|
In Reply to: Re: To Charlie posted by Charlie on June 07, 2002 at 17:30:40:
No, I don't think I'm stupid. :-p I think I understand where you're coming from. The "problem" (that's too string a word) I had was the context. It's hard enough in real life when you see things differently and have to agree to disagree. It's even harder on the web, when people misunderstand each other left and right all the time.
OK both Marina and Maria were abused. Maria is still an ongoing abuser.
Everybody's experience of the Family is different - you will find that some people will consider they don't fall into the abuser category at all - they see themselves much less as a former perpetrator of abuses, and much more as someone who was just doing their best to survive the choice they made to join; until they reached a point where their conscience said, "STOP", and then they did their best to get out as quickly as they could.
They see themselves as once having been blind, but not as a former abuser. They may see themselves as guilty of continuing on something they should've known better about, and reason that their thinking faculties were not fully intact. But that is a far cry from their considering themselves as perpetrators. That is their "script."
Psychologists will tell you "scripting" is vital for survival.
When we go to bed at night, (especially as children) we tend to run through the day's events in our minds - recalling, processing and cataloging our lives. Research has shown that children who have parents talk to them during this time about their day, tend to have excellent memories till their old age - it was all cataloged and filed away. They say this is the chief reason some people remember what happened to them at 2 and others don't. If the parent was a positive thinker and was able to script an event as a happy one (even though it might have been disastrous), that is the way the child will remember it for the rest of his life, and end up a positive thinker.
We all do our own scripting. In some cases, we may overlook certain facts in order to file away the event in a way that we can handle. Most scripting systems are flawed in some way. (Hey, nobody's perfect!) But what we script/remember about an event is what determines who we are as people. We script all the time. How we see ourselves is important. It determines who we are, and what our instinctive responses and actions will be.
If we script ourselves as victims, we will be victims. It's kind of like that "2 men looking out the window through the bars, one sees the mud, another sees the stars" analogy.
I understand that you find healing and compassion by scripting it your way. It helps you to pray and continue to have faith and hope.
For people who've come out of a complex abusive situation, they have to find out where their place was in the whole scheme of things. They have to identify who they were, and face up to what their role was. Were they an enabler? An abuser? A victim? Blind/weak follower? Zealous and misguided co-abuser? etc.
Some people have done a lot of work on themselves facing these things and figuring out why they joined, why they stayed, and who they are after leaving. Often the only thing that is clearest is why they left. They have come a long ways and formulated clear ideas about why, what, and who... and making distinctions is important - we can only be responsible for our own part - who we are/were and what we did.
So in that context, mixing Maria in with anyone else is not a flattering idea. Yes we may have a few minor things in common, but our responsibilities and roles are/were entirely different. I was not at the center of an organization sending out directives to perpetuate abuse, and intentionally deceiving the masses. That's crystal clear to me!
(Yes, I go as far as to say that Maria intentionally deceives, I don't buy it that she doesn't know better - there are enough people writing to her directly pleading with her, so she is fully aware and accountable)
Speaking for myself, I don't see myself as a former abuser in the Family. I never had that role. I was not abusive in the Family, nor did I have to struggle with that upon exiting.
Did I have issues that I had to face about why I was blind and contributing to the collective madness? Yes! Did I feel tremendous guilt and regret for having led people I loved to join the Family? YES! Did I have some fucked up patriarchal ideas I had to realize were wrong? Youbetcha! Did my immediate family pay for the stupid way I was? Yes. Did I have personal issues about learning not to hurt the way I was hurt? Yes, but it wasn't related to my Family experience - it was more stuff from my childhood.
If you had lumped me in with Maria as a fellow abuser/victim, I wouldn't have appreciated it. Sure we are human beings with our own lessons/battles, but we have little in common after that point, in the context of who is who and who did/does what to abuse 1000s of others, despite what warnings and pleading letters. It's just not the same.
