bad things like “he beat the shit out of me and told me I was a worthless whore that was so much trouble nobody else would ever bother loving me so I was lucky to have even one person to take care of me.”As abuse victims struggle to define what they went through as abuse – this turns out to be really, really hard – we get told to not be mean, we get told not to talk about it, we get told that we were wrong and it was not abuse. Women especially get this, as do people with mental illnesses, and the children of abusive parents because we are always supposed to be grateful that they chose to bring us into the world and provide us with the bare minimum necessary to survive.I realize this quote isn’t talking at abuse victims, but here’s the thing:Abuse victims and survivors are reading this. And other things like it. All the time. Stuff like this peppers them constantly, and every time it’s like this little popup window pops up in front of their mental browser and it says something like:“Be quiet. It wasn’t that bad. You were the one who was wrong. If you had only done things differently, they wouldn’t have treated you badly. Maybe you should be quiet now. Maybe you should just stop. Stop, please. You might be hurting them. You don’t want to hurt them do you? You’re better than them, aren’t you?”Once isn’t too bad. But when you’re first getting away from shit like that, you don’t get it only when you run across it. Your own brain does it to you all the damn time. So when you run across it externally, it just validates those awful little thoughts.I get what this quote is saying. Let it go. Make a clean break. Don’t burn bridges if they were a good person but times were just rough.I get that. And I kinda agree with it in principle. When the relationship was not abusive.But it does harm to many people in or escaping from or recovering from abusive relationships. And there are more of those people than you think.We should strive, always, to speak of people with integrity.Sometimes that integrity means you stand up and say “He beat me." "He raped me." "He threatened to kill my cat if I left." "He screamed in my face every day but never lay a hand on me, but I still cry when anyone raises their voice at me.”Never be ashamed of what you have survived. Never let anyone silence you.“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” – Anne Lamott -- source link