Fuck Tony Robbins. When
he literally, physically pushed a woman repeatedly to prove that she was
hurting herself with her #metoo anger and “victim mentality,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkiqfmobqI
the world (or at least the world that shares my algorithms) was horrified, and
he was indeed a terrible monster, but he was also pushing a belief that runs
throughout all throughout pop psychology. Even though a crime happened to us, a
terrible act of aggression and chaos that may have (or may not have!) jarred
our lives onto a new course, we are not allowed to call ourselves victims.
(Except Roxane Gay. She said at the beginning of Hunger that she doesn’t feel like she owes the world a heroic
narrative, and it was SUCH a relief to read that sentiment.)
Watching Tony Robbins be
a gaslighting creep onstage reminded me of the time (Waaaaaay before I’d ever
thought about trauma work or survivorship or PTSD) my poor Aunt Melinda
accidentally sent me to triggertown by quoting another pop psychology
patriarch: Dr. Phil. “You teach people how to treat you,” she said, frustrated
after listening to a relatively minor tale of roommate woe. I was speechless
with anger, feeling the weight of every abuse I’d even been blamed (or blamed
myself) for. I’m sure I said nothing helpful or articulate. I still feel the
weight of that rage, that mute fury, but luckily there’s blogs and Twitter and
being a street artist now, so I find the words. I’ll be finding the words for
the rest of my life.
***PLEASE NOTE*** My
beautiful anxiety brain is about to take us on a journey, in several leaps,
from my personal trauma to the global trauma of history. I don’t equate my
trauma to ANYONE else’s. This paragraph is to show the way my trauma helps
connect me to the other much more serious pains of the world, and how
gaslighting and victim-blaming helps perpetuate the smallest harms and the largest.***
I have never been able to
separate “You teach people how to treat you,” from “you were asking for (rape,
abuse, terror, etc.)” Did I somehow “teach” the group of teens who drugged,
conspired to rape, and assaulted me that that was the kind of treatment I
deserved? Did Trayvon Martin TEACH George Zimmerman that he deserved to die, or
was that CENTURIES OF COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND NRA INFLUENCE? For that
matter, did the nations and cultures that were colonized, tortured, and
sometimes even erased by Europe “teach us” that they wanted to be dominated and
oppressed? No. We dominated and oppressed them because we wanted to. That’s
what abusers do.
Aside from the abusive
aspect of victimhood-stigmatizing, we do it to ourselves as well. God forbid I
should accidentally call myself a “victim” instead of a “survivor” in a
feminist thread—I’d be accused of demeaning myself and others, but why? Why
should it be demeaning to admit that something bad has happened to us? (I’m
worried that I’m accidentally plagiarizing Roxane Gay here. Seriously, read everything
she’s ever written.)
I think it comes back to
an ancient and stultifying thread of magical thinking. To calm the chaos of the
world around us, humans still believe deep down that if something bad happens
to you, you must be bad. On that idea is built every atrocity, every erased
voice, every abuse from personal to global. Because of that magical thinking,
we suffer instead of getting treated, we are pressured to perform heroic
survivorship or at least general okayness, we try to empower ourselves with
self-blame, we shut off every tributary of empathy. I was seriously once told
by an opponent of Obamacare that I got hit by a car in the crosswalk because
having insurance invited injury. That is how desperate people are to find order
by placing blame, but why not place it on, I DON’T KNOW, the person who was
driving?!
If we’re hurt, we must be
bad, and if we care for the hurt, we just invite more badness, goes the magical
thinking. Teaching the Universe how to treat us. Primal. Understandable, maybe,
but the root of every violence and oppression.
Because I’ve had a bajillion
years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can occasionally question my own false
absolutes, the labels we place on ourselves and others that can obscure the
bigger picture. A few weeks ago, a teenage white supremacist facebook troll
told me that minorities should “let go of (our/their) victimhood and be
stronger.” He was wrong on every level and I told him why, but his ignorance
helped make something clear for me: Victimhood can’t change anyone’s value—why
would it? How could a thing that happened to us reduce our worth? A trauma or
oppression may change our outlook, it may give us new insights and growth, or
it may not. Victimhood may change us, but I don’t think I ever realized before,
it isn’t us. The things that happened
to me are not the same as what I am. (Pause for two decades of therapists to
rejoice.)
The crimes and
oppressions that influence us, our various forms of victimhood are not fixed or
permanent. Engaging with them doesn’t make us worse or invite more misfortune.
Recognizing the ways I am oppressed doesn’t take away my power, it gives me
more. Understanding the obstacles that I and my fellow humans face can burnish
us to alchemist’s gold, help us change the world, or just help us empathize
with our own shitty/miraculous fate as we head off to conquer another day.
If I could take away one
idea from the world’s consciousness, it would be the idea that if something bad
happens to you, you must deserve it. It’s a toxic, rotten, compelling idea, a
holdover from the time when we believed that illness came from demons, that
misfortune must reveal some secret sin. It would be especially be good to get
rid of this idea because THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO THE BAD THINGS! WHERE IS THE
COMFORT IN BLAMING THE VICTIMS INSTEAD?
While we work on
eradicating victim-blaming, I’m happy to be a little more free of victim-shaming, to see trauma as a shifting
influence, survivorship as multifarious and not something at which I have to be
amazing. It reminds me of when my BFF/ex-wife were watching Kesha’s Grammy Performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buM8OErfvu0 and
Amy, eyes full of tears at Kesha’s monumental, beautiful, grumpy transcendence
said “She’s too nice!”
“It’s only one song on
the album,” I said, and that’s how I feel about all of this. Kesha’s
survivorship is a diamond-brilliant facet of her artistic identity, but so is
her goofiness, her feverish dance beats, her sly romance. For anyone to reduce
her or the #metoo movement to stigmatized victimhood is only to see a very,
very narrow part of the picture. Everything I make will be an attempt to break
that narrow lens.
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