Telling is a Mitzvah

(Remember: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month)

I will keep saying as long as I can type and have breath in my body. Victims need to tell. Victims need to talk about it. The only way they move forward, heal and get validation is to tell. Not 'get over it' or 'just forget about it' or "move on" but to tell and be heard.

I have yet to meet a victim that was only interested in revenge. Yes, the thought crosses their minds but I talk them out of it easily. Why? Because for the most part - they want some sort of closure. Closure they won't get from their abuser(s). Usually because the abuser is too busy projecting, blame-shifting and trying to paint themselves (and sometimes their families) as the 'injured party.' And abusers see themselves as entitled and above reproach.

No, the overriding reason I hear for victims to tell - is the hope that the abuser will GET HELP. While the chances of a person who sees nothing wrong with using other people to get their kicks or take out their problems on actually getting help is slim, it is one of the good reasons to tell.

The other reason is to not allow the shame & guilt to chew up a victim inside. Victims care. Not wisely or well - but they often do still care about their abusers. Not retribution. Retribution is something only an abuser's mind would jump to.

No, telling is not a sin. It is a MITZVAH.

The Truth Would Tear the World Apart

Abuse isn't something that people seem to want to hear about, even though more people are talking about it today than in the past. I have my own personal opinions on this.

I tend to see abuse as a dirty little secret which perpetrators deny, justify, or minimize, in order that they can get away with it; and which most well-meaning people probably can't handle hearing about as something real.

It is literally stomach-turning to read the statistics on child sexual abuse, for instance, and turn the numbers into real children. When one out of four little girls is sexually abused, and one out of seven little boys, sometime before their adulthood, that means that every fourth little girl you know could well be a victim. The faces on the statistics are those of our daughters, the kids down the street, the children of your neighbors, homeless kids, or even your own child. Admitting that something so horrible could well happen -- and may already be happening -- to some precious little child that you know and love is a terrible thing to think of; so I suppose most folks aren't willing to go beyond a state of marginal denial about it.

For instance, how would you like to know that your next door neighbor is sodomizing his 3-year-old daughter every night, the same little child who loves to come over to your house and play with your pets? Or how would it be to discover that your gay teenage son is being beaten up by his boyfriend? Or to hear the story about the 18-month-old infant who was found dead, assaulted to death by an adult man who raped her so hard they found semen in her chest cavity?

Difficult acts to imagine, let alone endure. Yet perpetrators imagine them, as well as other violations too disgustingly evil to write out here, and practice them on their victims daily.

But victims do endure, and survive, and many tell their stories. In recent years, people have been talking, telling the world the truth about their lives and their experiences dealing with abuse, and the long, arduous process of recovery. Survivors have been talking vocally enough that there has even emerged a backlash against the recovery movement, evidenced by the existence of such organizations as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. (Take note: just because I mention that organization on my webpage doesn't mean that I endorse them or their activities in the least little way. My personal opinion of the FMSF is, to put it mildly, not particularly flattering. I will not say that false allegations of abuse do not occur -- they do --

but I am firm in my belief that the backlash against recovery is an angry attempt to deny the horrors that millions of survivors have endured. It is an insult to survivors everywhere, and I have no tolerance for it.)

Survivors have talked so much about physical types of abuse -- those perpetrated against the body (battering and sexual abuse, for instance) -- that such subjects are now widely known in mainstream society. Less widely spoken of are forms of abuse that are not directly tangible: psychological, emotional, verbal, or [online] abuse.

Survivors of multiple kinds of abuse often say that the emotional part of their experience is by far the most damaging. Emotional abuse leaves no physically visible scars; but the damage to the victim's very soul is often all-encompassing.

The perpetrator of emotional abuse teaches the victim to hate themselves from the inside out, leaving a legacy of self-destruction that may well survive long after the perpetrator is out of their lives. Depression, self-harm, suicidal tendencies, and addictions are often the result of having been abused.

The sinister thing about emotional abuse and its byproducts are that it's incredibly easy to blame the victim for it. Victims of emotional abuse are often told such lies as, "You're just taking it wrong", "You shouldn't let it bother you", or the old standby, "Sticks and stones/May break my bones/But words will never hurt me." (To this last, I say: BULLSHIT.) Words do hurt. A verbal abuser, for instance, can let fly with a barrage of name-calling, insults, violent anger, rage, and screaming, and then answer the victim's pain by telling them that they're just being "hypersensitive" and insisting that the victim is to blame for their own pain. Never mind that they've just had someone verbally rip them a new ***hole,

now the victim is not only hurting from the attack, they've also been informed that they are to blame for being hurt; and not only do they have to deal with the pain of being abused, they also have to deal with the crazymaking idea that there is something wrong with them, since it's their fault they were hurt.

SOURCE

Every Little Thing Is Not a Sin
by Kathy Krajco

I think victims fear to defend themselves because society has an unwholesome obsession with passing judgment on every single thing a person says or does. It's like there is some moral obligation to call every word or deed "right" or "wrong." This nonsense has gone so far now as to extend to FEELINGS.

You can't say or do anything without someone feeling it incumbent on them to tell you whether it was holy or a sin, though secular people use different jargon than that.

When I was teaching, I relieved myself of this burden. Sometimes I'd sit back at my desk in Biology lab and just watch the kids interact with each other. Every minute or so, someone would grab an instrument and tell his or her partner, "No! That's not how you do it, Dufus! This is how you do it!" Then over here, there's a kid snarling at his partner for "kidding" him in a way he didn't like. Over there, a girl is sitting back in disgust, tossing the instrument on the table saying, "There, you do it if you can do it better!" because her partner was criticizing every move she made. I could list no end of little human interactions like this going on.

When I was new to teaching, my indoctrination went off and I thought I had to race like a firefighter to the scene and correct this behavior. I must swoop down on every spat or quarrel, bawling the parties out for getting mad and judging who was to blame.

Then one day I had a brilliant thought. "Why?"

Why did I have to do that? So, I sat back and just watched. Guess what? Every little issue resolved itself almost instantly. A minute later, those partners were getting along fine again.

It was easy to see that one party stepped on the other's toes or was succumbing to mediocrity that would affect his or partner's grade and...YEOW - just like tiger cubs at play. Every so often, one of them gets ticked off and snarls. But then it's over.

The snarl actually works. It's nothing so long as the God of that world (me - TEACHER) doesn't descend on them and make a big deal out of it.

Once that happens, THEN their feelings don't blow away in under 30 seconds, because now they've been SHAMED by the teacher judging them as having sinned.

So, I learned to mind my own business. I'd just watch to make sure something I didn't understand wasn't about to escalate into something I would have to put a stop to. Guess what? I never had to. Those kids got along with each other and me beautifully.

Sometimes during one of these little spats one of them would look up and see me watching them - looking like "Oh-oh! She sees us and we're gonna get bawled out for arguing with each other!"

Why? Because that's what their other teachers would have done.

They'd keep looking back at me, more and more puzzled at why I wasn't coming at them and was just sitting there listening and occasionally laughing at something one of them said. I'd see the humor in it, you see. Then I'd make some joke to show them the humor in it, too.

In short, I just made light of it, made nothing good or evil of it, and just let them settle it.

Suddenly the brainwashing fell from my eyes and I could see that every time a person says a sharp word it is not a sin. It is nothing. It is part of normal human interaction.

Every time you yell, it is not a sin. Every time you get angry it is not a sin. Every time you slam a cupboard door it is not a sin. And if it's in self defense, even every time you hit it is not a sin. Neither is every time you fart.

I was a cradle Catholic and the nuns weren't HALF as bad as secular society is today in loading a guilt trip on you for every single thing you say or do.

Let's be honest. The reason people judge everything you say or do is because judging others is THE act of playing God and makes them feel morally superior to those they are saying sinned. In other words, it's nothing but self-righteousness.

And the punch line is that those same holier-than-thous doing this are committing the Sin Sodom (by denying you the right to do anything but bend over for abuse) while bawling you out for "raising your voice."

Don't be puppet-mastered by these moral idiots, whether they be the secular ones or the religious ones. Don't fear that you mustn't ever do anything that someone will call a sin. They can call ANYTHING a sin.

Knuckling under to their moral control tactics disables you and establishes a gross double-standard, in which the narcissist is free to rage, hit, abuse, be irrational, act crazy, lie his head off, smear, and steal to get whatever he wants, but you dare not even "raise your voice" or FEEL your anger.

Of course you don't want to degrade yourself by how you react and protect yourself. But don't be obsessed with fear of doing anything some holier-than-thou would say is wrong. If you do, you will soon find that you are nailed to a cross for target practice.

Every little thing you say or do simply doesn't rise to the level of being right or wrong. It needs no judgement. And being obsessed with such trivia is just a distraction from the big things, the things your moral judgment should be focused on.

What Makes Narcissists Tick: Every Little Thing Is Not a Sin