Issaquah Highlands Webcam: An Issaquah Highlands’ publication for community, by community

thanks a lot professor, this helped me so much! subscribed!

Surgeons have NEVER given me any option other than surgery or replacement. I’m glad to see that younger docs like this gentleman are coming around.

I have a similar story of abuse from a sister 3 years older from the time I was about 4 (?) to about 9-10. Again, similarly, I got this weird out-of-context apology, a random phone call when I was 18 saying I don’t know if you remember that “we used to play some inappropriate childish games” [gross understatement] and stating that her therapist said she should “take responsibility” and apologize. Although I fully remembered everything, like you, I didn’t really comprehend what I was doing when I quickly and easily brushed it off offering unequivocal forgiveness. It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the scope and impact of what had happened to me. Like you said, I much later began to understand the secondary aspects of the abuse, which may be even more hideous than the primary abuse. These things for me included: 1) established family myth/commonly accepted understanding of myself as an unreliable narrator—it was accepted “fact” in our family that any question of any event in our family history, no matter how trivial, would be misremembered or remembered wrongly by myself, and that my recollection of any family history of any nature would not be reliable—this was a carefully constructed, crafted, and curated myth perpetrated by my sister so that I would never feel I would be believed and, in fact, I would never be believed. 2) perpetrated myth of myself as a devious little golden girl who may have the parents snowed as to her perfect behavior but is really constantly sneaking around looking for ways to set the sister up to be framed for misdeeds (for which I was “really” at fault and my sister was the “victim” of such persecution). This taught me that I was the one responsible for my sister’s wrong behavior. I endured rehearsal after rehearsal of incident after incident explaining why I was at fault for her misbehavior. 3) commonly accepted family lore undermining my strengths or gifts. We’ll-accepted and commonly repeated phrases like: she doesn’t get straight As because she’s smart, she’s really no more intelligent than average or less. She just gets straight As because she’s a people pleaser and is unhealthily under compulsion to please her teachers (and bonus she has fooled her teachers into believing her golden girl act) . . . and she may seem smart but she’s really not—she’s only book smart, not street smart, not actually intelligent . . . and on and on. Obviously this secondary abuse has had much more far-reaching impacts than even the primary (direct/sexual) abuse. The mental and emotional manipulation and gaslighting and carefully crafted family myths so that I had no point of reference that didn’t also buy this narrative has had significant impacts that I am still unraveling today at age 49.

As someone of Japanese descent, with ancestors serving in many military factions, stories like this about americans having compassion despite knowing how brutal the Imperials were truly warms my heart. I wonder how things would've turned out if the Imperial military wasn't so brainwashed and arrogant from propaganda and their previous military successes.. more occurrences like this video might have been more frequent and many lives would've been spared on both sides