CW abuse
I’ve been poking about on the NHS website. I notice that medication to deal with trauma is something they offer to victims who can’t have meaningful therapy because their domestic abuse is ongoing. I’ve read page after page about coping with triggering and how to manage PTSD symptoms on websites designed to help people with mental health problems. I’ve read what content there is about how to support sufferers – be patient with them, listen – good stuff, but lacking something.
What I’m not seeing is the mental health advice about not triggering people. I’m not seeing the pages about dealing with workplace culture and bullying. I’m not seeing the advice to people about how to curb abusive behaviour and treat partners better. The Relate website is full of advice about what to do if you are upset, frustrated or annoyed in your relationship. It doesn’t say much about what to do if you are terrified, or in overwhelming distress, or what to do if your partner ‘makes you angry’ so that you feel justified hitting them.
It’s always the victim who has to change. It’s the victim who is expected to do the work, put the experience into perspective, take the meds, and become more resilient. Where is the content about how we do more to look after each other?
Everything I have thus far found online about PTSD therapy seems to start from the assumption that it was a one off event, never likely to happen again and that once you feel that you’ll be fine. Given the stats on abuse, child abuse, domestic abuse and people being made ill by their workplaces, it’s hard to see how this can be helpful. There are so many traumatic things people go through that aren’t one off events, but part of their daily lives.
If you’re wounded and struggling, all I can really offer you right now is solidarity and this thought – just because the majority of resources are focused on fixing you, does not mean it is you who are broken. The sick society that harmed you, is broken. The people who inflicted the damage, are broken. You need to feel safe – you should be able to feel safe. Safety does not really come from you changing the story about what happened, or working to minimise it. Safety comes from living in a culture that doesn’t encourage, condone and generally facilitate abuse and bullying. There’s nothing more healing and restorative than getting to feel safe.
Druid Life 
February 26th, 2021 at 12:04 pm
Absolutely, brilliantly articulated. 🌹🙏
February 26th, 2021 at 1:04 pm
Yes! Well said 🙂
February 26th, 2021 at 9:08 pm
Utterly brilliant and so true. Thank you for being so articulate around this emotive issue
February 26th, 2021 at 11:24 pm
This! 100%.
I have called out the workplace culture of trying to make employees more resilient instead of telling managers not to push them to work too hard.
https://link.medium.com/9Hjkq2UDceb
March 1st, 2021 at 10:07 am
This is good to know.
February 27th, 2021 at 5:11 pm
That last paragraph in particular…yes!
March 2nd, 2021 at 11:47 pm
Serious trauma—notably domestic abuse and adverse childhood experiences—is typically behind a substance abuser’s debilitating lead-ball-and-chain self-medicating lifestyle.
Generally, there’s a formidable reason why a person repeatedly consumes and gets heavily hooked upon an unregulated, often deadly chemical that eventually destroys lives.
The greater the drug-induced euphoria or escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived. By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
We now know pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive opiate pain killers—the real moral crime—for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
March 3rd, 2021 at 6:09 am
Thank you for adding this. I’ve mostly managed to avoid addiction, but I agree that it needs a radically different and much more compassionate approach.