Do you feel like a concentration camp survivor?

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I do. I feel like I have PTSD sometimes. Just from living a normal but awful life.


I can SO identify with Auschwitz inmates. I read a lot about them. I feel psychologically, verbally, emotionally, even physically abused. I feel psychologically raped, like they felt. I sometimes have minor mental flashbacks of unpleasant situations. A lot of the time I don't even remember the events, jsut that they were unpleasant. But I don't feel safe sometimes; sometimes I feel like I might die, like I have to be careful, like I have to be on the alert, like I have to pay attention and not get complacent, like I have to fear getting too confident and relaxed, like I have to watch what I say or I might get murdered. It's very minor, but a part of me does feel that way. I try to stimulate myself as much as possible... going on shopping sprees, etc. because this is hat a person who is still alive SHOULD do!


I think sensory deprivation/depression has something (or more than just something) to do with this.


Do any of you relate?

Sorry, but no. I don't know how you can possibly compare having AS to having been in a concentration camp.

I mean being in places where people take your dignity and right to be in control of your own life away by forcing you to do things, getting mad or insulting when you don't, having an effect on your appearace (telling you what to wear, etc.) and your actions and what thoughts you project-- not being allowed to tell or project what you're really thinking and feeling or people will get mad, say it's agaisnt the rules and punish you (like, even if you don't want to say something you have to to please people so they won't get mad or whatever).

I can see what you are getting at but think the analogy is a bit extreme - my dad had first hand experience being born in Europe in 1922.

Is it that you are living with an oppressive abusive family and are afraid? or is it just the genearl struggle to try fit in with the rest of world by trying to guess what you are supposed to do and trying to conform to be liked?

If the first then may be get help from social services, if the second then think whether it would be any worse to cultivate an attitude of who cares what people think and just take the risk to do/say/be what you want.

Fear is debilitating, may be see this thread.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... highlight=

I don't really identify with the shoah at all. I've had two people get me signed books by survivors, one was Night by Elie Wiesel and the other was by a woman I'd never heard of. Both times I was mildly irritated. I think it's just too extreme for me to take in and relate to. I wrote a poem about watching a documentary about it on television when I was a teenager. I had to leave the room. Some people seem to assume that because I'm interested in Judaism I must have an interest in the Holocaust, but I don't even really see the issues of theodicy that it raises as anything unique. The same issues are raised anytime there's a major disaster. It feels a bit ethnocentric to focus so much on that one event as a challenge to convential abrahamic views about G!d. There are so many other reasons to challenge that conceptualization. I don't like the way many people ignore all of the non-Jews who were killed, like gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally challenged and political dissidents.

That was a terrible analogy. People walked around naked, were beaten, starved to death and killed in Concentration camps.

Sure, it sucks being a pariah and an oddity and there is that sense of social control with psychiatry and society. But we're not starving in Africa watching our parents die of aids in a straw hut forced to believe in God because there is nothing better for us.

There's nothing to complain about here (there is) but we have it so good. You sound like a white north american girl teenager who didn't get what she wanted for her sweet 16.

I don't think we were focusing on the Jewish victims here but talking about the experience of any people who went through that. One of the best books I have read was by a Dutch lady who got sent to a camp for helping hide others.

I don't feel like a holocaust survivor but feel I have/had PTSD from traumatic events in my life, these may not have happened to me if I wasn't AS. I feel more like I am forever trapped in a prison inside my head, I can see out through the glass eyes and can hear my voice speaking words to people but I want to scream 'help me! let me out!' but can't.

On the subject of the holocaust I do feel we need to watch the eugenics again as medical advances make it possible to test for hereditary 'problems' that can be eliminated (aborted).

I read a poem/prose once that went something like,

when they came for the jews no-one spoke out,
when they came for the infirm no one spoke out
when they came for the gypsies no one spoke out
when they came for the catholics no one spoke out
when they came for me - there was no one left to speak out

alex,

I realize that. Just ended up on a tangent. It's something that I see happening frequently when it's brought up around me.

The poem you quoted is I believe by a Catholic priest. It's pretty famous.

I've been there and I don't think that the analogy is extreme at all, except in the sense that when people who practice this kind of mistreatment get the chance, they go to extremes. That is why there are laws to punish prison guards who abuse inmates. They are needed now and always have been. Even worse, we also need laws against the abuse of vulnerable people in mental institutions and nursing homes. A lot of people like to kick others while they are down just because they can.

There is a lack of perspective here. No matter how bad things might seem, you can't compare. It's offensive to the victims of those camps, who didn't have a say in the matter, first of all. They were hunted down and systematically destroyed. You have a choice. You have freedom of speech. You can fight back.

Hm, spaceplayer. Yeah, the analogy is extreme, and I can see why people could be offended. But the bit about "hunted down and systematically destroyed" kind of reminded me of my own school years... (not in a literal sense, of course) I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences.

Last edited by Stitch on 13 Aug 2007, 1:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That last isn't called for. Aradford, you're treating Ana as if her feelings are somehow not real or are chosen by her.

Spaceplayer says that we can't compare and I say that we must. Emotional deprivation is worse than physical deprivation because emotional deprivation can be taken to the same extremes without so many marks that show. I don't weigh in very often against dialectical materialism but here it is. If you can't see it it isn't there according to some people. It's quite possible to abuse people to madness and death while they never miss a meal. Yet people who are close to starvation can be in good spirits.

It's really easy to make others feel helpless and trapped. That's all it takes. It's a lot like someone can make it so that another may be able to eat the food, and it's good food, but unable to digest it properly and then unable to assimilate it correctly into the body. It is comparable when they can force a person away from her own life and keep her there by emotionally binding her.

People who say that a person can just choose to be different have obviously never been through it. If a person is injured badly enough they just say that he's got toys in the attic instead of recognizing that the person has been injured and needs to heal. That's a convenient way to escape the obligation to at least recognize the humanity of the other person and the validity of her feelings.

Hmmmm....let's see.


In school:

.You don't have a say
.Hunted down....you know where this comes into it.
.No choices in school
.No freedom of speech
.If you fight back, you get in trouble.


Soooo....

"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

Denmark was only a prison because Hamlet chose to believe it was a prison, and he admit that to himeslf. That is true of all things as well: people, things, or events do not distrub us but rather our beliefs about these things are what disturb us. So yes, her feelings are chosen by her.

Victimhood ends when one accepts the power of choice that each of us has.

I was just asking whether anyone felt that way; that's all.

I do.