hey. i'm sorry for the way that i said what i said... i really don't think i'm terribly good at expressing myself sometimes.

there is also the point that this is a topic that is emotionally charged for a lot of people and so it is especially important to be particularly clear in order to avoid hurt feelings.

in particular:

- i really didn't meant to say or imply that people 'choose' to see themselves as victims in the sense that we should hold people who identify as victims responsible for their identification.

- i really didn't mean to say or imply that people aren't sometimes treated inappropriately by other people. i really didn't mean to say or imply that people are unaffected by being treated inappropriately.

i worry... that while people don't come to this forum IN ORDER to have the victim label given to them or their rememberings validated as VERIDICAL or their failures to remember validated as EVIDENCE OF TERRIBLE EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES - that is something that tends to happen on forums of this nature.

People are getting into this at the moment.. The role of internet support forums for harmful identifications is soemthing that people are looking at now... It is something to be careful of...

I also don't mean to judge. I wasn't there so how would I know what happened. But it is important to note that memory doesn't work like a blank piece of paper that retains a true and accurate record of events. And it is also important to note that things can stick with us (as they tend to) and that the significance can be worked out later when we superimpose our adult perspective back on that memory.

IN particular - it is interesting to me that when people emphasised aspects of pinksoils account they tended to MAGNIFY the account - in the sense that the majority of people 'remembered' pinksoil being on the YOUNGEST end of her estimate at age and the guy being on the OLDEST end of her estimate of age. This might well be the case - but this does tend to show how rememberings can indeed be affected by the emotional tone we are trying to legitimate. E.g., people who are really hurting very badly from their rememberings tend to have magnify what they remember of external events.

I'm just trying to say that past events aren't accessible to us anymore (for the simple reason that they lie in the past). Rememberings can be very painful indeed... But sometimes how painful our rememberings are can be significantly affected by how we categorize and classify external events. Makes a great deal of difference in this case (where there seems to be ambivalence) whether the event is cast as 'intentional abuse and coercive manipulation' or 'kids being kids'. This is NOT SO for ALL rememberings - but given the ambivalence in pinksoils post there seems to be more scope for interpretations affecting the significance of the remembering... I just wanted to try and make sure that pinksoil considered some different interpretations. The coercive interpretation is of course one, but the kids being kids interpretation might be one that is open to her (that isn't open to others)... Perhaps...