Things To Say To Abusers To Block Their Attacks/lies/gaslighting/manipulation

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

One of the cool things about getting older that would have seemed bad to my younger self is you know that feeling when you meet someone and you immediately click and are just on the same wavelength… the first time that happens when you’re in like grade school it’s like soo crazy and the first time you date someone like that it’s like whoa okay. But the more you move around and travel and play and explore in life these people will keep popping up. You’ll feel comfortable around them like you’ve known them forever but it won’t be like this desperate once in a lifetime feeling you need to hold onto because you’re like cool it’s happening again. I always heard it was harder to form new connections when you’re older but for me it’s continually gotten easier bc I know myself, respect my own time and naturally gravitate towards ppl who energize me

So, inspired by being treated like dipshit garbage at my job, I would like to make a recommendation:

When you are having a bad time, especially when you are having that bad time because someone was a real fucking shit head at you, go to a store. You can retail therapy if that is useful and not like a slippery slope or something for you, whatever, I'm not your mom, but the critical thing I want to suggest in these situations is to just be very kind to a few people.

Of course you should always be nice to people working in retail environments, because they are frequently being absolutely worked within an inch of their life for not enough money, but here I mean things like:

Tell the folks in the small store at the mall that their store looks really nice and you can tell they work hard to maintain it.

Fill out the little surveys you get on receipts or whatever and be sure to mention especially how good the staff of the store you were in were. People who are mentioned specifically in feedback like this often get at least praise and like a $5 gift card from upper management. It is not a lot, but it can feel nice!

Tell the barista stuck at the coffee shop that their hair looks awesome.

Say the same thing to your fellow lost souls of humanity in Walmart. No one is in Walmart because they are having the best time.

Tell someone her leggings are really cute.

Tell your cashier that you hope that the rest of his shift goes quickly and painlessly!

Thank people, but do it specifically and sincerely. Tell them not just thank you but, "Thanks for your help, I really appreciate your time." "Thanks for the work you put into this." "Thank you for getting that for me, that was really nice of you." That sort of thing. People are used to 'thank you" as a ritual phrase that is just kind of a default. It can stop sounding sincere or like anything except the sounds you expect to hear after you do a task. But if you recognize what somebody did, even if it is a small thing, and personalize it, they will actually hear the thanks, they will remember it.

I often do this on my instacart feedback. I say "Thank you for your hard work/effort/service today, you really helped me out," in all my little comment boxes. Because they really do help me out. I can't carry all my groceries up the stairs, so they do a lot for me.

Don't lie or be insincere, just think a little bit about all the people who could just use a little extra positive feelings from other folks to get through the day, just like you. People like knowing that the work they're doing is not mindless bullshit.

All of these interactions make people feel nice about themselves and then they feel nice about you and then you feel nice about yourself and then your manager who is a dick can fuck off because not only did you get over their poisonous bullshit but you help some other people out of theirs too.

It will help you toward feeling better after people being nasty to you when you see surprised and delighted reactions from other people who didn't expect to be told that they were doing a good job or that their hair looks nice.

It's like a ranged attack of serotonin and dopamine and you can hit just like everybody within range of the checkout line, yourself included.

The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.

not speaking from experience, but you should address and communicate when u feel unheard or betrayed in ur relationships instead of becoming contemptuous and using that contempt to annihilate any connection u had with them like some kind of nuclear core meltdown powered by trauma instead of uranium.

next specialist to refuse testing or blame my maladies on my anxiety or weight despite me asking (begging, at this point) for further testing/a differential diagnosis is getting hit with the "document your refusal in my chart." no i am not "taking it one step at a time" no i am not accepting "you're just anxious" or "you're just overweight" as an answer. you are going to be a FUCKING DOCTOR and treat me. fuck you.

this is ok to reblog btw, i Encourage people in similar situations to express their anger. you deserve better we all fucking deserve better. no more being afraid of making them upset or angry. THEY make us suffer and want to die with their negligence. whatever discomfort we bring them by demanding documentation doesnt mean SHIT compared to what we go through.

rise up my disabled siblings, we have nothing to lose but a shitty fucking doctor.

in order to lead a happy life im gonna have to disappoint my parents a bit

Intrafamilial Parent/Child SA

An informational post on what it is, and advice on how to leave

CW: Incest, paedophilia, childhood sexual abuse, rape, manipulation, gaslighting,

Being a parental incest survivor is incredibly isolating, so I wrote this.

I wrote this with the intention that people currently experiencing this abuse will be able to read it. I took pains to keep the material factual to the ways we are/were manipulated and controlled. I don't discuss specific acts of sexual abuse because these are immaterial to this discussion and individual to the survivor.

Intrafamilial Sexual Assault is the most common form of CSA, Parents are the most common perpetrators of intrafamilial sexual abuse and also the most common perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse, and the next most common being an older sibling. Discretion advised in reading linked criminology paper.

Educational material below the cut.... Please reblog, lack of discussion/knowledge is both isolating and dangerous.

I can't believe I have to say this but I didn't write this for your fandom discourse, I'm not interested in being involved

Parental Incest is an unsettlingly common form of child abuse

Cases of parental incest are far more common than people generally believe. At least 15% of people have experienced a sexual contact of some kind by a parent during their life time, with a significant portion of us being subjected to sexual penetration or attempted penetration. This isn't something you need to feel isolated in as a survivor, don't be silent.

Tell People! Don't keep secrets... But make sure you prepared your safe exit.

Preferably the person you disclose to first is someone who is not connected to your parent/abuser, and is also a person who can help you to leave the abusive situation permanently. If you are a minor you can also make contact with child services (which I encourage if you are below the legal age of independence or there are other children in the house).

Abusers groom their character witnesses as deeply as they groom you. Whatever chips in the wall led you to question your parent/abuser, the people close to them haven't experienced and they have likely groomed the people around you to see you as a "story teller", "attention seeking", or "trouble".

You are likely to be accused of many things, and called many unpleasant names by members of your family and people close to you that you expected to treat you better or protect you, it will hurt.... But you are likely not the only person your parent/abuser has hurt/is hurting.

The reason for telling a person outside of your abusers influence first is that they can reassure you that you are right to act against your abuser if the people you love try to convince you that you're doing the wrong thing.

Why do survivors of parental incest feel obligated to protect our abusers?

Adult perpetrators of Incest act with predictable and repeated behaviours to instill a sense of complicity in their victims/children.

Introducing sexual ideas and behaviours through play.

"Love bombing" making the child feel especially important above other relationships in the parents life.

The parent makes great pains to reinforce to the child how "mature" and "trustworthy" they are.

The parent initiates sexual behaviours, typically followed by emotional reinforcement and statements of the child's responsibility for secrecy.

The narrative of the story is often changed to say that the child initiated the sexual relationship, "you were precocious" or "this was never meant to happen, but I'm glad it did".

If the child questions the relationship the parent explains it away, saying that the world doesn't understand relationships like theirs.

The experience doesn't need to match exactly, but it is likely to follow this closely.

We also feel conflict because beyond the grooming, the experience is paradoxical. You still experience sexual responses, arousal, pleasure and orgasm being subjected to intrafamilial sexual assault. It's traumatic and deeply confusing all on its own.

Abuse usually continues into adulthood.

The continuing abuse isn't necessarily sexual, though it often is, exiting any association with the parent/abuser is important because Incest is a particularly insidious vector of control.

The parent/abuser can leverage both the years of grooming, and also the embarrassment of an adult victim with their associated anxiety (with their generally undiagnosed c-PTSD) to exert control over the survivor/victim. Maintaining their silence, subservience and obedience. Allowing the parent/abuser to extract labour, financial support, and near anything else.

There are no excuses anybody can give for protecting your abuser!!!

There are no excuses, and you should not give any credence to anybody's argument in defence of them... You should not protect them but also you are not required to pursue prosecution of your parent/abuser. We survivors often struggle with significant trauma and have limited support networks. Your safety is paramount and always comes first.

When confronted perpetrators and those close to them will often obfuscate the abuses and their severity.

"it was a lapse in judgement", "I made a mistake", "it won't happen again"...

Or reasons why they can't be reported, such as they are too important to the family's finances, or if they go to prison they will be in danger....

Keep records, if you can do so safely.

This is the hardest part of it all.

If you have records (text messages, emails, letters, photos) keep them. You may not want to pursue prosecution now, but you may one day.

If you have soiled fabrics, put them in a PAPER bag somewhere dry and later seal them in zip lock bags with those silica gel packets if you can. DRY IS GOOD.

If you have not yet been able to leave your situation, diarise events (date/time, brief description). If it is safe to do so.

This will aid any future legal proceedings... Whether you are seeking prosecution or not.

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(Note: statistically intrafamilial sexual abusers are exclusively intrafamilial abusers, and generally do not have an inclination to abuse children that share no familial ties and may not clinically be paedophiles despite engaging in sexual abuse of children).

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This post does not discuss sibling incest perpetrators and survivors for these reasons.

Primarily my reason is that Intrafamilial Sexual Assault by a Sibling isn't within my experience

My second reason is that perpetrators behave differently at different ages and if I am going to write about Intrafamilial Sexual Assault by Siblings I will dedicate a post to it.

Third, parents are more common as perpetrators than siblings, while siblings are more likely to be prosecuted and less likely to successfully appeal (despite the overall rate of prosecution being low across the board) discussion bridging the two would need to address the failures in justice and the complexity of this is beyond the scope of this post.

On Voting in America

So one of the most profound comments on routine chores that I've ever encountered was, hilariously, the Pickle Rick episode of "Rick & Morty," where (after a lot of shenanigans have already ensued) this therapist absolutely lays Rick out:

"I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is: it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

I think about this at least once a week — usually while I'm doing my laundry or sweeping or some other task that needs doing and won't get me anything more than clean clothing or a dog-hair-free floor. There's no Pulitzer for wiping down your microwave or scrubbing your toilet; no one's awarding you for getting all the dishes out of the sink. At best you have the satisfaction of crossing it off your list.

Voting is very much the same (and I'm talking about the US here, as an American). Sure, you sometimes get a sticker; but nobody's going to cheer for you. There's no adventure here, no potential for anything more than crossing something off of a list. It's a chore, something that needs doing in order to repair, maintain, and yes even clean. So I get why people don't like doing it.

And I've decided I don't give a shit.

Do it anyway. Your country takes astonishingly little from you — taxes, the once-in-a-blue-moon jury duty, and a theoretical draft that hasn't been used in over half a century and likely will never be again — but it asks you (asks! not requires! not demands!) to vote once a year. It's not always easy; especially in conservative states, the impediments to vote can be ridiculous. But it is once a year and unlike in our nation's all-too-recent past, you will not die if you do it.

In fact, the worst outcome from voting these days is that the person or issue that you vote for loses — but you won't know if they lose until after the election. Polls are less accurate now, for a whole host of reasons; you cannot know until after the election who or what will win. This makes your vote more valuable than possibly ever before.

Use that power. Not because it's exciting or even rewarding, but because your vote is what keeps our country's metaphorical teeth from falling out and our metaphorical ass from stinking.

Brush, wipe, vote.

Abusers are generally great at something called “manufacturing insecurity”. It means, even if you’ve never been insecure about something, abuser will create an insecurity about it, solely for the purpose of emotionally manipulating you. Meaning, when you’re not doing, saying, or thinking what they want, they have a go at your “insecurity”, triggering your pain, fear, guilt, shame, everything they taught you to feel, as a way to teach you that this pain is what you’re going to get if you fail to obey them.

It’s not exactly hard to manufacture an insecurity (provided you are cruel and vicious), all you have to do is take a social norm and convince a person they aren’t good enough in one or all departments. You convince a person they’re too loud, too fat, too ugly, slow, naive, gullible, stupid, lazy, selfish, sexual, provocative, demanding, and that this is the reason why they will always fail, it’s a reason why they keep getting hurt, it’s a reason why nobody will ever love or care for them. It’s utterly cruel, and an absolute lie. Deviating from the “norm” in any way is not a reason of any of those things, if you’re getting hurt it’s because people are hurting you, if you’re unloved it’s because people around you refuse to show affection and care. These things cannot be the individual’s fault, it’s always the environment setting person up for pain. And abusers already know this. But they make a step to convince a victim it’s all their fault, everything others do to them, their fault. And even worse, that they deserved being hurt.

This kind of nonsense blaming everything on unrelated trait of individual can lead to a person getting terrified they could have somehow caused horrible things just by being themselves, that it’s impossible to even predict what might happen to them just because they’re “this way” or another. It creates an atmosphere of panic and confusion, and they find themselves seeing no way forward but to accept guidance from abuser. Abuser then pretends to know what victim is to do in order to avoid pain and failure - of course, only up to the point when abuser decides to inflict pain on purpose, to control and manipulate.

You’re not stupid if you fall for this kind of trap, it’s designed to work on people who are self-aware, who work on getting themselves better, who are trying their hardest. You don’t even have to lack confidence, abusers will take a confident person and eat their confidence away. And once caught in this situation, it might be hard to believe that someone would stoop that that kind of cruelty and lie to you while knowing perfectly well that you are good, that there’s no reason on earth to criticize your traits, that you have nothing to be ashamed of. That you haven’t deserved any of it.