Abusing PTSD: Snapshot

[mostly updated Nov 10 2020; extra comments in these square brackets]

Remember when I said my parents were the Dursleys, from Harry Potter? I wasn’t exaggerating.

They take CMU’s side and don’t see that there was anything to be upset about. Both parents and my younger brother constantly make comments about my “disability”–“oh, I forgot, she can’t because she has PTSD”, “oh look at this person on the news, their stickers got ripped, they’re so traumatized, they need a service dog”, “Mom, I can’t shower unless I have a service dog”. Mother regularly tries to prevent me from getting to my medical appointments, from hiding the keys to blocking the exits and refusing to give me parking money. Both parents have forced me to leave my service dog behind or into making up excuses for why I can’t go to some event. I know they trash me to the people at said events because everyone there has more concern than normally necessary when they see me next.

Everyone else knows what’s going on. They know about all of this. As is usual in this family, nothing is done because they either agree with it or refuse to intervene. If you do not acknowledge the problem, then there is no problem.

You see, my family don’t see why I would object to anything that CMU did because they treat me the same way CMU did, deliberately inflaming my PTSD. They treat me the same way that my harassers did. Still do. Worse, though, because at least my harassers were consistent about it and never pretended to care. I wasn’t dependent upon them for basic life necessities, for safety, for access to healthcare.

Copy of rec_20140919-0023 harassing dog bedtime. Here, my brother harasses my dog for a solid four minutes: . It’d been going on long before that, but I didn’t get that on tape. Mother yells at him to shut up halfway through, but of course he starts right back up again. She doesn’t care unless it bothers her–she’s literally said “he’s not harassing it, that’s just how he plays with it”, and “it’s just a dog, it doesn’t matter how he acts with it, you treat that thing better than you treat us”. In that recording, you hear her say his behavior is “scaring her”, but then she turns right around and denies it’s any kind of problem when I say anything about it. Selfish bitch.

Copy of 01032015 at 1830 on worthless parasite. Have a listen. Pay attention to what mother dearest is saying, agreeing to, etc. This needs no commentary. Their favorite comments to me are some version of “parasitic liberal whore” and “get out of my house”, always like this, with threat of violent physical attack backing it up. They’re usually careful to avoid the actual words because that way they get to deny they said it…..we’ll just ignore that they outright deny things regardless. These are the followups to the childhood versions: “witch”, “worthless”, “use your brain” said in the most vile way possible, and “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it”. They’re real big on murder.

Fighting Words

JT of Patheos put voice to the trend that any discussion of hot-button issues always seems to spiral downhill:

“Not only are they wrong, they must also be malicious or have some sort of agenda against something or someone that led to their wrongness….Now, this isn’t to say that agendas and assholes don’t exist – they most certainly do…Often from atheists and believers alike we seem more interested in tearing down our opponents by trying way harder to paint our opponents as evil people and getting around to deconstructing their arguments second (if at all).”

This tendency is a result of the fundamental attribution error: we judge another’s character, and therefore their intent, based on their actions; we judge our own character based on our intent, not the outcome of our actions. It’s a judgement error caused by the inability to know another’s mind. The only information we have about another person is how they act, and what they tell us about how they act; when the two conflict, we often go with how the person acts. A person who acts badly is indistinguishable from a person who is malicious. The two are the same thing for purposes of everyday character judgement.