Rage + Anxiety + Fear of Abandonment

I want to make sure you both understand that accepting in this context does not mean forgiveness, or accepting that "it is what it is, you just have to live with it".

There's nothing acceptable about what happened to you. The behavior of the person inflicting abuse is never okay, and it does not ever have to be forgiven because it is in fact unforgivable.

The victim might choose to forgive the individual based upon that person's mental illness or that they themselves didn't know any better because they themselves were subject to parental abuse - and that's fine. But it's also fine to never forgive the abuser.

Acceptance in this context is closely aligned with acknowledgment. It is accepting that this happened AND that it is safe to acknowledge that it happened.

The whole focus is on how the child's survival brain dealt with the ABUSE (by repressing it) and how that leads to disabling suffering in adulthood.

Acknowledging and accepting the reality of the abuse and realizing that it can no longer hurt you, is what this work is all about.

 

Huh? Not by legitimate licensed psychotherapists, surely? In the US, at least in the states I'm familiar with, unlicensed individuals can't legally call themselves therapists.

This sounds like influencers holding themselves out as life coaches on social media, and I would not even lump most legitimate coaches in with that crowd. Long before the internet we've also had televangelists promising that Jesus will make you rich if you pray hard and send them all your money, and while no one with common sense would confuse them with legitimate theologians, those guys have always made piles of money from the many gullible people who simply can not be saved from themselves.

I don't waste my time or psychic energy on the charlatans (or the folks who are taken in by them) unless they threaten our forum. We can only do so much.

Am I being too harsh?

 

Victimhood can be described as any life outlook or mindset in which an individual assumes the worst of the universe, indeed. They believe that nothing can change for them, that they are doomed to suffer, that other people or life in general, are against them or don't support them, that they can't thrive unless everything is perfect. Victimhood of course can look different in different people, but the general theme is the same.

To me, victimhood is exemplified in someone who seeks help here, receives all of the best advice, and keeps coming back with negativity, usually wrapped up in what I call a "Yes, But..." statement.

I've talked about victimhood and how it is a complete block to recovery, for years. It's heartbreaking when I see it, and also infuriating!

I've also talked about the need to achieve vulnerability instead of victimhood. Vulnerability is the state of mind that is required to get in touch with the deeply repressed negative emotions and primitive fears we developed in childhood. e
Even those of us with functional childhoods have these, it's part of how the child is designed to survive. We were designed to keep our negative emotions hidden during our entire 30-year-maximum lifespan, with no harm done since all we had to do back then was to breed and keep the species going. But as we learn from doing this work, a lot of harm is incurred from all of the repression in today's world and over long lifespans, and we have to break the repression cycle to survive emotionally anymore. And this requires emotional vulnerability. Instead of victimhood.

Dr Mate described an incident where his wife was not at the airport to pick him up because she forgot. He was so enraged at having to take a taxi, that he refused to speak to her when he got home, which lasted 24 hours until she basically slapped him upside the head and told him to get over it. This is the point at which he says he stopped being a victim, and reflected on his childhood rage, which he describes in great detail, connected to a period of enforced abandonment when he was an infant and had to be sent to distant family as the Nazis were invading his home city in Hungary. His rage at his wife was, at its heart, about abandonment.

Because, as he explains in every single chapter so far that I've read, it always goes back to childhood. It always goes back to childhood