Why I can’t disengage from hostile, irrational arguments
The fact that I am a victim of child abuse comes up sometimes. I wish it didn’t. I don’t like to talk about it, in any context. Not online, not face to face, not with my fiancee. Talking about it makes me feel physically ill. I start shaking, feeling watched, feeling ashamed, and like I have done something to apologize for. However, my history of being abused unfortunately informs a lot of my social interactions, so I think it’s important to talk about, at least a bit.
My childhood involved a lot of different kinds of abuse. It involved neglect, malnourishment and other food related abuse, hygiene-abuse, forced isolation, forced helplessness, exposure to hard drug use, and physical abuse and menacing.
Most importantly for this discussion, is that my abuse involved a shocking amount of verbal abuse, irrational hostility, and gaslighting.
My father is a paranoid schizophrenic, with a history of hard drug abuse, who had a stroke when I was 10 years old that made him even more irrational.
Throughout my entire childhood and teenage years my father would become irrationally angry for little to no reason. But he always thought he had a reason. He would force my younger brother and I to remain in the room with him while he would scream at us for, without exaggeration, 2 to sometimes 6 or 8 hours without break.
My father called me names. He screamed at me I was terrible. He screamed that I was a lizard incapable of emotion. That I was fat and stupid. That I had ruined his life, and that I was the reason he wanted to kill himself. He repeatedly threatened to kill himself. He told me I was lucky that he didn’t hurt me.
Even when he wasn’t screaming, my father’s paranoia made him say things that were blatantly and obviously untrue. He continually predicted the end of the world, and would tell my brother and I how we were going to die horribly. He believed that the secret service followed him everywhere. He believed that people would break into our house and drug our dogs. My father believes that Obama has a weather machine. He believes in chemtrails, and that flouride is poison.
When I got older, and started identifying as trans and bisexual, my father started screaming about how the gays were ‘committing genocide against our country’. How every trans person is a ‘delusional pervert’, and other such charming arguments.
And if you ever try to argue with him on anything, he’d just become louder and louder and more aggressive and angrier. It doesn’t matter what rational evidence you present him with, he will tell you that it’s been tampered with. That its government mind control. Anything that makes him right.
So yes, I have a hard time ignoring or disengaging from irrational, hostile arguments. That’s because my entire life growing up has basically been one long, hostile, irrational argument that I was unable to remove myself from. Because i was unable to remove myself, defending myself is habit. It try to break it. Some days I’m better at it than others.
Posted on my sideblog. Reblogging here to be added to my sidebar for reference.
