[Progress] Graphic Designer Going Freelance & Fastlane

[Bekit]

Ah, sorry to hear that @Bekit . What do you think will help you fully process or repair the damage done?

I've just reread this thread and it gave me goosebumps. I've messaged Nico outside the forum to see how he's doing and to yell him his thread was bumped. I don't know what Nico is up to nowadays.

Time has helped. For the longest time, I could barely even look back on that experience and process "WHAT EVEN HAPPENED?" I don't think there's much of a substitute for the passage of time. It's like healing from a broken bone. It just takes time.

Resetting my thinking has helped. I had to take a long, hard look at where I went wrong and how I had been "taken in" by manipulative tactics. I found two main categories here:

1. Areas where I was primed to fall for this because of PRIOR thinking patterns
- For example, I had a disproportionate trust in authority figures. "The leader should be deferred to." "The leader should be given the benefit of the doubt." "It's disrespectful to question the leader." This led me to dismiss red flags and trust a leader who turned out to be nothing but a toxic, evil person.

2. Areas where I went wrong because I drew bad conclusions in the AFTERMATH of the damaging situation.
- Once my eyes were opened and I quit, I drew a bunch of conclusions in my pain that tangled me up for a while. For example, "I can't trust anybody." No, just because THIS was a bad person doesn't mean NOBODY is to be trusted. Figuring out who to trust comes down to gaining skill in reading people, identifying red flags, doing better due diligence, and having the courage to ask hard questions. It takes a lot of work to parse these kinds of things out.

Talking about it has helped. For the longest time, I had a really hard time telling the story of what happened to me. But once I started to tell the story, I found myself far more able to process the experience, grieve over it, and come to closure. Interestingly, reading someone else's detailed story of their traumatic experience in a 100-part webcomic was incredibly instrumental in me being able to process my own experience. (Trigger warning for just about every intense thing on the planet if you visit that link, FYI.) The reason this helped me so much was that I could see SO many similarities between my own experience and this person's experience. Even though my actual circumstances were completely different, it was like the abusers were operating by the same playbook. And it felt like I wasn't alone, and I wasn't crazy for "falling for it" when I saw that other people had gone through the same kind of thing. (As a note - my experience was nowhere on the same scale of intensity as this story. Nevertheless, I could still see a lot of lessons and similarities that helped me.)

Where I said that "Even to this day I am still processing through some of the damage I suffered in that season," it's things like...

• I'm still gunshy about certain situations and certain kinds of people. This might make me hesitate or be more fearful than I used to be.
• I have repeatedly found myself in similar situations with similar people, almost as if I attract these situations like a magnet. Fortunately, though, I have become MUCH quicker at sniffing it out, and if I see the signs and the red flags, I'm out without hesitation.
• I keep finding areas where I have to parse out my thinking (similar to the example above of figuring out who to trust). I've run into countless unhelpful thought patterns that were holding me back, which could all be traced to conclusions I drew in the aftermath of that experience, which I then had to process through and figure out what was actually true.
• I have struggled a lot with feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness after being wounded in that experience, which was something I never experienced before and have had to learn how to deal with.

@Nicoknowsbest I wouldn't be surprised if the last 5 years for you have been a similar journey of challenges and ups and downs. Hope you are faring well these days!

 

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