I understand this on some level. Not too long ago I was doing debates in the science forum and I was suffering “debate lag” where it took me days to respond. Sometimes debating here feels like psychological weightlifting to me. If you push too hard, too fast, you can re-traumatize yourself. Listening to your brain telling “er, this is hard, let’s take a break and come back to it” is actually a good idea.
Now that I think about it, I think I actually did debate retraumatization once, but not on this website. However, that descent into mental chaos felt more like digging up trauma that was already in my system rather than adding more trauma from without. *scratches head* It was like opening a door on the top of a tower and getting surprised by the sudden onslaught of wind. Wind being mental chaos in this case.
Actually, I think I did that
twice, but the second time was body chaos instead of intellectual chaos, and so I had a degree of control and could manage the situation a lot better. Log off, emergency trip to a therapist immediately, talk to a friend, join another forum for my questions and issues. But that wasn’t just debate, that was chess re traumatizing, hence the physical aspect of it that dragged all my mind-body issues to the surface.
*blinks* Okay, maybe I don’t actually understand it after all, but at least I’m willing to be patient. Better to take a little more time with your responses than to write a bunch of chaotic posts and lose a rather valuable forum account due to losing control of your mind. Or your emotions, which may be more of what this is.
I generally find it easier to empathize with people who have gone through the same experiences that I’ve been through. Frankly, without a common experience, you have to use your imagination to build a solid basis for an empathetic response and it is really hard. Experience is not the obstacle to empathy, it is the bridge that makes true empathy possible.
A child doesn’t have a depth of experience, so an adult demanding that a child empathize with them is just abuse plain and simple. Demanding that the child help them because they need help is also abusive, an adult should be taking care of that child. There’s a difference between training a child to do the laundry so they can do it when they live on their own one day and demanding that the child do the laundry with no help just because the parent is struggling mentally or physically. A child can sense the difference.
Complete lack of emotional communication. The head of household, my father, was an abusive and threatening critic. This has left the entire household basically unable to talk to each other about any honest feelings. You say anything about how you feel, you get criticism of it immediately.
You shouldn’t feel that. You shouldn’t think that. The message is clear and obvious.
My and brother learned to relate to each other based on performance metrics. The household is a masterclass in how to respond to criticism.
Me: get angry and fight back. Ignore the criticism, do whatever you wanted to do anyway, and tell dad whatever he wants to hear to get him to get out of the way. (Eventually I took a deep dive and changed up my response to criticism as regards other people, but for me that is a very deep “default mode” that can resurface if you stack up enough frustration and criticism too quickly.)
My mom: get scared and anxious, cite weakness, make excuses and “I can’t do this” over and over again.
My brother: disappear into his internal world and not say anything to anyone. Refuse to answer questions about how he feels or thinks.
It’s a deep vibe of emotional anemia. We stand around at church parties like we’re ghosts. We aren’t allowed to talk to anyone else either, and we don’t want to. Hide your trauma and disappear, pretend to be normal. Me and my mother and brother were able to have deep intellectual discussions around the dinner table at points when my dad wasn’t around, but we’re three very different people who can’t really understand the internals of ourselves behind our intellectual viewpoints. We have no room to express them. There is almost no family unit.
But is this phenomenon Christian? Not like 100%. It’s CPTSD for 2 people, dyspraxia for my mom, and a sensory processing disorder for my younger brother, so it’s not a typical household. But we got told that
Romans 3:23 was a thing and that no matter how much we sacrificed, it would never be
enough for love. All have sinned, and thus all deserve to be criticized in light of Paul’s guidelines in the epistles. I learned really quick that personal self-sacrifice was a pointless endeavor, because there was not enough me to sacrifice. The point is that this household could exist in Christianity without ruffling any feathers. Nobody came along and told me “your ideas of love are unbiblical and wrong”. When I expressed them, people would nod and agree. Frankly, “Love is a commitment to the true good of another person” is a quote from J.Budzisewski’s
How To Stay Christian in college. I haven’t read any scholarly disputes against that statement either.
Christians are at war! Get your Ephesians 6 armor on!
GO! FIGHT! WIN! There was no glory in getting killed in my household, it was all about killing the evil philosophies of the Enemy through better debate prowess. Read, study and memorize scripture so you know what to say when a friend starts talking about their religion. Under that paradigm, the most loving thing you could do was not to be killed or suffer torture, it was to give guidance to help other people improve in Christ, to move the sanctification process along and help people become more sinless.
If Adam hadn’t been stupid enough to eat the apple, Christ would not have had to suffer on our behalf in order to love us. Not sure how you missed the “Christ had to suffer a bloody death and torture because you screwed up” message, but that was the one I got. Suffering is not a loving thing to do, it’s a consequence of sin.
I was told that suffering was not a loving thing to do, it was a sign that God was trying to teach you something to be less of a rotten sinner. God makes sinners suffer so they will accept the Gospel and get rid of the sin (as a gradual process). As one gets rid of sin, the suffering goes down.
As one grows in Christian maturity, what can happen is that God can just put one through suffering as a witness to others, which is you suffering for the sin of others, just like Christ did. The response to that suffering is to find the person that you’re supposed to witness to, do that, and the suffering will stop. It should be noted that God put Job through suffering as a lesson to him and his friends and as a witness to Satan and to all the readers of the book.
We suffer because we sin, we suffer because others sin, and we suffer because Adam sinned. There is no love in it. Criminals love nobody as they suffer in jail, and this planet is one big prison cell for sinful people.
Love is not about suffering yourself, it is about helping to relieve the suffering of others. There’s a big difference between the suffering endured by the man suffering a lifetime sentence in solitary confinement for killing two prison guards, and the suffering the Apostles endured while they were proclaiming the Gospel. The reason why the suffering of the latter is an act of love is because proclaiming the Gospel is an act of love. It relieves the sin and suffering of billions of people daily. The suffering just authenticates the proclamation: yes, I am going to die on that hill. I will not back down from my belief in the truth, no matter how much you torture me and try to stop me. It’s a witness for the Gospel.
Suffering is just what happens when love and sin collide. God loves us and that is His nature to love; he would not leave us trapped in sin forever because that would not be good for us. He couldn’t not do it. We put Jesus through all that suffering on our behalf. We didn’t have to do that. It’s our fault.
I mean, abusers cause people suffering, is that loving them? No! Saying that to love is to endure suffering, that sounds like an abuser justification to me “it is loving to put up with my torture”. It actually sounds like the idiotic narrative my dad told me while he was abusing me, claiming that he was loving me and to be anything less than an abusive jerk was unloving and thoughtless. He kept telling me that I was destroying my own life even as he was the one actually destroying it, and sure enough, it’s me that has to re-parent my own dad on the fly because no one else in my household is up to the task. My mom should have done that, but she was too scared and “weak” so it’s up to me the strong one to solve all the problems. I resent that a lot. It’s not loving to sit around and endure suffering like my mom did. One needs to learn from it. One needs to do something about it.
In the face of Christ’s suffering on our behalf, we are the abusers of Christ. All of us. We abused God; God is. Part of believing the Gospel is turning away from the abuse we’ve committed against God, expressing regret, going through the sanctification process and getting better. My father abused me; I am still me, just a better version. There is nothing that I do that wasn’t in me from before: at one point I forced all of my beliefs to be logically consistent with themselves. I would debate, and then I would read back my posts to see in the belief I had in one post was the same as a belief I expressed in a different debate, and evaluate the differences. (Which do I actually believe? Is this consistent with Scripture? Which is actually true?)
That’s a good process for repairing the intellect, but my true trauma was in my emotional intuition, because I had been emotionally abused, and emotional intuition doesn’t completely respond to that sort of work. Intuition is more about hedging probabilities and outcomes, less about what is true than what can be true. It’s a status monitor.
Anyway, I’m going to stop here because I don’t want to overwhelm you by being like “you haven’t finished responding to my previous post, but I’m just going to disrespect that and go after you”, that’s rude. I intended this post to be short, a brief respect of your need for more time, but it has ballooned out of control and that is my own fault. I have nobody but myself to blame.
