When Will Lloyd Edwin Richmond’s Victims Be Heard?

Incident of reference:

It is extremely difficult from a victim’s perspective to process all the emotions that are involved with finally having your experiences validated. At the same time, it is difficult to convey the cognitive dissonance that can happen from a victim’s perspective.

1. When a victim has a compounded trauma in the #workforce with physical and emotional violations, our #colleagues and #leadership teams can lack the backstory references that make our sense of #safety at #work more challenging.
2. When #workers are relocated from their support systems, if there is compounded trauma, a toxic culture may seem too daunting a task to move towards addressing it effectively. To victims that have been through severe trauma, it can add to our sense of #MoralInjury.
3. In large, it has been experienced that most people do not know how to respond to a victim. Most especially so when rape and murder are involved in the trauma. The most common reaction is that people will ask, “Are you okay?” This question is a Boolean question that does not get to the important aspect of how we feel. A better question is, “How are you feeling?”

For those of us that have been through rigorous counseling to face the challenge of accepting what happened to us while navigating various paths that can help us move forward, we can work towards healthier mental health living. This is not easy. It takes a lot of deep digging to pull those skeletons out of our closet.

Facing shame can be damned arduous work. The common social narratives can compound the trauma despite the good intentions of many. Others react from a place of self-centeredness that can result in reflexive anger from the victim.

I’ve had to catch myself several times since I found out that #LloydEdwinRichmond finally lost control of his self-control. Only his victims have seen the enraged manipulator that feels entitled to violate his victims. His arrogance finally got the better of him. Unfortunately, someone else lost their life.

My feelings have ranged between anger, resentment, frustration, glee, depression, and now I’m feeling a sense of stillness. The stillness with my emotions is not permanent. I’m quite sure that I will experience more fluctuations as this progresses.

There are moments of gratefulness that I’ve been doing a lot of deep dives into self-reflection to keep moving forward with my growth. If I had not embraced the opportunity to do that, I’m not sure how I would be reacting right now.

I feel like, before, the sense of anger and resentment would have been amplified. My reactions towards people’s attempts to reach out may have been less understanding. There was one person that I had to explain that the direction of our conversation felt very dismissive. That person was making my experience all about what they wanted and that I did not tell them anything about myself.

There was a good reason for that lack of disclosure. Except, I share a lot of personal information and sentiments on this platform. It doesn’t take a person much to find out who I am, what I have been doing with my life, and how I feel about various subjects. I do not have the patience, at this moment, to go into the warm fuzzies of the good that is happening in my life.

While there are so many good things that are happening, I have posted about that too. It is dismissive of my current experience to demand I only talk about the good. It’s not about you. This is a huge life experience that validates the point I was trying to make to authorities when my mother passed away in April of 2004.

I removed and blocked that person because there were continual accusations that I have not shared more about myself during a moment when I’m wrestling with a murder case that my mother’s husband and killer are involved in.

The victims, all of us, will be going through a rollercoaster ride of emotions and we will need the opportunity to feel seen, heard, and understood. We all have a right to have our voices heard, to have our experiences validated and we should not have to feel like the burden of proof, in all aspects of our violent abuse, is on our shoulders.

The victim’s family and friends do not need to feel like they are alone. Nor should his victims that have been living in fear need to feel like they are alone. Nor should we feel like what we are experiencing and feeling needs proof. We do not need people telling us how to feel and how we should perceive this.

Unless you have been in the trenches of exactly what we have been through, we don’t care what you think about how we should interpret our experience. You have not been through it. Our feelings are our feelings.

You can ask us how we are feeling, and you can ask if there’s anything you can do to help us. Just don’t tell us how we should navigate through this experience. It’s already overwhelming for us.