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Flowers for the Abused

Are you familiar with the book "Flowers For Algernon"; where Algernon is the mouse who recieved an experimental treatment before an intellectually disabled man did? For those who aren't, the book is written from the POV of the ID man, and chronicles his intellectual advancement as a result of the treatment, his discovery that the treatment would fail and lead to death (Algernon dies), his subsequent intellectual decline and fears of returning to his previous life, and the end of the book is written like the beginning. it is a problematic book for many reasons, and some people find it triggering.

The reason I brought it up, if you're curious, is that I'm like the main character in that I didn't recognize, for a very, very long time, that the way people treated me as a child and young adult was "bad", abusive. It was a theory of mine that perhaps this was effecting my ability to communicate with the other person, as typically, people reflect the behavior they experience; I'm one of the few people I know of who are obsessed with self-reflection and behavioral improvement based on science and research rather than experience, at least on the scale I have implemented. In other words, the behaviors I choose are *exclusively* created from self-help and psychology books, not copied from TV shows or personal interactions. However, if there are sections of my personality that I've failed to fix, I won't know until situations where people are hurt occur.

(That book also shaped one of my deepest fears - that I will become again unable to determine when people are being cruel to me and return to a world where I constantly get taken advantage of and hurt... I don't know if it's something that can be fully empathized with unless you've read the book, unless you identify so fully with the main character, unless you spent hours crying over Algernon like I did... without that experience, my thoughts may come across as ableist. But ...is a fear of being hurt because of your disability truly ableism?)

The most common method for people to determine whether their behavior is abusive is to determine how they would feel being treated that way. But what if I'm okay with being treated in a way that other people find abusive?

One of the considerations I have to deal with is a serious lack of the ability to recognize my own emotions. I believe this to be a trauma response, as I do *have* emotions, but I simply "turn them off" when they become overwhelming, I believe this to be a kind of dissociative state. Possibly a "fawning" fear response. This is how I mask, and how I deal with pain. Instead, I feel a slight giddiness, possibly it's anxiousness, and am prone to laughing and smiling. Unfortunately, sometimes I cannot turn them back on. At this point, I literally do not emotionally react to any treatment, and I am "ok" with anything. So that method does not work for me. I cannot recognize if I am being abused, so I do not know if I am reflecting abusive behavior.

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