Just say it!

Children have to be taught how to share and how to tie their shoes. They also have to be taught how to ask for help when they need it. And they can just as easily be taught that they should never ask for help and it's their own fault if they need help. Their growing minds are like little pieces of clay in that regard. An influential adult can mold them into pretty much any shape they desire.


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She can validate that you feel guilt without agreeing that it's giving you accurate information and that's about as much as you can expect. It's like when I tell my T things and get pissed at him. I know why he's not agreeing, but in my emotion mind, I want to be right. It just makes me more angry, but he's not going to agree with me and I have to wrestle with the facts of the situation.

As a few other people mentioned, I think a lot of us have been in the same place you are in regard to abuse. I think that if you are able to realize that perhaps your therapist is validating your feelings of guilt or shame surrounding the abuse, but she won't change her own thoughts on the issue of blame or culpability.

What I've had to learn about values and judgments is that my own personal piece of mind comes when I'm not totally invested in wanting to change others views to match mine. This includes my therapist's views that don't match my own. Instead, I'm working to be more curious about why I hold that view so close and so fiercely. What's behind me wanting so desperately to convince my therapist to agree with me? It's beginning to teach me a lot about myself and the underlying reasons that I hold some views so tightly and fiercely. Perhaps I've believed that if I'm the one to blame, than I can be in control of making things better and then all will be right with the world. My thinking this way is the basically the reasoning skills of a young child. Hard to face but something I'm determined to peel back the edges of and see clearly in the light of the day.

I hope you keep talking about it with your therapist. Maybe beginning to articulate why you believe this so firmly will be helpful. Write down all the reasons you believe it to be true. Write a list of what specifically you believe you could have done to make things stop. Write down what the different possible reactions could have been from your primary caregivers if you had acted the way you believed you should have acted. Explore your beliefs and views like a curious and determined detective. Couldn't hurt

[QUOTE=Jaybird57;4192329] What I've had to learn about values and judgments is that my own personal piece of mind comes when I'm not totally invested in wanting to change others views to match mine. This includes my therapist's views that don't match my own. Instead, I'm working to be more curious about why I hold that view so close and so fiercely. [QUOTE]

Yes to this -- and not just abuse we suffered as children (where we couldnt realistically save ourselves) but bad decisions we make in adulthood. The T is unlikely to get on our bandwagon as we berate ourselves. Ts are partly acting the role of nonjugmental witness. They encourage our self forgiveness.

The value in therapy is not necessarily getting agreement/validation for every one of our cognitions. Instead, exploring why that should matter. It seems at least for some of us therapy is about release from a vicious circle of self and other blame. Might not be there yet, and may never make it, but trying.

There's only so much you can do as a child (or teenager or adult even) to change the way you react to things in scary moments. Thinking back on my stuff, I know I take the blame a lot (some happened as an older teen, and by then I "should" have known what to do) because when I reached out for help, the help was ineffectual. So I gave up reaching out. I learned that reaching out or trying to respond differently made things worse. I could have kicked and screamed and made a lot of noise, but it would have been worse. So yeah, it was my fault for not fighting back harder, or screaming till my voice was hoarse. But it wasn't my fault because I knew that doing any of that would bring more harm.
I have yet to have a T agree even to that logic...
Looking back gives us 20/20 vision. We know what the outcome has been, we see places we could have done things diffenrently... One quote I keep reciting to myself: Dont blame yourself for not knowing something before you learned it.
Learning and experience make looking back a lot more painful.

Our responses to threat are neeurophysiological - meaning we have no cognitive control over the response. Those responses being fight, flight, freeze/submit. I think the hardest one to understand on an emotional level afterwards is the freeze response. But it's there in our neurophysiology for a reason, it helps us survive those things that may not be survivable otherwise.

So as for kids being stupid, I don't agree. Humans are innately sensible when it comes to survival.

I'm in the camp of accepting blame for all things. If it's my fault then I have some measure of control, and even if I didn't, I can delude myself. Because I am so revolted by my ineffectiveness and helplessness and absolute lack of power, I'd rather be always at fault.

And as a survivor of abuse, and the parent of a child survivor of CSA, it is so hard to place that blame on the shoulders of the ones at fault. I am more guilty than any child, because I allowed myself to be maltreated for over 20 years by three partners, when I certainly had a voice, resources available, and stupidly submitted over and over ad nauseum. And failed to protect my daughter from one of them, which she and I both blame me for and forever will.

I think maybe you can't forgive yourself and it's sad that maybe you never will. Maybe your abuser had you so brainwashed you thought any number of horrible things might happen if you tried to stop it. Maybe your mind knew resistance was futile. Maybe you reached out for help and your pleas went unnoticed.

If your T agrees with you, I will definitely get up-in-arms and pontificate about what a dastardly thing that is to do to a client, and try to get her license revoked!

She is probably wondering what it will take for you to understand that it isn't your fault, that you aren't to blame, and you don't deserve to be beat up.

I know you guys are trying to help, but this is really upsetting.I'm sure in being irrational, so I'll just stop. Thanks though

(((((Tongalee)))))

I struggle with self-blame also. . .but it is a little bit different from the way you describe. I'm torn about whether or not the abuse was my fault. But mostly what bothers me is that I blame myself for my parents not protecting me from the abuse and other things that happened to me in my childhood. I keep thinking that if I had been a better child, my parents would have loved me more, made sure to keep track of my whereabouts, provided for my emotional needs, and helped me deal with my feelings of blame and shame when I got SA by my neighbor. Because they just let me do whatever I wanted and didn't seem to worry about my well-being, I feel like somehow I was not worth loving, helping, and protecting. My t has been trying to help me see things from a different perspective, but it's difficult seeing the situation as something that is due to my parents' mistakes rather than mine.