“One of Pagourtzis’ classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, “had 4 months of problems from this boy,” her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.”
Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, Rodriguez said. “A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she wrote. “Shana being the first one.”“
Little Clara Bow got her name in the papers recently, when Robert Savage, untamed Yale student, tried to kill himself because Clara wouldn’t marry him. In the subsequent trial Robert testified that Clara kissed him so fervently that he was laid up with a sore jaw for two days. And now Clara says that the more she sees of men, the better she likes dogs
a form of gaslighting that i don’t see mentioned nearly as much as, say, refusing to acknowledge the past, or misremembering a conversation, is the way abusers project an identity or a characteristic on someone so strongly that they take on this projection as a fact about themselves.
like being told you’re incapable of love. or being told that you are hateful, or cruel, or dangerously mentally ill, or that you’re just like your father, or that you’ve never cared about anyone in your entire life.
parents are almost uniquely suited to this since they have so many opportunities to shape your perception of yourself from the moment you’re born; your parent’s definition of you becomes your definition of you. realizing that you have entire aspects of your identity that your parents have been trying to deliberately obfuscate and erase is huge, and so is the incredibly painful struggle to come out from under it.
abusers don’t want you to think of yourself as a warm or protective or capable person. they don’t want you to think of yourself as perfectly suited to love any number of people admirably and well. they need you here, and they need you to not even think about leaving, and teaching a kid to think like that is so much easier if you get them while they’re young.
coming out of that is hard work. you have to be able to go down through the events of your life, piece by piece, decision by decision, and dispassionately analyze them to the best of your ability. you have to be able to recognize your own efforts done in good faith with all the knowledge and understanding you had at the time. you have to be able to forgive yourself, and to give yourself the warmth and love of your own inner good parent. being able to be calm enough to do this takes an immense amount of work if you have anxiety or trauma, and handling the symptoms of those are difficult enough on their own.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.