I sought psychotherapy back then because of the abusive relationship I had been trained to be in with my mother; I wanted to learn how to get out of it. I saw this statement today, and I am meditating on it: “Trauma is not the thing that HAPPENED to you, trauma is your continued emotional RESPONSE to the thing that happened to you.”
I am so used to hiding the details of, and also hiding from while at the same time living in certain traumas, that they’re like furniture I keep having to step around, or a weight I drag, or a foreign object lodged in me. I think I need to perform surgery to get them out. Some kind of bodily ritual.
Working at that school. Being caught in the distorted image of myself they reflected at me. In the family, being told I was not who I thought I was. Becoming convinced I was impaired in ways I could not see, and that I had to stay in those relationships and in the relationship with self they suggested.
I have to look at these things and tell a different story. I have to stop giving these attackers power. I have to get them out of my body. I envision myself like a tract of land with three wounds in it that have tipis set up around them to protect them. This architecture then defines the landscape.
I don’t want to be defined by those wounds, they’re a distortion. I don’t want to define the period in which I didn’t write as a period of block. Something is happening now, there are things happening at work that I am fighting back at but refusing to let take up my time.
This is changing me a great deal, I see it. Refusing an abusive relationship and a distorted reflection, that was what I wanted to do originally. (I keep thinking my life is a story of failure because of those wounds but that is not an interesting, or particularly useful way to look at it.)
I need to stop protecting those wounds and defining myself through them. And these words don’t really get my meditation across, neither the images nor the deep, ritualistic air. But when I actually do the ritual I think I will have to say what happened and what it meant to me, which are two different things.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
A friend recently gave me a useful re-framing word for these family stories: mythologies. Not histories. I’ve found this shift very helpful indeed, and I pass it on in hopes it may also serve you.
Yes, definitely.
My thought currently is: psychotherapy, that part of Reeducation, was about (is about) getting the victim to internalize oppression, getting them to think it is their fault, getting them to naturalize harassment and abuse, “adjust” by saying it is their fault, and so on.