3:19pm March 6, 2012

➸ Icky Harry: tide-and-wave replied to your post: Oh look let’s support someone...

harrycryirk:

tide-and-wave replied to your post: Oh look let’s support someone who’s likely trying…

Ugh I saw the post you’re talking about. How do the people reblogging that post know that the person who made that post wasn’t in some way being abusive?

Yeah, I actually went through the person’s tumblr and it sounded like they had been having a rough time psychologically. And I’m just like “you expect someone in crisis mode to respond to your every message when they clearly have bigger things to deal with?” 

or “you found out someone was having a crisis even though they didn’t want you to know, and now you’re hounding them for information?” 

and while the OP might have just been a good friend who’s concerned in which case it’s fine, the people reblogging their post don’t necessarily know that. and posing as a concerned friend/family member is a relatively common thing among abusers from what I know? I’m just really tired of people completely uncritically reblogging things that are meant to ‘help’ with no care for the safety or wishes of the person who’s actually being affected.

If this is tl;dr skip to the bold part at the end.  This is an incredibly serious safety concern for stalking victims. 

Just to confirm the “concerned friend” thing.  Some people who (as a group) were stalking and harassing me, posed as concerned friends. In all cases they exaggerated their actual relationship to me.  One claimed to have lived with me for a long time. In reality she had lived with my family while I was at a residential facility and rarely saw me. Another claimed to have been my boyfriend in college, going so far as to post a photo of us taken by my mother when he visited me in a mental institution, and claiming the photo was actually taken in college.  He had actually had a brief long-distance relationship (if you can even call it that) where nothing really happened and he mostly took advantage of me while seeking out other girls.  (Which is what he did to all his girlfriends.  At least one of whom had to take out a restraining order on him.)

Both of them basically gave this weird distorted account of events where they only used real facts when they could be used to give a false impression of what actually happened.  The funniest part though (for a strange definition of funny) was when they tried to call CNN and tell them I wasn’t actually autistic nor diagnosed while they knew me.

I was able to not only show CNN my medical records showing a diagnosis none of them were aware of (because despite what they claimed, they were not anywhere near close enough to see my medical records).  I also showed them records of my doctor specifically telling my parents to keep me out of contact with these exact people because they were encouraging me to behave in pathological ways. (They were convincing me I had conditions I didn’t have.)  I also had evidence one of them had hosted an autism website for me in the past and that both of them had linked to my autism site without a single word of negative commentary for years.  And that one of them had even had to be told off for stealing my autism-related writing and plagiarizing it all over the Internet.

After all that, and talking to my family, and talking to my doctors, and getting my SSI records (which included them verifying my autism diagnosis from several doctors who knew me as a young teen and reevaluating me independently), and tons of other verification that my “concerned friends” were full of crap (including inventing connections to me that verifiably never existed), they stated on national television that they’d done their research and I am in fact autistic. 

But if it weren’t for stalkers masquerading as concerned friends, and some people believing them, the proof would never have been necessary.  Mind you, these concerned friends acted all concerned and pitying in some contexts but vitriolically attacked me in others and announced that their real intentions were to remove my government benefits and the services that keep me alive.  Which was carefully worded to look like they were attacking a benefit scrounger to other people but look like a death threat to me. 

These people’s actual relation to me?  It’s complicated, but they were basically part of a group of bullies that masqueraded as friends to me and some other socially clueless people at my college.  They saw me as a highly amusing living toy. And their rage towards me was basically that I got away.  Once I got real friends I rapidly noticed the difference and abruptly cut off contact. Which led to years of cyberstalking. They wanted their toy back. 

If you really want more details about what happened – and what can happen to people naive and passive enough to think bullies are friends – I wrote about it more thoroughly in my post Passivity and Naïveté Aren’t Virtues.  Which was inspired by a mother who thought her son was wise because he thought the kids who dumped sand in his head and called him retard were playing a fun game with him. 

But the bottom line is, calling oneself a concerned friend is a favored tactic of stalkers.  One man who stalked me and was obsessive about women in general, posted pictures of me and various women on his website, making it look like he was a friend who lost touch and asking people if they’d seen us.  My father’s cousin almost told him, before my dad told her what games this guy was playing.  I was not the only person he did this to, that had a no-contact notice up on my website.  But without seeing those notices, people really would have thought he was a friend of ours.  

And one thing I noticed about my stalkers in general was that they consistently represented themselves as more connected to me than they were.  Having met me before they did in places they’d demonstrably never even been.  Having had more contact with me, closer and longer relationships.  Having lived with me when they really just lived with other family members.  Having known things about me that they’d never known, including giving out the false locations I claimed to live at instead of the real locations I did.  And of course the biggie – being concerned friends, not creepy-ass bullies who wanted their human plaything back. 

Don’t ever ever give out information to someone who claims to be a concerned friend of someone else, unless the person in question explicitly tells you it’s okay, and you don’t see anything fishy going on.  Doing this could harm someone both physically and emotionally. It could even kill them. Take this seriously.  This is how stalkers operate. 

4 notes