My thoughts are that in a way, this is what the boards are all for - because people outside can not, even in imagination, fathom what such a thing would be like, except on a purely hypothetical and short-term level. In the same way as people remove themselves from feeling the tragedy of a documentary film about abuse or any other foul occurrence for any period of time after watching it, thus, even our loved ones can only go so far with us. They feel terribly about it while it is "playing", shocked and traumatized even, but since it is too much reality and they feel they can not do anything about it anyway, soon afterwards it will be relegated to something that pops up in their minds once in a while but that becomes something they'd rather not think about too much. People don't typically watch the heavy, truly disturbing flicks more than once or twice, and because - as Starry mentioned - they really feel unsettled that it happens at all.
My partner is the best friend I've ever had, and he too was truly outraged upon hearing about the program (took me just over a year to tell him at all, as I had gotten so sick of dealing with it - and so used to being private about what I would go through)... but I keep it as just one of the things he needed to know that is now in the past. I think part of the response is that when people hear they are just too shocked and hurt for you to do much more than listen. After time, they start to process it, and then they start to think 'what would I have done', 'why didn't he/she just do this...', 'how could he/she have let that happen...' etc etc... which they can never tell because they WEREN'T there, and COULD NOT know how they would have responded or what we should have done differently, or how we could have allowed what happened. I don't know if this makes sense, but since they meet us as people in the 'real world', who would now NEVER let such things happen to us again, they can not relate to us as scared, fucked up kids under siege, who responded simply to survive in that environment. We were different people then, people our loved ones can't see us being, so they distance from "that other person" because it is too alien to join to the one they are with now.
It is funny - ironic, not haha - that they can deal with and incorporate so many other 'past' stories (including the "horrible druggie past" we were told to shun) but can not cope with thinking about how we lived, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year in those places.
