as small as a world and as large as alone, lichgem: forthegothicheroine: ...

2:40pm June 27, 2014

lichgem:

forthegothicheroine:

cousinbarnabas:

Like that Edward jerk from TWILIGHT, to name just one.

“Not all vampires”

This looks like a page from La Vey’s Satanic bible.

To respond to the hashtags someone put:
“#this shit sounds creepy#like yes there are emotionally draining people in the world#but not everyone who needs help and support is one of them#lots of Satanists are really into becoming ‘perfect human beings’#part of which means to them being victim blaming and ableist and crappy”
I’ve seen this problem too. Basically, a lot of people don’t distinguish between:
Emotional/spiritual vampires
Sick and disabled people who happen to perk up when you spend time and energy interacting with them.
People who are exhausting to be around.
When I was a teenager – and very psychiatrically unstable and emotionally needy, but nowhere near vampiric – I had a self-proclaimed emotional vampire tell me that I was an emotional vampire too, and offered to let me “feed off of her” because she knew I “needed it”. She defined “feeding off of her” as spending time with her and talking to her. I… avoided the crap out of her, to be honest. I found the whole idea creepy, and her ideas about me insulting, plus if she really was an emotional vampire I did not need to be drained any more than I was already being drained by life in general.
On the other hand, I do believe that energy vampirism is a real thing. A person gets a high-like rush off of feeding off your energy, and then craves that rush. Meanwhile, if you’ve been fed off of, you know it. At least, if you know what you’re looking at, you know it. It’s not just being tired after spending a lot of emotional energy on someone – it’s not even the kind of exhausted you get after spending way too much emotional energy on someone who maybe you shouldn’t have done that with. It’s several orders of magnitude worse.
The last time I ran into an energy vampire, it went something like this: She would come into my room exhausted and desperate to have any contact or conversation with me, especially if she could get as close as she could to me and talk to me and touch me and all this stuff. And then she would interact with me for fifteen minutes or so, looking more and more blissful and perky the whole time, and then leave me so drained that at one point I slept for three days straight, and my energy felt, for lack of a better word, completely wonky afterwards for a week. She did this to everyone she encountered, and seemed to especially target disabled people and our staff, which was weird (and highly dangerous because a lot of us did not have the energy to spare, and some people got really sick).
I’m not sure everyone who is an energy vampire knows they’re an energy vampire, though. The person above experienced the “high” of feeding off of people as “love”, and insisted that she “loved” you, right as she was sucking you dry. I also don’t think most people would do energy vampirism if they knew what it was actually doing. Not necessarily because of the ethical impact on others, but because of the spiritual impact on themselves. But that’s a whole nother topic.
But basically… I think that there is a real thing behind the concept of energy vampirism. I’ve experienced being on the wrong end of it more than once and it’s… real, it just is. However, most writing I’ve found on energy vampirism contains a lot of highly ableist ideas, including that when disabled people need other people’s time and energy more than usual, then that’s the same as being an energy vampire. And it’s not. Not that disabled people can’t also be energy vampires, but… yeah. Simply being sick, difficult or exhausting to deal with, etc., is not the same thing, at all, whatsoever. And I see the idea of energy vampirism being used against disabled people or difficult people more often than I see it being used accurately for people who are like actually taking energy from other people and getting high off it (or using it for magickal purposes) basically.
But if you do ever run into someone. Where every time they spend even a little bit of time with you, you end up sleeping for days, feeling completely washed out, getting sick, and not feeling yourself at all? (When that’s not just your normal response to being around people – this would be like so much worse than normal that you’d notice big time.) Be really really careful, at minimum. And try to limit their connection with you, don’t take presents or favors from them or anything that could come with 'strings attached’, don’t let them touch you, etc. Even if you don’t believe in energy or vampirism or anything like that, the dynamic going on there is going to be still so bad that you don’t want any part of it, trust me. Don’t let them know you know what’s going on, just get out of the situation.

forthegothicheroine:

cousinbarnabas:

Like that Edward jerk from TWILIGHT, to name just one.

“Not all vampires”

This looks like a page from La Vey’s Satanic bible.

To respond to the hashtags someone put:

“#this shit sounds creepy#like yes there are emotionally draining people in the world#but not everyone who needs help and support is one of them#lots of Satanists are really into becoming ‘perfect human beings’#part of which means to them being victim blaming and ableist and crappy”

I’ve seen this problem too. Basically, a lot of people don’t distinguish between:

Emotional/spiritual vampires
Sick and disabled people who happen to perk up when you spend time and energy interacting with them.
People who are exhausting to be around.

When I was a teenager – and very psychiatrically unstable and emotionally needy, but nowhere near vampiric – I had a self-proclaimed emotional vampire tell me that I was an emotional vampire too, and offered to let me “feed off of her” because she knew I “needed it”. She defined “feeding off of her” as spending time with her and talking to her. I… avoided the crap out of her, to be honest. I found the whole idea creepy, and her ideas about me insulting, plus if she really was an emotional vampire I did not need to be drained any more than I was already being drained by life in general.

On the other hand, I do believe that energy vampirism is a real thing. A person gets a high-like rush off of feeding off your energy, and then craves that rush. Meanwhile, if you’ve been fed off of, you know it. At least, if you know what you’re looking at, you know it. It’s not just being tired after spending a lot of emotional energy on someone – it’s not even the kind of exhausted you get after spending way too much emotional energy on someone who maybe you shouldn’t have done that with. It’s several orders of magnitude worse.

The last time I ran into an energy vampire, it went something like this: She would come into my room exhausted and desperate to have any contact or conversation with me, especially if she could get as close as she could to me and talk to me and touch me and all this stuff. And then she would interact with me for fifteen minutes or so, looking more and more blissful and perky the whole time, and then leave me so drained that at one point I slept for three days straight, and my energy felt, for lack of a better word, completely wonky afterwards for a week. She did this to everyone she encountered, and seemed to especially target disabled people and our staff, which was weird (and highly dangerous because a lot of us did not have the energy to spare, and some people got really sick).

I’m not sure everyone who is an energy vampire knows they’re an energy vampire, though. The person above experienced the “high” of feeding off of people as “love”, and insisted that she “loved” you, right as she was sucking you dry. I also don’t think most people would do energy vampirism if they knew what it was actually doing. Not necessarily because of the ethical impact on others, but because of the spiritual impact on themselves. But that’s a whole nother topic.

But basically… I think that there is a real thing behind the concept of energy vampirism. I’ve experienced being on the wrong end of it more than once and it’s… real, it just is. However, most writing I’ve found on energy vampirism contains a lot of highly ableist ideas, including that when disabled people need other people’s time and energy more than usual, then that’s the same as being an energy vampire. And it’s not. Not that disabled people can’t also be energy vampires, but… yeah. Simply being sick, difficult or exhausting to deal with, etc., is not the same thing, at all, whatsoever. And I see the idea of energy vampirism being used against disabled people or difficult people more often than I see it being used accurately for people who are like actually taking energy from other people and getting high off it (or using it for magickal purposes) basically.

But if you do ever run into someone. Where every time they spend even a little bit of time with you, you end up sleeping for days, feeling completely washed out, getting sick, and not feeling yourself at all? (When that’s not just your normal response to being around people – this would be like so much worse than normal that you’d notice big time.) Be really really careful, at minimum. And try to limit their connection with you, don’t take presents or favors from them or anything that could come with 'strings attached’, don’t let them touch you, etc. Even if you don’t believe in energy or vampirism or anything like that, the dynamic going on there is going to be still so bad that you don’t want any part of it, trust me. Don’t let them know you know what’s going on, just get out of the situation.