So there are a ton of posts out there – especially from some of our favorite BDSM bloggers – that talk about and list red flags. What they are, what to look for, how to spot them, etc. Lists upon lists. I reblog them often! Knowing what red flags to look for can be helpful and can save someone from lots of pain, damage and heartbreak. There are lots of those red flag posts out there.
This is not one of those posts.
This is not about what red flags to look for. This is not a list of things to avoid. This is not a list of warning signs. This is not about how to spot the red flags. This is a post about what to do if you missed the red flags.
Those who pay attention to my more personal posts may be aware that in the last few months I’ve been working with my therapist to deal with the trauma of being raped last October. (And most of you are probably aware it’s been long, hard, and not really felt like it’s going that well.) Anyway, the long and the short of that point is that the man who raped me was someone I’d been dating for a few months and was someone I thought I could trust, someone I thought I was safe with, someone I thought was a good person.
Or, in other words, I missed all of the red flags.
Me. A person who regularly reads, discusses, and reblogs posts about warning signs and things to look for and red flags to avoid. A person who can rattle the red flags off without even thinking about them. A person who can spot these red flags in someone else’s relationships with no problem. I missed them. I missed the red fucking flags. And I paid for it. And I’m still paying for it.
So what the fuck do you do with that?
Well, I’ll tell you. Don’t blame yourself. Seriously – do. not. blame. yourself. Do not beat yourself up. Don’t sit there and think about how stupid you are. Don’t talk about how this is your fault. Do not do that.
Here’s the thing about red flags. When you’re not the one immediately and emotionally involved in the situation – they seem like the most obvious things in the world. They seem so easy to spot. They seem cut and dry and like giant glaring neon warning signs. You literally sit there and read this shit and think to yourself that stuff like that is so obvious and you’re prepared for anything and there’s no way you could ever possibly miss that. (Despite, in my case, ending up in toxic, abusive relationships more than once.) But when you are the one involved in the relationship? It’s so much messier. It’s so much harder to spot. It’s so much easier to get sucked in and caught up and not know how to get yourself out once the red flags start to seem more obvious.
That’s the thing about abusive people. That’s the thing about abusive partners. That’s the thing about dating and being involved with an abusive person. They are really fucking good at this shit. They are manipulative as can be. They are masters of the mindfuck. They have spent years and years practicing this and mastering this and becoming really fucking good at this. They know how to draw you in. They know how to make you care. They know how to trap you and get you in so deep that you feel like you can’t leave. They know how to make you believe their lies and their bullshit and their complete and utter abusive crap. They know. They know.
So my point? It’s not your fault.
If you’re sitting there going back over and over and over your relationship and parsing it and slicing it and studying it and tearing it apart and wondering what you missed and how you didn’t see it and how you could have done this differently… If you’re sitting there blaming yourself? Don’t. Don’t. It is not your fault. It is not your fault. It is so easy to see things in hindsight and to go back over the relationship when you’re not in the moment and caught up in all of it and having to interact with the person abusing you and see all of the things that you missed, and all of the things that were wrong, and all of the things that you should have noticed.
I know how that is. I know how that is. But trust me. It’s not your fault. It. Was. Not. Your. Fault.
So you missed the red flags? I know how that is. I know how that feels. I know the shock waves it sends through your life. And you know what you can do about it? Don’t blame yourself. Seriously, stop it. Stop it! Stop blaming yourself. And then when you’re ready? Talk through it with someone you trust and someone who has your best interests at heart. Look at the things you missed. Set up check-ins for the future so that you can have someone else help you look at situations when you’re in them and help call out red flags.
It sucks to miss the red flags. It will haunt you. I know.
It will make you feel like you did something wrong. You didn’t.
You’ll feel like an idiot. You’re not.
You’ll feel like you deserved it. You didn’t.
You’ll think it’s your fault. It is not your fault.Really, it’s not. It’s not easy to spot these things when you’re living the red flags every single day. You didn’t do anything wrong. So stop blaming yourself.
Tag: manipulation
I wonder if another reason everyone is cryig fake about the IRA accounts is that there’s a lot of really obvious accounts that are considered russian bots, ergo Twitter, and they can’t believe that maybe there’d be actual subterfuge, and maybe that’s why there’s been so many obvious fake accounts.
If I was given a budget and guidelines to infiltrate a particular foreign political community, for the sake of, say, causing chaos and massive fragmentation and making it impossible for said community to properly unite under a given candidate, the first thing I’d do is cause a diversion with the aid of very blatant burner accounts. There would still be people foolish enough to fall for the torrent of disinfo being put out by those accounts (particularly if the disinfo already matched their existing biases), but those would just be the low-hanging fruit. My actual purpose for them would be as a sort of diversionary tactic, making the public think that they’ve got my work figured out and countered.
My actual work would be done with the aid of individuals who could realistically pose as members of whatever communities I wanted to infiltrate. In this case, they’d need not only very good knowledge of the target community’s native language, but also of the community’s ‘code’ (the way in which community members communicate, their most often used words, the way they refer to in-group and out-group members, their jargon, etc). This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, to anyone with a good head for language and people-observation skills. For example, I could very easily pose as a US social-conservative or a Fundamentalist Christian from the so-called ‘Bible-belt’ simply because I’ve got over fifteen years’ worth of experience from observing these kinds of people interacting and misbehaving on the Internet.
All of this is just…. basic logic and understanding how social manipulation campaigns work. The fact that so many people on here fail to comprehend this is, honestly, terrifying, because this leaves people as prime targets for manipulation by all sorts of unscrupulous elements.
it’s crucial to realise that abuse cannot be reduced to a list of contextless behaviours. abusive actions are abusive, not because of their inherent nature, but because of the place that they take in a larger pattern of control or intimidation. if you try to paint a picture of what an abuser acts like without reference to these larger patterns, you’re inevitably going to describe a lot of the ways in which people who are being abused act–and many abusers know how to take advantage of that.
for example, an abuser may accuse their victim of witholding sex, saying that their victim is strategically denying them sexual access in order to control them. this falls into a larger pattern of the abuser feeling a sense of ownership towards their partner, feeling entitled to sexual access, and resenting their partner for exercising agency over their own body (& overwhelmingly, cases such as this involve a male abuser and a female victim). they may become angry when their partner understandably doesn’t want to have sex with them after they’ve been abusive towards them in other ways.
however, it’s also true that many abusers do strategically use sex as a control tactic, using their victim’s need for intimacy against them and refusing sex specifically as a form of punishment for other perceived slights. and the mere fact that one person is refusing sex with another person cannot tell you which of these, if either, is occurring.
similarly, abusers often use physical intimidation tactics such as stomping about, slamming doors, and breaking objects in order to create fear in their victims (and the expectation that perhaps they’re going to be hurt, whether or not the abuser has been physically violent before), or to punish them for stepping out of line. they’ll later claim that they just “lost it.”
but it’s wholly possible for victims of abuse to slam doors or to break objects out of understandable frustration with the terror to which they’re being subjected. without a reference to the overall dynamics of power in the relationship–whether or not the door was slammed in order to create fear, whether or not the person who broke an object also uses other tactics of manipulation and intimidation, and often whose objects were broken (abusers may claim that they “lose control” of themselves, but they conveniently seem to destroy only things that belong to their partners)–you can’t say that breaking an object = abuse.
& you have to keep in mind the fact that many abusers keep their victims on the defensive by accusing them of using their own manipulative tactics. someone (likely a man) who controls their partner through checking out other people & engaging in affairs may call their partner crazy or jealous or controlling for trying to put a stop to the behaviour–all the while being highly jealous and controlling of their victim, strategically fabricating suspicions about their infidelity in order to take the focus off of their (the abuser’s) behaviour.
or perhaps someone really is jealous–but feelings of jealousy do not automatically equal abuse in the absence of abusive behaviour relating to that jealousy. & you can apply the same concept to things such as crying or showing other signs of emotional upset when confronted with criticism, asking your partner to contribute more around the house, or a great deal of other things that I could name: these could all be manipulation tactics used by an abuser, responses to abuse manifested by victims (which the abusers may then spin around as evidence that they’re the ones being abused), or examples of simple conflicts that arise in nonabusive relationships that can be worked through in a constructive way.
abusers know how to manipulate shallow or inaccurate understandings of how abuse operates to the detriment of their victims, and they benefit from descriptions of abuse that abstract it away from dynamics of power and control. let’s avoid making their jobs easier for them.
The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
Okay.
It took me days to get time together to read this whole thing, but I have finally done it.
This is it. This is the one article you need to read to understand just what is going on in Britain, America, and Russia.
This is the one piece of writing you need and can use to reference the very chilling reality that these countries have been tied together in the machinations of just a few billionaires, and how Facebook and Google tie in insidiouslyi.
I keep telling y’all to stop fucking with facebook but that’s moot now. It’s so much bigger than this.
“Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”“
This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics.
It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population.
Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”
“And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.”
Read this. Read the entire thing. It will take you a while and it’s a lot to digest but you need to know.
Signal boost.
@sunderlorn we’re finally completely united in propaganda, isn’t that nice!?
The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 