Attention Must Be Paid

Posted on May 1, 2007 in PTSD

Those who raised us — we who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder — trained us to take in everything. We learned to listen for the whine of the door hinge, the squeak of the floorboard, a change in the intonation of the voice. Adept we became in detecting subtle changes in emotion. As adults we became hypervigilant of what was going on around us.

Worst of the gifts was the belief we sometimes carry to the effect that we must listen to every person who wants our attention. Our parents and other disturbed family members demanded — even as they wanted our silence — us to pay perfect attention to what they said.

Attention must be paid.

In adulthood and in the lives of friends (here and here), I see people giving their whole being to the wants of predators. These people stalk, these people demand that we give them our full concentration even when to do so is unreasonable and destructive. Just like we were raised to do.

Elsewhere, I wrote to a friend:

You don’t need to entertain the jerks. You can block them from your site if they are too much for you. You don’t have to become entangled. And you can drop me a line any time you find yourself hogtied by such scoundrels.

It’s a legacy that abusive parents teach us: attention must be paid no matter how abusive the insistence may be. We’re no longer kids, marj, so we don’t have to put up with that kind of crap. The principle is wrong. Beware the predators who operate on that principle.

We don’t have to listen if it tears us apart.

[tags]mental illness,ptsd,anxiety,memory,attachment disorder[/tags]