Dear Ed:

You are welcome. “For me personally, I felt like the word ‘objectifying’ always had a strong emphasis on the idea of dehumanizing a person” – yes, it makes sense to me, objectifying=dehumanizing. To dehumanize (my definition): to treat a person with no compassion, with no care for the person’s hurt and pain; no care for causing it, for adding to it, and/ or witnessing it happening and not intervening.

“From the perspective of the abuser… I think that by isolating aspects of the personality of a victim they try to control which parts they are presented with, or in short, its a process of conditioning the victim“-

-conditioning (online): “the process of training..  a person or animal to behave in a certain way… a form of learning in which… a given stimulus (or signal) becomes increasingly effective in evoking a response”- conditioning then applies an intent to condition, on the part of the abuser, and a purposeful, persistent execution of a plan to condition.

I read from people who assign their abusers with an intent, a plan, and an execution of a plan to abuse. When you look at a story of abuse from a distance above grounds, away from the story in time and place, you can see retroactively elements of a plan, but on the grounds, most often- the abuser acts on impulse/ the heat of passion.

“Going by what you wrote about your mother maliciously (re)inventing your existence.. I feel like that was also an attempt of forcing a conditioning on you to change who you are to someone who would please her” – there was no planned conditioning on her part, no execution of a plan to reinvent me: that’s why she failed at creating “someone who would please her”. If she had a plan to reinvent me and if she executed such a plan.. she would have succeeded, at least while I was a child, because I was highly motivated to please her: I would have done anything and been anyone!

“I just see similarities to my life: my father screaming at me for hours for not being ‘good enough’, my mother supporting this by not intervening and making me feel like he was right, my first ex-girlfriend physically and verbally abusing me when I didn’t do things she wanted me to do and my second ex hating me for not being able to save her” – all these people were abusive to you. As I understand it at this point, your father abused you impulsively, in the heat of passion, projecting his anger at himself/ at his real-life abusers => into you.

My mother too screamed at me for hours, it was a miserable experience. She didn’t stop going on and on and on until she got physically tired.

“I have been suffering from diagnosed dissociations and depersonalisation for years as part of the ptsd complex of symptoms“, “I am interested if you are as well, if you are okay with sharing about that” – I am okay sharing about it with you, but as you know, it’s difficult to do so (that’s why I procrastinated replying to you this morning). Personally, in real-life, I never met or noticed anyone being anywhere close to how very dissociated and very depersonalised I felt and acted so very often, for so many years, except for a few actively-psychotic people I came across. It is surprising that I physically survived, ex., I remember.. finding myself in the middle of a busy street with a truck just passing me by very closely, not remembering how I got there. Currently, I am less dissociated/ disconnected… more and more associated/ connected.

“you shared a lot about the process of trauma-related fragmentation or ‘breaking’ of one’s personality following trauma… Do you feel like piecing yourself together while still generally trying to grow as a person will have an end?..  Or do you see it more as a life-long obligation to yourself, no matter if you are ever ‘finished’?” – I mentioned to you that I go on walks, and I do, every day. I live outside the city limits in an elevated area, a forest. So, on my walk I see lots and lots of trees. Whenever you see an injured tree, you can see that it doesn’t stop growing, it finds a way. It grows in a different direction than it would have grown if it wasn’t injured, but it grows. I see old growth trees, dead stumps of trees, but at the top, new trees grow. Life finds a way.

Becoming more and more associated (less and less dissociated) will not have an end point in my life for as long as I am alive, there is no finish line other than physical death. There will never be a finished product. I will never  be… as good as new, I will never be anything like I would have been if I grew up in way better circumstances. I hope I answered your questions.

In the next few posts, just in the next few, don’t ask me more questions: talk about yourself, if you will. Will you?

anita