11:03pm June 10, 2012

Why it is impossible for me to ever trust someone who chooses to remain friends with an abuser.

[tw: abuse, apologism]
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I’ve had the same problem in people remaining friends with a small number of people who were stalking me and had abused me in the past. Not within the context of a relationship (although one of them pretends to have had a long term sexual relationship with me, when I don’t even count whatever we had as a true relationship, it was so fleeting and coerced). But still, a long history of really fucked up abuse, then stalking and harassment after I realized it was abuse and cut off contact. And another stalker who popped up later.

With one of them, what I found was his male friends didn’t even take his abuse, rape, and stalking of women seriously. Even after people got restraining orders. One of them referred to him as “a compulsive liar who’s obsessive about women” in a kind of shrugging “what are you going to do?” sort of way. What I saw was that he would hurt people, often in a criminal way, convince people he’d changed, then do it all over again. He could be very charming and persuasive, and had what a friend of mine described as an “innocent and slightly wistful act”. One reason he hated me was I saw through it.

And I found that he was actually manipulating “mutual friends” into contacting me and trying to get information out of me. I found out because each one told me they contacted me because he mentioned me. Then they would ask identical series of questions and refuse to believe my answers. Then I’d get the creepy hang-up calls several times a day. I had to change my phone number, then immediately one of them tried to tell me it was urgent I contact him right away and only phone would do… yeah, no.

Another time, I found out that someone I’d considered a friend was trying hard to help someone who had repeatedly and blatantly threatened my life, attend my talks. His rationale was she hadn’t tried to kill me yet so everything was okay. (He also took the bizarre position that if someone had habitually abused and harassed people in one place, then every new place they go they should be given a clean slate until they do it again, and only then should they be thrown out.)

After many, many instances like that I realized I had to cut off contact with mutual friends for my own safety. I knew that some were probably not my friends at all. And the rest were in denial about the seriousness of what had happened and was happening to me. They didn’t want to believe it happened or didn’t want to believe it mattered.

I had at first not wanted to put anyone in the position of a forced choice between me and someone else. It seemed unfair. Maybe it is. But what is a thousand times worse is helping someone stalk or abuse or get away with abuse because you don’t want to believe it’s serious. I understand that it was confusing with one of these people because her habitual method of abusing people was to accuse them of stalking and impersonating her, and then to try to get the person as isolated from their community as possible with such accusations, before letting loose on them with a barrage of defamation, abuse, threats of violence or death, harassment, and stalking of her own. But from what people have told me, anyone remotely familiar with how sociopaths operate found her transparently manipulative and me transparently real. So still. Not that hard to tell which was which.

And yeah. In the past, I trusted people who tried to remain their friends. Now I don’t. Because every time I have trusted, I have found my privacy violated and my safety or life in jeopardy. Plus it’s horrible to know that a traumatic, life-altering experience for me that has resulted in long term damage to my mental and physical health and loss of friends and allies, is either denied, laughed about, minimized, or treated as something where everyone knows but nobody cares. That shit is just awful.

I am really sorry that this has happened to other people. I didn’t understand what betrayal meant because I’d never trusted, then I trusted and got this. Now it’s hard for me to even believe new friends are new friends – I almost didn’t meet my most intimate (not in a sexual or romantic wY) friend ever because I met her right as the stalking and accusations of impersonating people was really ramping up. And she was so very uncannily similar to me that I was certain someone must be setting me up again, as had already happened many times before. But she turned out to be real. It’s just hard to know, when you have had so many friends take an abuser’s side.

Notes: