9:04pm December 1, 2013

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

youneedacat:

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.

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I think there’s also a thing where people think they *have* to be triggered or enraged or otherwise in an extreme state of mind in order to say that something is not ok. In order to say that something is wrong and that you’re not going to tolerate it. Or even that you don’t like a thing.

For some people… the right to say no is something you can only earn by being triggered,

And that leads to massive clusterfucks of drama too.

Yes it does.

Also, going “out of control” like that can be weirdly exhilarating sometimes, for some people. Especially when you already have intense emotions about things. It can feel like “letting go” and saying everything you always wanted to say, kind of cathartic. And that doesn’t help either.

Both of the things I just mentioned can lead to the accidentally-on-purpose getting triggered thing.

And just for fun, many of these motivations are buried where you can’t see them until you look closely, and the whole point of everything is not to look closely at all.

Notes: