#Social Abuse

[furiousgoldfish]

How abuse affects your friendships and relationships

Friendships/relationships

Abusive childhood teaches you to stay in abusive relationships

Children of abusive parents are more likely to tolerate abusive friends

Abuse will make toxic friendship feels normal.

Abusive parents teach us to chase people whose love we think we can 'earn' or obtain by removing boundaries and suffering more abuse.

Abuse can trick you into believing you have to love people unconditionally even if they abuse you.

Abusive parents fails to teach you the signs of an abusive relationship.

Abuse makes us scrutinize our own actions and behaviours, but never others'.

Abuse will make you completely disregard subtle red flags in friendships.

Long term neglect can make us long for any kind of attention

Neglect makes us extra vulnerable to Love Bombing and Mirroring

Abuse makes us vulnerable to Future Faking.

Abuse makes us tolerate more pain than anyone normally would tolerate in a friendship/relationship.

Abuse can teach us that neglect, lack of positive attention and engagement, lack of consideration for our needs and wants, is normal and acceptable in our friendships and relationships, leading us to tolerate it.

Living in abuse and using fantasy and idealism to endure the reality, will encourage the development of Magical Thinking in adulthood.

Abuse makes us emotionally vulnerable to grooming, and likely to bond with groomers.

Abuse makes it impossible to notice the signs of an abusive relationship.

Abuse can groom you to accept and tolerate abuse from others.

Sense of self

Neglect causes low self esteem.

Abuse greatly amplifies the human fear of being unlovable, unwanted and dying alone.

Being raised in abuse can make you feel like you're 'not normal' and make it difficult to relate to people.

Abuse can make you feel like you're a constant inconvenience and always left out.

Abuse forces you to keep secrets that alienate you from friendships or feeling like a part of community

Abuse in isolation makes us feel like the world abandoned us.  

Attachment disorders

Abuse can lead to intense, over-attached, idealized, unstable, disorganized, or detached and fragile attachments as opposed to stable and healthy ones with boundaries and realistic expectations.

Neglect can cause abandonment issues, which then cause intense stress, anxiety, insecurity, and overall traumatic response to a break of a friendship/relationship

Neglect can cause craving of being ‘taken care of’ or ‘being the caretaker’ rather than pursuing equal and completely mutual relationships

Abuse can lead you to bond intensely with a 'favourite person' which puts you into a position where you can easily be groomed or exploited, and unable to get out of it.

Abuse leads into idealizing people who show us even the minimum of kindness.

Abuse can make us crave ‘feeling important’ even from abusers

Parentification

Parentification teaches you to take care of other people as a Survival Strategy

Abusive parents can set you up to live as a resource to others

Abuse teaches you to keep your pain secret while tearing yourself apart to care for other's pain.

Socializing

Abuse starves us out of conversation, touch, gentleness, community, and it can be painful to introduce ourselves (back) to it.

Abuse makes casual socializing anxiety-inducing and frightening.

Social abuse can invoke social anxiety.

Abuse can make attention feel dangerous.

Abusive parents can sabotage you socially, making your real entrance into social life only after you get away from them, and by that time you've missed out on valuable development of social skills and you're starting with a disadvantage

Suffering the pain of abuse alone can make you feel like isolating yourself and being away from people is the only safe way to exist.

Suffering long-term abuse can make you intensely doubt people's intentions (and sometimes you might be right).

Abuse can make any criticism in a social situation extremely painful and triggering for us

Abuse can create strict double standards for how we're allowed to live and feel, and what others are allowed.

Intimacy and closeness will trigger emotional flashbacks, painful memories and personal crisis, making you unwilling to try and be close to people.

Long term abuse makes it painful for us to receive or accept comfort.

Abuse can make us feel indebted for comfort.

Abuse makes us feel like we're craving abuse when we're only craving comfort

Abuse makes us look for positive attention in non-effective or dangerous ways.

Abuse can make you blame yourself for any social interaction that hurts you.

Abuse makes us dismiss our own discomfort with others.

[daughterofanarcissistwoman]

The sad thing about smear campaigns is that they work. You notice people start to treat you differently.. that they all seem to be repeating the same judgments/criticisms of you.. and you realize they’re connected to the narcissist, and it is truly hurtful. This is the intention. There’s no point in trying to fight the lies. Just move on and let them judge who they think you are…

[creature-wizard]

Okay, serious post time, y'all.

Multiple times I have encountered people who told me that some so-and-so was posting the most horrible content, doing the most awful things, or just whatever. And then when I actually looked? The very thing they claimed was happening, simply was not happening.

More of you need to get better at not doing this shit. You need to watch yourself and ask whether you're doing a paranoid reading. You need to slow down and read that post a few times to make sure it said what you thought it said.

When you go around accusing people of things they aren't actually doing, you are doing harm. You are damaging their reputations (and possibly the reputations of their community) in a way that's totally undeserved. You are behaving in a way that can cause serious trauma, both for people you're talking about and for any bystanders nearby. You are engaging in abusive behavior.

So for real, knock this shit off.

[noxthesleepymoodyoverthinker]

Cinderella is not the story of a naive girl who “let” her step-family push her around and then went and married a man after one dance and get “saved”. It is the story of an orphaned, grief-stricken child who, immediately after losing her father, was manipulated and used by her stepmother, and abused by the only family she had left. 

Despite that, she became self-sufficient, made herself useful to her step-family so they didn’t throw her out of the only home she’d ever known, and yet, didn’t let the constant bullying take away her hope or make her bitter and resentful.

She just wanted to go to a ball like a normal girl of her station. She just wanted to dress up pretty and go to a party. She wasn’t looking for a prince, she just wanted one night of fun where she could have it.

The fact that she married the prince and escaped her family was the happy ending, but it wasn’t the only point of the story. Besides, if marriage is not what defines a woman, why should her marrying the prince define or pull down her strength?

Cinderella is far from a poor role model. (None of the Disney princesses are poor role models or weak characters, IMHO.) But Cinderella especially so.

Ask anyone who can actually relate to Cinderella -- someone who lived while experiencing any kind of abuse or neglect but could not leave -- and none of them would see her as a weak character or role model.

[spvrkvoid]

like shit that frightens me so much is when i do keep in mind that i'm very different from average ppl in the way i think n behave and still hope that they'll be okay about this. i can't be that bad anyway. but nah, no. somebody will find me ridiculous & horribly wrong and won't be able to tolerate me. and will for sure ruin my reputation so no one will want try to befrend me. i know that everyone cause the wft reaction sometimes but i hate how frequiently this happens to me. idk how's that. like. i don't deserve this. i can't. why are the normies so mean?

And the funniest part of it is that I was normal when I was little. Now I can't go back and it feels like I'm cursed forever.

The generation gap between me and ppl of my own age

[inkskinned]

having good & true friends will literally save and protect you in a million unfathomable ways. like okay we have written so many times about lovers. but the way a platonic friend laughs and cries with you. the way they hold your hand at 14 years old and at 34. the way they keep a little silver tie to you, touching base over and over and over. how you can go years without talking, only to re-meet and discover: oh shit! you're still cool!

there are people who have been in my life for more than half of it, and i have loved every version of them. do you know how fucking beautiful that is. yeah love will save the world. but the way friends love you is gonna save the you.

[spyroz]

if anyone needs help identifying things that can become moral scrupulosity OCD obsessions/compulsions, heres a list of some i've experienced:

rereading your posts/texts over and over

checking your notes and/or followers list frequently to "make sure" bad actors aren't interacting with you

checking OP's blog before interacting with posts

compulsively opening a social media tab to look at your notifs and then closing it, over and over

fearing ways that things you say/do (or don't do) could be taken in bad faith. being anxious that your words/actions will be misconstrued as morally wrong, bigoted, rude, or aggressive

feeling guilty or obsessing over whether you should or shouldn't have reblogged a post

feeling like you aren't "allowed" to disengage from online discourse or unfollow people who post it

fearing you're being stalked, talked about, or called out behind your back. fearing you'll never be forgiven and that people might even celebrate your disappearance or death, even though you havent done anything wrong

searching your own name/username to see if anyone is actually talking about you

imagining defenses you would make against nonexistent heinous accusations or arguments against you, to prove that you didnt do it

feeling like you have to roll over and become a doormat when others are cruel to you, because it could cause strife if you do anything other than grovel or apologize

having trouble enforcing your own boundaries out of fear that they are somehow "wrong" or unethical

ending up surrounded by people who have all the "right opinions" but are super mean and unpleasant, and make you feel like you have to walk on eggshells

fearing that just HAVING moral ocd makes you a bad person somehow (for example, i often fear that having moral ocd is somehow pushing a 'stranger danger' or misanthropist agenda, even though i actually have a lot of faith in my fellow humans)

some of these bullet points are not inherently bad on their own, but if you find yourself having this kind of anxiety very often, that's not normal, and it's time to get offline or even seek professional help if it's impacting your life

this list is catered to how online culture influences moral scrupulosity, it is not indicative of how everybody's moral scrupulosity functions, and it is not exhaustive

[zenosanalytic]

This is such a sad fucking story. A part that jumped out to me in particular:

During our phone call, she recalls the night the Daily Signal op-ed went live: “I sat there at my screen, watching these high-powered Twitter accounts, a lot of them anonymous, with tens of thousands of followers, tweet it one by one. It was an orchestrated event. Less than 24 hours later, Fox was on the phone going, ‘Hey, we want you on Laura Ingraham tonight. We’ll send a car to pick you up.’” 

That would be a big moment in anyone’s life, and it was particularly huge for a middle-aged veteran living on disability. Shupe, for what it’s worth, agrees with this: “I’m just sitting at home, adrift, every day,” she tells me. “So, you know, what is it like when somebody like Marchiano sends me a new mission to go on? I got something to do. I’m useful now. I’m no longer this loser on disability. I’m a useful person to a movement.” 

How pernicious, the idea of usefulness; this ideology that says a life isn't worth living without purpose, that life needs it? This idea our society plants in all of us that if we aren't Important, Known, Famous, Active, then we're Losers. That losing is the worst possible thing a person can do. As if competitions, as if fucking GAMES, were more relevant than our very lives.

I know this article is about how conservatives manipulate and exploit detransitioners but it low-key lays out the ways our hierarchical, competition-obsessed society makes us susceptible to such manipulation so powerfully.

The full archive—sent to me, and other journalists—contains every email Shupe sent or received, from both of her two email accounts, between 2017 and 2023, the years when she was most active as a member of the organized anti-trans movement. There are years of media, legislative and tactical strategy outlined in those emails; there are conversations in which some of the most well-known TERFs in the movement coordinate strategy and brainstorm talking points. It is a playbook for how anti-trans organizations operate and a compressed history of how the TERF movement joined forces with the Christian right to create the current moment.

Most important, it is a record of how Elisa Rae Shupe was crafted into a weapon; how her narrative was established, edited and eventually taken out of her control, even as her name appeared on testimonies, Supreme Court briefings and highly circulated op-eds. This is the making of a “detransitioner.” More like her are being made every day.

[…]

There is a long history of extremist movements recruiting damaged and isolated individuals to do their dirty work. Yet Shupe’s crusade wrecked her life, and in the end, the movement that elevated her also chewed her up and spat her out without hesitation. There was no big fuck-you-I’m-out moment for Shupe, no definitive point when she knew it was over; the tide just turned on her. A fellow TERF named Karen Davis started publicly attacking Shupe for her supposed autogynephilia. Shupe says she received death threats.

“I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.”

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[sparklecryptid]

Look, I think we can all agree with the fact that abuse thrives in darkness. So explain to me why a 21 year old used the word pdfile and pronounce it exactly like that when we were talking about child abuse. Censoring the word does nothing. It literally took me several seconds to understand what she was saying. Clear communication is vital when someone comes or tries to come forward. It can be the difference between them feeling seen and heard and refusing to divulge anything. When you censor words like that in real life there can be consequences because you are obscuring information and hurting communication. Use the proper words. And if they make you so uncomfortable you can’t use them then maybe you shouldn’t be having a conversation that requires use of those words.

[furiousgoldfish]

Hi

I'm wondering how you cope with trauma and relationships? When past experience tells you to run from what might be a good thing and your flight/fight response is activated and wants to run or self sabotage. How do you cope? Looking for any advice as I am in this situation

You are asking the hard questions. The answer is that I am just not coping very well with that.

I don't think self-sabotage is a real thing, if I feel uncomfortable around someone, I get away, and that's that. If I don't feel happy and relaxed, there's nothing to be gained there. If someone activates my fight/flight response, I usually just fawn and tell them anything they wanna hear until I can safely leave their presence and then I never talk to them again, for safety.

I don't feel guilty for putting distance between myself and other people, if my instincts tell me I would feel better alone, I go forward alone. It's not like a person needs to be a perfect friend, to always know what to do, to react to everything perfectly. We're all learning and figuring it out. I think it's okay to break things if I continually get upset, if I feel no empathy from them, if I feel exploited, neglected, offended or annoyed, and it's repetition of those feelings, I figure I don't want this and move on.

I don't have a lot of social contact with people as a result of this, and I feel calmer for that. When I do talk to people, it's by my choice, and it's people I know will not upset me or make me feel on edge. It's going to be pleasant conversations, predictable reactions, laughter and fun, and these people will have decent understanding of who I am, and won't make me feel like I'm in danger. There's not a lot of them, but they're all I want in my life. I value stability more than having people in my life who give me a lot of ups and downs, drama, anxiety, or trigger traumatic responses in me (even if they trigger them accidentally, I just decide it's not a good fit and move on).

I don't think we can get far by ignoring our instincts or forcing ourselves to stay around someone just because we feel like we should, or like we owe them. If we start feeling bad and upset, even if they didn't mean to make us feel that way, it's still the reality of the situation. If those people insist it's *our* fault that we're upset and triggered, that means they don't care they're making someone absolutely miserable with their presence, and they demand for those symptoms to be hidden, rather than resolved.

If you had a more of a specific question, you can ask again, this is very broad and general answer, but you were asking it in a very broad and general way! If someone has a better reply or tricks on how to not get triggered by people all the time, please do add it in the comments or replies. I don't wanna deal with triggers at all so I just avoid anyone who triggers anything bad in me.

[she-is-ovarit]

A lot of pro-kink/sex positivity/and even LGBT activists pushing for normalizing sex to children and teenagers either don't realize or don't care that exposing kids to sex is a form of child sexual abuse.

I cared for a girl from the ages of 12–14 after she was removed from her mother due to extensive terror and abuse. Her mom was in several open relationships and had zero sexual boundaries with her children. She walked around nude, walked right into the bathroom while they were showering or using the toilet, talking to them about her sex life, answering the phone to talk to her kids while she was actively having sex, etc.

When her kids would act embarrassed or want privacy, she would get outraged and lecture them about how sex was normal, it was fine, sex shaming was bad and inappropriate, etc.

The fact that she was exposing her child to sex showed up in the guardian ad litem report by a woman who worked 17 years as a CPS caseworker and was a practicing therapist prior to becoming a guardian ad litem, and she identified this lack of boundaries for what it was—sexual abuse.

So while I understand that oversheltering kids from sex causes social problems, I do not for one second trust anyone who centers exposing minors to sex as a concentrated social justice effort. Sex education done by trained professionals is fine. Me hearing a they/them with a mic throw on the Jesus camp voice at a Pride event cheering how it's now up to a bunch of adult strangers to "teach" kids about sex since conservatives won't and enthusiastically joke about and describe their kinks to a bunch of minors in the audience is not fine.

I will not forget that little girl saying to me in an emphatic voice "sex was everywhere".

You are part of the problem.

[iphigeniacomplex]

stephen king was right when he wrote about mr keene at the derry pharmacy selling sonia kaspbrak tap water aspirators because he knew she was overmedicating her son but did not want to "make himself a party to the woman's foolishness" and he was right when he wrote about mrs dumont, the former teacher of a boy believed to have been murdered by his abusive stepfather, being told by the entire school system not to report the child's injuries, because "suspected child abuse [...] always comes back to haunt the school department at tax appropriation time" and he was right when he wrote about mike hanlon researching the history of his town and finding a culture of silence surrounding each discovered terror ("...and yet that—what shall i call it?—that quiet fits the pattern, too.") and he was right when he wrote about the creator of the universe providing counsel but no real help in the face of it all. and he was right because there will always be another adult in the room, but this is no guarantee that the child will be saved.

[seventeendeer]

this isn't at all meant to be condescending or finger-waggy because 100% we all have blind spots like this, but I'm really, really hoping that the people who never found Gaiman's approach to his own fandom concerning in any way will take this all as a learning moment.

he was an older, hyper-famous author engaging directly and frequently with an online audience of largely vulnerable young marginalized people. he presented himself as cultured and worldly, and made himself approachable as someone to go to for advice, encouragement and "wisdom." his manner of speech was extremely pathos-heavy and clearly intended to be comforting and encouraging in exactly the way his target demographic needed it to be to swallow every word. the way he spoke about stories and creativity was designed to make young creative hopefuls feel special and important, while sweeping real analytical techniques under the rug - in hindsight, likely so no one would think too critically about the disturbing amount of patriarchal abuse played for cheap shock value and voyerism in his own body of works.

Gaiman saw a target demographic that was desperate for an older creative role model to tell them they were worth something, and he exploited that pain to twist a narrative around himself where he was king and any critique leveled at him or his works were the enemy.

to be clear, he could have been innocent. he could totally have been just an out-of-touch old man saying nice things to people because he wanted to be kind and he thought he was a lot smarter than he really was. red flags are warning signs, not a surefire way to tell if someone is actually "secretly shitty."

but if you used to look up to him, PLEASE take this moment to revisit the ideas you absorbed from him. did you take his words to heart because they seemed to have objective merit? or did you take them to heart because it felt good to believe what he said? do you still hold these values? does knowing he was intentionally manipulating his online audience make you less certain? do you need more information from a different source before deciding one way or another?

again, I'm just really, really hoping people on here will take a moment to reevaluate the ideas and opinions he's injected into tumblr fandom culture, because his reach is immense and he has absolutely been manipulating popular perception of relevant topics to gain further influence and control the narrative around both his own and Pratchett's legacy. please, please take this moment to notice what he's been doing - and next time someone tries to pull the same shit, hopefully we'll be able to apply what we've learned from experience.

[feralboo-the-weirdo]

You know what is just mind boggling? Neurotypical people exist. Like there are people who can just DO things and not have depression, anxiety (in every form ever), RSD, sensory overloads, and not get overwhelmed. Like there are people who can work for eight hours every day and still do things after. People who can make phone calls with no struggle. Who aren't constantly bombarded by a cacophony of thoughts both good and bad when they do things. Who have anxiety but it isn't crippling. who can spend hours, WEEKS with people and not get tired or fear that everyone there hates you. People who have no idea what Depression or intense trauma feel like. People who hear instructions and do it right first go. People who can follow a conversation without zoning out, or having to mask.

Like. Do neurotypical people actually exist?

Because I can't even imagine what it would be like to be neurotypical. Or mentally healthy. Both sound alien and foren. But like. Obviously they exist because neurodivergent people wouldn't struggle so much if not for how the world was structured for Neurotypical people but I don't know if I've ever met a neurotypical.

idk. food for thought I guess.

[furiousgoldfish]

Happy birthday!! Hope it's okay!

I've read your article about how school bullying follows up child abuse and how child abuse creates the risk of abuse in the future, and I wanted to ask something. Idk how and why but child abuse and school bullying were two different, separate things for me 🤨 like I felt that my first experience of being bullied was in high school. It wan't the same and 'nothing uncommon'. I felt devastated like it was the first time ever I was treated like that. Maybe child abuse just has made me sensitive to others' judgement and to how people percieve me? Like the only truth about who I actually am, is in how others see me. What do you think?

Yeah, it can definitely make you more sensitive to judgment!

I don't know if I can explain this well, but this is something that can happen when you're abused at home, but usually feel safe in public areas: you develop 2 types of behaviour, almost like two personalities, one for home, and another one for public. It also changes how you feel about yourself at home, and how you feel about yourself in public, surrounded by other people. At home you're constantly aware that you're not valuable, that you're despised, that you can be hurt at any moment, and that you're disposable. But with friends and in public social setting, you can feel welcome, valuable, like you fit in.

Then, you have to base your self worth choosing from these two settings; if you're well received in public and amongst your peers, you can decide that well, parents must have been wrong about you, because all of these other people like you just fine and want your around, so your parents obviously don't know shit about you and can go to hell with their dumb opinions. You embrace your image of yourself of a person beloved by your friends and you hold onto that in order to survive the hateful ordeal you have to endure at home, knowing it is undeserved and that you're not all that awful things your parents say you are.

But, deep inside you're still scared that your parents might be right. Because they knew you first, and they knew you the longest, and they watched you grow, and their words are etched into your brain. So you're always careful and looking for warning signs that other people might develop these negative opinions of you as well, it's never a truly 'safe' situation, as long as there are people like your parents claiming confidently that you're nothing but a burden or a waste of space.

So then, when you're clinging to this hope that people in your peer setting will view you in a more favorable way, and then you end up abused in that setting too - that's when your entire view of yourself can crash. Because you just received a confirmation that even people who are not your parents, see you as nothing but a target, someone who is acceptable to hurt and harass and nobody will find you worth protecting and saving. It's absolutely devastating, and it can make you question yourself very deeply on how are you perceived and what is your true identity, if everyone around you is okay with you being abused? It's extremely painful, and very cruel for an abused kid to be given a little hope of normalcy, and then to have it yanked away like that, by some kids who don't even know what they're doing or who they're hurting, they're just in for lashing out at someone vulnerable and unprotected.

I only realized way later that bullying had this same negative impact on my self-worth, even if I didn't know it at the time, because bullies just weren't as violent as my parents, so I didn't need to take them as seriously. But they did mean that I was seen as nothing but a target both at home and social setting, and it did manage to isolate me even more, and make me even more certain that I am not a part of society, and will only be hurt and rejected if I ever try to belong anywhere. It is a very painful thing to be put thru.

So in conclusion, yes, abuse makes you extremely sensitive to how you're perceived in public, because your self-perception has already been challenged and weakened by the trolls that live in your home so having the outside world affirming their stance is devastating.

In the contrast to this, not being abused at home can make your self-perception positive enough, that when you're bullied at school, you're aware that these bullies are the only source in your life who find you an acceptable target and that you will be seen differently, and accepted in all other areas of your life. It's still a crisis in not managing to belong with your peers and being seen as an acceptable target in a social setting, and sometimes pride or shame can stop a person from even confiding in their parents about it, but it shouldn't completely crash their self-perception, like it would happen for an abused kid. (I am speaking here just hypothetically, I might be wrong about this, I don't actually know for sure how non-abused children deal with bullying other than what I've seen in tv shows)