Vlog CCCVII

Religion has had quite a different impact for me. As I've said, I was sinking and not swimming as a new migrant and I really needed others' help to orient me and explain how to live in a new society, but my requests kept being encoded not as actual meaningful requests but as so much "emotion". I found this really perplexing. People brought up with a religious ideology are trained to view aspects of experience or content they cannot understand as irrational. I found that people also had some strange notions about hidden essences behind reality that I had never really come across before. MY attempts to get people to take my predicament seriously were viewed as "feminine" and "manipulation" -- kind of as if I were manipulating everyone from a point of powerlessness and from below. (This cultural view seems to come from the notion that "Eve" was devious as well as open to deception.)
Eventually I just couldn't speak anymore. I developed this tight band of psychosomatic stress around my neck, and I felt like my voice was choking every time it came out.
Without any help or orientation I muddled through, but things kept going wrong. I just didn't know enough to master my environment. And once again, people kept blaming me as if I were doing it on purpose -- trying to manipulate them from below, from my point of ignorance.
This whole situation was complicated -- again along gender lines -- because my father resented the higher level of value nominally attributed to women in the new cultural setting. He saw any achievement I made as a mark against his name, whereas others saw my lack of knowledge as contrived and inauthentic.
I think I had CPTSD on a mild level for a long time, but mostly I just succumbed to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
After a whle I did find it terrifying that whatever I said was disbelieved or viewed as a form of manipulation. I'm still traumatized by that -- the anticipation that I will say something to an authority figure and it will be viewed as the opposite, for this is what has generally occurred.
If we listen to the words someone is saying and we make the assumption that they are referring to something in reality, we can often help others in their time of need, but ongoing neglect and denial makes things much, much worse over time.