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12:05am December 20, 2013

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

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youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

Hufflepuffs identify with people in crisis a bit too strongly and sometimes don’t have good boundaries about offering support vs taking over.

Also, Hufflepuffs identify too much with the underdog, and can get taken in by someone posing as the underdog.

As in, if a bully…

do you have any idea how to avoid playing into that kind of situation?

No.

Short of knowing really well how to spot a very specific kind of bullying pattern.  But if you don’t have that skill, you can easily make serious mistakes.  Because they will portray innocent things their target does as “part of a bullying pattern” too.  (In fact, in general, they will reflect everything they do back as something you’re supposedly doing to them, and then they’ll probably claim you’re doing the same, just because.)   And yet, “staying out of it” can also contribute to the problem as well.

I never felt so alone as when this was done to me by a really skilled bully.

And yet every time I even try to describe it, I get frustrated.  Because I know everything I say of them is something they were saying of me, and that many outsiders don’t know how to tell the difference.

(Like they said that I “had an amazing way with words and was eloquent and good at manipulating people” and that I was somehow exploiting their own language difficulties.  However, the situation was actually that I appeared more eloquent because of the sentence structures I was using, versus the ones they were using.  But that actually, they were manipulating hidden language problems of my own.  And that while they did not appear eloquent in a traditional way, they were actually excellent at using language to convey pictures of things like disability stereotypes that they then used to make themselves look like the wronged one and me look like a villain.)

I can say one thing.

If someone feels — underneath it all — like a giant ball of hate coming at you, steer clear of them and be very wary of what they say, and of what you tell them about yourself or others.  That’s the one thing — she felt, underneath all words, underneath all everything, between all everything, like this giant ball of hate.  And she felt that way even when she seemed to be doing things that were innocent, kindly, or cheerful.  It was like being blasted with pure hate.  That was a warning I should’ve heeded, but didn’t. People who blast pure hate are likely to do harm, on purpose.

But usually real-life situations are not easy.  :-/

I think part of the way to have a defense against this is to be *really* careful about secrets.

If someone wants to keep the fact that they ever talk to you a secret, that’s a major, major red flag for this kind of thing.

If someone wants to keep relatively trivial things secret, that can also be a red flag. Like if they lose their shit because you mentioned offhand that their iPad is the 64gb model, or that you’ve met their cat. (Absent some legitimate reason for that to be a secret).

Extreme demands of secrecy are usually part of a strategy to cut you off from everyone else.

Although actually part of what happened to me during that time made me very secretive in an almost paranoid way.  Because she was using even innocent details of my life against me, and I didn’t want things getting back to her.

One thing she did do, that should be a massive red flag, though:

She used triggers as a means of manipulating people.

She didn’t say the word triggers, but she meant it.

She basically said she was triggered any time anyone mentioned that they had anything even vaguely in common with what she had said about herself.  Then she systematically “mentioned things about herself” that were topics I was likely to talk about, in my own life.  In order to manipulate me into never talking about those things again.  It got so I felt boxed into a corner.  But what could I do, because she was triggered, and triggers mean you always have to avoid doing what triggers someone, right?

That’s when I started to learn that my “the person claiming the most abuse/emotional problems/etc. is always right” ideas were drastically wrong and dangerous both to me and others.  And that I needed to just get away, that I should never have agreed to those terms of conversation to begin with.

And that’s the thing, she set impossible terms in order to have conversations with her, and then blew up if you couldn’t abide by them.  And she did a lot of that on purpose.

Like one thing she did that made me realize she was not on the level:

She found out from me some perfectly innocent facts:  I was getting a new communication device that summer.  At the time, I buzz-cut my hair every year in the spring and summer as the weather got hotter.  Things like that.

Then she made a video of herself called “New For Spring”.  She showed that she had buzz-cut her hair because the weather was getting hotter, and that she had gotten a new communication device.  Then, she said, “I wonder how long until Amanda copies this about me, too.”

Which was basically setting me up to have “copied her on purpose and triggered her again” when I began to do what she knew I was already going to do at that time of year, and at that point I knew beyond any doubt (as I should’ve known before) that she wasn’t on the level, that this was manipulation, not innocence.

She did similar things to other people I knew, deliberately setting them up to look as if they were hurting her somehow, when she was using seemingly innocent knowledge about them in order to make it look like they were hurting her.

That’s when I started becoming ridiculously secretive, because I was afraid she would use more innocent information about me. But I eventually realized I couldn’t live with that level of secrecy all the time.

So I do understand why some people would be really secretive.  But yes, she did things that were similar to the things you describe, and I can’t explain how they’re similar, other than to say they’re similar in spirit even if I can’t explain it.

Yes. The secrecy thing is hard to talk about, for exactly that reason.

It’s also a major red flag if people are constantly triggered by stuff you do *and think that’s your fault*, and tell you you’re an awful person for triggering them, but still want tons of time and attention from you.

And it’s also a major red flag if someone is basically very deliberately making use of the idea that they are ‘more oppressed than thou’ in any number of situations, to make it seem as if they are always right no matter what horrible things they are actually doing.  That’s a super-dangerous one especially in places where 'oppressed people are more right about everything’ is an accepted social norm.  People like that walk all over everyone in places like that.