This is a comment by Archy on the post “Why Women Aren’t Crazy“.

Yep, quite true. I’ve had people act “crazy” to me before, I tried hard to understand their behaviour but it was very difficult. Major emotional mood swings, taking things I’ve said way wrong and using their pain and experience from other people to colour the way I am to them, I guess it is triggering. One experience was a female friend who was a victim of abuse, we had a disagreement that every other friend I have wouldn’t have thought much of, even friends who’ve been abused, but she was triggered and I guess I reminded her of him. She would pay attention to only some of what I said, ignore the rest, and automatically I’d be thought of as the abuser.

It was heartbreaking to see and that friendship died, I couldn’t handle her extremely personal outbursts of anger such as saying hello when she wasn’t in the mood to talk yet was in the mood to talk 5 minutes before, it was like this switch would flick over and turn her from nice into a total bitch, to me the behaviour was pretty fucking crazy but on thinking about it the only thing I can guess as to why it happens is her mental health had suffered tremendously under the abuser’s reign, made her so volatile and sensitive that it was near impossible for me to have a normal conversation with her.

It reminded me of myself years ago after going through a lot of bullying, I took everything to heart and very seriously, any criticism was like a stab in the heart and I’d lash out. To others that’d look crazy, and I don’t blame them, it’s not a normal behaviour (by normal I mean the average behaviour of most humans) but it probably is normal behaviour for those who have been through abuse. It can take a lot to understand why people act the way they do.

Photo credit: Flickr / M. Pratter