Why do we need to label it?

[Catie 08]

I experienced abuse as a kid over many years and never spoke about it until I was in my 30's.  Living most of my life without labels, it makes me cringe now when I hear people use the reference victim survivor.  For me, it is unhelpful.  How I feel can change from day to day. Sometimes I feel like a victim and other days I feel like a survivor but I find it more helpful to say that I experienced what I did.  For me, it leaves room for me to grow, evolve and try and live my life the best I can. If I am told I'm a victim or survivor of something then that label sticks.  And sure, we may well be a victim or a survivor of our past but I feel that it is so much harder to find ways to look towards a fresh chapter of life when we aren't given the chance to take our experiences with us, no matter how hurific the pain and how traumatic the experience, without the chance to choose for ourselves how we want to be seen.  I don't hear of others feeling this way, and perhaps that's because the use of these labels in the media are so widely used and accepted, but I wondered what others who are being labelled feel about this?

[Croix]

Dear Catie 08~

I can see what you are saying and I believe labels are a mixed blessing.

for a long time I did not know I had PTSD, depression and anxiety, in fact I'd never heard of PTSD. As a result I felt the ways I reacted, and the ways I thought were flaws in me. Then I found the cause and the label and it really helped. I could see that my behaviour, mental and physical, was a well known set of symptoms, not shortcomings in myself.

It assisted me to find appropriate treatment. All good - but when people label me "a PTSD" they are not seeing me, just the label, and they make assumptions that simply are not valid and make 'allowances' for my condition that I do not want or appreciate.

My state does change, both up and down, and I do grow.  I do not see myself as a survivor (obviously - I'm here talking to you) or a victim (even though my conditon was caused by others), just as a person who happens to have have had traumatic experiences in the  past. I'm an individual, as are you.

Croix

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Catie 08 and Croix,

I think this is a really good discussion to have. I have never thought of myself as a victim or survivor either, just a person who went through traumatic experiences.

However, like Croix, I did not understand I had a trauma condition. I was actually profoundly dissociated from myself which was part of the condition. It’s only in recent years I could even say I experienced abuse. Even when I first saw my current psychologist two years ago I remember saying something like I only have gratitude towards my parents and have forgiven them for anything they did to me. But I have had to admit the reality of the things done to me and allow the suppressed emotions, especially anger, to come up which it is finally doing. I’ve been in perpetual fear my entire life and had no safety or protection. I’m slowly learning to help myself feel safe and very recently I’m strongly releasing anger now.

But again, this anger is not about me perceiving myself as a victim or survivor but an organic process I need to go through for my body, mind and spirit to heal. I’m diagnosed with Complex PTSD now but that label is helpful in that it has put me in touch with many helpful resources on my healing journey. So I do think labels can be helpful, though I think some psychiatric ones also can be unhelpful at times.

What tends to happen with the media is certain words become like buzz words and get used repeatedly and it is true that victim and survivor are used a lot. At the same time, I can see where those words fit such as the massive abuse done to children in institutions. It is a fact they were victims of the adults who perpetrated against them and they survived it. But whether the repeated use of those words for everyone with trauma is always helpful is something that may vary from person to person.

If a person only thinks of themselves in victim and survivor terms it may limit their life. They could get trapped in trauma as the defining feature of their existence into the future. So I think it depends on how the terms are used but also how they are felt by people who’ve experienced trauma.

At the moment I am shedding parts of myself that no longer serve me. They were adaptive strategies for survival developed in childhood. But I want to let them go now. I don’t want to be in survival mode anymore.

Thank you for raising an interesting topic. I see thise terms as a mixed blessing like Croix. Basically now I seek peace and resolution of past trauma patterns within me. I am just a human seeking to be well.

Eagle Ray