Hiromi_X

I just posted a long comment on Nadia's blog, but I'll repost here, because it refers to this post, too.

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I understand this need for justice and for acknowledgement from the offending party.

In my own experience, at least one person involved in my incident (my mother, who introduced me to my rapist and blew it off when I told her I'd been raped) *has* come around and realized she was wrong. She has not asked for my forgiveness, but has said she can never forgive herself. And she has also come around to condemning the rapist's actions.

All of these things were things I thought I desperately wanted from her: acknowledgement of wrongdoing, apology, condemnation of the man's acts. I have gotten them all and it really doesn't feel like anything. I doesn't change the past, and while it is *like* what I wanted, it does not really *feel* like I imagined it would.

I realized recently no matter how she behaves or what she says, it will never *feel* like I imagined that moment to feel. I had some imagined concept of feeling released or freed in some way, in some great, instant rush. And I am finding that, of course, she is really only human and can't provide that sort of thing for me. Nor can she act like she acts in my imagination--that is, perfect. I imagine she'll have the perfec thing to say or do that will free me. And yet, no matter what she does, it doesn't have that effect. And *I* don't even know what the perfect thing to say or do is. I just keep hoping somehow it exists, and that she should know it.

So lately I've to terms with the fact that that perfect release moment *doesn't* exist. And that it's just not about the others on the outside. Even IF my rapist came and begged for forgiveness, or explained he saw the error of his ways, even if he voluntarily put himself in jail, or even if *I* managed to have him jailed...I'm not sure that would give me the imagined release I was looking for. So far I've found the only incindents that have provivded me with that feeling of release were in doing things for *myself,* outside of them and their behaviors/beliefs, positive or no.

I have begun to feel now that nothing else matters. Whether they realize doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they get healthy or enlightened. It's not my job to make them see the light--and i no longer want that job, as there's no real return on investment. And in terms of my rapist, that almost feels like i'd be "helping" him, and I really have no desire to provide him with any aid whatsoever.

I'm finding that only I and my healing matter, and only I can give that to myself. Those people on the outside, no matter what they do, can't give it to me. On Hiromi's blog, she mentions people suggesting "living well is the best revenge." I don't buy this theory, because, though I in no way forgive of forget what was done to me, I just don't want to focus on revenge at all anymore. Because revenge is reactive--it's still all about that other person, not me.

I'll go with "living well is the best reward," though. not because I want to prove anything to anyone. Just because, dammit, after what I've been through, I deserve some spoiling of myself. I deserve everything.

And so do you.

Wow. I read your post Hiromi, then had a million thoughts racing around my head, but was reluctant to post anything because it's hard for me to "preach" to someone who has been a victim of something so tragic/dramatic/horrific as a rape while I so far have been spared agony of that degree.

Then I read what Miss Syl wrote. She expressed everything I wanted to say, but in a much better way. I agree 100% with her. I've always believed that if your goal is to make people change, you will always be disappointed. Trying to get someone to apologize will be a HUGE disappointment if it happens - trust me on that one.

Living well is the best reward. It's mentally challenging, but much more rewarding in the long run. Hiromi should always be your #1 priority.

I would say (without platitudes, without cliche) table it. Take care of yourself first, then when it's time to deal with him, you'll be able to.
The itch you feel: there is the bitterness that other victims should exist at all, indulge it. Make a doll, stick pins in it (hey, may actually work), scream his name while you take a baseball bat to a rock, get it out so it's manageable, but, Hiromi... Take care of yourself first. Solipsism is a VERY good word for your right now. THEN, after you're (mostly) OK with where you're at, THEN deal with him.

I'm with Dark Neuro, but I wouldn't write off that idea of karma just yet.

I'm not a believer, but my own observations show that people like your ex are shits and eventually they shit on one too many people, or shit on the wrong person, or just shit so much they shit all over themselves. And when that happens they get what's coming to them. It's independent of God, it's just how people work.

Slight comfort I know, but better than nothing.

There is a price he is paying. He isn't a part of your life. He doesn't see your smile, hear your laugh, enjoy your company, or feel the warmth of your being. He doesn't get to be a part of your triumphs or is there when you need someone to hold them. He lost someone who used to care what happens to him and now does not.

Unless he is totally psychotic, then he knows all of this.

Excellent point, Bruce. Yeah, H, the justice thing on a larger scale is a huge issue, and involves societal change. I think in a way each person who starts talking about it like you helps remove the stigma attached to it and thus puts in out in the public domain. Eventually, it won't be so secretive and therefore will be taken more seriously because it's always in people's faces.

Another thing I've learned of late is that there's a really big push now from the therapeutic and law enforcement community to move from a sole focus on building sexual assault risk reduction(which focuses responsibility on victims to make sure they're not assaulted) and sexual assault response (focused on helping the victim and punishing the perpetrator after it's already too late to do anything to stop the assault), to a heavy focus on sexual assault prevention awareness campaigns. This "prevention" approach is not focused on victim or perpetrator responsibility, but on community responsibility--it stresses the responsibility of all individuals to be aware of the behaviors they may be engaged in that may facilitate or unwittingly allow the assaulter's ability to act, and to move from bystander status to intervener as soon as those early warning signs are visible. I think this effort, if it takes off, will go a long way toward promoting the kinds of justice you're talking about. It makes everyone feel responsible for the safety of their fellow human beings, and makes them less afraid to step up and say something, which ultimately would make it less possible for the assaulter/abuser to walk around thinking everything he/she did was no problem. Being frowned upon/soically policed or shut down by a vast majority of others (sadly) has a much greater effect for assaulters than being frowned upon by the person they've victimized, I think.

I have to preface this by saying I don't know where I stand on matters of karma and the afterlife. That said, I once saw an interview with one of those cheesy TV hosts that connected audience members with loved ones who had passed away. I don't give that kind of stuff a second thought, but he mentioned in this interview that his 'powers' (if you will) came after a near death experience. During this event, he saw is life through the eyes and hearts of everyone he ever encountered. Meaning that, if there is a judgement, it might be possible that your ex would experience everything he inflicted on you with the emotional impact and stress that 'you' experienced. He would experience his life with you, as you. I love this idea of retribution and hope it's true. It's calmed me whenever I'm disturbed by actions of people I read about,..... to think they'll get what they dish out.

I've been trying to formulate a worthy comment on this subject, and the only thing I am sure of is that I don't have any good answers for any of this.

I think it's important to not conflate justice with revenge, but then this is not something I know how to do. I'm often driven by spite and by fantasies of vengeance against people who have wronged me. I think deep down I really want them to be as upset as I am, and to have some kind of epiphany of shame and remorse and compassion for what I went through, but what comes out of my mouth is so fraught with anger and bitterness that it just makes them treat me worse.

The only thing that makes these feelings go away is the passage of time. But this is for things that are relatively trivial in nature...women who have dumped me, people who have harmed me professionally or insulted or humiliated me in public.

My experience with violence/abuse is more complicated than that, because the events happened many many years ago, but the people involved are still in my life and so I have to reconcile unresolved feelings (anger being the main one) about what happened to me with a couple of decades worth of relatively peaceful happy memories since then. The way I dealt with it for most of my life was to squash it; alcohol works wonders for this. Since I quit drinking, I have more trouble keeping my anger under wraps, but still, I don't know healthy ways of processing the anger...certainly the time for confronting people is long past, they're old and they're in poor health both mentally and physically. So it lurks there in the background.

I guess my first instinct is always to offer you advice, but every piece of advice I could think of, when I think about applying it to my own situation, it starts to sound like obvious bullshit.

The AA answers are, as usual, inadequate but better than most of the alternatives. Letting go of anger, letting go of resentments. You can't make the ex feel anything or do anything, but if you can somehow get to a place where you care less about justice than you do now, it might be healthier for you regardless of what happens to him. And maybe the only ways to get to that place are the passage of time and doing whatever things seem like they help, like helping other women in your support group. It ain't much, but it's a little something.

Sorry if this is scattered, I still don't think I have very well-formed thoughts on this stuff even after all this time.

Hi H,

I've read the above comments, and while I've not been a victim of rape, I did live in a childhood of pretty serious abuse by an alcoholic father. This is what I've found-- take it for what it's worth.

People gravitate to what is familiar to them-- I think that this goes back to when we were monkeys on the savannah. It was always safer to stay in place where you knew where the lion was, because there was ALWAYS going to be a lion. Very few people naturally gravitate to happiness, unless that's what they've known.

The problem is this-- every time you do something to re-live the abuse, after some level of necessary processing, you're injuring your brain again. We gravitate to the familiar-- but the familiar, if it is trauma, re-injures us over and over and over.

I finally moved at least somewhat past my past when I was dating an abused woman with three kids (can we say mother-figure) and got to the point after one of her children was kidnapped by her ex, that misery was making me miserable, and that miserable was something that I didn't want to be, even though I was VERY familiar with it, knew how to handle all the ins and outs of it, and such.

It can be very uncomfortable being happy. Lots of us from traumatic pasts feel un-moored from the world around us, because in lots of ways, while our misery weighs us down, it also anchors us.

But here's something that I learned. Once I realized that I really didn't want to be miserable, and unlike some people that have no choice about their physical conditions, I did have lots of choices, I got used to being happy.

And it has been a much better place. But it took a while to get used to it.

FWIW, I don't think it's a great idea to work with women that have been abused in the same way you've been traumatized. All you're doing is setting your brain up for re-injury, through living through someone else's misery. Far better to find some unrelated activity to do service. It will be hard at first, because your brain won't be getting the same juice it's been getting from the misery. But you can de-tox from your old life. At least I did.

XO

CHuck

I was really struck by this post, and reminded by something I read a few months ago on the blog of a writer from the UK, Jenny Diski.
She wrote (motivated by Blair's lack of repercussions for involvement with Iraq):

"...Getting away with something is what upsets children. Not the fact of wrongdoing but the lack of consequence upsets them because it suggests that there might be no natural justice. An elementary part of growing up is acknowledging that and a few other things. No natural justice. No purpose. Contingency is the nature of the world. We die.
"It doesn't seem like much to have got into my head after all these years, and you won't find me denying any of them, but I still can't confront any of those facts with equanimity. I can tell you the only way of being human is somehow to manage in that reality."

I read this just when someone I really cared about was dying unexpectedly.
I don't know if this helped me exactly-- actually it did nothing to prevent me from spiraling into a depression-- but I was really struck by it at the time and still remember it... No natural justice. We die. We somehow need to manage in that reality. If I could really get my head around that (I have not yet) I figure I'd be happier.

Take care of yourself.

Yeah, I realize the issue you were talking about was more abstract (Nadia's less so)--not so much that you wanted to MAKE something happen so much as why it happens that way at all, and how entirely sucky that is. You mentioned revenge in the post but you really weren't talking about that, but about an emotional response to, "How can events transpire like this? THIS is the way it works? NOT RIGHT."

The issue IS metaphysical. And a HUGE societal mind shift would be required for that set of realities to no longer BE the outcome, and that seems overwhelming. Yet, I think there are practical inroads that can move us toward that societal mind shift. So yep, active education, protesting, telling one's story, writing one's lawmakers, all that is part of it. And that's why I'm also surprised and encouraged that the new push is to require bystanders to feel responsible for identifying small early warning signs and cutting the victimizer OUT, shutting him/her DOWN. That sort of mentality is geared toward a consciousness change for the entire community. Before, it was only focused on the vicitm and the perpetrator(s). They got put in a little bubble and everyone else got to say "nothing to do with me," so it was far easier for the perpetrator to isolate the incident and pretend, like the bystanders, that the reality of it had nothing to do with him/her. I'd like to see a day when societally people will make a victimizer feel the pressure of holding his inappropriate attitudes and behavior, and of the full weight of societal disgust for them.

Hiromi,
I've posted a couple of times here when something has struck me deeply or made my mind work in a new way on an issue about which I think I have an understanding. This is one of those times. I have dated a few women in my time who either came out of abusive relationships or suffered from rape in their past. What a burden to bear and I know they all suffered from feelings of shame or responsibility. A hearbreak to see it in their eyes or actions and how it seized them suddenly at times called unbidden from their memories by some action, or turn of phrase, or even a scent.
Though I cannot empathize, I can sympathize. I lost my left leg at nine and for many years had phantom pains. My leg long gone yet an itch or sharp spike of pain would shoot up a limb that was no longer there, yet my mind couldn't let it go. Over the years these have lessened to a great degree, yet at times out of the blue I will experience a quick, sharp pain that runs right up an invisbile leg straight to my brain. A reminder that though I have learned to live and function very well with it, the loss remains with me forever.
Once someone asked me, "how did you overcome your loss?" The question caught me off guard and I answered almost instinctively so that I even surprised myself. I told them that I never did, I simply told myself that I wasn't going to live my life around the loss. I was going to live and deal with limitations as they arose and overcome as many as possible. Sometimes a success, sometimes not but never starting with the leg foremost in my mind or defining events. Every night I take that leg off, I go to sleep and sometimes I get up quickly in the night and forget so I try to walk and fall on my face. I laugh when it happens,"right, I say, I am a guy with one leg." LOL I laugh though because what is, is...
I am rambling a little but in my present relationship my fiancee and I talked about our pasts and the negative things that have occurred in our separate lives. She worried that things she saw as personal failures would cause me to doubt us. This is what I wrote:
"What roads have we both walked and what dark paths have we trod to reach this destination are part of who we are not who we shall become. If we cannot trust, then we cannot love. Trust me then that I truly do see you and that no frailty will condemn your strength, no injury can overthrow your beauty, no fury shall contradict love."
It is a bit prosaic I know and it was part of a longer letter but I guess what I wanted to say was that everything I have seen in your blog here tells me that what is true of her is true of you too: no fraility will condemn your strength, no injury can overthrow your beauty, no fury shall contradict love. I hope I didn't exhaust patience on this and I shall take my seat in the back again...

The desire for justice is part of our nature - hardwired into our brains. It seems to predate humans, as some monkeys get outraged when not treated equally. A desire for justice is important for social animals, in order to solve the problem of free-riders in cooperative societies. It isn't something that is subject to direct control by your consciousness, and it isn't something that you can wish away.

I don't think that achieving justice would do much about getting rid of your desire for justice. Having read your blog, these are not small offences that are easily forgotten and forgiven. Not matter what actions your ex might make, or what consquences he might meet, they would not be 'justice'.

Accepting that, and working on your reactions and train-of-thought when you remember those wrongs, would likely be much more productive, if your goal is to feel like you control the desire for justice, rather than it control you.

Perhaps Miss Syl's suggestions in comment 13 are most important - working towards the end that society recognises certain behaviors as unacceptable. Incorporating the desire for justice into a desire to change society might give a sense of purpose and direction, as well as re-training your emotional responses.

The whole question is interesting from a different perspective for me, as I'm teaching a course on 'Happiness' (philosophy) this semester. Jonathan Haidt's book, 'The happiness hypothesis', and Daniel Gilbert's, 'Stumbling on happiness' would probably both be interesting reads for you.

Hi H,

I don't think of it as avoidance. I'm just past it. My sister and brother still have not moved past it. But for me, it is not the defining event in my life. It would be foolish to say that it hasn't built some of my character--but at 44, 28 years later after moving out of my parents house at 16, I've got 28 different years to say about what I am. I see lots of people with past problems re-living their problems out through other people, through doing things like becoming counselors, or helping with other abused people. Some of these people turn out to be very powerful, successful and helpful people. But some don't. The way I look at it is that sometimes you need a break from it all. As always, you have to decide for yourself what the truth in your situation is.

I thought the story of the Mad Scot was stunning-- one may lose a leg, but it is a personal decision to build their lives around the loss.

Hiromi, you are on the way to getting better simply by recognizing the healing power of helping others. You will someday feel sufficiently whole to provide the kind of help you have seen the woman from AA provide. In giving that help, you will help yourself -- you will strengthen yourself -- in more ways than you can know or feel today. In fact, you are already offering help, and helping yourself, by sharing your struggle and your pain on this blog. You are to be much commended for your courage and your honesty. But it is my gut feeling that emotional healing needs a dialogue, face to face, voice to voice or even message to message.

I hope and pray that you have people you can talk to -- a therapist, family members or close friends. Reach out to them. Forsake your pride. Wear them out if you have to. You may be surprised to find out how much they care; how willing they are to listen, to share, to offer their support. You can't begin to through this pain until you let it all out. This is not a matter of getting justice -- it is a matter of regaining equilibrium, or something that passes for equilibrium, by getting rid of all the poison you've been made to swallow as a result of injustice.

But please remember that YOU CAN HEAL. This pain may never fully subside. You may never get "closure," which is a term and a notion I despise. But you can get far enough beyond this moment and these awful feelings that you may be able to share love, give trust and know joy again. YOU CAN DO IT. Your spirit, as damaged as it is, wants to repair itself, just as the body does. You will be left with scars, but you can and you will keep going.

My e-mail address is ergoatergo@yahoo.com. Please feel free to write to me any time you care to talk about how you are feeling, or if you think you could use a little bit of nonjudgmental goodwill and support. It would be a pleasure for me to be there for you on whatever terms you are comfortable with. Just remember that, as much as it hurts, you can pull through this, and you are not alone.

Hiromi, I find your post and the discussion very interesting, as this is something I've also been puzzling over in the aftermath of a relationship gone wrong. I also am an atheist, and I don't believe there is any sort of inherent justice to the universe, and I also am unhappy with it. It's *unfair* that people should benefit by being shitty to others, and yet somehow it is just the how things are.

Concerning what Miss Syl said, I think guilt and apologies are nice, but they are not entirely justice. My idea of justice is this: I went to a small college where there was an honor code that both students and faculty took very seriously. It was the guiding rule for personal conduct on campus, and it said, "No member of the XYZ community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the XYZ community." There was a committee that dealt with violations, generally students cheating on coursework, and the rule of thumb was, (1) nullify any unfair advantage, (2) ensure that it does not happen again. This kind of justice is not hard when only grades are involved, but rather more difficult in life...

Two other comments.

Definitely with the best revenge being living well. It's something that I try to remind myself when I feel like I'm falling into anger and negativity -- this only hurts myself.

I think the second best revenge, as Bruce pointed out, is casting someone off and being able to believe it when you tell yourself that they don't deserve anything from you, that you no longer have to experience all the hurt and pain associated with caring about someone who treated you so badly. For me this was a difficult decision to make, and a difficult decision to live with, but I think it is proving to be surprisingly freeing.

As an addendum, Larry Niven coined the word tanj, for "there ain't no justice..."

I'd posted the #12 comment a few days ago, which I belatedly realized might have seemed harsher-- or something (bleaker?)-- than I intended. Sorry! I am a sympathetic (mostly lurking) reader of your blog, though that probably didn't come across. Your post just triggered strong thoughts on lots of the stuff I'm struggling with myself right now.

(also... about 15 years ago I was the victim of an attempted rape at knifepoint-- while I managed to get away, it still shapes my behaviour in a big way to this day, and probably will until I die, which really sucks. it's a hard road, I know.)

btw, I've read the Gilbert book too, and recommend it-- very interesting. If you want a bit of a teaser, listen to his podcast listed here: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/ .

It was a small science college actually. Definitely a rather homogeneous community. But, I take "nullify any unfair advantage" to mean undoing the damage caused to others, hence easier on gradesheets vs. in life.