When you say you’re the victim of abuse you are supposed to, by the common understanding, be able to bring up very specific episodes of that abuse in order to “prove its really abuse”.
But a lot of abuse just doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes they just wore you down constantly. Sometimes you couldn’t put your finger on it, but felt all of effects none-the-less. Sometimes its so plain awful that you’ve repressed it. Sometimes it was so damn insidious that you normalized it until one day years later you mention it and someone gives you a look of shock and you realize it wasn’t normal.
All of you. Any of you.
You are all just as valid as someone who wrote a whole damn memoir on the thing.
The stories coming out of this post are absolutely heartbreaking.
thank you for this post
Tag: abuse
if you see someone active on social media or something, and you message them, and they don’t reply, they don’t have to. just because they are awake and alive does not mean they have to engage with you whenever you want them to. you are not entitled to someone else’s time.
in the past, an abuser would see me post online and then hound me on aim until i answered. i felt like i had to hide. they also lived in my building and would pound on my door if they saw me online and i wasn’t responding to them. i had to completely ditch a screenname, lie about having skype, and turn off my phone to hide. if i saw they were online i couldn’t post on facebook or interact with anyone without them demanding to interact with me. the only legitimate excuse not to talk to them was being asleep. in their eyes, if i were really their friend, i would always want to engage no matter what, even if i had a migraine or work to do or wasn’t feeling very social. it didn’t matter.
please do not do this. if someone doesn’t write you back, don’t guilt them about where they are or what they’re doing. if you see someone posting on tumblr or facebook and they aren’t signed into aim or google or skype or whatever, that’s their business. if they are signed on but don’t write you back, it’s okay. sometimes people can’t talk to everyone all the time every time. some people can only talk to one person at a time without getting overloaded. some people are signed on in case someone needs to contact them with something important and not to be social. they’re not always hiding from you, and you shouldn’t make them feel like they HAVE to hide from you.
this is probably jumbled and i’m probably missing a lot here, but pressuring people to always be available to you every hour of the day and always answer the phone or text or chat or pm or whatever…if you require that of someone, you might need to take a step back.
Reminder: There are also actual reasons that some of us may have serious trouble responding to messages at all. And it’s unlikely to be about you unless you are acting like that.
I really don’t want to come across as some kind of antisocial asshole, but notifications popping up still freak me out every time. It goes way beyond “I don’t like IMs”. Seeing that it’s from someone I would want to talk to if I weren’t having a PTSD reaction doesn’t actually make it easier to respond, unfortunately.
No worries for anyone who hasn’t been aware of the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable talking about it. And I feel bad about just leaving people hanging.
(To add to the OP’s excellent points.)
good parents don’t raise children with flashbacks
good parents don’t raise children with extreme fear of touch
good parents don’t raise children who can’t say no
(continue the chain! reblog with “good parents don’t raise children” and write your own symptoms!)
good parents don’t raise children that fear their own emotions
good parents don’t raise children that don’t know what consent is
good parents don’t raise children to be silent about their reality
good parents don’t raise children that feel like their existence is a problem
good parents don’t raise children that hate themselves
good parents don’t raise children that feel guilty over basic needs (food, clothes)
good parents don’t raise children who are paranoid about whether their parents are mad or not (not at the children, just mad/not happy in general)
good parents don’t raise children who think “if I don’t get mad at someone else and pin the blame on them first, someone will get mad at me”
good parents don’t raise children who can’t ask for things and just learned to passive-aggressively hint at stuff instead
good parent don’t raise children who cry with confusion and happiness the first time someone accommodates their needs because the concept is so alien to them
good parents don’t raise children who feel they need to apologize for basic needs
good parents don’t raise children who think that anytime there a fight they might as well go down swinging, metaphorically or literally, because they are going to be hurt no matter what they do
good parents don’t raise children who blame themselves for uncontrollable events
good parents don’t raise children who think if they don’t make everyone around them happy they are worthless
good parent don’t raise children who expect to be mocked and ridiculed by the ones they trust
This is really, really, really important.
I wish this was talked about more. Sometimes maladaptive coping mechanisms are just embarrassing and awkward, but sometimes they are things which are genuinely cruel and manipulative. They may have helped you survive when you were trying to endure abuse, but they aren’t appropriate to every conflict/desire to reach a goal you encounter.
North Carolina church investigated for importing hundreds of Brazilian worshipers and turning them into slaves
okay this is the craziest shit i’ve seen all day.
According to the Associated Press, the Word of Faith Fellowship recruits young members from two affiliated churches in Brazil to come to the U.S. on tourist and student visas where they are put to work on the church’s 35-acre compound in Spindale for no pay.
One man, identified as Andre Oliveira, told the AP that he was forced to work 15 hours a day, usually for no pay, cleaning offices and warehouses owned by the evangelical church. He well also forced to work at private businesses owned by some of the church’s ministers. Olivera stated that failure to comply resulted in beatings and shaming from the pulpit.
“They kept us as slaves,” Oliveira explained. “We were expendable. We meant nothing to them. Nothing. How can you do that to people — claim you love them and then beat them in the name of God?
Leaving My Abusive Partner GoFundMe Project
www.gofundme.com/wingsofsurvival
Here’s everything you need to know about my situation and why I need your help:
1. I have survived an entire childhood of abuse. I’ve finally decided to go No Contact with my mother and I’m free from her. I’m gonna be doing the same thing with this man.
2. My partner and I met in 2011 and he was abusive even then. I had only moved in with him to escape my abusive mother.
3. We had a baby and he was nice to me while I was expecting, so I thought he was a good man who just got angry at times. But he was emotionally abusive in ways that I didn’t yet recognize.
4. I began to realize that I absolutely could not deal with this forever when I saw how uninvolved he was with his own beautiful and perfect baby. I took it as ignorance and figured he’d grow into his role of fatherhood. He didn’t.
5. He yells at the baby all the time, scaring him. When the baby reacts, he tells him to “Stop fake crying.” This is very similar to how he reacts to any thoughts or feelings that I express in the relationship. He invalidates our feelings so that he doesn’t have to take responsibility for them. He must always appear to be “the good guy” and he must control every situation and conversation. So now I just don’t talk.
6. I called the police on him both times that he was physically abusive so he knows better than to do that anymore. I’m not just “letting it happen”. He just slams things now to terrify us whenever we are here. And no, he doesn’t care that he scares the baby.
7. He gaslights, lies to everyone and has a split personality so I can’t stay and argue. He invalidates every single thing that I say when I open my mouth. Even things I’m obviously right about that are just random topics. He has no respect for me and tries to make me doubt myself. He literally laughs at me when I cry or show any emotion at all. I caught on and stopped showing them. Now he’s even worse and that’s why I ended things for the second and LAST time.
8. It used to work when I still loved him, but I don’t anymore. Without the love goggles, I see myself and him more clearly. That’s why I decided to end the relationship.
9. Now I need to move out. However, I don’t have childcare for my baby, don’t have a place to stay and need money for travel. I don’t have the time or safety to just stay here and save up either. My baby is stressed out because now that I’ve ended things (I HAD to in order for him to realize I’m not going to have sex with him), he’s in a horrible mood and tries to intimidate us both. It’s very hard to downplay your reaction to someone who is scaring your baby. Due to alienation I don’t have reliable friends here and my mom obviously doesn’t care. I have called every shelter, the abuse foundations – there aren’t funds or housing for mothers in my state at this time. The shelter in the state that I am going only accepts mothers who’s abuser lives in the same state. (It’s like…. do they wanna help victims or not)
10. My close friends mother has a daycare in her home and would be able to watch my son while I work. My friend also can get me a job in her company, because I have the credentials. The rent is much cheaper where she lives. So there is hope here. I can survive this, I just have to get there.
11. I will need to fly there, get a studio apartment and work hard to save up. I’ll need to buy a used car for the commute to and from work. That’s what the GoFundMe campaign is for.
12. I made an Instagram @wingsofsurvival for the campaign, but I am going to keep it for victims suffering through what I’m dealing with now. I will continue to come up with new ideas and ways to support people who have dealt with these things.
13. I am not ashamed of the things that other people have done to me. You do not need to feel shame for their actions. I want to be an example to anyone suffering right now that you can get out.
I understand that not everyone has money to donate and that’s okay. Sharing it is free! The more people know, the more awareness we raise for my campaign and other victims, the smaller the donations can be for everyone, the quicker me and my baby can get out of here. It’s always easier when we work together.
I want every woman to find their wings of survival.
www.gofundme.com/wingsofsurvival
If you have anymore questions, just message me.
A.I. is coming in more sympathetic than some people…it’s 2017
according to Amazon, the Echo (Alexa) CANNOT actually do this unless the woman set it up beforehand–just like you can put in a phone number so it’ll dial it when you say “Alexa, call mom” or whatever. the woman apparently programmed it to dial 911 when she said “Alexa, call 911″ (which the woman is heard saying on the 911 recording). so why am I nitpicking about such a tiny distinction?
because Alexa WILL NOT call for help unless you’ve set it up this way first!
this woman was REALLY smart to do that, because otherwise the Echo thing would’ve done nothing. don’t think your Echo will respond to “call 911″ or “call the cops/ambulance/fire department” unless you’ve set it up with the numbers first, and certainly don’t think it’ll hear sounds of a struggle and call for help without a direct command. otherwise think of how many false reports it would make just from overhearing TV and movies being on!
so instead of this being shared as “Amazon’s AI is going to hear that you’re in trouble and will call for help by itself!” this story should really be shared as “hey if you have one of these things, set it up to respond to a voice command CALL 911 before you’re in that kind of situation!”
according to what I’m reading on this, alexa didnt pick up on the struggle, the boyfriend actually was the one who ended up setting it off, yelling at his girlfriend “Did you call the sheriffs?”, and Alexa picked up on “call the sheriffs”, prompting the 911 call
A note on the topic of trauma that I personally found helpful in accepting the idea that I am a trauma victim is that one of the most widely accepted facts in the field of trauma research is that abuse is often not the common factor in whether somebody will develop ptsd.
Many people can go through awful things without developing trauma based disorders as long as they receive compassion and support in processing those events as they happen. The most common factor in developing something like ptsd is emotional neglect. And emotional neglect on it’s own can be enough.
Whatever you went through was enough I promise, you’re not overreacting. Abuse and neglect are traumatic at any level, you don’t need to have gone through the worst possible experience you can think of to develop ptsd. If it hurt you then it hurt you.
…..oh.
And to support that, the number one determining factor on how badly something affects a person is how they’re treated afterward, not how objectively bad the event was. They’re called resiliency factors.
It looks like this:
Horrible brutal traumatic event + Family and community support + legal amelioration + closure and therapy and help
ONE MILLION TIMES MORE LIKELY TO RECOVER THAN
Event that the sufferer may think “seems minor” compared to what others have been through + Family neglect and abuse (you deserved it, name calling, support the abuser) + no legal means + denial and stifling and no therapeutic support
I have been raped, I have been abused by someone who was supposed to be family to me, and I have recovered and gotten my life back together. I have psychiatrists, psychologists, best friends, lovers, and family who support me. I did not get legal justice, but I got the person(s) out of my life.
My friend was repeatedly verbally abused by his step-parent, and when he was abused and hurt by others he was blamed for it by that parent. He had no support and no one to talk to about it for over 10 years.
He still feels guilty for even being affected by it and I’ve had long talks with him about how it isn’t “nothing compared to” what I went through.
You are not wrong to be upset. You are not wrong to feel the effects of trauma. Your hurt cannot be measured against anyone else’s. Your resiliency is your own and your situation is valid to you. Perception is everything. The worst thing that ever happened to you might ostensibly be less bad than the worst thing that ever happened to me – but it still is what happened to YOU.
Trauma is so predictable that we can make tidy little equations out of it. The ones above are good, but the ones I’ve seen are a little simpler. Something like:
Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD
http://apolohgy.tumblr.com/post/162102558721/not-to-start-any-drama-but-once-you-realize-that
This is true regardless of gender of partner, though.
When I thought I had to have a girlfriend to be a Real Gay I dated an abusive jerk.
When I dated a woman because I liked her and I wanted to, I had a loving, fulfilling relationship that lasted a couple of years and changed my life for the better.
I’m not saying heteronormativity doesn’t say some really weird ass things to women who like men. It totally does. (And it says different destructive weird things to men who like women, btw.)
But the relevant point is not so much “women don’t need men” as it is that relationships should be about genuinely liking someone and wanting them in your life, not about desperately needing any kind of interaction.
This goes for friendships too, btw.
Same –
When I thought I had to prove that I was “actually bi” and that I didn’t “hate women” because I was transitioning… I ended up staying with a woman who made me almost constantly afraid and tried to pressure me into doing things I didn’t want. Once I started standing up to cultural bullshit and just being with people because I genuinely loved being with them, the relationships I’ve had have been much more full of joy.
As a person with Complex PTSD, there are certain characters who also have C-PTSD who YES, they behave badly, but I’m not certain if people understand why.
I don’t mean this in terms of “This person/character was abused, therefore it excuses their actions” I mean this in terms of “This person/character was abused and they literally DO NOT KNOW another way to behave”.
Especially since fiction tends to have virtually no therapists.
Here’s the thing. When you’re a kid – and a teen – still in that Learning How To Be A Person stage of things, if your parents/caregivers around you are abusive assholes? That’s your primary frame of reference for modelling “How are people supposed to react to this?”
How are you supposed to react if someone does something that hurts your feelings – even accidentally? How are you supposed to react if someone wants you to do something you don’t want to do – even something that might hurt you? What’s the appropriate way to express how you feel about ANYTHING?
Abusers also tend to isolate you as much as they can, so you probably haven’t been exposed to Actual Sane, Reasonable People very much. There’s a good chance that if you have any extended family, THEY don’t want to be around EITHER because your abusive parent is awful. (Assuming they’re not also awful – which is also a thing that happens, especially in cases of intergenerational abuse.)
It doesn’t help that – even if you’re TRYING to, you just really don’t know how to handle a situation – it can end a lot of friendships because you didn’t know how to interact or how to handle feelings.
If someone’s being kind, is it a trap? It MIGHT be. It was the way you grew up. Where’s the catch? What do they WANT from you?
Teachers rarely see “this kid is being abused at home” they see “This kid is disruptive/withdrawn/weird”.
Maybe you blow up at people when you’re overwrought – nobody’s ever taught you how to calm down (and learning how to calm down and process feelings IS a learned skill, nobody’s born with it) or taught you constructive things to do with your feelings, and you still have PEOPLE HURTING YOU at home, so you’re pretty stressed out most of the time.
Maybe you get clingy to an extent that someone is uncomfortable – because HOLY SHIT, A PERSON DOESN’T THINK I’M SCUM, because you find that person and you latch on like an octopus. For some reason you can’t FATHOM, they think you’re worthwhile. Getting possessive of a person is not healthy, but you don’t know another way to be because you’ve never had or seen a healthy friendship modeled.
That’s another problem. When somebody has been told they’re worthless and a burden for their whole life, a person giving them even a little affection and praise can lead to a situation where you would do absolutely anything for them. It’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for a person from an abusive home to fall right into another abusive relationship (not just romantic/sexual relationships – ANY relationship where you’re being taken advantage of).
And you go with it because you might not even see yourself as someone who is worthy of existing as a person who has value inherently because you’re a person.
Maybe you’re afraid to set boundaries because “What if this person who likes me STOPS liking me because of it?” which can lead to resentment because they can’t read your mind, and then one day it gets to be too much, so you blow up over it.
I have absolutely been a complete asshole to people – friends, even, or potential friends – because I was trying to figure out how you are supposed to handle human interaction when I didn’t know how to set boundaries properly or say “This thing you are doing is bothering me”.
Even if you know “What my parents did was WRONG, so I should do something else”, well, what then? Throw a dart at a list of EVERY POSSIBLE REACTION to a situation? Knowing “not this one specific one” is not as helpful as you might think.
Not to mention there are people who will DESPERATELY deny that what happened to them was abuse. Nobody wants to feel powerless, and admitting you were a scared child involves feeling powerless again.So, can anyone guess which character is on my mind?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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