Sexual violence survivors worry a lot. We transfer the worry others should have felt about what we were experiencing into worry about our current loved ones, long after our own bad experience is over. We think this is helpful to others and to ourselves, but it can be unhealthy if we use worry wrong.
Like when we hear sirens late at night, for instance. We think of loved ones who may be in trouble. We go over the mental list of where our loved ones are and if they are safe. Once we assure ourselves the sirens aren’t for someone we know, we send out good thoughts and healing to the strangers who are actually in trouble.
And then do we sleep? Or do we stay awake worrying about all the bad things that might happen, get caught in loops of thought about danger and pain?
Sirens represent pain. Perhaps we wish that when we were in trouble, someone would have called for rescue. We might think that if law enforcement and ambulances and search and rescue that come to the scene of our crime, what happened to us would have been different somehow.
Worry harms us, and it harms our loved ones. Falling into worry when we hear about pain may seem like we are simply protecting. We wanted to be protected, and we are projecting that unmet need because nobody protected us.
Question for the day: What do you do when you hear sirens?