Stockholm syndrome

Note: These Comments Might Trigger You

You’ve been held in a windowless room for a long time. So long, you can’t remember how long it’s been. You have shackles on your ankles. Sometimes you can see beyond your sleeping pad, sometimes not so much. You’re instructed to perform tasks assigned to you according to the will of your captor. Most days you work so long you feel as if you’ll drop. Sometimes you have enough food to eat, other times not. It’s cold and damp in this holding cell where you’ve lived most of your life. You’ve been sick here, but you have no access to a doctor. You’ve been beaten regularly, physically and verbally, for infractions perceived by your captor. You still have the bruises. You’ve not been outside this place for so long you’ve stopped scraping the number of days you’ve been held captive onto the walls.

But, sometimes, you can faintly hear a voice whispering to you from the outside. It’s a voice that calls to you in quiet moments when the usual crushing noise more easily heard doesn’t drown it out. It’s hard to understand the words the voice is speaking. They sound so foreign to you. The voice suggests there is something else outside this cell. When you ask your captor about it, the reply is always the same…laughter, mocking, anger. So you become afraid to listen.

Then one day your captor gets careless. Or maybe you’re listening closer. The incessant noise seems less. Your captor forgot to lock the shackles on your ankles and bolt the door. You hear the voice outside. It offers you something else. It sounds too good to be true. You’ve heard your captor say as much. You’d been told that the voice offers empty promises that will never become reality. But you ask yourself how much longer you can go on here? So, you stand up at your sleeping pad. Your legs are shaking. The hair is standing up on the back of your neck and carefully, timidly, you walk toward the unbolted door. You reach out. Your hand is shaking as you place it on the knob. You see the red marks from old bruises on your wrists. Something inside you knows you no longer can tolerate this cell. Only, it’s all you’ve ever known, or it’s all you remember.

It’s your moment of truth. You might not get this chance again in your lifetime. Do you turn the knob? Do you step across the threshold and move toward the voice? Or do you shrink back, fearfully choosing the familiar, the devil you know? Do you choose the somewhat reliable crumbs laced with indifference and resentment your abuser has been dishing out for years? Can this really be all there is? Or can you find it in yourself to take a leap of faith? Are you going to continue a life of institutionalized abuse and exploitation or are you going to walk across the threshold into a different life?

Continue reading “Are Your Shackles Showing? Hyperbole, Metaphor or Shades of Reality? by Karen Tate”