2:45pm November 30, 2013

Social predators, self-examination, and the unwritten rules we go by that can be twisted against us.

So in the first part of the post (I wrote it last week) I had described, at length, things a social predator had done to me in terms of cyberbullying, and how to spot people that you might want to avoid.  It was long.  I’m not including it now.  Maybe I’ll include it later.  But basically one of the biggest things she did, was she would do this thing where she’d tell me she would be triggered if I were to say that I had anything even remotely in common with anything she said about herself.  Not just say it around here, but say it anywhere.  And then she’d systematically do things I was going to do (some of which were really blatantly manipulative) and therefore prevent me from doing them because I was so invested in thinking that she was always right and her demands were always just, because she was an abuse survivor and lots of other things.  She did a lot of other things too, it would take too long to describe them.

Please don’t use the following description to claim I’m somehow unique in the things I admit to doing, in my past, here.  I see people doing things like this all the time, all over the place, on tumblr and elsewhere, especially in communities where a lot of people have been abused.  I’m simply stripping it bare and describing what happens, because these are things that truly horrible abusive people can use against you.  And honestly even though it can hurt to look these patterns in the face, it hurts less than having someone use them and twist them against you.  Trust me.  I’ve been there.  So anyway, here’s that part of the post, under the cut. 

Bottom line, if someone makes you feel really unsafe. And especially if being around a person makes you feel like, coming directly from the person, is a blast of incomprehensible hate aimed straight at you, then be very very wary indeed.  Especially if there’s no surface reason for it, no apparent lack of self-confidence on your part that seems to be the true origin, and they seem to be doing anything but hating you on the surface.

Until you have been targeted by really hateful people, you have no idea the extremes people can go to and how they will use any ordinary information you’ll give them in ordinary conversation.  If someone sets off these alarm signals, don’t tell them anything about yourself.  Even seemingly innocent information can be distorted, twisted, or used alongside other information.  They may already have worked out a bunch of information about you.

It is okay to lie in situations like this, you do not owe a hostile stranger the truth about your life.  It is okay not to answer.  It is okay to walk away.  It is okay to not get entangled in the web of fear they are trying to weave around you.

Those things are okay even if they are oppressed.  Those things are okay no matter how many oppressed groups they belong, or claim to belong, to.  Those things are okay whether you happen to be part of those oppressed groups or not.  Those things are okay whether you happen to be oppressed in the same way they are, but to a lesser extent.  Those things are okay even if they are a current or past abuse victim, or claim to be.  

Those things are okay even if they have, or claim to have, an emotional problem that will trigger them unless you do exactly, exactly what they want you to do.  Those things are okay even – hell, especially – if they have, or claim to have, an emotional problem that will trigger them unless you do (impossible thing) and not doing (impossible thing) means they will be nasty or even abusive to you.

And those things are especially especially especially okay if they are quite obviously deliberately manipulating your personal beliefs about oppression, abuse survivors, or people with emotional problems in order to maneuver you into not running the hell away when they abuse you.

If they are manipulating you in such a fashion, you don’t necessarily have to change those beliefs about oppression, abuse survivors, or people with emotional problems.  You can continue to believe that they are generally true, if you want to (you can believe anything, if you feel it is right or useful or just or whatever).  But you might want to add some kind of clause in there, that social predators will, if they target you (or target someone else and want you to believe the worst of them), manipulate your beliefs about those things, so you have to be on your guard when you’re targeted by obvious hate and not apply your beliefs in the same way to those situations in such a way that you’ll feel guilty about setting boundaries or doing other things for your own other others’ safety.  People who want to hurt you on purpose and are even halfway competent at doing so, will always want to manipulate you based on your beliefs about the world.  It is good to be self-aware about what those beliefs are, so that you can be self-aware about how those beliefs can be manipulated by others.

And from experience, that can be really hard to be self-aware about.  In my case, I had to confront some really painful truths about myself and my own beliefs about such things.

For instance – and I’ve seen this often enough in other abuse victims to know it’s a thing, and not just me.  I know that one of the reasons I’d latched onto the “the victim is always right” belief when I saw others saying it.  Was because I myself had been the victim of abuse.  And I wanted to be always right in certain interpersonal interactions.  I didn’t want to be accountable when I hurt people when I lashed out while triggered.  I wanted to be able to be, when triggered, a ball of pain and rage and fear and not worry about where I landed or what I hit.

And to confront that I even had this belief about the world, I had to confront the fact that I had done harm to others.  I hadn’t meant to.  But I had.  I was self-centered in my pain and in that self-centeredness I did harm without realizing it.  And when I did realize it, I quickly suppressed that realization in order to focus on my hurt and my pain and my fear and my rage and my my my my my me me me me me.  It was intoxicating in a bizarre way.  Because in those moments I could become invincible from the consequences of my actions, I could forget about everything and be immersed in the pain itself and the feeling of it and that was somehow comforting.  If I couldn’t get away from the pain, at least I could soothe myself with the  false comfort of self-pity.  I didn’t notice why I was hurting more and more and not less and less, eventually being engulfed by it.

But while all that me and my pain was going in my head, I was doing things in the real world.  I was saying things that hurt people.  Doing things that hurt people.  Even lashing out in violence and hurting people physically.  I wanted to believe I am the victim I can do no wrong and neglected to realize that the people I was harming weren’t even the perpetrators, I was victimizing other people in my quest to be the victim-who-could-do-no-wrong.

In my case, none of that was conscious.  I was not a predator.  I did not want to hurt anyone.  I did not set out to see how I could hurt people but still get away with it.  i was not consciously manipulative in any way.  My motives were very different than that.  

My motives were to do with myself, not others.  I wanted to feel certain ways, not feel other ways.  I wanted to focus on myself, and my feelings, not focus on what I was doing to others, or how I made them feel.  

When it came to trauma, I wanted to be the main character in my own story.  To focus on the plot and emotions involving my backstory.  How my backstory made me feel.  What it made me think about.  My flashbacks.  My trauma.   My emotional highs and lows as a result.    I didn’t want to look at how I was affecting the other characters, nor did I really want to see either myself or others as full people.  And above all I didn’t want to see, or be responsible for, the damage that I was doing as a result of this self-centeredness.

I did begin to get over this after awhile, by the time I ran into the bully in question.  But even though I’d begun to act more like a caring and decent person, and to truly care what happened to others, and to control my behavior more, and all that other important stuff.   I wasn’t out of control anymore.  I was learning to be a responsible human being.  But I had never fully confronted what I’d been like before.  And I’d never fully confronted the beliefs that got me there.

So when I met her, a part of me still fully believed (even, yes, as my life at that point contradicted parts of this): 

* That an abuse victim is always right, and the victim of the worst abuse and oppression is the most right.

* That if an abuse victim lashes out in response to a trigger, then they can’t be responsible in any way for what happens to others as a result.

* That it is solely the responsibility of everyone around an abuse victim to protect them from any and all triggers.

* That the abuse victim has no responsibility to try and avoid or mitigate triggers, or their responses to them, even if their response to triggers is potentially harmful to others.

* That triggers are entirely beyond a person’s control and so are responses to them and that there is no possible way to learn self-control.

* That if an abuse victim says that something is triggering, then it is absolutely the responsibility of everyone around them to do everything they possibly can not to do that thing, even if it harms the person not to do it.

* That it can never harm a person as much to avoid a trigger as it harms a person to be triggered.  (And it hadn’t even dawned on me in the slightest that sometimes avoiding a trigger for someone else can be triggering to the person doing the avoiding, that would’ve put me into full-scale Star Trek computer paradox-meltdown.)

* That it can never be truly impossible for someone to avoid triggering someone else.

* That it’s almost always easy to avoid triggering someone else, and never that hard.

* That even if semi-conflicting triggers exist, they never really conflict in the end, there’s always some relatively easy solution.

* An abuse victim’s demands never hurt anyone ever.

* An abuse victim is never deliberately hurtful, abusive, or even predatory.  If they do hurt anyone, they didn’t mean to and should be immediately forgiven.

* People never lie about anything surrounding the circumstances of their abuse — that it happened at all, what happened, that it is the reason they are acting the way they are acting today, etc.  People are never mistaken about such things either, for any reason.  You must always believe exactly what the person says about themselves regarding abuse, even if it is “I am behaving like a predator because I was abused in ways you can’t even imagine.  If you could imagine the abuse I went through, if it was anything like the abuse you mere mortals went through, you would never question me again.  Please feel sorry for me and also let me do whatever the hell I want.”

* If an abuse victim was hurting others, I should always immediately leap to their defense no matter what they were doing because they couldn’t possibly mean to.

* The worse the abuse someone went through, the more it justified them doing horrible things.

* If an abuse victim did horrible things, then it must be because they were abused.  There could be no other reason.  They could not just enjoy hurting others.  They could not just be really really selfish.  They certainly could not be social predators who just happened to have also been abused.

In fact, I had learned this set of rules partly from people who were deliberately (rather than unconsciously) exploiting it to their advantage.  It had been so easy to learn partly because it allowed me to get away with things myself.  Not that I wanted to get away with things because I was a predator who wanted to hurt people (unlike one of the main people I learned these rules from).  But because I had a kind of self-centeredness more common among ordinary people who might not want to hurt people but do anyway, all the time.  And many abuse victims learn these rules from each other and are the worse for them.

This is not to say that I think the ideas behind these rules are totally wrong.  I haven’t swung to the complete polar opposite of these ideas.  I just happen to have less rigid ideas now.  Ideas that are more about circumstances than absolutes.  Ideas that take into account that abuse survivors can be selfish in both ordinary and extraordinary ways, can be predators, can lie or be mistaken about anything including abuse, can hurt people by accident while triggered, need to be accountable if we are ever to stop hurting people by accident or on purpose while triggered, and can internalize these rules and hurt people more because we have learned them than before we had learned them.  And all the rest.

Anyway, what pushed me into this realization was an extreme experience.  I’d encountered plenty of other abuse survivors who, like myself, internalized these rules and ended up blundering around hurting a lot of people because of our own self-centeredness.  Some of us eventually learned better, some of us went right on using these rules as an actual excuse not to learn even when presented over and over with situations where they’d really hurt others in big ways.  But now I encountered a predatory person who, whether or not she had been abused, was not blundering at all.  She was deliberately hurting everyone around her and taking joy in both hurting people and in getting away with it.  And she was using these rules to get away with it.  And she was targeting me in a huge way.  On purpose.  With intent to hurt, and wound, and kill.  (Not hyperbole.  She made death threats and tried to rile people up against me and then point would-be murderers at my home address.)

And these rules nearly destroyed me from within.

Because when I hit a wall of “DOES NOT COMPUTE”.  The rules were deeply ingrained in my psyche.  I was not even aware of them, they were ingrained so deep.  They were basic assumptions I made about the world and about right and wrong.  And also my ego was still bound up in them and kept me from seeing them even when I should see them.  All of which meant.  When I hit that wall of “DOES NOT COMPUTE”.  Instead of questioning the rules, I questioned myself.  Everything about myself.

And that was because the rules couldn’t be wrong.  They just couldn’t.  They were part of reality.  They were a part of what kept me from seeing certain things about myself I didn’t want to see.  Therefore, if anything was wrong, I was.  I had to believe her, because she was an abuse victim.  Therefore, since she said that her triggers proved that I was wrong about myself.  Then I was wrong about myself.

I can’t get into everything she did, so just understand that a lot of things happened and she got deep into fucking with my head on purpose.  So she got me to question every memory in my entire life, pretty much.  I ended up calling family members and friends to ask “Did this really happen to me?” “Did that really happen to me?” and they said, yes, yes it did and no matter how many times they said it I couldn’t believe them anymore.  Even though they were witnesses to all these things and there were too many to work with even the most elaborate conspiracy.  The rules couldn’t bend so I had to bend and I bent until I nearly broke.

I questioned my every motivation, my every everything.  Everything except the ones that I needed to be questioning, that was.  Which was why did I need so badly to believe her?

And there were many reasons:  She knew my buttons well and she pushed as many as she could find.  But one of the real reasons was that to question those assumptions about the world would mean I’d have to question more things about myself.  More uncomfortable things than even the ones I was questioning already.

Was it easier to question whether I was obsessed with watching a certain 45 rpm record spin around when I was two years old, and therefore all of my similar memories, and therefore my sanity and all-around authenticity, than it was to question my effect on others when I worked from the same set of rules that she was manipulating for her gain?

I don’t know, still, but I know I suspect, because I know it took me a long time to even look at those rules.  I think to question them too soon would have felt like the world crumbling under me.  But eventually, I suspect, it came to my sanity-for-real or those rules, and the rules eventually gave.  Slowly.  Not all at once.  Not in any way where I coherently realized what was happening.

And I slowly realized how many people I have hurt in my lifetime and excused it with the idea that if I did it during a flashback or a triggered moment it didn’t count.

And slowly I realized even worse things, things I’d never have believed myself capable of.  Accidentally-on-purpose getting triggered.  Not in a way where I sat down and deliberated about it, but not in a way where there was no intent involved.  The intent was just unconscious.  But it was there.  I would be angry and want to have a reason to behave in a raging sort of way, so I’d get myself triggered so I could do it.  

Now that I’ve spotted it in myself I’ve spotted other abuse survivors with anger problems pulling the same shit.  Or using triggers as an excuse to let loose all their rage at the world even when the rage isn’t actually about being triggered.  And it’s all so damn easy to do when you believe that nothing you do after you’re triggered is your responsibility.  Or that other people’s responsibilities to you matter immeasurably more than your responsibilities to them.

There’s a part of abuse survivor culture and a part of SJ culture that both thrive on this.  This is the reason there is so damn much drama in both communities.  There’s a lot of damaged, fragile, broken people who find it easier to point the finger at the world and not themselves, finding ideologies that make it easier for them to do that.  It’s a toxic combination yielding toxic results for them and people around them.  So much of the drama and fissures that occur aren’t because one side has done something terribly wrong and the other sides has been righteously angry and called them on it in devastatingly accurate ways.  But rather because both sides have a lot of fucked up people doing fucked up things and looking at everyone else’s fucked-up-ness but never believing their own is as bad or worse.

AND.

to get back to my main topic.

That’s why social predators pick up these communities, and even communities heavily influenced by them, and thrive there.  THRIVE there.

As long as we are unwilling and unable to question the rules that we use to prop up our own bullshit.

There will be those who use those rules to devastating effect because they meant to devastate as many people as possible and enjoy devastating people.  And that’s horrible and sad and the only way to protect against it is to learn how to spot it and how to deal with it.

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