Hi all,
Thanks for such encouraging words. And yes, Ellie, I would gladly accept a hug! 😉
I think for me the issue about the Cosmic Kick-Me Sign is that it makes putting myself out there an act of self-endangerment. Why would I stick my head out of the cave when I know I'm going to get slapped or bitten?
Perhaps that's a dilemma a lot of us face? On one hand, we've been admonished so many times that no-one can change things but ourselves, but on the other we know better than the advice-givers that putting ourselves "out there" isn't consistent with protecting ourselves. It's a Battle of the World-Views.
I don't know how to resolve it.
That's partly because I don't quite grasp what's going on. For instance, a short while back I found an organisation meant for adult survivors of childhood abuse, which introduced me to the concept of complex trauma. It was a revelation to me, and shed light on what I'd been feeling, and how things had impacted me, for my whole life. (I raised the subject of complex trauma with my GP, and asked if he thought the description fitted me, and he said, "I would've thought that was obvious!") So I rang the organisation's "professional counselling" line, and explained I was trying to understand how complex-PTSD fed into the Cosmic Kick-Me, hoping that understanding would lead to some kind of shift. I was dismayed from the outset at how proscriptive and autocratic the people on the phones seemed to be, and how overtly cross they got if I said that one of the sweeping conclusions they lept to on the basis of single statements didn't feel to me like it fitted. But the website said these are highly-trained professionals, and I'm predisposed to think that the problem is always with me, so I hung in there. After a few more calls, still just trying to get an answer to my one question, I noticed that the people I was talking with were becoming openly adversarial. I mentioned this to one counsellor I was speaking to, asking help with understanding where this was going wrong, and she abruptly ended the conversation in a kind of righteous indignation. I could only think of that cliché of "if you don't know what you've done, then I'm not going to tell you!"
So I managed to speak with the woman who "co-ordinated" the phone counselling, whatever that particularly means, explained my experience and asked her what was going on. She started the conversation as aggressive and insulting, and gradually sank into being openly abusive and (frankly, childishly) spleen-venting. As the conversation went on, her insults became more and more overt, and when I didn't bite, she finally called me by my real-world name (which is also Gaelic), and made the comment "if such a ridiculous thing really is your name!" ... I said, "Oh come on, that's a bit gratuitous", and she flew into what seemed like a stage-managed panic, and shouted, "Oh myGod, I'm not safe with you! I'm terminating this onversation!!) and hung up. She'd got where she wanted to go, it seemed. But along the way she'd told me the team had often discussed me and complained among themselves that I was "insubordinate" (the word she actually used) and that I had rung too many times (despite no-one ever raising this with me as a problem, and in fact each time saying "ring back whenever you need to!").
I still have no idea what I did "wrong". But I was really shocked that they could let this situation develop to outright hostility before ever saying anything to me, and I was also shocked that this "trained professional" could find no better way of addressing it than speaking in hurt-scoring complaint.
Part of me, of course, feels a futile rage at being treated this way. It was unprofessional. It was reprehensible. It was damnably unfair. But another part of me cannot handle thinking blamefully of professional people, actualized and government funded ("Who do you think you are?!" rings my mother's voice in my head) and so becomes convnced that the problem must be with me, even though I cannot see what I did that was objectively wrong, let alone to justify such treatment. Did I ring too often? I clearly needed to, and as professionals shouldn't they have handled it constructively? Did I not give due deference? Then that too should have been handled in the conversation, not bitched about behind my back and then flung at me blamefully, causing intentional hurt with the knowledge that I'd been complained about.
But I have trouble thinking ill of someone else's behaviour, so it must be me who is at fault. And I really can't grasp the thought that they treat everyone that way -- that would be just too appalling -- so I figure it must just be me. But even then, what kind of "professional", even if they thought their anger was justified, would be as abusive as she had been and leave a traumatised person dangling in that manner? Wow, I *really* must have screwed up.
That's a very hard thing just to shrug off. I'm not one to brood, but without anyone around me to help me debrief, or to change the pictures hanging on my mental walls, it means I'm sitting around perpetually in my own dirty bathwater.
So why not get out of the bath and put on clean clothes? Because, experience tells me, they're only going to get more mud flung on them.
Is ... a puzzlement.
