I’m seriously beginning to think that a lot of people honestly assume that “childhood trauma” is something that only affects children, rather than both children and adults who were traumatized back when they used to be children.
This is the kinda shit that ruins every attempt I make at taking a hiatus, like, I witnessed the galaxy brain take of someone saying, “I can buy people still suffering from childhood trauma when they’re 16, but if you’re in your early 20s, you can only use that as an excuse for so long”, and by “excuse” they literally just meant, like, an excuse for being sad and fucked up by the fact that your parents beat you or something.
Like, imagine sitting a kid down after they’ve been through some horrible, soul-shrivening shit and telling them “Well, you’re 10 now, so you’ve got about 8 years to figure out the many complicated and emotionally draining feelings you’re experiencing right now, cause once that big 18 rolls around, you need to grow the fuck up and get over it!”
And I fucking say this like this isn’t essentially the exact sort of message I was bombarded with as a kid for years until it eventually turned into “You really should be over this by now.” or the more nefarious and to-the-point “I think you might be some kinda fucked up weirdo because you’re so obsessed with your own childhood.”
The worst thing about this is I have NEVER SEEN anyone who had a positive experience with any intervention happening before they were an adult. Like in general if you get sent to therapy or whatever it is often your parents who hire the them, and afaik usually children are abused by their family or people who the family trusts.
The result is, everyone I know who started treatment young are completely unable to trust their perceptions on anything because the “help” they got was basically gaslighting them. This additionally on some level can make you dependent on therapy because you need a check system because you cannot trust yourself.
Child abuse trauma effects the foundation you build your thought processes on and if you have no “before” you can remember, how the fuck are you supposed to get better???
I’ve been living with the effects of complex trauma for a long time, but for many years, I didn’t know what it was. Off and on throughout my life, I’ve struggled with what I thought was anxiety and depression. Or rather, In addition to being traumatized, I was anxious and depressed.
Regardless of the difference, no condition should ever be minimized. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, it’s important and urgent to find the right support for you. No one gets a prize for “worst” depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has Complex PTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels.
For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational. General anxiety can often be calmed with grounding techniques and reminders of what is real and true. Mindfulness techniques can help. Even when they feel disconnected, anxious people can often acknowledge they are loved and supported by others.
For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.
Those living with generalized anxiety often live in fear of the future. Those with complex trauma fear the future becauseof the past.
The remedy for both anxiety and trauma is to pull one’s awareness back into the present. For a traumatized person who has experienced abuse, there are a variety of factors that make this difficult. First and foremost, a traumatized person must be living in a situation which is 100 percent safe before they can even begin to process the tsunami of anger, grief and despair that has been locked inside of them, causing their hypervigilance and other anxious symptoms. That usually means no one who abused them or enabled abuse in the past can be allowed to take up space in their life. It also means eliminating any other people who mirror the same abusive or enabling patterns.
Unfortunately for many, creating a 100 percent abuser-free environment is not possible, even for those who set up good boundaries and are wary of the signs. That means that being present in the moment for a complex trauma survivor is not fail-proof, especially in a stressful event. They can be triggered into an emotional flashback by anything in their present environment.
It is possible (and likely) that someone suffering from the effects of complex trauma is also feeling anxious and depressed, but there is a difference to the root cause. Many effective strategies that treat anxiety and depression don’t work for trauma survivors. Meditation and mindfulness techniques that make one more aware of their environment sometimes can produce an opposite effect on a trauma survivor. Trauma survivors often don’t need more awareness. They need to feel safe and secure in spite of what their awareness is telling them.
At the first sign of anxiety or depression, traumatized people will spiral into toxic shame. Depending on the wounding messages they received from their abusers, they will not only feel the effects of anxiety and depression, but also a deep shame for being “defective” or “not good enough.” Many survivors were emotionally and/or physically abandoned, and have a deep rooted knowledge of the fact that they were insufficiently loved. They live with a constant reminder that their brains and bodies were deprived of a basic human right. Even present-day situations where they are receiving love from a safe person can trigger the awareness and subsequent grief of knowing how unloved they were by comparison.
Anxiety and depression are considered commonplace, but I suspect many of those who consider themselves anxious or depressed are actually experiencing the fallout of trauma. Most therapists are not well trained to handle trauma, especially the complex kind that stems from prolonged exposure to abuse. Unless they are specially certified, they might have had a few hours in graduate school on Cluster B personality disorders, and even fewer hours on helping their survivors. Many survivors of complex trauma are often misdiagnosed as having borderline personality disorder (BPD) or bipolar disorder. Anyone who has sought treatment for generalized anxiety or depression owes themselves a deeper look at whether trauma plays a role.
first of all how dare you
Also this should be obvious, but it is a SPECIAL KIND OF AWFUL to shame people who are STILL IN THE BAD ENVIRONMENT for not being able to improve.
Like obviously there is no 100% safe enviorment but even then it assumes at least a MOSTLY safe enviorment. This is a very bad assumption ESPECIALLY if we are taking dealing with kids with trauma who are the most likely to still be in the abusive situation, and often the therapist is employed by their abuser.
Like if you are still experiencing the thing that traumatized you people telling you it will be ok and that won’t happen actively becomes dismissal and gaslighting and reinforcing that that person should never ask for help because people will just blame them for not being able to drop hypervigilance they are literally still using to survive. It’s the equivalent of giving a solider therapy for trauma when they are still actively deployed and will have to go back to that as soon as they leave the office. It isn’t helping anyone.
Also important: boy there are like no resources for actually getting people out of environments like that so the solution is just sending people to therapy that can never actually help them. Hmm maybe we should alot funds to THAT not just generic anxiety treatment that might actually make things worse because it generally involves denying that anything is wrong in the present, just the past.
Unfortunate reminder that domestic violence in England goes up by 26% when England plays and 38% when they lose.
For anyone who needs it tonight, the national helpline for domestic violence is 0808 2000 247. Please consider sharing this even if you’re not an England fan.
This is an update of the “Superbowl Sunday Hoax” all the way back in 1993 where feminist groups claimed the same thing about American football, with the same absence of any evidence whatsoever:
Basically, feminists claimed on Superbowl Sunday
there was a 40% rise in wife-beatings, hospital admissions
and calls to domestic violence hotlines, and every newspaper but one repeated it as true. Then one reporter actually did his job and rang round the emergency rooms,
domestic abuse hotlines and women’s shelters to check the claims and found out that there was no change in domestic violence incidents on that day to any other, and that, among other things, a quote from a
forensic psychologist
used in the original article was completely made up.
What’s amazing is that, even after being thoroughly and inarguably debunked like that, the lie continues to be repeated every year right up until the present day, until now it appears in another country hanging onto the coat-tails of another sport.
And what’s most troubling is how many people are willing to repeat and reblog such a load of old shit without ever stopping to question or fact check it at all. See the notes of this post for a demonstration.
Even if it isn’t true, there is no harm in reblogging this information in case it IS true and has the capacity to help someone. The only thing that’s ‘troubling’ is your resolve to not help women in need
That’s a curious way of rephrasing “not wilfully perpetuate groundless hysteria and fear cynically propagated for political gain”
It’s not for political gain, it’s an intensely intimate thing. Some of us have to capacity to, I don’t know, care about other people, and hope that they don’t get hurt.
Tumblr is the only website where saying that “lying is bad” is a contentious statement. Willfully lying in any way is unacceptable for any reason other than immediate self defence/preservation
Hi, OP here. Tumblr definitely has issues with how it does social/political issues, and I will be the first to say that I dislike the way opinions can be spread on this site. There is a problem with snappy posts that are phrased in a “word of god” style with no context of the debates and facts behind them. Fact-checking is super important, especially in 2018.
However, I’m not “willfully lying”. These statistics come from a study by Lancaster University, and it has been cited by a number of major news websites and used in a recent anti-violence campaign. Here is a BBC article. Here is an Independent article. Here is a Huffington Post article. Here is a tweet from the British government-funded NHS. Here is a statistical case study from 2012 that found domestic violence spiked on days when England won and lost a match during a previous World Cup. And this is literally only the tip of the iceberg of the literature on this subject.
Tumblr also has a problem with being US-centric. You’re the third person to assume that the information in this post came from that American Superbowl study (which I had never heard of before today) when this post was clearly made by an ENGLISH person about an ENGLISH social issue for ENGLISH people who might need it. It would literally have taken all of 12 seconds to google “world cup domestic violence england” and find all the results I linked above. I should have cited sources in the original post, and I’ve apologised for that three times now, but I was on mobile so I couldn’t link. I had absolutely no idea this post would blow up like it has. I have barely any followers. I hoped it would get a few hundred notes at most. I thought the “world cup” tag would be swamped with people talking about the match, but apparently I overestimated how much Tumblr cares about football.
Now I’d like to say something about the purpose of this post. I made it shortly after England lost, because I was talking with a friend yesterday afternoon and she mentioned that domestic violence rose whenever England played and especially when they lost. She showed me this tweet, which is clearly making fun of the fact that girlfriends and wives get abused when male football fans are disappointed:
Later, when they lost, I remembered what she’d told me and researched it. I found the sources I’ve linked above. I found some tweets raising awareness, but nothing on Tumblr. As I don’t have any other significant social media presence other than Tumblr (and I barely have one on here), I thought that making this post was my way to contribute to awareness about this.
This post was for people who might be in an unsafe home, to remind them to take care, to reach out for help if they needed, and to remind other English people to be aware of their neighbours and family and friends. 30k notes later, I’ve seen countless replies and tags from people saying “yeah, I’ve experienced this” either in previous years, or right now.
And was there an increase in domestic violence last night? Yes, there was, as predicted. But as that tweet also states, the majority of fans were responsible. I never said that all football fans, or all male football fans, are abusers. The majority of football/England fans that I know are lovely people. My dad is a huge England supporter, and he’s the most calm, mellow, respectful man I know. I’m saying that there are a LOT of football fans out there, it’s the biggest sport in the world, and some of them are abusive people anyway, and the heightened emotions of the match are likely to provoke an abusive response from these kinds of people.
I’m not interacting with responses on this post anymore because I have no desire to engage in a debate with you or anybody else. I’ve covered my ass, I’ve linked you some pretty reliable sources, unless you want to contest the reliability of the BBC and the NHS, in which case, I suggest you do so in you own post. I think I’ve proved that I’m not “willfully lying”. I was quoting a piece of research and providing a helpline for those in need. Is the study I cited perfect? Probably not. But if you have an issue with it, I suggest you get in contact with the university that conducted the research, or any of the news websites that reported it. They are much more educated on this issue than a sleep-deprived girl with a Voltron blog who literally just wanted to provide a helpline for those who might be in need of one in a time of heightened danger.
Why are we concentrating on “what an abuser is” instead of “how does abuse occur”, like, id rather focus on the fact that everyone has had abusive behaviors. The act not the person sth like that.
This is something I’ve been talking about with a lot of people lately, and it’s part of what got me started talking about all this.
I feel like people want to maintain this idea that you can spot an abuser by things like looks or mannerisms or even hobbies is born from a desire to feel safe, like, especially among victims because, I know for me, I wish that my various experiences with it provided me some sort of, like, abuser-sense, but if anything, it’s left me realizing that, like, anyone can be a potential abuser.
And this is also why I hate this idea of, like, assuming that abuse is the product of inherently toxic/abusive people, as if there just exists people who were born abusive, because experience demonstrates that, in the majority of situations, toxicity isn’t localized in the individual, but in the dynamics between individuals, with power imbalance being a huge factor that contributes to it.
Age gaps, class/financial stability differences, health differences, racial differences, all of these things and more can contribute to an abusive dynamic forming, but I find that a lot of people, most people even, still have this sort of “love will find a way” attitude towards these things, or rather they ignore them in the pursuit of attraction/desire for friendship, and that’s what starts things down the road to toxicity.
Which is another scary thing about it is that abuse can arise just as much from ignorance as it can from intent. Lack of ability to navigate those above factors, lack of emotional intelligence, poor communication skills (on the part of both involved parties) can all turn the relationship between two people toxic and abusive without either person realizing it, and I think that is the root of a lot of abusive situations, people wanna think they just inherently know how to treat other people right, but like, that’s a learned skill that has to be partially relearned every time you enter a new relationship, and that doesn’t excuse it, like, at some base level, it’s important to be aware of how your actions are affecting other people, but the sad truth is that that idea of love or camaraderie, as something you have to learn to do right, is not what we’re taught love is, instead it’s just this thing that we’ll “know” when we feel it and everything will just fall into place.
Like, my first romantic relationship lasted about 3 years, and it was really good at first, but around year 2, they wanted to leave and didn’t know how to communicate it, so they started doing things like avoiding me, not answering my calls, and when we would meet up, acting with lowkey hostility towards me, the relationship had turned toxic. Now, my own trauma signaled that that meant I just needed to try harder or do something different, and it wasn’t until a year later that I finally worked up the courage to be like “why are you doing this?” and they finally told me that they felt trapped by our relationship and had wanted to break it off back when this started happening, but didn’t know how to communicate it.
Granted, some of their inherent traits contributed to that toxicity. They were very egotistical, ambitious, and charismatic, but with an acute lack of self awareness, but that doesn’t mean they were inherently toxic. We’ve stayed friends since then, and I’ve seen them in their other relationships, making the same sort of missteps as they did in ours, but with people who didn’t possess the vulnerabilities that I did/still do, and with time and experience, they found people they could engage with in ways that weren’t toxic.
So I think, what good would the current paradigm of handling abusive situations done either of us in that situation, or really any of the abusive situations I’ve been in? Focusing all resources on disseminating the graphic details of what happened in order to render the other person persona non grata while I’m, what, performatively coddled for the duration before being promptly forgotten? I would much rather have been able to turn to people who could have intervened and bridged the gap of communication between the two of us and, like, yes, held them accountable, but not in the form of public spectacle that accountability takes now, but in a way that meant that they were aware what they needed to be doing differently and having people keeping tabs on them and helping guide them toward better behaviors and ways of approaching relationships.
And that doesn’t even touch on situations where things become mutually toxic/abusive between people which I feel is where this entire system ruptures. Like, despite what people seem to want to think, the world isn’t split up into abusers and victims, and sometimes a dynamic forms where both parties have grown to be abusive to the other, something which frequently resolves on here as outright civil war as people suddenly treat this as an opportunity to pick sides in deciding who the “true” abuser is, with the end goal of painting the entire other side as abuse apologists, when in fact, nobodies relationship problems should be dragged into the public eye like that. It’s pure spectacle and does nothing to improve the situation.
So, by focusing on what abuse is, we open new potential for positive resolutions to these situations. When people know what to look for, they know when it’s time to seek help if they are within the relationship, or when it’s time to intervene if they are observing it from the outside. If the consequence isn’t total exile and ostracization, but like, real accountability and redirection, then denial of wrongdoing no longer becomes a matter of survival and allows them to honestly confront their actions. And once all parties are separated and safe, they can all begin healing and improving, that is the system I’d like to see, or at least something approximating it because the current way of dealing with things is more reminiscent of the Queen’s court from Alice in Wonderland than anything capable of producing legitimate justice and reconciliation.
And yes, there are serial abusers who are fully aware of the abuse that they perpetrate and intentionally seek out situations where they can abuse others, and there are also those who abuse through physical or sexual violence, both of which demand a harsher communal response, but I feel like using those to justify the system as-it-is is akin to people who say “abolish prisons? then where will we keep people like serial killers?” like, a system which does immense harm to people who need other forms of intervention just to accommodate those edge cases is inexcusable, and like, I feel it’s not an incredibly complicated thing to identify those cases where separating and working with both parties will be insufficient.
But all of this, it takes work, it takes admitting that we all shoulder some amount of guilt for letting our communities get this way, it means no more self-righteous highs from engaging in witch hunts, it means no more superficial sense of safety by relying on cues we find in people, rather than in situations, to reveal to us where, why, and how abuse takes place, it means actually doing the work of using our interconnectedness to affect real positive change in people’s lives, enlisting each of ourselves in the social machinery that keeps people on the right path to healing and self-improvement, rather than the easier road of letting people just rot in intentional neglect. And maybe the former just isn’t possible, maybe the melange of personalities, cliques, and general beliefs that make up our communities disallow the sort of harmony something like this would take, but I refuse to participate or contribute to the latter, so pipe-dream or not, it’s what I’d advocate for.
“Unless you are a survivor of emotional abuse, you have no idea what it means to fight daily battles in your head with a person you no longer have contact with. Verbal, emotional, and physical abuse have residual effects on the victim. You don’t just get over it.”
Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed
Pregnant women in immigration detention under the Trump administration say they have been denied medical care, shackled around the stomach, and abused.
Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.
“An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,” she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. “I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”
Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldn’t have come to the US seeking a safer life if she’d known what would happen. She asked that her full name not to be used out of fear of repercussions while in detention and for her family back home.
“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.
Abusers don’t hit you on the first date. They don’t write “I will humiliate and belittle you” on their Tinder profiles. They don’t wear “I break things to intimidate my partner” t-shirts. People don’t get trapped in damaging relationships because they saw an abuser coming from 20 yards away and decided “I’m going to date that person anyway”. That’s not how any of this works.
In the beginning, abusers can be some of the most thoughtful, attentive people you’ll ever meet. They’re obsessed with you; that’s what makes them so toxic and deadly as time goes on. Abusers buy you flowers. They remember your birthday. They remember to text you “good morning” and “good night”. They listen to your problems, confide in you and share silly inside jokes. They can keep that “loving, doting partner and best friend” mask in place for months or years if they have to.
So the first time they scream at you or hit you, you don’t see an abuser. You see your best friend, your confidante, the person who brought you soup when you were sick and always laughs at your stories about your nutty coworker. You tell yourself they just had a bad day. Maybe they were tired, sick, hungry, or under a lot of stress. You know them. You’ve made a life with them. And they’re so sorry and so ashamed of what they did. This isn’t who they are.
And so things go back to back to normal for a while. Wonderful, even. This is still one of the best relationships you’ve ever been in, even counting that one incident. You go back to date nights, cozy nights in and 5-hour-long conversations that feel effortless.
And then it happens again.
And you still don’t see an abuser. You see the person who means the most to you in the whole world. You decide that maybe they’re just struggling. Maybe they have mental health issues. They’ve told you every horrible thing that’s ever happened to them as a child, and maybe it has something to do with that. But either way, they’re not an abuser. Not yet. They’re just a person who needs you more than ever.
Then things are good for a while. Then something bad happens. Then it’s good again. Then it’s bad. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. And every time it happens, it gets a little harder to get out. The time you’ve invested in the relationship goes up, and your self-esteem goes down. By the time you realize that, yes, the person you thought you knew is an Abuser with a capital A, you’re in deep. You’re a frog that stood in a pot of water so long it turned you into soup before you even noticed it was getting a little warm. But you didn’t ask for this. And you certainly didn’t know it was coming.
We have this image in our heads of what abusers must look like. We picture brawny men with low foreheads and stained white tank tops, screaming at their wives while they drink beer in front of the TV. We think they’re like wildlife, as if we could spot them with the help of a guidebook and know to stay far away from them. But they’re not. Abusers can be anyone. They can be female. They can be accomplished. They can be well-groomed. Queer. Politically far-left. Politically far-right. Artists. Athletic. Charitable. Intelligent. They can come from any walk of life, any spot on the gender spectrum, any religion, any background. It’s not the abused person’s fault for not spotting them – they can’t always be spotted. It’s the abuser’s fault for abusing.
So, I just wrote that big thing on ‘progressive’ white America’s modern view of the chattel slavery of African Americans, and I have deiced, on behalf of all white people, we need to stop lying to each other. Teachers, tour guides, even just random people, when they get asked “Was Master X nice to his slaves” or “But most slaves were treated well, right?” Need to uniformly answer “No.”
No owner ever treated a slave well. Not George Washington, Not Thomas Jefferson, not your potential ancestors, not the nice family you heard about on vacation last year. To own another human being is to not treat them well.
We have to stop lying to kids (and each other) and saying that there is a humane way to strip another human being of there right to self, to take a person and create a marketable commodity .
White Americans still benefit from the legacy of slavery, and Black American’s still suffer from it. We need to stop teaching it as an ancient quirk that left few scars because everyone was more or less happy.
It wasn’t symbiotic, it was parasitic, and we need to stop saying otherwise.
To own another human being is to not treat them well.
Aside (in relation to hearing about another conversation): To own another human being, means they cannot give enthusiastic consent to sex. There were no slave and master love stories. The inability to say no to the person who can beat you, kill you, starve you, sell off family members, sell you off away from all you’ve ever known, kill family members and or torture them – means there’s no consent to sex.
No slave master ever fell in love with a slave then treated them right by NOT freeing them and not freeing their family and not supporting abolition.
The fact that a person did not have the full autonomy and were forced to be at the whim of another person is abuse. Period. Slavery was ongoing abuse.
All of these bullshit ‘massa treated me well’ narratives are STOCKHOLM SYNDROME.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD SLAVE OWNER. THEY ARE ABUSERS. ALL. SLAVE. OWNERS. WERE. VIOLENT. ABUSERS
CW FOR SLAVERY
Want to know a good way to shut down Thomas Jefferson apologists?
Point out the fact that under Virginian standards in Jefferson’s time, the children he fathered on Sally Hemings were white.
Sally Hemings was one quarter black and three quarters white.* She had three white grandparents and one black grandparent in the maternal line.
Jefferson was white. So the children that Jefferson impregnated Sally with were one-eighth black and seven-eighths white. Virginian law during Jefferson’s time stated that a person who had one black great-grandparent was a white person. They were, in the racial parlance of the time, ‘octoroons’ and octoroons were considered white people (NB: THIS IS A VERY LOADED RACIST TERM, AND I’M USING IT HERE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, DO NOT USE THIS TERM TO DESCRIBE PEOPLE.) The children were slaves because they were born to an enslaved mother**, but they were legally white children, and Jefferson deliberately decided to keep them in slavery, which was allowed at the time.*** This is where the apologists get uncomfortable. They’re like “Don’t make this weird.” And you’re like WEIRDER THAN IT IS ALREADY?
Now, not only were they the half-siblings of Jefferson’s own children, and were raised in slavery, but Sally Hemings was the half-sibling of Jefferson’s wife. Sally Hemings and Martha shared a father. Sally was 25 years younger than Martha, and Martha and her husband inherited baby Sally as property after her father’s death. At the age of 14, Sally – used as a servant for the Jefferson’s teenage daughters – became Thomas’s concubine and got pregnant. SO THAT’S REALLY NICE. TOTALLY NOT CREEPY OR WEIRD.
Jefferson didn’t see a problem with enslaving and impregnating his wife’s sister IN HIS WIFE’S HOUSE – his wife’s teen sister that he had OWNED SINCE SHE WAS A TINY BABY – and keeping the resulting children as property. There’s no need to make it weird, guys! This is totally normal behavior.
The only reason that Sally, as a pregnant teen in France, did not run
away from Jefferson in a country where she was legally free was because
he apparently promised to free her children at the age of 21.
In their 20s, two of the children (Beverly, a boy, and Harriet, a girl) ran away to the North, where they were legally free.
They self-identified as white, entered white society, and married middle-class white people. They disappeared into history.
Jefferson did not pursue them or make any attempt to recover his property, which is seen to demonstrate his Compassion, and the fact that he totally Freed His Children. But not legally. And in such a way that they ran about in the North for a bit, sparking interested gossip and speculation, because they looked a hell of a lot like Jefferson. People try to handwave it – “Oh, he freed them by letting them escape… we don’t mean that he FREED them, like gave them official papers to keep them safe from slavecatchers or allow them to vote or anything… he just didn’t…. run them down with dogs.”
When
Beverly ran away, he was 24. Remember how Jefferson promised to free the kids at the age of 21? That must have been an awkward few years. “So can I have some voting rights and the ability to get married, like you promised my mother, please? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Can I get a little of that?” “Oh no, don’t worry about it. Tell you what, if you ever decide to run away and are forced to establish yourself in an alien society from scratch without ever seeing your family again, I won’t run you down with dogs.” NOW THAT’S GOOD PARENTING
Jefferson legally freed the two surviving sons in his will – it was a dicey moment, because he died in Lots of Fucking Debt and huge chunks of Wayles-Jefferson-Hemings family got auctioned off randomly and weren’t seen again. But the other two boys were freed and just about managed to dodge the debt collectors. After his death, they remained in the South and married, only moving away when they feared slavecatchers would kidnap them. Imagine leaving your own children (who were also your wife’s nephews) in that situation. BUT THAT’S NOT WEIRD.
Jefferson didn’t want to deal with any political awkwardness that would happen if he officially freed any of the children when he was alive.
Because, you know.
That would have made it weird.
* This is known and recorded; her family tree is clear. It was valuable information that contributed to her ‘market value.’ Disgusting! But clearly recorded!
**This changed later, and varied by state; you can read plenty of accounts of “white slaves” with predominantly Caucasian features being bought and sold in the South. The ‘just one drop’ rule was widely adopted to make this easier for slavers – if one black ancestor could be proved or suggested, the person could be bought and sold as property. A young vulnerable white person with no family could be conveniently be ‘accused’ of having black ancestry, so that blue-eyed-blondes could be purchased and sold as sexual slaves – and used to produce more slaves! This was absolutely shocking for European visitors at the time, who wrote it all down and went “LOOK AT THE FUCKERY THE AMERICANS ARE DOING?! DO YOU BELIEVE THIS? THEY INVENTED A SPECIFIC KIND OF RACISM TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY AND NOW THEY’RE NOT EVEN STICKING TO THEIR OWN RULES??” So you know, this was just incredibly terrible and unethical the whole way down. Hopefully everyone gets that? Does using white people as an example clarify matters for everyone? It’s problematic, but it’s a technique that abolitionists used for hundreds of years, because it’s effective and usually REALLY freaks out apologists. Thus there was the now-forgotten plot device of the “tragic octoroon” used in abolitionist plays and literature – usually a pretty blonde girl with secret African ancestry, forced into sexual slavery until rescued by an abolitionist in an extremely heavy-handed plot twist – but it was extremely effective at freaking out the middle-class white people in the North. “That could be my daughter! We have to stop slavery!” And Europeans were just like “Jesus CHRIST what are Americans even DOING?!” as they frantically wrote letters back home.
*** The Virginian law statedpartus sequitur ventrem – the child of an enslaved mother is an enslaved child. Even if they aren’t technically ‘black.’ Because it made Jefferson’s life less awkward.
NB: SLAVERY IS WRONG and it was ALWAYS wrong to enslave people. The fact that the Hemings children were “legally white” – basically a meaningless term anyway – doesn’t mean they “deserved” to be elevated above other enslaved people and freed. It’s just a really good way to shut down the apologists, because they like to set up a fake fantasy system where slavery is totally justified and fair. This is not compatible with reality, particularly in the case of Presidential children.
There are men out there who learn to see the signs of a girl or woman being vulnerable, sad, self-hating, self-harming, depressed, mentally ill, traumatized or submissive because of fear or socialization, because they know these girls and women aren’t likely to put up that much of a fight and defend themselves and therefore they consider them easy targets for manipulation, abuse, violence and sexual exploitation and coercion. “Why does she choose such bad men?” is such an irrelevant question. “Why doesn’t she just leave him?” is such an irrelevant question. The questions we should be asking is: “Why are these men drawn to women they can hurt?”, “Why do men seek out women only to hurt and abuse them?”, and “Why does he hurt her?”.
And ladies that’s why I keep telling ya to be on cynical as hell on here and another platforms cause these dudes stay trying to groom you into relationships that you probably don’t want and really don’t need atm. Don’t let these fake ass online “shoulder to cry on” internet “Nice guys” fool you. They are just preying on your feelings. Treat them like fungus keep them in the dark and feed them shit.
Seek out professional help/advice or find some lady peers to talk to. Don’t get caught up. Speaking from second hand experience. ✌❤
Speaking from first hand experience with a friend, not a boyfriend: so-called “friends” can do it too. Emotional abuse. Prey on your weaknesses. Celebrate your failures. Treat you like shit. All of that. I wasn’t emotionally strong enough to defend myself at the time. But – thankfully – the friendship ended, however I still wanted to know “WHY”. Why would I allow someone to treat me that way? I was way too embarrassed to talk to anyone I knew (and who knew me) – loving family, other wonderful friends – about it. So I sought a therapist. Someone who was neutral. Who didn’t know me. Who was kind and understanding. And I worked through my feelings of inadequacy, lacking self-love, etc. Therapy was a marvelous, MARVELOUS, experience. I was able to talk through all of my fears and ask SO many questions. I was given exercises/assignments to do. Ultimately, in the end, I really learned the value of loving myself. Really LOVING myself. And liking myself a little bit more than I had before. I would still be circling the drain (or worse) and engaging in hurtful, unhealthy relationships (romantic and otherwise), MANY years later, if I hadn’t sought help at that time.
Along with @screengeniuz There are some siblings/family members who can do this to you as well.. I’ve been there. I had an older sibling swoon into my life when 16 yrs old, confused, burned out with school, I was down and feeling worthless. She was not the favorite sibling in the family. Manipulative.. She thought she was molding a 2nd coming of herself.. When I was 35 yrs old I stood up and backed her off.. After a while I discovered over time she created a rift between my other sisters and myself… ( I could not figure out why they were acting odd with me)She got to know my personality, got to know my personality with them and used it against me when I couldn’t be there to defend myself. Being the baby and they were way older, not believing she could do such a thing.. They believe her about me and I believed her about them. well, skip… Age 35 I got tired and started to feel I am some body and she clowned… She got ugly. I will digress… Anyway… We made up years later but, the relationship is not the same.. I am not very comfortable with her as I use to be.. I don’t call nor talk to her as often but, I don’t believe in cutting family ties…
This is absolutely true. The main problem I have with this sort of thing is, it is a problem across the board, not a problem with dating. Every single friend I made in grade school, either abruptly stopped being my friend or I caught like, gossiping about how they didn’t really like me behind my back. I have had multiple unpaid internships which sent me home halfway and told me they would give me credit for the internship but I wasn’t needed. I don’t even have cell numbers of any of my family outside my mother, and even she doesn’t hear about them LEAVING THE COUNTRY for example until like a month after they come back.
Ok so clearly I could use a neutral party at that point to weigh in. I actually started therapy at age 6! I have been to a dozen therapists in the past 2 decades. What did they have to say? Well, to put it simply, therapists for children are employed by aduts, not children. This matters because it means every therapist from before I turned 18 would come at everything I said with the assumption it wasn’t true. The people who say horrible things to your face every day do not hate you actually, you are imagining it. Your family brought you to me how could they be abusive! The bad ones since then have been largely ones gatekeeping treatment. The one who refused to test me for adhd because of the depression dx, the pain clinic one etc. The doctors that the PCPs called in to evaluate me were kind of neutral, they came back with “wow no wonder you’re depressed you got sent to me instead of a specialist for your disability”. The 2 that have been at all helpful both were picked by me with no input from anyone else and one of them was fully out of pocket so not even insurance had a say.
So to put this bluntly, it is super common for mental health professionals to not be neutral parties at all, because humans are bias. Which is scary enough on a normal doctor, but it feels so much worse when you are there because people have made you distrust your perceptions and the response is “have you considered they are right?” How common is this? well my current therapist, who is one of the two helpful ones, has agreed that it is legit safer to have me be suicidal then in a mental hospital because SHE is scared of what would happen to me because here is the kicker: this conditioning also makes you so much more vulnerable to medical abuse. Not just from therapists but all doctors, like man you haven’t been gaslit until you have been to a pain clinic, it is fucking incredible. (Very seriously, if you have a history of this BRING WITNESSES TO DOCTORS APPOINTMENTS for your own safety).
And something that makes this harder is… it makes it really hard to tell if you ARE being awful. Like as many people on this site will point out, it is not exactly uncommon for people to use mental illness as an excuse to not fix their own bad behavior. When you look back on your life and it has ALWAYS been this way, when it isn’t just failed dating attempts but also friendships, also family, even WORK seems to be effected, that kind of makes the common thread in everything you doesn’t it? Like if I can as an adult look at my mother and realize that everything she does that hurts me is literally because she refuses to acknowledge SHE has problems and refuses to admit it so she could mitigate harm how the hell could I trust myself to see if I am doing the same thing? I don’t know honestly. I have asked a lot of people but no one has been able to give a good answer.
IDK I guess what I am saying is, the big scary thing with this is once this starts it often keeps going. You get groomed for easy abuse, it attracts more people that hurt you, the hurt makes it worse/grooms you more, it attracts more bad people. etc. Eventually the idea of people not seeing you as a burden becomes more and more unrealistic because it’s all you’ve ever known and it’s been decades with no evidence otherwise. Even if you find a good therapist “you deserve better” feels hollow when there are a dozen other voices around you saying it’s a lie, and only one of them is your brain. And most people won’t want to pick up the pieces and help you put them back together. Your damage becomes other people’s justification for why you aren’t worth their time.
There are men out there who learn to see the signs of a girl or woman being vulnerable, sad, self-hating, self-harming, depressed, mentally ill, traumatized or submissive because of fear or socialization, because they know these girls and women aren’t likely to put up that much of a fight and defend themselves and therefore they consider them easy targets for manipulation, abuse, violence and sexual exploitation and coercion. “Why does she choose such bad men?” is such an irrelevant question. “Why doesn’t she just leave him?” is such an irrelevant question. The questions we should be asking is: “Why are these men drawn to women they can hurt?”, “Why do men seek out women only to hurt and abuse them?”, and “Why does he hurt her?”.
And ladies that’s why I keep telling ya to be on cynical as hell on here and another platforms cause these dudes stay trying to groom you into relationships that you probably don’t want and really don’t need atm. Don’t let these fake ass online “shoulder to cry on” internet “Nice guys” fool you. They are just preying on your feelings. Treat them like fungus keep them in the dark and feed them shit.
Seek out professional help/advice or find some lady peers to talk to. Don’t get caught up. Speaking from second hand experience. ✌❤
Speaking from first hand experience with a friend, not a boyfriend: so-called “friends” can do it too. Emotional abuse. Prey on your weaknesses. Celebrate your failures. Treat you like shit. All of that. I wasn’t emotionally strong enough to defend myself at the time. But – thankfully – the friendship ended, however I still wanted to know “WHY”. Why would I allow someone to treat me that way? I was way too embarrassed to talk to anyone I knew (and who knew me) – loving family, other wonderful friends – about it. So I sought a therapist. Someone who was neutral. Who didn’t know me. Who was kind and understanding. And I worked through my feelings of inadequacy, lacking self-love, etc. Therapy was a marvelous, MARVELOUS, experience. I was able to talk through all of my fears and ask SO many questions. I was given exercises/assignments to do. Ultimately, in the end, I really learned the value of loving myself. Really LOVING myself. And liking myself a little bit more than I had before. I would still be circling the drain (or worse) and engaging in hurtful, unhealthy relationships (romantic and otherwise), MANY years later, if I hadn’t sought help at that time.
Along with @screengeniuz There are some siblings/family members who can do this to you as well.. I’ve been there. I had an older sibling swoon into my life when 16 yrs old, confused, burned out with school, I was down and feeling worthless. She was not the favorite sibling in the family. Manipulative.. She thought she was molding a 2nd coming of herself.. When I was 35 yrs old I stood up and backed her off.. After a while I discovered over time she created a rift between my other sisters and myself… ( I could not figure out why they were acting odd with me)She got to know my personality, got to know my personality with them and used it against me when I couldn’t be there to defend myself. Being the baby and they were way older, not believing she could do such a thing.. They believe her about me and I believed her about them. well, skip… Age 35 I got tired and started to feel I am some body and she clowned… She got ugly. I will digress… Anyway… We made up years later but, the relationship is not the same.. I am not very comfortable with her as I use to be.. I don’t call nor talk to her as often but, I don’t believe in cutting family ties…
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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