The words that were used.
There have been times that I have been stuck in the investigation and understanding of what has happened to me. My thoughts were that if I only could figure out the red flags that I missed, or the “why me” I could prevent being sexually assaulted again. But that is so not true. It is yet another way to try and control the chaos that we call life. It has nothing to do with the “why” from me, it had everything to do with the “why” in his mind, and that cannot be figured out. You cannot read another mind, you cannot truly know what they are thinking, what they are scheming, or what they are planning to do.
Sure looking back some see the “red flags” they assume they missed, or they pushed out of their minds with “oh that’s not what he meant,” but is it really necessary to try and figure it all out? For keeping yourself safe, listening to what your feelings were at the time can be helpful, but sometimes there were no red flags, you look back and cannot see what “you did” that would have caused it, what “you did” that would keep it from happening again. The horror of it all is that it wasn’t what “you did,” (or did not do) you cannot make yourself completely safe. Because evil exists in this world, there truly is no “safe” place. I challenge any therapist to tell me where this “safe place” is, and I will give them a scenario that makes it not safe. But just because the world is not safe does not mean that we try and hide ourselves away from everyone hoping the less contact with others, the less possibility to be hurt. That is not healthy. We are social and made to be with one another, to help one another, to love one another, and at times while we are doing this, bad things will happen. Bad things happen to good people all the time. It is not what has happened to you, but how you perceived what happened.
I thought back to when I had been first assaulted in the military. The perp told me that I wanted what was happening to happen, that I liked it, that it was me that caused this to happen. That’s a load of bull that we need to get rid of. It is these words that were used by the perps and by others to have us wondering what it was that we did. To try and shift the blame back on us. The perps do it to get out of what they did, to rationalize to themselves, to put blame somewhere else, and even to help turn your own mind against you. Others use these words to make their seemly safe world stay that way, to block that there is true evil in this world, that another can take pleasure in the humiliation and torture of another human. That is why so many people want to associate some type of mental illness with someone who commits these acts, they do not want to really know that there is nothing mentally ill about these people; they have just chosen evil. They did not just sit back and let things happen, they acted upon the evil, they made a choice to do it. And you cannot understand the reasons why they choose that evil, it just is.
So why do we choose to use words that would give some responsibility to what happened back on us? Because we are bombarded with them. Our bodies knew what was happening, our minds just tried to rationalize something that is not rational, give meaning to something that is meaningless, find the red flags so that it does not happen again. Evil will still happen. We need to know that, accept that, and move to live in a world with that knowledge. All those words are used to protect others, not ourselves. To protect the perp from the responsibility (and rightful consequences) of their choices, to protect the rest from taking their heads out of the sand and admitting there is evil, there is not true understanding of it, we cannot put some diagnosis on it, it is not a mental illness, it was a mental choice, an evil mental choice.
