2022 is the year i look as sick as i feel

Emotional symptoms of long term abuse:

• You feel that you don’t have it that bad and that you just need to suck it up and endure it
• You believe you’re exaggerating and dramatizing your pain, you’re probably fine and just faking it.
• You don’t think you have any right to complain because there’s people who have it worse out there, and you should be grateful it’s not worse.
• Someone thinking you’re in need of ‘saving’ gives you anxiety. You don’t want anyone to worry about you, or to seem like you’re in distress.
• You feel like you’re pathetic for waiting for something to happen to make your life better.
• You feel guilty and ashamed a lot of, or even most of the time.
• You are disgusted by the idea of being seen as weak, spoiled, attention-seeking or a special snowflake. You’re secretly scared of being any or all of that.
• You would endure as much as possible before asking for help or causing any concern.
• You are always worried if someone will get angry at you, and if they do get angry, you feel it’s your fault and you deserved it.
• You see other people’s struggles before anything else about them, and feel grateful you don’t have to deal with that on top of everything else.
• You understand anyone who’s been misunderstood, quiet, outcast, or universally hated. You feel a connection with them almost instantly.
• You’re ashamed of it but you long for approval so badly you’d go to any lengths to obtain it.
• You don’t feel that you deserve love, or that it is even possible to love you.
• Being judged, criticized, shamed, rejected or mocked hurts you on deep and even physical level. You don’t feel that you can bear it.
• You are terrified of failure. You’re scared that you could actually be horrid and irredeemably bad at everything. It makes you so paralyzed you can’t even try things you could be bad at.
• You hide your true desires because you feel they’re too much, you feel ashamed dreaming of being passionately loved or unconditionally accepted and adored. For you, these feel like unachieveable dreams.
• You’re able to understand, defend, excuse, fight for, stand up for and adore anyone, but yourself. You feel that everyone else deserves more kindness, compassion, understanding, empathy and support, but you can’t feel this for yourself.

If 4 or more of these ring true for you, know that these are not just personality traits, they’re a results of long-term shredding of your own self worth, confidence, self-perception, perceived value in society. These beliefs are a result of grooming. Nobody who is raised/treated lovingly would ever believe any of these lies. If you feel this, you’ve been exposed to psychological and emotional abuse.

lyrics that an abused kid/person can relate to (emotional/neglect/physical)

second third and hundredth chances, balancing on breaking branches

those eyes add insult to injury

i think I've seen this film before and I didn't like the ending

I'm not your problem anymore so am i offending now

you didn't even hear me out

you never turned things around

entirety of tolerate it.mp3

you're so much older and wiser and i

i wait by the door like I'm just a kid

use my best colours for your portrait

lay the table with the fancy shit

and watch you tolerate it

If it's all in my head tell me now

tell me I've got it wrong somehow

i know my love should be celebrated but you tolerate it

i see the permanent damage you did me

i wish it wasn't 4 AM, standing in the mirror saying to myself,

you know you had to do it, i know the bravest thing i ever did was run

it was always on your terms, I waited on every careless word

i gave you my best and we both know you can't say that

better man (Taylor's Version) (from the vault)

You knew the password, so I let you in the door
You knew you won, so what's the point of keeping score?
You knew it still hurts underneath my scars
From when they pulled me apart
But what you did was just as dark
Darling, this was just as hard
As when they pulled me apart

hoax by Taylor Swift

Living in long term abusive situation, the abusers will often require you to ‘act normal’, as if everything is fine and good, even if you don’t feel okay. They present it to you as necessary, polite, ‘don’t be rude to xyz’ or will straight-up belittle and humiliate you until acting 'normal’ will be the only safe option for you. It creates the illusion that everyone is secretly falling apart inside and suffering silently only to be polite.

Acting normal in every situation can become a compulsion, something you do automatically to protect yourself against possible or imagined backlash; you live as if you’re unphased by anything, because showing pain feels like showing weakness, and being hurt while you’re weak is worse. You additionally might feel that your feelings are too much, nobody would want to deal with them, you’re oversensitive, overdramatic, over-emotional disaster of a human and you keep it all in to save yourself rejection and embarassment.

The abusers will enforce the 'play normal’ rule even when the situation is desparate, when you’re seriously hurt, panicked and in need of help, you’ll find that you’re expected to extend any effort to 'act normal’ or else. They also use the fact that you’re able to 'play normal’ to prove that 'nothing is actually wrong and you were just dramatizing for attention or pretending to make them feel sorry for you.

After being gaslit like this for a while, you start to believe it. You start to think that if you can still play normal, then you’re clearly not suffering enough for it to be adressed. Even if you’re in such bad state you’re dissociated for the most of the time, you dismiss your own pain and fear just like the abusers do, it must be nothing, if you can still keep yourself from screaming, you must be okay. You wonder if everyone lives feeling like this, and envy their acting; you’re barely holding it together. You feel ashamed and pathetic for every second you’re not able to 'keep control of it’, or every little feeling that bleeds out thru your pretense. You feel like you’re weak and failing to control yourself, when everyone else does it so easy.

So let me relay some facts: Most people don’t act. They’re allowed to be upset, and don’t try to control their feelings at all. Most people aren’t exposed to the amount of trauma that would require them to control their feelings 24/7. Most of people were never told to 'keep it in’ or to 'act normal’ when everything is falling apart. The amount of effort people put into being polite is way below containing trauma. What you’re enduring is completely unimaginable pain to them. You’re keeping together what they never would, or could. You’re not weak for a moment of distress; anyone else in your situation would be fully freaking out, full time.

Even if it’s possible, by insane effort, to act okay when terrified and hurt, it doesn’t mean you’re 'okay enough’ to dismiss it. Your abusers lied. Being forced to keep horrible feeling unexpressed makes them that much worse; not only you’re in pain, but you’re in danger, unsafe to express distress, unable to call for help. It’s being trapped in a world where only 'acting okay’ is safe, but there’s a time limit to how long you can do it without breaking, and every time you break a little, you experience terror and shame. You don’t know how to keep it up, and you blame yourself for it. It’s a world where nobody cares what you’re going thru, and you can’t make anyone care.

This is what abusers do to gaslight, isolate and force the victims to hide the trauma and abuse that’s been caused. It’s a tactics to protect the abusers, at the immense cost to the victims. If you felt this, your abusers are monsters, and they lied to you; you’re not supposed to act okay. You were supposed to get a relief from pain, you were supposed to get help, comfort reassurance, to be taken seriously, to get protected, safe, understood, and your pain removed. They denied all of this to be able to abuse you some more. Your self control was never the problem. Their control of you was.

I didn’t want to be “stronger” I wanted to be a child