Negaters Gonna Negate
I’m a big fan of the “defriend” and “block” options on Facebook. About twice a year I go through my friend list and defriend anyone who has been negating me or who has repeatedly made snarky passive-aggressive comments on my posts. Cause life is short right? And there’s no rule that says that you have to keep people who don’t like you in your life. If someone is especially hateful then I block them, cause I don’t have space in my life for hateful people. I don’t care what they are saying or doing and I don’t want them in my energetic space.
We can’t control who we run into in real life but we can control our online interactions. This is why I love the defriend and block buttons. They allow me to filter out the haters and negaters from at least one part of my world.
When I spoke out about childhood abuse I experienced I had a lot of family and friends negate my experience and attempt to silence me. These people cared more for maintaining the status quo in their own lives than they did for me. Their interest and motivation was the high value they placed on not having to change their lives at all. If they accepted what I said as true then they would feel compelled to action, like calling out the person who abused me or cutting them out of their lives. So it was easier to demonise me and suggest I was crazy than it was to accept that someone they knew had done horrible things.
When I spoke out about the man who abused me in a relationship again very few people believed me. I experienced a deep and inhumane negation of self, a negation of my experiences as people tried to dismiss and silence me. It was a form of communal gaslighting, where I was repeatedly subject to people trying to convince me that I wasn’t abused, or that what had happened to me “wasn’t that bad”.
Twice in my life I have had suicidal ideations and both times were a direct result of speaking out about abuse and not being believed and not being supported through the abuse I was experiencing. It wasn’t the abuse I experienced that made me suicidal, it was the negation of what had happened to me by the people I reached out to. They were my family and friends. I expected them to help me. I expected them to support me. I now know that supportive reactions are more likely if they don’t know or have any connection to the person who abused or hurt you.
This negation is not an uncommon experience, I’ve been working with victims of domestic abuse for 7 years and every woman I’ve worked with has suffered from this second punishment of negation.
Because of the experiences I had with being treated so badly I am extra aware of when someone I meet (irl or online) is negating me, dismissing my legitimate concerns or attempting to silence me. These are skills I am also teaching my children. Negation of children’s experiences has been quite common with the kids in my life and those I’ve worked with . Rarely do these children have the language to explain what has happened to them. When kids are uncomfortable about something someone said or did to them I explore it and unpack it with them, and we look at the motivations behind it and see if the person was negating or dismissing them/their concerns. This teaches emotional intelligence and critical thinking skills which I think aside from love are the two best gifts you can give a child (or an adult!)
If you can critically analyse what someone has said to you then you have an awareness of the various factors at play. (I’m including an example below this piece). This awareness allows you to use your emotional intelligence to understand the motivations of the other party — which is often something that the other party isn’t even aware of. In my work with women who have come out of abusive relationships I always sit with them and go through the correspondence (texts or emails) in order to further their knowledge in how to analyse communications — or as I put it, “How to know what they’re really saying.” Once you have this skill you can’t unlearn it, it’s with you for life. It becomes second nature to read between the lines — what people really mean.
Life is too short for haters and negaters. It’s ultra painful when they’re your close family and friends but in my experience (of trying both ways) cutting them out is not more painful than keeping people in your life who dehumanise you by minimising your pain and silencing you. That is, in my opinion a deeper and more long term wound to carry.
It is a joyful thing indeed to only have kind supportive people in your immediate circle and I wish that for everyone who wants it for themselves ❤
Below is an example of critically analysing a text.
The abusive ex of one of my clients sent her the following message (reprinted with her permission):
“From memory I recall that you didn’t have a close relationship with your father as a child please consider this as a starting point to determine why you’re so angry towards me. This will only result in our children getting hurt so badly by the things going on around them.
I strongly believe that you should seek out some help on the destructive relationships that you have had and continue to have in your life so that you can become more accepting of others and with that become a better parent.”
This man’s children had spent 4 months being seen by a child psychologist and as a result of the disclosures the children made in that time the psychologist expressed grave concerns about the father’s parenting, saying that what he was doing to his children constituted child abuse. He had also abused his ex partner for a number of years and was still being abusive to her after they broke up.
Analysis
“From memory I recall that you didn’t have a close relationship with your father as a child please consider this as a starting point to determine why you’re so angry towards me.”
Freudian psycho-babble, trying to intimate that the woman’s absent father is the reason why she is angry towards her ex and not because her ex is abusive towards her and her children. Abnegating all responsibility for his own actions causing an emotive response (anger) from his victim, victim blaming.
“This will only result in our children getting hurt so badly by the things going on around them.”
Blaming the mother for the breakdown in relationships even though he was the abusive party, casting aspersions and apportioning blame — “children getting hurt” ie. “You’re a bad, selfish mother with Daddy issues”.
“I strongly believe that you should seek out some help on the destructive relationships that you have had and continue to have in your life so that you can become more accepting of others and with that become a better parent.”
Assumes knowledge of the relationships that the woman has and incorrectly assumes that her current relationships are destructive. Victim blames her for being a victim of abuse and a victim of negation from her family and friends (and him), gaslighting her by saying that she should be “more accepting of others” when the only people she has fallen out with have been those who abused her or negated her experience, it is also victim blaming to suggest that if only she had been more accepting these people wouldn’t have treated her so badly, false accusation/insinuation of bad mother/mother blaming.
