The Negative Identity and Challenges in Washing it Off

Give yourself a negative identity

I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties.

Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me miserable.

So I spent the next few years focused on Getting A Life and practicing the art of Living Well Is The Best Revenge. And it's one of the wisest moves I ever made.

That is a comment by me on Hacker News. It has 111 points and is the top voted comment in the discussion. 

I encourage you to read the ENTIRE discussion. At one time, I was respected on Hacker News, especially for my comments on this sort of thing. I was posting as openly female on an overwhelmingly male forum and being very evenhanded about things like "Sexual assault happens to men too. This is NOT about men are all rapey bastards." 

But I also got flak within that very discussion by someone claiming my willingness to discuss sexual assault as a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum was proof I wasn't recovered and it was pathological behavior.

One point I made:

The issue is that if you get hit by a car, the entire world doesn't spend the rest of your life pitying you and hanging their car-related baggage on you and refusing to acknowledge they are doing so. If you get raped, every bit of sexual baggage of everyone you know will be dumped in your lap in the name of "sympathy" while people actively refuse to allow you to move on.

And here is a comment by a guy:

As a male, people told me I'm a liar and that it's not possible to be raped by a female. I don't bother bringing it up anymore.

You can click into it and read the replies to it.

Footnote

If you are not a member of Hacker News:

1. Flagged to death comments will probably not be visible at all to you without an account. (Accounts are free if you want one, but brand new accounts come with some technical restrictions.)

2. Greyed out comments are down voted below 1 point. There are four or maybe five shades and it goes down to negative four points. You can continue to lose points after that, but they stop visually signaling it to the reader.

If you are having trouble reading greyed out comments, click on the time stamp. That should give you a version in black ink.