The other day I watched Netflix's "Trust Me: The False Prophet"
As much as I have a massive distaste for its obvious use of AI to keep vulnerable children anonymous(the use of AI not the fact they are keeping the kids anon obviously lol)... I couldnt help but feel a kind of familiarity with the host, Dr. Christine Marie... Someone who was very obviously opposed to the grooming happening within FLDS communities, but aware enough that meeting them with hostility or too much doubt was extremely unhelpful.
Part ways through the documentary I acknowledged a feeling that I have known and spent the entirity of my life keeping at bay - the knowledge that I was groomed. I knew I had been/was being groomed when it was happening, as an older child. I remember being present while my mother was proselytizing to someone who said they had a bad childhood - the thought that was running through my mind, I am currently having a bad childhood." I knew it to be true and have known it to be true my entire life, and yet even with the actual legitimate abuse I experienced as a youth - STILL - I struggled and continue to struggle to expose it fully. Self preservation? The inability to rationalise the fact that people I care for, people who care for me have caused me irrepable harm and the fact that I do not think that they would understand that my saying that is not an attack on them but on the systems they let govern them?
Today I spoke to my MHOT about it and she asked me how the ~realisation~ made me feel. I told her how it felt sort of freeing initially, like I already knew "grooming" was the appropriate word, but how I had always kept searching for more because grroming felt so broad and indefinable, but how in that moment I realised it actually encompassed everything I felt perfectly. But then how now, later, it felt too broad again. I spoke about how I feel like "well, it kinda seems like... everyone... is kinda groomed?? Like thats how we learn and stuff..." she made the point of noting a distiction between "grooming and socialiation" (and then admitted that it can be thought of as a spectrum; and socialisation becomes grooming when the ideaology is too far from what is considered normal") I suppose that helped. But I am still back in the.. I suppose its what I'd call the avoid-because-its-too-big/searching-for-answers phase, where I just Know that my childhood was not normal and I am extremely messed up from it and will seek out all the extremely traumatic docos because the trauma feels familiar I suppose. The autistic ~yearning for knowledge~ maybe one of these people will explain trauma in a way that I find Useful.
I dont know how to talk about this stuff, and I feel like... It has taken so much from me. But I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that me talking about it or dwelling on it is because I want pity or that I am complaining about my lot in life or whatever. I guess to a small extent there is probably a little truth there. But I just want to know myself, I just want to... be able to understand it better so that I can understand better how to live in a way that allows me to feel able to create cool things and have fun with my friends and just live my life. I do feel like a lot of things that have happened across my life hold me back from doing things I would like to do. And yeah, I am more than a little mad about it. I'm mad that I never felt safe enough of loved enough to be whoever I felt like I was, and that is something I am realising that I will never fully heal from. Its kinda freeing knowing that, that the goal isnt to be unbroken.