topoligel

I know I should, but for right now talking on the internet about it (with the ignorance about whether I am truly anonymous blanketing me) is the most I can do. I have had bad experiences in group therapy, I did not find it helpful.

I have been diagnosed with PTSD, I know I show many symptoms of it. It makes me upset that it may have held me back in achieving goals in my life, but I just know that regardless, I need to take things slowly. I have too many emotions that distract and cloud my ability to think clearly about things I consider very difficult (mostly stuff in computer science and math).

So I just go really slow, as slow as I need to, and I wait for things to click, and then they do. I just try to forget that the rest of the world is still rushing by, and I remind myself that none of that matters to my own personal understanding about the things I want to learn about. I get discouraged a lot, and sometimes my mind can really feel completely clouded, and nothing I do seems to help it, and I can become very afraid that I will be lost in confusion forever. That I am either past my prime, or that I never really was smart, or that I'm too damaged to really persist and actually see the fruits of my labor. Sometimes I think it is good enough to be convinced into persisting despite knowing that I never will actualize, but that thought saddens me in an exceptionally destructive way.

I know I am strong and that if there's anything that really keeps me wanting to live day to day, it's being able to experience learning in the right way, and I consider myself lucky that I get to do that even though I work.

I have, I met with a licensed psychologist who did this in my area, but we didn't proceed because my experiences as I described them were things he did not think he would be the best with helping.

I can understand the first paragraph perspective as being a valid one, but I can not understand how that would prompt a rape victim to complain about rape victims who want to shed light on rape as a crime. I know some people are immature and think that it's a grab for attention, but I think that these are immature and / or unresolved coping methods.

I had a therapist suggest to me that that was what I was doing to myself, re-traumatizing myself every time I remembered it. I do not think so. I think having a parent scream at me that what I experienced was not rape, was traumatic. I think having a parent prod and poke until I described my rape in detail was traumatic. I think my rape was traumatic, I felt violated. I think it continues to affect me sexually, to the point that I am almost hopeless in having a normal sexual life.

I do not desire living a life of suffering, but I allow myself to feel the sadness and the emotions that trauma caused. I have had people mock me and call me cruel names and say very cruel things, some people I was very close to, over the incident. I was convinced that I hated myself because of it, because of the whole thing. It was painful to accept that I had been raped, but it was not as painful being raped. I had almost been brought to believe that remembering being raped was suffering that I willfully brought onto myself. For me, beginning with that premise was mental hell. I could never resolve the feelings I had, I couldn't explain why I was crying all the time for what seemed like no reason. Everyone around me wanted a reason, but the reasons I gave when I had them weren't enough.

For me, talking about my rape when it is relevant helps me. Feeling like I have firm position and understanding of what happened to me helps me. Feeling like I am emotionally and intellectually strong despite my past (and how my past has affected me) helps me. I am genuinely sorry for what you experienced. In a similar light, I can not be confident with anything I can say to you to help, because maybe you have already found inner peace and balance. I'm just okay. I'm sad, but I'm okay with being sad, because there are lots of things that happen in life that are valid things to feel sad about.

People might have multiple ways of thinking about their own experiences, and some of these ways are collected from people around them, the culture they grew up in. Some of these ways are truths that reside within themselves - their own feelings. The truth that an individual knows inside of the themselves can only talk about themselves, it can not describe how another individual feels about their own self awareness.

People may share empathy between similar feelings, but this does not mean that one person should try to project their way of having emotions onto another person, as if there is a 'right' way to have emotions and a 'wrong' way to have emotions. Emotions are not actions, they are emotions.

For me, as a rape victim, being raped affected my feelings in a way that was traumatic. No one else can tell me what my feelings were from the experience I endured. So now that we can take this as a fact, instead of an opinion, we are getting somewhere in understanding how to define rape objectively, using subjective (but qualified) terms. The reason I feel those feelings is because I was raped.

You don't have to make a judgement call. But some things can only be known on an individual level, and it is up to you to decide whether you believe that person, and that is all you can do as far as 'knowing' anything about it without experiencing it. From that, you can direct your life and how you interact with and understand the world. But that is the limitation you are at.

I do not know what it feels like to be a rape victim who does not feel like it harmed me significantly. I do not know how I would communicate with them because I have never had to. I have never met anyone that has been raped and brushed it off like it was the same as eating cereal that morning instead of toast. So I have no perspective on this.

It's been 10 years. I have objectively gotten better, I take better care of myself. Even when I feel like I can not go on, I still get out of bed and I do my daily routine, whether it is going to work or going to the gym and doing my chores. I've hidden in the bathroom at work to cry, and I've had many nights where I've gone to sleep wishing I would not wake up in the morning.

I have had some wonderful conversations with people online, and that gives me hope that I will be able to feel happy and be able to recognize it when I feel it. I make art, I make music, and I take great care in learning about computer science and code, and making improvements in it. I have an interest in philosophy and a love of knowledge in general, and I often think it is amusing to me that I use abstract maths to distract myself from traumatic memories, a bit of a quirk that I like about myself. I have my moments where I feel like I think I might love myself and I know who I am, few and far apart they may sometimes be. The last 5 or 6 years have been like a hurricane for me. I still struggle with a lot of things, but I think it has gotten better.

Thank you for your response. I have developed the strength to be able to respond back to comments like that, or to ignore them. I have heard them all my life. People like you existing and continuing to have the strength to exist like that is enough. I try to be a person like that too. Make sure that you are kind, caring and empathetic to yourself.

Thank you for your compassion. It does mean something.

Rape is very different from showing a breast or two, or two people making love.

There are many illustrations of murder which include the psychological impact on the victims. I really haven't found any material that empathizes with me, as a rape victim. Instead, every rape and sexual assault scene in Hollywood is 1-5 minutes long and triggers me into wanting to cry and rock back and forth.

I haven't seen any of his work regarding sexual violence, but there is a lot more depth to it than just the illustration of it. People who write about it who have never experienced it nor researched it sufficiently will not portray rape in a way that demonstrates the impact it has on the victim. It is often exaggerated and minimized as 'part of the life' of the character that endures it. The reality is that it is like your life was made of glass and rape is the bullet that was shot through it, creating cracks that continue to crack in everything that is connected to it, and sometimes the whole thing shatters and you can't ever imagine how to go back to the person you were before you were raped. You don't know how to put the pieces back together and neither does anyone else. But yet you are expected to keep on going. Happiness without sadness is a thing you don't understand, and you acknowledge that you may never understand. Fear is your best friend and your worst enemy. You might become repulsed by your own body. Your identity may fracture and your sense of reasoning and rationality may twist and warp. Labels follow you everywhere. It is a violation of life.

> soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.

What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that?

What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.