7:35am June 24, 2014

sexxxisbeautiful-selfcareafterrape-for-the

youneedacat:

sexxxisbeautiful:

selfcareafterrape:

For the purpose of this piece, please understand that I am using relationship to mean ‘prolonged human coexistence’ it could be an abusive friendship, an abusive parent, an abusive member of your community.

1. Abusive relationships almost always have honeymoon periods.

Which means some, maybe even a lot, of your memories of said abuser may be good memories.

And you may miss those parts of them.

Missing the ‘good’ parts of them, loving the good parts of them even, does not excuse the bad things they did to you.

It doesn’t make it better, or not as bad, since sometimes you laughed and had fun. It doesn’t change the fact that they were, or still are, abusive.

2. Abusers are, by nature, manipulative.

They’ll gaslight you- make you feel as if you’re the one who abused them. Abusers know that when they make their victims feel as if they’re the ones who did wrong- the person usually feels guilty. And in feeling guilty they usually double up on the ‘If I loved you enough/behaved enough this wouldn’t bother me/you wouldn’t do this’ mantra that a lot of survivors have.

They make you feel like you deserve what they did to you. That they’re the good guys really, in the whole situation. They were punishing you so that you could learn- and thus become a better person.

All of these things are wrong though. It isn’t true. They were not the good guys. But the fact that you sometimes, you have conflicted feelings- because you began to believe them- believe that you deserved those things…. it doesn’t change the terrible reality of what abuse is.

and it doesn’t make what happened to you less significant.

3. Stockholm Syndrome/Traumatic Bonding

Traumatic bonding is “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”

In abuse- especially in those who went through traumatic bonding or suffer from Stockholm syndrome… there is a lot of denial that the bad things are going on.

When going through these things… people cling to whatever small ‘kindness’ that they can find. They often truly care for their abusers, partially in an attempt to make the bad things not as bad, or happen less.

Bonds like that can be hard to break. It is not your fault for struggling.

4. You feel like you owe(d) them.

A lot of abusive relationships start off with abusers doing really nice things. And then calling in ‘debts’. This kind of goes along with the honey moon phase stuff- but not always. This may be more extreme than just a honeymoon phase.

These are people who step in and ‘fix’ situations (some legitimate- some not) in order to call on it later and be like, “well, I mean.. I did do soandso for you.”

Looking back on these events, you may still feel a lot of gratitude. That doesn’t change the rest of what happened.

5. You were made to believe that it was as good as it gets.

This is usually done in a combination. First, they insult you. Try to ruin your concept of self-worth as much as possible. Remind you that no one will ever love you.

and then they step in and say that its okay because they’ll always be there. That no one will ever love you like they loved you.

It can be very hard to change these thoughts. They work very hard to make us believe them. It is not your fault that you are struggling to fix the wreckage they left.

6. You were young.

Children do not always realize that sexual touch is wrong. Especially when abusers tell them that its okay. That its their special secret. That its a prize for good behavior.

You are not at fault for having believed those things- and for occasionally slipping back into that mindset. It is not your fault that felt special as a child, and thus your memories are ‘positive’.

You are not broken.

———

Having positive memories of your abuser, missing parts of what they were to you, even loving them…

does not mean you are wrong. it doesn’t make what they did okay.

You are trying to heal from a terrible thing, and no one can fault you for where you are at on your journey.

Having conflicted feelings does not make you wrong, it just makes you human.

Wow yea I needed to read this tonight. Thank you.

There are other reasons than this, though. All of these presume that there is something wrong with loving your abuser. And that the only way you could love your abuser is because they have done something wrong, possibly through subterfuge, or that there is something wrong with you, like Stockholm syndrome.

The reality is that relationships and human beings are complicated. People like to think of abusive relationships as if abuse is this thing that overshadows everything else about the relationship and renders the entire relationship invalid in some way. But it doesn’t work like that, and I think presenting it like that does a disservice to abuse victims (as well as to perpetrators, but for obvious reasons I care more about the victims here).

The man who molested me is a close relative. I loved him then. I continue to love him now. This is not because something is wrong with me. This is not because of something he did to mess with my mind. This is because he is family and, while I have a perfect right not to love him if I don’t want to, I also have a perfect right to love him.

Mind you, we are not as close as we were before the abuse. And I do not see it as my duty to protect him (although I do avoid naming him, most of the time, I see it as my right to name him and his specific relationship to me as often as I damn well please, because he was the abuser, I was the victim, and it’s not my obligation to protect him from the consequences of his actions.

The molestation, the threats of death, and the other things he did to me? Those things seriously marred our relationship. But they did not erase our relationship entirely. Which is a family relationship. I would be totally justified in saying I never wanted to see or hear from him again. But instead we went through therapy, he was reintegrated into our family life, and we enjoy a somewhat distant but friendly relationship. It’s not what it once was, but it’s not gone either. And I love him. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I was also in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. While I can’t say I love him (I discovered early in the relationship that I didn’t love him, but was afraid to tell him… at least according to my diary), I can say I like him. He was a confused teenager with an angry streak. I was an equally confused teenager who did not make things easy in the relationship myself. I’m not saying I blame myself for what happened, I’m just saying it was a complex situation and I can identify with his position. These days, he has a girlfriend, and I’m a lesbian, so I don’t love him, but we are on friendly terms and enjoy emailing with each other.

A key element in both of those relationships is that the person who abused me, showed the ability to look into their conscience and change their behavior, with or without the help of therapy. This means that I now trust them not to hurt me, and that goes a long way.

My relationship with my parents was also sometimes abusive growing up. Some of that is stuff that was dealt with, through therapy and otherwise. Some of it was never dealt with. But I love them. They’re my parents. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me, or them, for having a loving relationship in spite of its imperfections. They have apologized to me many times over for many of the things they did to me when I was younger. Other things, I’m not totally sure they understand or remember clearly. But either way, I love them, and they love me, and nothing anyone tells me is going to get in the way of that. They tell me now that they simply didn’t know how to handle certain things, so they made mistakes.

People make mistakes.

Abuse can be one of them.

Abusive behavior does not turn a person into a permanent monster called an abuser, who can never be truly loved, and never show any human feeling or sentiment.

Abusive behavior is a bad thing that human beings do to other human beings. All human beings are capable of it to differing degrees. By putting abusive people into a category of their own, synonymous with monster, we make it impossible to actually teach people to watch out for abusive behavior in themselves, recognize it in others, and assess what the situation really warrants.

The reality is that abusive people are people. The vast majority of abusive people are more than just abusers. Much abusive behavior is a matter of degree, with the kind of abusive behavior that requires totally cutting a person off and stopping loving them really depending on the situation. It’s not wrong not to love an abuser. But it’s also not necessarily wrong, or a sign something’s wrong with you or that you’ve been manipulated, if you do love an abuser.

And the whole idea of what “an abuser” is can vary greatly, they aren’t just one type of person, and there isn’t just one type, or degree, of abuse. Everyone can (and does) behave abusively under the wrong circumstances. But even habitual abusers vary a good deal in terms of what type of abuse is going on, how bad it is, what their reasons are, and whether they’ll be able to change, given time and effort.

Some abusers will manipulate you into loving them. But other abusers are going to be people that you love anyway. And if you haven’t been manipulated into loving someone, then it’s your choice whether to continue to love them. And whatever you choose, your choice doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, or bad, or weak, or that you’ve been brainwashed. It means that “abuser” is another word for “person who’s done something very wrong”, which is another word for “person”, which means a person can be loved for all kinds of valid reasons. Including that they are, for real, your friend, or your family, or your significant other.

Whether this means they are worth sticking around with is another story. I broke up with my abusive ex once it became clear to me that what was happening was abuse. I haven’t regretted it. We’re now friends, but we’re never going to date again for a variety of reasons including gender incompatibility. With him and with the man who molested me, I did spend a period of time apart from them before I reconciled with them again, and I needed that time apart to work through the abuse and to see whether they were going to really change. And it’s always fine to love someone and decide that you never want to see them again, ever.

With my parents, there was no time apart, and I had to work through a lot of what happened on my own because the conversations we could have had, were simply too painful. I came to accept what they had done, not as the optimal thing that absolutely ideal parents should have done, but as the best they knew how to do at the time. Absolutely ideal parents don’t exist. Maybe there are parents who would have known not to hurt me in some of the ways my parents hurt me, but those weren’t my parents, and in the end, I feel like they did the best they could with what they knew. They certainly did far better than their own parents did — something my father learned in anger management therapy was that what his own father did to him was abuse. And my mother’s father was a piece of work, so was my father’s mother.

I also know that I have behaved abusively at times, partly in fact because of the culture of abuse victims that I ran across at one point. It taught us that if you are an abuse victim, then anything you do to anyone in the course of a flashback or other response to abuse is okay. This means that I’ve done a lot of shameful things, including finding myself on the floor hitting my best friend over and over, who had done nothing wrong except startle me in the middle of a flashback. This happened many times. This is now what I would call abusive behavior. So is the way I took out my anger on people online sometimes.

And I see this happening all the time in online communities that deal with abuse and oppression: Abuse victims and victims of oppression are taught that if we are responding to abuse or oppression, we can do no wrong. That if we aim our rage and hate at someone, then it is justified, no matter how out of proportion our response is to the situation, no matter whether the person we are aiming it at has done something wrong or not. Often, this escalates into abusive behavior. Which creates quite a conundrum in communities where “abusers” are supposed to be permanently shunned and unloved, rather than treated like real people who have done something wrong.

And certainly, there are people who should be shunned from these communities. But if we shunned everyone who behaved abusively, there would be practically nobody left. In my book, the types of people who should be shunned are people who are deliberately abusive, who get off on it, who enjoy hurting people and use these communities as cover to do exactly that, as much as they want, for as long as they want. Because there’s a difference between an abusive person and a predator. Predators need to be shunned, abusive people need to be dealt with on a case by case basis. And we need to acknowledge that abuse exists on such a continuum that it’s a rare person alive who has never behaved abusively.

So if you love your abuser, there may be nothing wrong at all. It may just be that your abuser is a person, and you love them because they are a friend, or a family member, or a lover, and that’s how people feel about friends, family, and lovers. Or it may be more than that. Certainly examine how you feel. But I spent years in therapy with people trying hard to get me to stop liking my abusive ex, because they thought that I must be “trapped in the cycle of abuse”. And I wasn’t trapped in the cycle of abuse, I was just aware that my ex wasn’t the hardened criminal everyone was treating him as. Certainly make absolutely sure that you’re not falling for any abuser’s tricks to keep you involved when you shouldn’t be. But at the end of the day, you may just love them, and that’s okay too, just as okay as if you were roped into it somehow. Make your own choices.

This reminds us A LOT of one of the things we found most toxic about a lot of abuse recovery communities, and also the abuse recovery aspects of the plural community 12 or 13 years ago. Also, I’m really sorry people are being shitty to you for saying these things. (And my expressive language is not up to snuff tonight, so I’m sorry if this comes out disjointed.)

Basically, there was this binary division of people into survivors and perps (abusers, short for perpetrators). If you pushed them about it, some people would admit “oh, well, some perps were abused too, but that doesn’t excuse them.” But the basic idea seemed to be that perps were people who were scum. Not even worthy of being considered human. That if you had any contact in any way, shape or form with someone who had abused you in the past, even if they had apologized, even if it was a complicated relationship (and not in an “oh, he beats me but it’s my fault because I make him angry, and he always buys me flowers afterwards” way), you had to cut off every bit of it right now for the sake of “recovery,” no matter how bad a situation it would leave you, or them, in.

Many communities pushed you to talk about them in ways that made them sound as bad as possible, emphasizing only their abusive aspects and not a single one of their good aspects. Some people would ask you, almost as soon as you entered a community, “Who was your perp?” They would push you to disclose all the details of all the abuse you ever remembered experiencing, and from whom. They had detailed lists of who their own perps had been. And it really was like once someone had been pushed into “perp” status in their heads, they could not see the person as anything but a complete monster.

There was a very high level of paranoia about “who might be a perp” or whether there “might be perps in our community” in some places. (I can guarantee you that in any community that encourages talking about sexual abuse publically, there is always going to be some sleazy person lurking around finding the details titillating. Hell, some of the worst MPD/DID books are written in this incredibly disturbing and skeevy way that we can only describe as victim porn.) There was an online community called “No More Victims”— a support community for reformed sexual abusers who were really serious about wanting to change and never do it again— and people in some recovery groups talked about how they were convinced it was just a gathering place for abusers to share child pornography in.

You could get singled out in some places if people decided you “talked like a perp” or “sounded like a perp” based on some arbitrary trait, and that you were actually an abuser pretending to be a victim. We knew someone who got accused of this in an IRC chat because their 9-year-old system member didn’t type in lilspeak. If you wouldn’t disclose all the details of your abuse, some people would suspect you of being a perp. Many people didn’t believe the concept of reformed sexual abusers was even possible— that they could never reform, never change, never stop doing it, and even considering the idea that they could was dangerous and threatening, and you were considered automatically suspect if you thought it was possible. People were constantly bickering about who was “safe” and who was “unsafe” within their own communities: if you thought it was possible for even some child molesters to reform, many people would automatically put you on the “unsafe” list.

Also, one of the most toxic effects that can come out of “all abusers are pure evil, period, end of story” thinking is that it can create situations where people or groups of people pressure someone to move out of an abusive situation or even just a complicated relationship, and the “helpers” become abusive *themselves* in the process of “helping,” and gaslight you about the nature of what they’re doing, saying “we just want to get you away from those horrible people.” Or they encourage people to abuse or neglect former abusers “in return” because “that’s all they deserve.”

This stuff isn’t just abstraction for us. We mostly didn’t talk about our abuse online, because we didn’t want people to be able to use it against us. (A lot of people would play abuse one-upmanship games where the more you had been abused, the more valid your feelings were, and if you could claim the title of having been abused more than anyone else in a certain community, in some places, you could practically control it, dictating what could or could not be talked about, or could only be talked about with splats and so on, based on your triggers. And other people would just pull “well, I was abused more than you, so my feelings are more valid” on you when you had a difference of opinion. We didn’t want to get sucked into that game.) But we had a close friend who ran afoul of those “perps are scum, get them all out of your life, there are no grey areas, only black and white” attitudes.

They had a lot of complicated relationships with people in their life, and couldn’t move away from the town where they lived, at the time, due to financial and disability circumstances. And they repeatedly ran into other multiple systems who decided they were in need of therapizing, and would get into friendships with them, and then, over time, begin to lecture, scold and even threaten them about “keeping abusers in your life.”

And these people weren’t necessarily coming from the parts of the community you would expect. All of them had histories of abuse but were very enthusiastic, at one point or another, about wanting to spread the idea that some people would just be multiple anyway, whether they were abused or not, and could be very contemptuous of “fluffy bunnies” and “crying princesses.” But they had all started out in recovery-type communities like Divided Hearts and Sanctuary (a MUD for abuse survivors, structured as a set of chatrooms, that’s been around since 1994), and it seemed like they have never really gotten the “you must get all your perps out of your life no matter what it takes, you must cut off all contact with them completely in order to heal” attitude out of their heads.

The most disturbing thing was how much their techniques resembled, well, *abuse.* One of them repeatedly told our friend that they HAD TO move away from the town where they were living at the time, away from the relatives they had complicated relationships with, and live in a big city with them, or else they would *die.* They would say things like “You’re going to die there! You’re going to die in (town name)!” The way our friend& put it to us was “Because this town was in the Midwest, because it still had something of a rural ambience at the time and hadn’t yet succumbed to urban sprawl, and because it was in the middle of a county consisting mostly of family farms, in their eyes it might as well have been the town in ‘Deliverance.’”

This is a really common recruiting technique used by small-scale cults— we’ve referred a few times, I think, to a person we just call our phony spiritual mentor (because that’s what she was— she set herself up as a spiritual mentor to us, but all she ever gave us was a bunch of New Age crap and misuse of the concepts of reincarnation and karma, and told us we had to kick out everyone in here who wasn’t a past life because they were supposedly energy vampires). Anyway, she told us that we needed to move out of our parents’ house (we wanted to, desperately, but it was financially impossible for us at the time), or we would “spiritually stagnate” and evil spiritual entities would attack us. But we weren’t just supposed to move out of their house— we were specifically supposed to move *in* with her and a few other people she had designated as having had past life connections with her in some kind of group karma thing.

We’ve heard so many variations of this story that we’ve lost count. ”You need to move out, or you’re going to stagnate and rot away there! You’re going to die/commit suicide if you stay where you are! You need to live with me, in wherever it is I’m living!” For our friend&, the system pushing them to drop everything and move to a big city seemed to think that *anyone* who didn’t live in a big city was going to stagnate and rot and die, and had all these phobias/prejudices about rural areas and certain parts of the country. (And again, our friend& were not exactly living in a rural area. It was a mid-sized town with a state university.) They had convinced another system to move in with them by telling them that they (this other system) would end up eventually committing suicide if they stayed where they were. They were also, ironically, phobic of cults in rural areas, when the most cultlike situation was the one they themselves were pushing our friend& to move into.

They had a very cut-and-dried view of the relatives our friend& had complicated relationships with. They did a lot of things for these people that they couldn’t do themselves for disability-related reasons. But according to this system, who hadn’t even met one of the relatives in question, these people could “really” take care of themselves if they wanted to, and were just taking advantage of our friend&. To the one they did meet, they were often rude and unpleasant.

Later on, our friend& ran into two other systems who kept exhorting them to leave everything behind and move in with them, even though it would have required them to immigrate to another country. The “you’re going to die” threats weren’t present there, but they were told, repeatedly and explicitly, that they would never heal from their past abuse if they didn’t get away from the relatives they had complicated relationships with. They occasionally would acknowledge that they had some good qualities, but mostly, it was all about “They are horrible spirit-killing abusers and you must get away from them.” They were told that as long as they remained living with or in contact with those people, they would continue to have an “unhealthy unbalanced worldview” that would never be fixed except by severing all their ties with their relatives. (Where “healthy” and “balanced” seemed to have these weird nebulous meanings that they’d picked up in recovery communities, and the definition could change at the drop of a hat— “If we think it’s okay, it’s healthy and balanced. If we don’t like it, it’s unhealthy, unbalanced and abusive.”)

Our friend& had, in fact, talked in great detail with their relatives about the things they’d done in the past which hurt them, and weren’t holding all of it against them any more. But from what we and they saw, these other systems never seemed to understand that— they always seemed to default back to “once a perp, always a perp” thinking every time our friend& had an argument with one of their relatives and got upset. They practically painted them as cartoon caricatures of evil at some points.

The “leave everything behind” stuff didn’t seem to be just for the sake of convenience, either. It got to seem, eventually, like what they really believed was that our friend& needed to get rid of everything that remained of their old life, move in with them, and start completely fresh, in a place where they would have no choice but to do whatever they were told was necessary for “healing.” They proposed many different plans to “get them out of there,” which often relied on totally unfeasible logistics and encouraging them to not feel any empathy or attachment to their relatives.

And the relatives in question WERE being legitimately screwed over when it came to disability-related stuff. One of them had fibromyalgia, CFS, migraines, and was still considered “not disabled enough to need services” by the county, and had been cut off from financial support by his parents. One of them was repeatedly treated like shit in a hospital because she was elderly and disabled, nearly died several times because of medical negligence, literally had her bed shoved into a closet because there were “too many patients,” and very likely would have died there if not for our friend&’s continual advocacy. And yet when it came down to it, these other systems still couldn’t seem to see how difficult it would have been for them to get help from anyone else, and that our friend& did gets something from their relationships with them— all they could see was “evil abusers you must get away from.”

When one of them passed away, our friend& were told to abandon her home and everything in it and, once again, “come move in with us,” even though the logistics were still unfeasible. Our friend& were told there was no reason for them to keep or feel attached to any of her possessions— even though they themselves had helped our friend& sort through some of her things, and despite seeing her as an evil abuser caricature, they took some of her stuff because they thought it be useful for *them,* including kitchen equipment, clothes, books, and blankets. They took all of her winter blankets, and then when our friend& were unable to pay the heating bills themselves, and ended up having to warm up the house by turning on the oven and leaving the door open, we were the ones who had to send them blankets. Their justification was “Well, we thought you would move in with us by winter. If you haven’t moved yet, I think you don’t really want to get out.” Our friend& were also told to kick the disabled relative who couldn’t get services out of the house and “leave all his stuff on the curb and let him fend for himself,” and that he didn’t deserve any better.

We’re not saying our friend’s relatives were saints. They would be the first to tell you the relatives in question weren’t saints. One of them was pretty bad to us when we visited, in a way I would say was abusive; we saw it firsthand. But we couldn’t get past the fact that they were being told the only way to get themselves into a position where they could heal from their abuse, was to abuse and abandon disabled people whom they were caring for.

And we’re also definitely not saying either that there are NO situations where you absolutely must get out of a situation because it was too abusive and too unsafe. We have another friend who had to leave a living situation because one of the people involved in it had threatened them with violence and said that she didn’t trust herself to not assault them. We’ve had to cut off contact with members of our birth family, or minimize it as much as possible, because every time we opened it up they would just start trying to hurt and manipulate us again. We are DEFINITELY not saying those situations don’t happen and that sometimes getting out isn’t a matter of survival. It’s just that we’re very familiar with the kind of situations you’ve described in your posts too, happening both to us and to friends, where we couldn’t write someone off as pure evil and kick every trace of them out of our life. And it’s really shitty that people write you crap like you got for saying that complicated situations and complicated relationships where “just throw them out of your life” is not the best solution, exist.

-Tamsin