Living a Life Outside the Box of Other People’s Experience is Lonely
When people don’t believe those of us with different experiences just because it didn’t happen to them
I once had an old, conservative, Baptist woman attack me verbally and calling me a liar because I talked about having gone to school when I was younger, but also having been homeschooled.
I looked at her in confusion and said that I spent ten years in school, and over the period of those ten years I went to six different primary schools (three of those were all in year seven), was homeschooled with government curriculum for two of those years, and then when I got to high school was completely homeschooled.
She decided that wasn’t possible, I suppose because she had always lived in the middle of fucking nowhere Mississippi, had gotten married at sixteen, and had a bunch of kids.
Her inability to work out such a simple thing even when carefully explained (she was of course educated in Mississippi also), didn’t make me a liar, it made her someone who misunderstands. Her misunderstanding after having it explained was not my problem, and it didn’t make me a liar.
She purposely “misunderstood” me so that she could keep her narrative of events, making her superior to me. Claiming that I was lying and then attacking everything about me was the kind of thing this women liked best.
I was just her latest victim. Not her first and not her last. She will always have someone to find fault with, it’s a hobby for her.
This woman was looking for a way to attack my character because I had, *gasp* (insert pearl clutching) dared to disagree with the (male, of course) pastor about something. Furthermore, I had been stupid enough to say so on Facebook.
Some things people claim I lied about or made up because I’m insane are actually important. In the grand scheme of things, what this old bitch thought of anything I said was not my problem.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is a lonely disorder, especially as I have other things going on that people also don’t believe in.
It’s quite offensive and cruel to refuse to believe in another person’s experience just because it’s not your own experience.
These days I just block people from access to my life if they are going to be rude about it.
I learned that I had to cut my losses. Anyone who automatically believed my family about the abuse they heaped on me were people that I knew were not my friends.
If someone is a friend of my parents, they are no friend of mine. I’m not saying my family shouldn’t have friends, I think everyone deserves friends, I just have cut ties to the point where my parents have their friends and I have mine and never the twain shall meet.
People want to believe the best of adults, and assume the children are bitter about how they were treated by their parents. They refuse to see the awful things we endured and I’ve learnd that their refusal is a them problem, not a me problem.
It’s entirely about them and their closed off minds. I don’t bother trying to get people to believe me anymore, because they double down and get really fucking obnoxious and evidence be damned.
I constantly see parents complaining that their children cut them off and that they “have no clue what they did.” This is, in most cases, absolute hogwash.
They know exactly what they did, but since people tend to believe parents over their children, even if those children are grown, it’s so easy for parents to play the victim.
It sounds like people who are mad that they were called on their shitty behavior and then cut off when they refused to acknowledge it. This is also their problem and not mine, so why they feel that they have anything useful to say on the subject of estrangement is baffling, but people are going to do their thing.
It’s much easier to attack someone’s character, than it is to realize that this stuff actually happens to people.
The amount of articles I’ve seen lately bitching and moaning about estrangement and lecturing people who have cut their family off is crazy. I suspect most of them are from bitter parents who have been cut off and know why but that’s just conjecture.
I’m just merely pointing out that if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs (please don’t, it’s cruel), the one that howls the loudest is the one that got hit.
Nobody has the right to lecture me about cutting off family if they haven’t walked in my shoes. Family isn’t actually everything, and they absolutely do not deserve access to me just because I suffered the misfortune of being born into that bullshit.
People don’t get Dissociative Identity Disorder because they “didn’t like how they were raised.” They get it from severe, ritual trauma. Anyone who comes at me about how it’s not fair to my parents to cut them off can fuck right on off.
Yet I’ve seen multiple articles gaslighting people like me, lecturing us on what horrible human beings we are to not at least try other resolutions (that were already tried years ago). They speak without knowledge but think they know it all.
These people assume that the solutions their mind comes up with should be universally applied and will work for everyone. People like that are obnoxious. Despite their delusions to the contrary, they actually don’t know everything and their advice sucks.
Furthermore, they are well aware that their advice sucks, is cruel, and gaslights us. They know this, but they spout it off anyway because they think they are the supreme source of knowledge.
I have a small group of friends who I love dearly. They have chosen, despite the craziness of being friends with a multiple, to hang around, and in so doing, make this easier to bear. I’m so grateful for them. My friends understand exactly why I am unable to have any communication with my family.
My therapist has helped with processing the aftermath. The choice of cutting family off completely was difficult and hurt me very much. I decided that despite the hurt, I needed to do what I did because my family were actively confronting me in a nasty manner publicly accusing me of lying.
I didn’t have the capacity to cope anymore. My mental health is important enough to not allow my family to continue to abuse me via public bullying.
