Ineffable Experience

Since April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, this seemed an important topic to blog about. Recently, I've been listening to iTunes U Berkley Cognitive Psychology lecture while doing the exercise bike, which spawned this morning's post.

It's interesting how so many psychological concepts are compared to color blindness. 

Previously it had been in comparison to psychopaths with emotions and their limited spectrum. 

“A high-scoring psychopath views the world in a very different way,” says Hare. “It’s like colour-blind people trying to understand the colour red, but in this case ‘red’ is other people’s emotions.”

This morning it was comparing it to experience, and explaining that you can know all there is to know about something but the intellectual content cannot equate to the ineffable experience. Such as a color blind person might have all the education and quantitative data applying to color theory in art, and the physical workings of the eye, as well as an understanding of light and refraction that produces color, but still not be able to comprehend the actual experience of seeing red and the emotional impact that experience causes.

It all boils down to the common saying "You had to be there". There are in essence some things that cannot be explained. They can only be experienced. It is said that wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making good choices. Making good choices comes from making bad choices.  

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” 

― Rita Mae Brown

In truth, I only got a B in Psychology in college, and that was after the second time I took it, dropping the class on the first go round.  However even with that initial grasp and a mother who was a sociology major, most of the psychological concepts about abnormal psychology did not click until I had experienced being in its presence. The random theories and their creators were trivial to the mostly unavailable content of coping with the constant onslaught of abuse. It is in many ways a very small and very personal war, learning to defend and protect yourself in a very hostile environment.  No text could prepare a person for the experience. It is so different from normal healthy human interaction, and taken in small doses may seem to be normal until the bigger picture comes into view.  But when attempting to have healthy relationships after having been in unhealthy ones for so long, you find the healthy ones to be what's foreign and feels unnatural. You find yourself on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Throughout my life, I've had a burning desire to understand "why".  And after marrying a psychopath and seeming to have a certain "type", I had to know "why". Why was I making these choices? Why was I allowing myself to be abused? And why do they do what they do?  If knowledge is power, then it was the mechanism with which I was able to regain that sense of power that had been taken from me. I took the immense information of experience that was uniquely mine, as all experiences are, and I did something with it, by trying to understand it and learn to defend and avoid it as much as possible.

However, afterward, I found myself in a strange position, because having experienced emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in several forms, my understanding deepened, but the effort to explain the experience and its consequences certainly felt ineffable.  While I could tell others the events and facts, any depth of understanding was limited to those who had been through similar experiences.  Those who had not, simply could not understand, and often that was the core of most victim blame that I received. All they could do was compare it with their own library of experiences, and to them, sex was a good thing that people wanted, and they could not equate that to the vastly different experience of being raped.  Or though they may have been in spats with significant others, they had not experienced the devastating effects of constant emotional abuse.  At the end of the day, they were abuse-blind. They had not experienced it themselves and therefore could not imagine what that would be like or its effects, and even imagining something was not the same as experiencing it for yourself.

At the end of the day, even two abused people have vastly different experiences. A person's relationship to the abuser is a mixed bag, each with its own fallout. One of the horrible things that the competitive world tries to do is label one as being worse than another.  Such as, you were molested, at least you weren't raped.  But it is the worst thing that person has experienced and still has much the same effects, with the addition of the experience being minimized and invalidated, creating new and different problems. It is especially damaging for those inexperienced in abuse to label such things on someone who has experienced it. They can not possibly know. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and when actions are extreme, their reactions are as well. This is why there exists Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When traumatized, there is only so much the mind can handle, and often it will do all it can to keep from experiencing the same trauma again.  Which can result in avoidance of reminders, which make one relive that ineffable experience. The abused may also possibly re-enter similar situations to attempt to exercise more control over something that was completely beyond their control. Ultimately continued abuse is a pattern of what is familiar.

If you are with someone who has PTSD, just remember that they have a vast library of experience information that you do not that might fuel what some consider an over-reaction, but it is simply a reaction to something that was extreme, making their response extreme. Often they need to be reminded that you are not that person and that they are safe now. Although some of us would love to explain it to you if we could, the world is colored differently to someone with PTSD. The best thing you can do, is just be aware, and trust that sometimes, we might see something that you don't.