earlgraytay:

funereal-disease:

My mom is from New York City. She was taking the subway alone at the
age of six. As a young woman in the ‘70s, she went gallivanting God
knows where until God knows when, and she (obviously) lived to talk
about it.

At that time, as she tells it, the vanguard of
women’s advancement was on her side. Go West, young woman! Get out there
and seek your fortune. Dance all night and flirt with strangers – and
if you want to do more than flirt, that’s no one’s business but yours.
Ambient “everything is terrible and you’ll definitely get raped”
messages were a relic of her Catholic parents and the associated Old
Guard. They were framed, explicitly, as regressive, as part of
the patriarchal structures that kept women’s heads down and their hands
busy with housework. Defying them was what young Boomer womanhood was
all about.

Keep reading

….This essay goes a little wrong, but please read it anyway. 

I’m not a woman, but…. for what it’s worth, I’m a survivor. I agree with every bit of what funereal-disease has to say here. The idea that Trauma Is The End, it is the Worst Thing and if you’ve had it you are Collapsed Forever- it’s the worst thing. It’s the thing that’s kept me from recovering more than anything else. 

Reblogging partly for that very important point.

I have dealt with other trauma. But, one thing that really struck me when I was in my early teens and had some other things badly misinterpreted as signs of a very specific trauma history? The repeated insistence that feeling dirty and damaged is only normal and to be expected. It was hard not to feel under pressure to respond that way.

Or to get too far away from the idea that this might also be projection from the people who kept bringing it up, unprompted. They were obviously thinking about that so much more than I ever would have on my own. (Beyond some of the rest of the actually harmful regressive ideas there.)

Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but that does still seem to be such a common attitude, particularly dealing with people affected by certain types of trauma. No matter how good people think their intentions are, messages of brokenness are just not likely to be helpful.

In that particular example, I can only imagine that the whole experience would likely have been way more actually damaging for someone who was also trying to deal with the presumed Horrible Life-Warping Trauma in reality. It messed me up bad enough, and I was afraid of what kind of reception talking about real traumatic experiences might get after that for too many years.