The lines we draw in us after pain

We have all build our reality with who we think we are.
What if under our idea of self there is a hard line, an abyss we ignore?
Danger, darkness, anything that threatens our truth about us goes there.
Once we have encountered trauma, this line is often hard to bypass.

Trauma shakes our system up, and we go into survival mode.
It is easier (and often automatic) to disassociate and push away all pain.
But when we distance ourselves from hurt, we distance ourselves from us.

If we have been victimised, we are a victim, and abusers go beneath that line.
Male and female, BAME and white, cis and non-binary, an infinity of dichotomies.
As long we define ourselves in contrast to something other, as long as we are good and the other is bad, we are deflecting feelings and thus ourselves from ourselves.

I have seen many abusers unable to accept their actions because their worth is deeply rooted in being a victim;
Everything they do is a consequence of what was done to them.
The only way to avoid this is to accept that there is no ultimate evil, we all carry good and bad inside of us.

Realising we are not who we have built ourselves to be can be unnerving and uncomfortable.
But the longer we ignore who we are the deeper our feelings fester.As long as we do not accept the sum of us, we cannot heal from pain.
Guilt, shame, self-blame, evil, ignorance, selfishness;
We might think these feelings make us bad too, but they mean we are human.

“If we cannot process and understand these feelings, we cannot process and understand ourselves.”
– I May Destroy You E.9

And once we have ruptured this line, all that was hidden is going to tiptoe out.
Healing is a gradual process.
One day we will wake up and realise that memories we had repressed and feared, people we had feared and hated, places we had hated and avoided, they mean nothing to us now.
They are no longer the line that separates the before and after.
They are simply dots in our lives that lead us to now.

Here’s a post about accountability after trauma and how to see whether we were at fault.
Are you obsessed with being right and lose friends for it?
Here’s a post about being right or being free.