Thread by @CCChatMagazine

Let’s talk about the trauma of not being believed.

🧵

Too many of us have personal experience of not being believed by a person we trust.

Or of going to the police to report a crime (domestic abuse, rape or assault, for example) and not being believed…

What is it like to go to someone you know and trust, or to report to someone who is supposed to protect you, and to be ignored, dismissed, not believed or accused of lying?

When your experiences are not deemed believable or worthy of support, it causes a person to question themselves. To doubt what they know. And it causes them to dismiss their own experience of the harm done to them.

They may feel:

Why tell anybody? No one will believe it

What I experienced wasn’t so bad if I’m being told it’s not a big deal.

I’m just taking up the time needed to support those who REALLY need it.

I am making too much of this.

I deserved it.

A person may become distrusting, defensive, angry.

So feel they HAVE to prove they are telling the truth.
This may become persistent.

Or may feel so betrayed that they retreat inwards and become isolated.

Or puts up with the abuse because no one else sees it as a problem.

A person may feel the need to constantly explain themselves and their motivations EVEN when it hasn’t been asked for or is not necessary.

And may grow explosively angry at the injustice of not being believed.

They may learn that they can’t trust themselves to know the difference between whether they are being harmed or not and may put up with intolerable treatment because they have been convinced or have convinced themselves that it is really tolerable.

It may change the way they view the world, causing them to be distrustful. It may affect how they interact with the world - other people- and making it harder for them to achieve their goals.

It may damage their self-worth.

“What’s wrong with me? Why was I not believed?

So that they end up feeling worthless.

They may feel so ashamed at not being believed, at believing they are unbelievable, that they avoid anyone who could help them, who could offer them support.

And so they suffer in silence.

#Trauma
#DomesticAbuse
#DomesticViolence
#CoerciveControl