One frustration that I used to have in healing from child abuse was all of the “shoulds” that people threw my way. I “should” not still be having flashbacks. After all, nobody could have experienced that much abuse. I “should” be feeling anger toward my abusers. I “should” stop feeling shame and, instead, love myself.
You know what? What I “should” have been feeling was irrelevant because, whether I “should” have been feeling those things or not, I was feeling them. That was my reality. To tell me that I “should” or “shouldn’t” feel a certain way only made me feel even more badly about myself than I already did.
So, I decided to remove the word “should” from my vocabulary as it applied to healing from child abuse. What mattered was my reality, not what another person thought my reality “should” be.
I think that people “should” child abuse survivors to death because they want to put us into a box that they can understand. Does it make sense for a person to feel guilty and responsible for an adult raping her as a child? Of course not. And so, because it does not make sense to the other person, the other person wants to “should” us into a place that makes sense to him or her. However, if you read over the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), you will see that guilt and shame are hallmarks of the disorder. If we didn’t have the symptoms, then we wouldn’t have the diagnosis, would we?
If you are feeling overwhelmed by other people’s “shoulds,” choose not to listen to them. What matters is what you are facing in this moment, not where you “should” be according to another person. Whatever you are feeling about your child abuse history is normal.
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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
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