#managing abuse

[furiousgoldfish]

Attempting to dismiss abuse and 'not take it personally', doesn't take away from how it affects you; it makes it worse. If you're approaching each insult, degradation, threat and disrespect as if it was 'not meant seriously' and 'they only said it because they were upset/trying to help', that doesn't mean that you are now not suffering insults, degradation, threats and disrespect. You are. But you get convinced that it is on you to rationalize it, not take it seriously, dismiss it, believe it was not done personally, to try to see it from the abuser's side, to imagine what made them do it. Which means in practice, you are taking abuse and then on top of it accepting that it is your fault if it ever gets to you, if it ever hurts you or gets you upset, or scared, or threatened, or despised, or if it makes you feel worthless and ashamed.

And nobody is rationalizing it on purpose, rather we're shamed by the abusers for taking anything personally, for being affected by anything hurtful they do to us, they make us believe that any reaction we have is our fault, because we failed to dismiss it and endure it and recover from it instantly. They make us responsible for what they do to us, and how it affects us. Being shamed for 'failing to rationalize abuse' is a part of abuse.

Abuse is always personal, it's done to a person whose well being is not prioritized and valued, which is exactly why the abused person feels worthless and ashamed, they can tell they're not prioritized or valued in any way. But if then on top of it you're convinced that your perception is wrong, that you're faulty for being hurt by this, for protesting this, now you can't even vocalize what is wrong, out of fear for being shamed for having a reaction. Your attempts to dismiss and rationalize it don't mitigate the effects of it, you are still being disrespected, threatened, degraded, but now you're also too ashamed to protest, to say it's bothering you, to speak out and acknowledge that you are a person whose life experience matters, who doesn't just exist to take on others malice, sadism and hatred.

You can end up feeling even more alone, because you have to hide your reactions, and act like nothing is wrong. You still feel scared and anxious about all of the threats, you still feel humiliated, offended and upset by all of their insults and degradation, you still feel your personhood wither away because you are obviously not treated as a person, and you can feel it, but you can never say it. You can't believe your own senses and assume that you're wrong for feeling it, rather than the abusers being wrong for mistreating you. You're filled with anxiety of 'What if they're right? What if I am all of those things they keep saying about me? What if one day they act on their threats? What if my life is without value? What if something is deeply wrong with me and I shouldn't even exist?' regardless of whether you take these things personally or not. This is what abuse does to an individual who is powerless to fight back.

You can take all abuse personally. Anyone making you feel like this, forcing you to have these thoughts about yourself, is not treating you like a living, breathing, feeling human being, and your instincts are right to tell you that this is wrong, that you're being treated badly. There's no actual reason or justification for anyone to do this to you. Hurting you will not make anyone better, will not fix anyone's problems or make anyone's life better. The mere urge of another person to do this to you is abnormal and suggests something is wrong with their sense of right and wrong.

[faeriekit]

I think Alfred needs his own prompt 👻(dp x dc)

Alfred had died.

(It was a bit of a waste of time— he'd been scheduled to get the boys to and from their suit fitting at this time. Now here he was; languishing. Murdered. Sulking, even.)

(How frivolous.)

As a busy man with children (an adult child) to care for, a house to maintain, and a budget to supervise, Alfred's main goal was to return to Earth, obviously. If he left Master Bruce in charge of the dusting, the man would absolutely let the unused parts of the house go into disrepair. Too impatient, his ex-ward was.

The only problem was that in this green, nebulous, and gravity-free afterlife, there seemed to be only one way out— navigating through the individual worlds that the denizens of this world have molded around themselves, until he finds a being willing to grant his wish to return.

Alfred sighed, checked for the pistol at his hip and the rifle on his back, and marched straight upwards. Or. Well. Downwards. Actually... Never mind.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[thatswhatsushesaid]

psa that the day there are no jgy stans left on tumblr dot com is the day i am dead

but rest assured i'll go to my grave exactly as i lived: obnoxiously proclaiming to everyone within earshot how great lianfang-zun is. narratively, metaphorically, spiritually. sexually, too, like why limit myself. i like to keep my options open

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[that-ineffable-devil]

Listen, I love the Night Nurse as a character. I love Ruth Connell, period.

But when she stands there in Charles' memories and watches him get beaten with a belt and then takes the words he cried at his father to beat him down further "No, you can't make it better. You never made it better, then you died."

I have yet to forgive her for that. It is, without a doubt, one of the cruellest lines I've ever heard in film or television.

[ineffabells]

hey, you know what's a fun thought?

what if one day, pre-ascension, Mobei-Jun was beating up Shang Qinghua as usual, but this time when he threw him, SQH hit his head on a jutting out piece of rock or wall in just the right place

and instead of crawling onto his knees and doing his over-the-top wailing and begging for mercy routine that MBJ had come to expect, SQH just lay still.

and a dark pool of blood, impossibly big and horrifyingly still pouring, spread from skull, on the floor aroud him, soaking through his sunny, ink-stained an-ding robes,

as Mobei watched, a cold horror settling over him. and SQH didn't get up.

[capinejghafa]

Steve Blackman on being pressed for being abusive, then goes: I didn't see things that way... sir, obviously you're in a position of power why would you???

[pathetic-gamer]

[repotting]

a pet peeve of mine is stuff proudly labelled vegan but it's farmed w slave labor. like how is that vegan then.

we made this without exploiting or harming any animals!!! (but the human children forced into dangerous and underpaid agricultural labour to make this product don't matter i guess???)

like how are you gonna try to sell me child abuse chocolate and tell me it's vegan like come on

[stevetwisp]

ZEE AND JINGLEBELL IN THE YEAR 2024

[furiousgoldfish]

[fatetainted]

Clearing the air here though I'm genuinely afraid for my own safety to.

I didn't block @whitexdove "for no reason" and if they had an ounce of self awareness they would know they were an abusive, manipulative person who drove me to attempt suicide because "it's been a week now" and I "need to stop being so negative all the time." If I didn't respond to their messages they would ask me if I hated them or tell me I was ignoring them or I was making their paranoia worse so I would update them that I wasn't in a headspace because I was having a breakdown or a meltdown and would look later. Because of this they accused me of making their anxiety worse and I needed to get over it because I was having a very bad week with my life falling apart. I nearly killed myself because of years of manipulative abuse and them telling me to just get over it when I was suicidal.

But they've been suicidal for years and I was meant to comfort them every time and several times now they have threatened to cut me off multiple times over the most minor, insane little things. Instead of actually communicating what was wrong and how they felt they made essentially a break up playlist blaming me entirely and told me to listen to it to see what I did wrong and the only fault they would ever take was that they didn't say anything sooner. But suddenly when everything was fine again they would ask when I would send them a gift I bought them. However they had essentially convinced me we were over to the point where I grieved the friendship and returned the gift because I had no use for it anymore.

They hide behind mental illness and autism as if that excuses them being abusive to me and the things they've said to my friends. They blame my BPD for blocking them when it's their own actions and I'm sick of your annoying pity parties.

For years they have emotionally abused me and for years my therapist has been telling me they're not a good influence on my life and she was correct. I developed a THC and xanax dependency because they caused me so much anxiety with their abuse that I could not speak to them without using both daily (and of course, if I didn't speak to them or tell them why I wasn't going to be, they would tell me how paranoid I was making them, but if I DO tell them then I'm being too negative and ignoring their boundaries)

They were ALWAYS setting unreasonable boundaries and I bent over backwards to accommodate. Blocking them is my boundary. And now they're fishing for attention and sympathy for a situation they caused themselves and to drag me back into their abusive cycle.

In addition to this they would say very shitty things about my other friends that actually treated me well and tried to manipulate them into not only making them a LOT of free art but making the character details and backstory (which is a very similar thing they got mad at another artist for!). Most of my friends didn't even like them and were being cordial because I was their friend.

They are now refusing to remove characters based on my original work and flipping out on my friends for no reason other than jealousy and pettiness. Stop plagarizing me, stop claiming you just added to my lore when you added NOTHING and nearly everything is based on my ideas, including Dreameater who is literally the twin of my oc in my original work. And Caelum who is the brother of another oc of mine in my universe. You said you "won't throw away characters you worked hard on" but you have no lore that isn't mine and barely ever spoke of these characters or developed them. You added nothing to this universe or these characters. Don't you EVER use the design I made for the alien species (that is my lore and not yours!) again. It's no longer yours and you can have back that mime design you gave me, I truly do not care. But if you don't listen to me now then by your own logic I can bring back those ocs I made in your universe and I will use them because I worked "so hard" on them.

Before you pull the "I'm younger than you, how can I be manipulative?" Like you did before when you had a major fall out JUST like this (and yes! You also force shipped with me and guilt tripped just like you did with her!) Anyone of any age can manipulate someone else of any age. Just because you're younger doesn't make you the victim.

Stumpy. You are a toxic person the refuses to seek out ANY form of help and expected me to play therapist for you all the time but God forbid I need someone to listen and you expected me to accept how terribly you treated me forever. That's why I left.

You identify with and project heavily onto a character who has canonically killed her entire school and drugged her crush to get him to like her and you ship them despite the clear sexual assault and how canonically abusive and terrifying her obsession with him is. She's a genocidal white savior and that's fucking terrifying. Even more so terrifying is the way you joked about how you kill your rats and feed the dead rats to raccoons. And the fact you fetishize trans men being pregnant, it's a very clear very gross fetish you cannot let go of and forced on me constantly. The fact you seem to fetishize sexual assault and rape and ship people like that with their victims is vile. The way you talked about sleeping next to me in the same bed was disturbing as I look back on these things and I truly don't trust you to have not done things while I was unconscious. I have that little faith in you because of how you act and fetishize things.

You also told me you were going to whitewash a canon poc character and it's okay because it's you doing it. Genesis is Asian. He isn't white. You drew my Japanese character with yellow skin. You white knight in public but you're shitty to any race that isn't Korean or Native American.

For the record, I don't hate you. But I'm happier without you in my life and I don't feel anything for you anymore because of your own actions that broke our relationship irreparably. You're a toxic, vile person and completely self centered and extremely possessive.

Get help. And stop playing the fucking victim.

Allow me to return the favor. I take accountability for not saying anything sooner even though with your unreasonable boundaries and constantly telling me you're suicidal that I could never bring it up with you or any bad thing you were doing to me because you would probably kill yourself if I upset you.

Now you take accountability for your actions and deal with the consequences of abusing me.

You literally never loved me, you just miss having someone love you so much you didn't have to love them back (which you pretty much told me several times you were incapable of even with your own family).

Good riddance. Thanks for the memories even though they weren't so great. I truly will not be returning to this blog so don't bother trying to contact me here or anywhere else. I'm done.

[buggachat]

the fact nathalie is terrified of the idea of adrien being alone in a room with his father is. terrifying to me as well. nathalie, who historically always gave gabriel the greatest benefit of the doubt, is afraid of what gabriel would do if left alone with his own son....... hello????

[dmbakura]

fucking eww man how do you manage to be homophobic, transphobic and all around gender essentialist all at once. do people not think before they speak

[mangosaurus]

unironically think i would prefer living in the universe where you could get spontaneously eaten up by a rogue dino on your way home from work if it meant escaping the current status of this timeline's hellish world politics