Susan's Place Transgender Resources

(I wondered if this belongs in one of the "News" forums, but the linked article doesn't have any TG content.)

I ran across the following article this morning:

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/survivors-child-abuse-remind/ (http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/survivors-child-abuse-remind/)

4 Compassionate Reminders Every Survivor of Child Abuse Deserves
March 3, 2016 by Robin Tran

The "reminders" (topic headings):
1.  You Deserved a Better Childhood
2.  Be Compassionate and Patient with Yourself
3.  You Are Still Loved, Even When It's Uncomfortable to Accept Love from Others
4.  Forgive Yourself for Hurting Others

I've never thought of myself as having been an abused child, but boy did this article read like a checklist for me.  (Well, unlike the author, I don't have a particularly terrible temper, though when I'm angered or triggered, I can be nasty without even knowing it.)

Anyway, I have trouble with all of them, but especially 3.  It has such lines as:

*  This is why I have an impulse to push people away who show me affection. I'd rather feel misery since it's more comfortable and familiar.

*  The feeling of being unloved by others is a projection that comes from not loving myself. The moments when I believe that others can love me only occur when I feel love for myself.

These are so true for me I want to cry.  (Except I got trained not to cry a long time ago :( )

Asche

Point 3 hits home for me.  For a long time I didn't believe that I was loved or that someone could love me.  This harmed almost every significant relationship that I have had.  The breakthrough for me was when I started to understand, accept, express and love my 'self'.  Once I realised that I could love myself, I found that I could accept love from others and my relationships improved.

Being trans this was tough for me, because for many years I feared that I was broken, defective, born with a weird kink etc.  Once I found that there was both a reason for why I felt like this (gender dysphoria) and a therapy (hrt),  my life was transformed.  This didn't happen overnight, but with a strong relationship, supportive friends, a great therapist and a fantastic endo, I started my journey and am now in a world of happiness and light years from my former world of fear and pain.

Safe travels

Aisla

Asche, thanks for posting this. I don't consider myself to have been abused, but these four points were very helpful to me as well, since all are problems I struggle intensely with.

I hope you find success taking these reminders to heart. You're a sweet soul and deserve to be at peace with yourself.

It was a good article.  Emotional abuse as a child is a silent epidemic that is easy to push under the rug.  It is very hard to get any sympathy from anyone, others or self, when you experienced it.  Unlike physical or sexual abuse the damage is silent and the dysfunction doesn't appear until long after the damage had been done.

I relate quite a bit with the article.  Many children who were different suffered from some sort of emotional abuse.  The article deals with parents in particular as the perpetrators, though it can come from multiple sources such as teachers, older siblings, and peers.  It is a shame that all too often we conflate our anger and shame with being a bad person or somehow not deserving love and acceptance.  This is a hall mark of borderline personality disorder.  While not unique to BPD the article is incredibly aligned with the functional disaffect of the disorder.

I'm still trying to figure myself out and my past, but right now I think that what I went through as a child was more emotional abandonment than emotional abuse, although it was accompanied by the same sort of gaslighting, shaming, and silencing that goes with overt abuse.