Dec. 29, 2019, John Æonid

This article is a stub, to be fleshed out at a later date.

The big thing I've learned from the #meeto movement is that our cultural perceptions of abuse are shadow impressions, meaning that they are often very incomplete.  For example, I used to think that casting couch was for B-grade producers and directors getting together with bad actors and actresses trying to sleep their way to the top.  Instead, the slap in the face that I got was that A-grade actresses of which I am a fan were black balled.  That is, they didn't somehow just experience a one-time instance of abuse, as if that wasn't bad enough.  Instead, they had their career ruined.

This stub is a starting point for discussing what it means culturally to push unpleasent memories into the shadow.  Why is it that I have for so long been motivated to keep my own miserable upbrining out of the light?

Imagine being forced to join a cult against your will.  Is such a thing possible?  Oh, Gawwwd--fill in hoards of online videos about just that.  It's more common than you think.  There's a woman in our energy-work group from a prominent church loosely associated with Utah. (Fair disclaimer, there was a family in my grandmother's neighborhood of that caste, and I have wonderful fond memories of them.)

It's not that the #meto movement was the first place that things were brought to light.  But, it magnified it.  It shows us more about what's been lurking in the darkness, the way perpatraitors discourage their victims from coming forward, and the way we repress our own dark memories out of a sense of shame.

Here's an article about how we end up having an emotional short-sightedness that kind of forgets the miseries that we suffer.

The Psychology Behind When Emotions Turn Us Into Different People

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/04/784670057/the-psychology-behind-when-emotions-turn-us-into-different-people

I don't know how other people deal with it.  I haven't heard people talk about this kind of thing too much.  But, there seems to be cultural evidence of how one of my coping mechanisms is not mine alone.  And, the key evidence of this is in the phrase "we'll get through this somehow."  Oh wait, how about "the sun'll come up tomorrow..."  When I'm in a bad place, I've never been so trapped that I didn't believe there was no escape.  I used to use a mantra in one of the toughest times in in life: "how do I pass through the darkness."  It's a mantra that requires a certain kind of faith, though I don't claim to be a person of faith.  I have to wonder what it's like to think that a person comes to believe that there is no out.