Everything I've Learned About Victimhood
Ok not everything, that would take a book. But in honour of International Women’s Day, and as an ode to the incredible strength of the Jewish Women who came before me and who’s resilience lives on in my DNA, I want to talk about reclaiming your own power.
What are my victim credentials? Do I really know anything? Well, I was abused as a child, viciously, by my mother and her neo-Nazi husband. I was held in solitary confinement, locked in my room for months at a time, from the age of 6. I was called a Dirty Little Yid on account of my father’s Jewish heritage, I was assaulted and humiliated and in public my regular disappearances and obvious distress were explained away as “extreme mental illness”. I moved from abusive mother to abusive husband and was beaten, raped, and controlled. Finally, my two children were abducted and have been kept away from me for over a decade, by excuse of the aforementioned “extreme mental illness”. I have fought seven court cases to see my children. Do I know something about trauma and victimhood? Yes. Yes I do.
During the last five years, I resolved to fix myself. I decided I would recover if it was the only thing I ever achieved in life. I dropped out of my promising international journalism career to pursue “healing” and “do the work”. It destroyed my life.
The truth is that the cult of perpetual victimhood, that only sees people through the lens of their respective trauma and oppression, made me more ill than the abuse I suffered ever did.
I spent time in online spaces that spread messages like “it’s ok if all you did today was lie on the sofa” and I ran with it. I lay on the sofa. I spent time in online spaces that told me that my issues with my body, particularly as a rape survivor, were societal not physical or health related, and the answer to my discomfort that my reactive binge drinking had caused me to gain some unwanted weight was to reject diet culture and eat whatever I wanted. For five years I lay on the sofa, cried about how cruel and unfair life was, stuffed myself with crisps, sweets and pizza to the point of pain and vomiting, and spiralled into a pit of despair.
With the October 7th Massacre and the explosion of radical antisemitic hatred in all these left-wing “liberation” spaces that I lived in, hatred that my inner child knew so well, and the repulsive rape denial and victim blaming that my adult self knew so well, I was shaken awake. Deprogrammed from a doctrine that hates women as much as it hates Jews. That seeks to keep us in our boxes, label and define us by the things that others did to us. Keep us sick and fat and sad and tell us there’s no point trying to better yourself, and if you do try, you are harming other women.
Now, after five months of distilling baby from bathwater in the context of my triggered trauma, this is what I know.
· Whenever your problem is someone else, there is no solution.
Hardest first, for me at least. My children were stolen. I will never get them back. My mother’s complicity in this heinous crime will never be ok. There will never be a day when what she did is just fine. But I cannot control her. I cannot control anyone. I have no power to change what she has already done. All I have power over is me. I have to find a way to live with that gaping hole in my heart. As long as I centred the actions of others in my pain and my problems, there was never going to be a solution. I could play over events and arguments obsessively, nothing was ever going to change. Until I realised that all I could do was live, I was lost. Which leads us to number two.
· Acceptance is not giving up.
It happened and it was shit. I believe you, I hear you, I know that pain that tears you apart, it is real. Accepting things that have already taken place, that you have no power to change, is not surrender. In fact, this is where the magic is. I was raised by two sociopaths and married another. That’s real. I accept that fact. Surrendering to the reality of what is freed my mind from living in a fantasy land where it never happened, and all the what ifs and could have beens, and made space for me to make a plan for now. What do I do now. Where do I go from here, from right where I am. The cold light of day is terrifying, I know better than most. But it is real. And your life only exists in what is real. Anything else is just a slow death.
· Behaviour Change Is the Only Change.
Action is your best weapon against trauma. This is my personal conviction based on a literal lifetime of experience, but I’m a journalist, not a doctor. That said, one of the first books I read about trauma was The Body Keeps The Score, and if I had stopped there (and didn’t utterly detest yoga) maybe I would have had more luck. Your body holds onto your trauma. You need to physically move through it. For me, right now, that looks like extremely fast walks and extremely slow jogs, blasting music in my ears and feeling the wind in my hair. Its bodyweight exercises, press ups and crunches, physically and viscerally moving my rage. Its dancing round my kitchen and feeling genuine joy in movement for the first time in years. What I’ve done to my body has left it weak and tired, and I can’t do a tenth of what I want to, but I can feel the change in my mind, and I see it reflected in my daily habits. I stopped binge drinking and binge eating. I just stopped. After years of wishing I could stop something in my mind clicked when I accepted my own responsibility for my life. I will not stay in the hole dug for me by someone else. I refuse. This far and no further. And the brutal truth that no one wants to hear is that’s what it takes. How do you stop? You stop. You accept responsibility and you take action.
· Self-Discipline is Self-Respect, Self-Indulgence is Self-Loathing
I can literally hear the outraged shrieking. “HOW DARE YOU TELL TRAUMATISED PEOPLE THEY NEED TO BE MORE DISCIPLINED!!!! VICTIM BLAMER!!!!! AAHHHHHH” Take a breath Jess, let me explain. You are not responsible for what happened to you. I will never be responsible for what happened to me. We are, however, responsible for our own choices, and it will be a cold day in hell before I let a nazi of any stripe dictate my life. When we tell ourselves “This awful thing happened to me, and now I’m no longer capable” we allow our trauma to dictate our lives. We give up all agency. When we indulge all our worst impulses, to drink to black out, to eat 6 Krispy Kremes in one sitting, to have sex with everything that moves or snort Columbias national deficit to escape the pain, we give in to absolute futility and darkness. I am here to tell you that no matter what they did to you, you deserve your happiness, your best life, whatever that looks like for you. I deserve to write and tell important stories. You deserve to do whatever it is that lights you up and you CAN. I swear. You CAN. And every single time you keep a promise to yourself, show up for yourself and take action for yourself that tiny flame of self esteem will grow. For you, by you, and with no reference to the rancid little ghoul who made you feel like you couldn’t.
· Feeling Negative Emotions Does Not Mean You Are Sick
Finally, I hate to break it to you, but you will never be happy all the time. Particularly for those of us with genuine horror in our pasts, I can’t see a time when the pain won’t show up, when the triggers won’t affect me. Even if all my dreams come true and I’m a successful published author relaxing on a sailboat with a hot Israeli husband I will still be brought to my knees by memories of my daughter screaming as she was ripped from my arms. Hypothetical-Hot-Future-Husband will never be able to touch my neck, because of another man who tried to crush out my very existence by constricting it. It’s not sickness. It’s how you know you’re still alive. Emotions are a barometer. They tell us what matters to us. The pervasive idea that all sadness is depression, or all anxiety is inherently disordered, is so dangerous. You are still here, and you are whole, and you deserve the full spectrum of human experience without labelling yourself as sick and broken. Trust yourself, even if you don’t trust me.
And finally, please. Please believe that you deserve more than suffering. Please believe that whatever a good life looks like to you is a valid thing to want. Please believe that there’s no door a woman can’t open if she puts her mind to it. In a world that is constantly telling you no, I am here to tell you yes. You Can. You Should. You Will.