TW for CoCSA, CSA, incest.
When I started this blog, I did not foresee it being mostly about my twin. At all.
But it turns out that's what I have to mostly process, still. I have had many years processing that The Parents didn't love me and abused me instead and the trauma they unleashed on me. But the realisation that The Twin just passed all that abuse right along to me and enacted the same kind of violence... that's newer and way more horrifying to realise.
It's like. Look, The Parents were grown-ass adults in complete and utter power over me, a tiny child, at the time. It's easy to see how they could abuse me.
But The Twin... well, they were just a tiny child, too! In fact they were even a little bit smaller than me, though the difference wasn't that significant. But ever since kindergarten at the latest I have seen them as someone to be pities and helped. Someone who has it tough and needs and deserves support.
And they grew up trans and queer and became disabled and had psychotic episodes and became homeless as a result. So many hardships and so much discrimination! And I don't think they deserved the shit they got for those things. Cause that just helps no one.
I don't know, I guess I'm realising that them being so marginalised and robbed of opportunities to be part of society made it HARDER for me to disentangle myself from the trauma bond and the web of obligations and loyalties they'd spun for me (and that I'd helped spin). If this society would just provide for everyone no matter what, grant everyone actual human rights, UBI, make public transport and public spaces accessible financially and disabledly, well then it'd have been so much easier to just kind of drift away from The Twin who was abusing me. It would have been so much easier to just choose to spend time with people who were actually making me feel better. But since society is shit and capitalism sucks the joy out of everything, we were both struggling with poverty, isolation and disability in adulthood.
And so I had few people in my life who were there for me and who were better than The Twin. And I felt an obligation to help them because no one else was. No one understood them, that kind of thing. Typical abuser stuff, now that I know that. But I did not know. I thought that only privileged people can be abusers, because that's what marginalised people who abused me taught me, The Twin among them.
Us-versus-them, black-and-white thinking, the aggressive flattening out of nuances and disregard for context, all that I know now to be hallmarks of abuse, a sort of indoctrination. But I suppose that's a topic for another time.
I guess what bothers me so much is how dirty The Twin made me feel. MAKES me feel, because that feeling is not quite over yet. We are the same in so many ways, the simple solution of "blame the one with the power" or "clearly the older one is responsible" doesn't work. And neither does "blame the parents". Not entirely. Of course The Parents are to blame. I don't believe for a second that The Twin (or The Brother for that matter) would have sexually or otherwise abused me if it hadn't been for abusive parents. Kids don't spontaneously invent and revel in abuse, they learn it from somewhere.
But I didn't. I didn't abuse anyone! I certainly didn't sexually assault people. I tried to be kind and helpful where needed. I sure have flaws and I probably hurt people's feelings by accident or on an occasional outburst, but. Ugh, it's just. If I could refrain from becoming a full-on abuser, then so could The Twin.
It feels so ridiculous to blame a small child, a five-year-old. Except I'm not blaming a five-year-old. I'm just remembering trauma. And blame or no, a five-year-old could and did traumatise me. And no adults helped me. And decades later, The Twin blamed me, then told me there was no childhood trauma whatsoever. Never a shred of accountability. Everything was always just my fault. Well, I accepted responsibility. I responded the way I wished my abusers had responded. And I cried and freaked out at poor, confused Dion a lot. Sorry about that.
It reminds me of that thing where I felt SO ashamed about the sexual abuse because "the perpetrator wasn't feeling any shame, but someone has to". Like, the situation caused all these feelings, the trauma, and the guilt. And since The Parents and The Twin refused to feel them or deal with them, I had to. Not because I caused them but because no one else did. As though there was trash lying about, stinking up the place, and I picked it up despite knowing full well it wasn't my trash. But if whoever did it doesn't deal with it, then someone else has to.
I always, automatically, see the bigger picture. I see the group and society implications and the solutions. The "treat others the way you want to be treated" and the ripple effects that both harm and kindness have – or could have – in a family, group or society. And I used to never consider my own needs or suffering significant and believe that I automatically always (well, almost always) like helping others who need it. I have a hard time wrapping my head around a selfish, exploitative or abusive perspective because it's so obvious to me how unsustainable and ultimately self-sabotaging they are. Abusers drain the very people dry who serve them until they CANNOT serve them any more. What's the point in that?
People, especially classmates in school, treated me like I was stupid for not playing those selfish games. But I maintain that I was seeing a bigger picture and was better at actual problem solving than they were, or rather, I was formulating better problems. Not "how do I personally gain a short-term advantage over others who are in the same boat as me" and instead "how do I help the group as a whole, or even the world, thrive?" Well, turned out I couldn't do that while wasting my time and energy on abusers. So I was making plenty of mistakes.
That guilt and shame, though. That disgusted feeling that I apply more readily to myself than to my rapists. I can easily picture their faces, sneering at me in disgust and calling me gross. I can picture that easily and I'm sure all my little hard-working mirror neurons were firing like good little worker bees.
I can't remember my own feelings as clearly or easily. They were muted or numbed out or frozen or put on the shelf. They could not be dealt with at the time, nor at any other time later. So the good little worker bee neurons had no chance to fire up for ME.
Writing it down like this is actually super helpful. My brain, like all brains, remains capable of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis all these decades later. I can feel now what I couldn't feel then. I can understand now what I couldn't understand then. I can be my own witness and helper now that I didn't have then.
It's not too late, it never could be. Hey, according to my Inner Helper, it wouldn't even be too late to heal from trauma in the next life or the one after that! No, it really is never too late.