#sometimes the abuse we go through is so covert not even we can put a finger on it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sleepy-shutin · 11 months ago

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i don't have much to say on the basis of endogeny since that's not my wheelhouse at all but speaking from the perspective of a person who has/suspects DID who has read a lot about DID in the handful of years i've been doing research, with 117 of papers and books in my zotero program... this is pretty correct, scientifically speaking.

obviously, there will be exceptions where people thought they were DID and weren't, but like OP said, in the longrun, there's hiccups to finding things about yourself, and DID can be one of them. one big thing to remember about this is that DID is not the worst possible trauma disorder to have, it's a disorder of extremely specific circumstances, and if you turn out not to have it, that says nothing about the validity of your trauma and everything about the specifics of your circumstances, from the coping mechanisms you used to your support systems or lackthereof and down to your own personal psychology and the way you handled and rationalized your trauma. having or not having DID doesn't make or break you.

to address the points OP lists specifically:

1) i've met so many people with tons of fictives who have been diagnosed and in treatment for years. there's not a lot of literature on it, but i heavily suspect it's because we're in a new era of technology, instant-access to information, and media consumption that is going to produce psychological effects on people that we have yet to put names to. there's a lot going on here that we have completely normalized now, but we're living in a world where there are people who were born before consumer computers existed. We have people born before Pong, credited as the first video game, was invented. You really don't realize how quickly we moved from analogue media (reel-to-reel, VHS/video tape, audio cassettes, CDs, DVDs, video game cartridges, etc) to digital media just by looking at the timelines from hindsight. There's a lot more I could say about this but that would make this point way longer than it needs to be. My point here is that we are still catching up, and it'll be long time before we're caught up properly. We're still studying the effects the internet has had on some of the now well-known people who first got to be parts of it, (tomska, bo burnham, etc). Someone having a lot of fictives is not an inherent sign of faking or being mistaken about having DID.

2) I've read a lot of testimonies from people with DID and a lot of books by therapists who have treated DID and while many people cannot control who's fronting right off the bat, there are also many people who can, whether they know it (and about their DID) or not. This aspect specifically is a complex part of DID that can and does vary between individual to individual due to their specific circumstances. It might benefit a person to know about a few alters they have, even if they don't know that's what they are, and to be able to switch through them as needed and to be able to communicate with them on some level before therapy.

3) in the 2017 paper "Revisiting the etiological aspects of dissociative identity disorder: a biopsychosocial perspective" (Vedat Şar et. al.), it is noted that emotional neglect from parents or siblings was the strongest individual predictor of any dissociative disorder, including DID, even when compared to other forms of abuse and other relationships subjects had to abusers.

Milder presentations of DID are sometimes associated with traumatization that is covert, such as enduring severely dysfunctional communication and relationship styles in family members, including subtle forms of emotional neglect.

In a study conducted on a large group of college students, Şar et al [39] demonstrated that emotional neglect predicted a dissociative disorder (including DID) diagnosis. Krüger and Fletcher37 demonstrated that self-reported emotional neglect by biological parents or siblings in childhood was the strongest individual predictor of an adult diagnosis of a dissociative disorder (including DID) in psychiatric patients (out of all other combinations of abuse type and abuser-abused relational ties).

Some data and theory suggest that disorganized attachment style may also underpin the development of DID. [40–45] Bowlby [46] proposed that inadequate care-seeking interactions with primary caregivers could lead the infant to develop multiple internal representations of self and attachment figures (which he called internal working models [IWM]). Main and Hesse47 identified disorganized attachment developing from a relational context where the child who is seeking safety and comfort is frightened by the caregiver whom the child is pursuing for soothing or the child frightens the caregiver, thereby impeding connection. Contradictory IWM develop to represent the caregiver as dangerous and safe at the same time. These models activate in contexts of abuse to motivate protection from the same caregiver to whom safety seeking is also sought. Early-onset abuse and/or neglect by a relational figure is associated with disorganized attachment (and disorganized attachment may heighten the likelihood of abuse experiences). Hence, disorganized attachment may provide a foundation for DID. [40,48]

so yes, OP is completely correct about that third part, no ifs ands or buts. the fact that people with DID and people with trauma in general tend to downplay the trauma quite a bit for several reasons ties in very harshly with the concepts that DID can only be caused by whatever nebulous idea the person has of "the worst abuse imaginable".

this is the exact reason that i think saying things like "DID is the most severe trauma disorder" or "DID is only ever caused by the worst possible abuse" rather than recognizing DID as a disorder of extremely specific circumstances is JUST as stigmatizing and misinformed as saying that DID is a disorder that makes you have evil alters that hurt people, because both will lead people to believe that a "normal" person could never have DID, because it's "too obvious", "too severe", "they would be locked up", and more misconceptions that many people have about DID before learning about it in depth.

DID is unique for how it affects everyone who has it. you won't have the same experience as the next person, because DID becomes highly personalized to your personal experiences with trauma.

and if you don't have it in the end, that's fine too, because if you suspected you had it in the first place, there is more than likely something else going on. you're likely traumatized in some form or another. you may have a different dissociative disorder that doesn't involve parts dissociated to the degree of DID, like DP/DR, or another disorder known to cause identity problems with strong links to trauma and dissociation, such as BPD.

what matters most in the end, however, is not the specific labels that you find yourself leaning towards, but finding whatever works for you personally in regards to symptom management and making yourself happy. if working with your identity through a plural lens works for you, then that's what works for you. if not, then that's also fine. you don't need to stress out over labels as much as people on the internet might have you believe.

the post that i am nervous about posting

i saw a post earlier today and i felt i needed to address it. i'm not going to be linking the actual post as i feel that would be insensitive, but the basic gist of it was "i'm not a system because i have an insane number of fictives and can control who's fronting. plus, my childhood trauma wasn't strong enough to cause a split."

this was really bothering to us in a lot of ways.

number of fictives has no basis on validity, and it's a common tactic of fakeclaimers to target fictive-heavy systems and tell them that their existence is not valid.

WE control who's fronting. if felix wants to stop fronting, he simply asks raven, "would you mind fronting for a minute?" and they will. sometimes felix will stick to front and it's difficult for anyone else to front, but most times, we have control over it. that doesn't mean we're not a system.

say it with me, guys: IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW MUCH TRAUMA YOU HAD OR HOW STRONG YOU THINK IT WAS. everyone is different and different levels of stress can trigger splits in different people. plus, when you're a literal CHILD, things are much more intense than they would be if you were 5, 6 years older. DO NOT DIMINISH YOUR TRAUMA. it may not have been a family member dying, and it may not have been straight up abuse but when you're a kid, things hurt a LOT more than they would if you were older. PLUS THERE ARE DIFFERENT REASONS SYSTEMS FORM THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH TRAUMA.

quick disclaimer by the way: if someone thinks they're a system and it turns out they're not, that is absolutely fine, it takes time to figure yourself out and you might have some hiccups along the way. but also, if you think you're a system member, PLEASE don't diminish your existence just because someone tells you that the way you are plural isn't chill.

i don't usually post about sys stuff, but this felt important to address.

OH ALSO: if you're a system you're a system. it doesn't matter how old you are and it doesn't matter if people tell you you're not. there is no wrong way to be multiple. pls remember that

#reply;#hope this reply is ok to add #idk much about the endo experience so that's like #mostly thrown in there haphazardly a bit #but i hate the characterization that DID can only be caused #by like the worst trauma #huge misconception in all of these online communities #(not accusing you of that belief op)#(i just wanted to make it loud and clear lol)#overall good post op i'm just elaborating on your points #and showing how they are backed and not baseless

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fan-dot · 5 years ago

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Adora’s Abuse

I cannot stand how people minimize Adora’s abuse.

The form of abuse Adora suffered is insidious. It’s the kind that if you attempted to lay it all out, it doesn’t sound all that awful for most people. After all, she was being praised! She was the preferred child. She was the golden child.

The thing is, the abuse she faced is just as damaging and traumatizing as a ‘classic’ examples of abuse.

A Brief and Incomplete Breakdown

The primary form of abuse Adora faced (as far as we know) was emotional abuse. Shadow Weaver manipulated, terrorized, and traumatized her in an attempt to mold her into a weapon that she could use.

Adora’s Need For Control

Adora was placed on a pedestal. If she acted out, the people under her would be punished for her misbehavior. This bred a guilt complex in her- if bad things happened, it was her fault. She had to be good, whatever that meant to her in that moment, because if she was bad or misbehaved or wasn’t good enough, others were punished in her place.

On top of that, others around her were taught to look up to her. She couldn’t make mistakes because not only would she be letting Shadow Weaver down (and potentially getting her friends and squad mates hurt- or worse) but she would be letting everyone else down. And even further, if she messed up enough she could be the one getting hurt or tossed aside. Children need the love and affection of their caregivers. Potentially losing Shadow Weaver’s affection and attention could be terrifying for Adora.

But it wasn’t just Adora herself that had to behave well to avoid Shadow Weaver’s ire- it was the people around her. Shadow Weaver made Adora responsible for the behavior of others from a young age. When Catra misbehaved, messed up, or didn’t live up to Shadow Weaver’s expectations, Adora was blamed for it and Catra hurt- physically and emotionally. This again deepened Adora’s guilt complex. Now, other people’s behavior was her fault as well because Adora should have worked harder to make sure that her people behaved and did well. She should have checked in on them, pushed them harder, done more, anything- it’s her fault that they got in trouble. She needs to fix things. Everything has to be perfect because if it’s not, that’s dangerous. People are going to get hurt.

Adora is constantly on alert and seems to operate from a place of fear and anxiety a lot of the time. She needs to be the best, because if she isn’t, people are going to get hurt and she’s going to lose the people she cares about. She needs to do x because if she doesn’t, bad things will happen. If she isn’t perfect, if she’s not good, if she doesn’t fix things, if she, if she, if she-

The Effects of Witnessing Physical Abuse

We haven’t seen Shadow Weaver explicitly strike Adora yet as a child in the show. Even if she has, however, just witnessing how Shadow Weaver tormented Catra would leave scars. Children growing up in households where one parent is physically abused become fearful and anxious and hypervigiliant. Even if they are not being hurt directly, they have to watch someone they care about be hurt by someone else they care about.

There is a constant fear that the abuser could turn on them. Self-blame becomes a huge specter- if they had stepped in, if they hadn’t upset the abuser, if they had said something, if they were better, if they were good, would the abuser not hurt the other person anymore? Why am I not getting hurt? What did the victim do wrong? Sometimes the witness of the abuse can get angry at the victim for upsetting the abuser.

Adora grew up in an unstable, dangerous environment where as far as she knew, she could be hurt as badly as the others around her in a moment’s notice. She blames herself for a lot of what happened- after all, “if I was good, if I was better, maybe Shadow Weaver won’t hurt Catra.” She puts herself in danger to protect Catra, the same way a child might try to intervene if a parent or sibling were being abused.

Despite us never seeing Shadow Weaver hurt Adora while she was in her ‘care’, we still see Adora flinch from her and anxiety when she touches her. She tracks Shadow Weaver’s hands and squeezes her eyes shut when she pats her head, as if expecting a blow. That alone is sign that she fears violence from Shadow Weaver, whether or not she ever physically abused Adora as well.

Physical Abuse

The only physical abuse we have witnessed so far in the series comes from the episode where Shadow Weaver attempts to mind-wipe Adora.

Adora is in pain at the hands of the person who raised her.

Though we haven’t seen much evidence for physical abuse, I think it’s possible. Adora was raised to be a soldier and I wouldn’t be surprised if she faced a lot of direct or indirect physical violence as a result. A rare strike or electric shock could do a lot for Shadow Weaver’s attempts to keep her ‘in line’. A ‘I hate that you’re making me do this’ could be one way Shadow Weaver would use it to manipulate her.

After all, Adora is terrified of her touch. It could be from witnessing Catra’s abuse, but there is potential that Catra wasn’t the only one who faced physical abuse, even if she was the primary target.

Beyond that though, there is a form of physical abuse that is a bit fuzzy on whether it is emotional or physical abuse in nature that both Adora and Catra experience in spades.

Body blocking.

Shadow Weaver is always looming over Adora and Catra. She exerts her power over them and nonverbally threatens them. She traps them into rooms and into her space and takes away their power.

Adora’s Weak Concept of Self

Like many abuse survivors, Adora has a weak sense of self. This is only compounded upon by her being raised to be a soldier. The failures and successes of herself and the other cadets were pooled together as a group and attributed to the leader- Adora. Adora’s successes then were attributed to Shadow Weaver, and so on and so forth. Adora’s sense of self was eroded away through attaching her sense of self worth to what she could do for other people and making people happy with her.

Her identity is completely wrapped up in being a leader, being a weapon, and being responsible for others. She needs to be perfect or what else is she? Adora is put in charge of Catra after seeing her get shoved around and frozen, cementing that need for perfection in her. Others suffering and success rely on her, making up a key part of her identity.

It takes seeing first hand the horrors of the Horde for her to change sides because Adora wrapped up so much of her self-worth and self-identity in being Shadow Weaver’s ace. It takes until then for her to start to break through Shadow Weaver’s manipulation. Catra knew that and could recognize on some level what Shadow Weaver was doing to the both of them- after all, she faced the overt abuse, saw how differently (and negatively) she was treated from others. Adora could not, especially with Shadow Weaver beating into her head a lack of self-identity.

Becoming She-Ra, as much as it was her idealism and innate sense of justice, was a way of clinging to a new external identity after her old one was shattered. She sees the sword as her identity, her worth tied to how good a weapon she can be for the Princesses now instead of the Horde. When it shatters, so does her sense of self and purpose.

Overt Emotional Abuse

When Adora does go against Shadow Weaver, without Catra around anymore to be a scapegoat, there is a reversal from covert to overt emotional abuse and manipulation being the primary tactic.

Shadow Weaver attempts to reinforce Adora’s lack of self worth and self concept. Whether explicitly or more subtly, she told Adora over and over and over and over again that she was nothing. That she was worthless if she wasn’t what Shadow Weaver wanted. That she didn’t matter.

All the good things about her? They were conditional on Adora’s obedience.

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Other Side Notes

- Shadow Weaver stalked Adora during that episode where Adora’s trauma and PTSD is on full display (the first Mystacor episode)

- In that same episode, she took Glimmer’s form and said awful, manipulative, and abusive shit to her

- Adora knows Shadow Weaver is willing and capable of killing- and knows that’s a potential consequence for failing or not ‘keeping Catra in line’; that’s a lot to put on a little kid

- How often did Shadow Weaver go a little too far (on purpose or on accident) and weaponized affection to bring Adora around and make her feel guilty for being upset or upsetting Shadow Weaver?

- When Adora rejects Shadow Weaver’s attempt to manipulate her with affection, Shadow Weaver switches gears to praise. There’s groundwork there, years of conditioning and manipulation that lead to this exchange.

- Adora’s childhood was filled with gaslighting, but that’s a topic for another post

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Shadow Weaver traumatized Adora to the point that she had panic attacks and a breakdown over the thought of her being around her. That alone tells you how much that woman traumatized her. Her abuse is not lesser because it was primarily psychological and covert. That just makes it harder to recognize and harder to heal. Don’t minimize it.

#spop #she ra #adora #adora spop #long post #abuse #meta #spop meta

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c-ptsdrecovery · 4 years ago

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A friendship with a narcissist

I had this friend--let’s call her G. I met G through church. She was an intelligent and creative woman, very well respected by others.

There WERE some early warning signs. She seemed to have a little affectation. Affectation is defined as, “behavior, speech, or writing that is artificial and designed to impress. A studied display of real or pretended feeling.” Many narcissists just kind of give you the impression that they’re always on stage. Something just seems a little theatrical about their behavior. It’s a little grating and cringe. G and her husband often sang on a worship team, and the way that she closed her eyes and lifted her hands while singing seemed a little fake, a little more for show than the way her husband did it.

But then, some people just have an unfortunate manner. So I ignored it.

I knew G for a few years before we really became friends. I think we really got to know one another through a Bible study we were both going to. We were both well-educated, especially in English, both smart, had similar (liberal) politics. (Though, in retrospect, narcissists do often take on the politics and beliefs of the people they’re love-bombing, to make them more compatible. So I have no idea what her politics really were.)

Somehow, we became friends. We sat next to each other during service. We attended the same Bible study. After awhile, it became a weekly thing that I would go over to her house and we would go out to eat together. I also pet-sat for her when she and her husband went away.

It was tough holding a conversation with G. She had to use everything you said in some kind of clever comment. Either that, or she would feign being offended and twist whatever you had said into a slight or an insult against her. She did it with a smile in her eyes, to show she wasn’t mad, but still you would have to insist that you didn’t mean it like that, and often give her a compliment. It was EXHAUSTING holding a conversation with her sometimes because of the combination of walking on eggshells, trying to keep up with her clever commentary, and having to constantly reassure her of your good opinion. (A mutual friend of mine asked me once if I found it tiring to talk to G, so I know it wasn’t just me!)

Repeatedly, over the course of our friendship, she exclaimed spontaneously, “It’s so good to finally have a friend!” or, “You’re my only friend!” This always struck me as deeply weird, because I KNEW she had other good friends in our church. I often would point this out when she made comments like this, and she would brush it off, like, “Yes, but they can’t keep up with me in a conversation”, or some other compliment to me. I would let it drop, but I knew that these excuses weren’t true either, as I knew that at least a couple of the friends she had at church were just as intelligent and educated as I was. This always weirded me out at the time, and I know now that it was lovebombing: narcissists often go out of their way to pull in a target by assuring them that they have a special and unique relationship. They want you to feel flattered so you’ll stick with them.

Increasingly, I found that was I completely physically exhausted after an afternoon with G. I had chronic fatigue syndrome, so I did get tired easily, but I got more tired with G than I did hanging out with any of my other friends. After spending a couple of hours with G, I would have to go home and straight to bed. I thought this was strange, and it began to make me feel ambivalent about spending time with her. But I was very isolated at the time, and my weekly meetings with G were a way to get out of the house and go do something, so I felt dependent on their continuing. I have learned since that covert narcissists are sometimes called “energy vampires” because of how mentally--and indeed, physically--exhausting it can be to be around them.

G decided eventually to go into the ministry. (I have known a number of narcissists in the ministry; it’s a position that gives them lots of attention and narcissistic supply, and unfortunately has the side-effect of giving them lots of opportunities to victimize others through their spiritual authority.) I remember the first time she gave a sermon:

It was pretty cringe.

What she was saying was fine. The text was fine. But her affectation, which I had learned to ignore by that point, was much more obvious when she had a whole audience, a whole congregation, to impress. Public speaking seems to bring out the worst in narcissists with affectation.

But I was a good friend: I told her she did a great job, and gave her lots of reassurance (read: repeated compliments) that she had been wonderful.

I was struggling a great deal at that time with my parents. I was living with them again, and my mom had done an “emotional discard” with me. (The cycle of narcissism is to idealize the target, devalue them, and then sometimes suddenly discard them. My mom couldn’t suddenly disappear from my life, since she still wanted to be seen as a good parent, so instead she made it very clear to me in subtle and passive-aggressive ways that she wasn’t going to support me emotionally anymore and I didn’t matter to her at all. It was subtle enough that I wouldn’t be able to carry really awful stories of her to others and make her look like a bad mother, but also hurtful enough that living with her was torture.) Then, on top of that, my mom thought I had insulted her on my blog at one point and went into a complete narcissistic rage for a MONTH, doing everything possible to tear me down emotionally, while I just sat there, bewildered as to what was happening or why.

The result, especially since my parents had systematically undermined my self-confidence through gaslighting throughout my life, was that I couldn’t figure out what was going on in my relationship with my parents (and my mother in particular--I didn’t realize at that time that she was a covert narcissist, or even that her behavior constituted emotional neglect or abuse). I didn’t trust my own intuitions and my own feelings about it, and so I went to my friends to try to get an outside opinion, some kind of validation of my impressions. I had been indoctrinated by my parents with the idea that I was “constantly overreacting”, so I needed somebody else to tell me I wasn’t.

Luckily, I had one friend, Jen, who kept telling me that my mother’s behavior was abusive and unacceptable. But it’s so hard to believe that your own parents, who have raised you to believe that they’re ideal parents, are abusive or toxic. So I would bring all my troubles to G, too, looking for corroboration.

My interactions with G felt like my interactions with my mother, in the sense that SOMETIMES she would build me up and tell me I was right and that my feelings mattered and so forth, and sometimes she would side with my mother. Just like a gambling addict, I kept going back to her because I SOMETIMES got a payoff, and SOMETIMES it felt really good, but the price was that oftentimes, she made me feel like I WAS overreacting.

With Jen’s help, I eventually did figure out that my mother’s behavior was abusive (it was quite some time later that I managed to work out that her problem was narcissism; at this time I was still trying to work out if she had had some kind of minor psychotic break, her change in behavior had been so dramatic!). G seemed to support me, telling me about how she herself had felt as a child that she hated her emotionally neglectful parents. (I don’t think she was just putting this on to make me feel like she and I were similar; narcissistic personality disorder very frequently IS partially a product of early childhood emotional abuse/neglect.)

But still, I began to feel increasingly like G was gaslighting me. More and more, there were times when I told her a story about my mother’s behavior which I had already determined beyond a doubt was abusive--and G would play it down, or explain it away. I think she likely realized that my mother was like her, a fellow narcissist, and either she was sympathizing more with my mother’s situation than mine, or she wanted to keep me in thrall to narcissistic techniques of control, or both. If I got wise to my mother’s manipulative behavior, I could get wise to HER manipulative behavior, too.

The friendship began to feel more and more uncomfortable and distasteful, but because I had so few friends in the area and so few opportunities to get away from my parents’ house, I kept seeing her every week.

(There was also an incident, when G was showing me the little apartment she and her husband had built over their garage. Knowing that my mother was abusive, I was trying to figure out how to leave my parents’ house--but I had nowhere to go, and little money to live on independently. So I asked G, “If things with my parents get really bad and I need to leave--can I come stay with you here for awhile?” Her answer was an immediate “No.” She told me that they had established the apartment so her sons could come stay with her. Her sons had homes and lives and jobs of their own, and one of them was married. But she was very emphatic that I could not come to stay with her, even if I was driven out of my house. I found this puzzling and hurtful, considering how nice she was always being to me and how she kept telling me I was her only real friend. To this day, I have never known either of her sons to come stay with her. I would like to add that it’s not that she didn’t have the right to decide who could come and stay in her guest room, and if she had been worried about something like the expense of helping to support me, I would have understood. But to claim she liked me SO MUCH and then to deny me support I needed that she could have given always struck me as contradictory--and revealing.)

Finally, I decided I needed to draw some boundaries. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what in G’s behavior was so toxic, but I knew there was something, and I needed to start working on weeding it out. So I found a behavior of hers that upset me, as a place to start.

She liked to give me unsolicited advice about things. It annoyed me because it was so often something that wouldn’t work for my situation, and getting this advice kind of triggered me. I realize now that part of the problem was that when she gave me advice, she was putting me in subordinate position. I was a full adult, over thirty years old, with a PhD, plenty old enough and competent enough to run my own life. She was about my parents’ age (25ish years older than me), and I felt like her giving me advice was her way of feeling superior to me.

So, I thought through what I was going to say, and the next time we got together, I asked her very nicely not to give me unsolicited advice anymore, because it upset me and wasn’t really helpful. I was worried about her reaction, but her reaction was perfect: a seemingly genuine, “Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize that upset you. Yes, I’ll stop. And if you catch me doing it and I don’t realize, say something, and I’ll stop.” I was relieved and gratified at her immediate acquiescence.

A few days later, I was texting with her, and she felt the need to give me unsolicited advice. And this wasn’t just a single line of, “Hey, have you thought of trying such-and-such?” No, she literally sent me a text SO LONG that my phone service broke it into three long sections (and actually sent them to me out of order) because it couldn’t handle it all. IIRC, it was about daily devotions, and she was describing EXACTLY how I should be doing my devotions.

Now, not only was this an egregious example of giving unsolicited advice in terms of length, but it was also a subject on which I felt she shouldn’t have been giving me advice in the first place. One’s Christian devotional practices are very personal, and other than “you should read the Bible and pray”, how you do it is really up to you. And she was giving me GRANULAR instructions on how to do my devotions.

I was annoyed, but she HAD said she might forget and give me advice by accident. So I texted back, “Thanks, but I can’t really use that advice.” or something to that effect. She texted back--and these aren’t the exact words, but they’re pretty close--”I was just trying to tell you what you should do.”

...which... is what advice is.

I ended the conversation soon after, and I decided we probably needed a break and I needed some space in our relationship. I had felt that she was gaslighting me on the subject of my mom’s bad behavior, and now she was overstepping very clear boundaries. And boundaries have to be enforced, not to mention I really didn’t want to be spending so much time with her if she was going to behave this way. I worried a bit about how she would react when I turned her down for our next lunch date.

I needn’t have worried. She stopped contacting me entirely. Not a call, not a text, not a lunch date. From getting together every week, she very suddenly dropped our relationship entirely, cold turkey.

On one hand, I was relieved. This meant I didn’t need to step back from our relationship myself. On the other hand, it was puzzling and hurtful. She knew that I was isolated and dealing with abuse and that I needed a strong social support system. Not to mention how she kept calling me her “ONLY FRIEND”. And yet she dropped me flat. I have since learned that this is characteristic of narcissists--another, more obvious form of the “discard”:

“When the target asks for compromise, reciprocity, empathy, integrity, honesty, and boundaries (all healthy and valid requests that people with extreme narcissistic qualities generally do not engage in), the person with narcissism may decide that the target has lost his or her luster and is tarnished—no longer the “perfect partner” to fluff the ego feathers. Inevitably, the discarding occurs when the person with narcissism either disappears or orchestrates his or her own abandonment by engaging in some form of egregious emotional abuse.” (source)

G’s discard of me was just as sudden as my mother’s, but was demonstrated through sudden literal/physical abandonment rather than sudden emotional abandonment.

That was in October. She DID call me up again one more time, in April, and we had one lunch together. By this time I had gotten diagnosed with C-PTSD from my mother’s emotional abuse, and I told G about it. She was perfectly nice at lunch, but I had a total emotional meltdown about something about an hour later that I attribute partly to G’s emotional/physical effect on me and my resulting lack of forks. That was in 2019. It has now been almost exactly two years, and I haven’t heard a word from her since. She apparently has also stopped going to our former church (I’ve stopped going there, too), and our former pastor has commented to me in emails that he misses me and G (thinking we’re still friends). I haven’t tried to disabuse him of the notion or tell him my suspicions, that G is a covert narcissist. I don’t know if he’d believe me or not, and since she isn’t going there anymore, there’s no need to tell him. I do worry that she might still be trying to work in the ministry, though.

So here’s the point of that story:

Was any of G’s behavior toward me overt abuse? No. There was something I think was gaslighting, and there was violation of boundaries, but not something that meets most people’s definition of abuse. I think G probably went out of her way to be nice to me because she was using me as narcissistic supply--just like my narcissist mother is SO NICE to all her friends, who all think she’s WONDERFUL, and saved her nastiness for those of us living in the house with her. So G was being careful NOT to abuse me, under the common definition of abuse.

But was there harm done? Yes. Being friends with G was harmful, both mentally and physically, to such an extent that the end of our friendship, sudden and unexpected as it was, filled me with relief. She was draining me emotionally in a time when I needed my friends to build me up instead. She was reinforcing my mother’s gaslighting of me, making it harder for me to get away from my abuser. She even literally made it harder for me to escape that abuse by refusing to give me any shelter despite her easy ability to do so and her avowed affection for me.

We humans need our relationships to be mutually supportive. Narcissists don’t know how to do mutually supportive. They only know how to pump you up with flattery in order to get narcissistic supply out of you. Relationships with narcissists, even “non-abusive” ones, are not relationships: they are a covert matter of cold transaction, in which the narcissist is determined to come out on top.

This is why narcissistic apologism rings so hollow. The argument “Not all narcissists are abusive” is beside the point. G didn’t directly “abuse” me by many people’s definition of abuse. Yet being friends with her was still ultimately harmful. She didn’t harm me as much as some other narcissists I have known, but that may be because I had begun to learn a good bit about narcissism and emotional abuse by that time, and it was my getting wise to her that made her end the friendship. Being in a close relationship with a narcissist--be they a parent, a partner, a friend, or a boss--can be very damaging over the long term, even if the narcissist isn’t overtly abusive. Yes, G’s narcissism probably came from a history of emotional abuse/neglect at the hands of her parents. This is true of many narcissists, including my mother. I feel bad for that. No, on some level she can’t help her natural instincts. But I also don’t need to put myself in danger by engaging in relationships with narcissists on the off-chance that they won’t harm me. I will also warn people about the characteristics of narcissists so that they, too, can protect themselves.

I don’t blame tigers for being tigers, but I don’t try to make friends with them. And telling other people that tigers make for dangerous friends doesn’t make me a bad person. *

Meredith Miller writes**, “After years of talking with people in my personal and professional life about covert narcissists, I’ve come to believe that in order to really understand the nature of the covert narcissist, you have to have lived it. . . . Only someone who has been inside that nightmare can really know what the experience is like. Even then it’s hard to describe.” I think she’s probably right. So I don’t expect narcissist apologists to really understand, and this post probably won’t change some of their minds. But people who are currently experiencing narcissistic abuse need to know that narcissistic abuse DOES exist, that it IS harmful. They need to know what it looks like so they can escape their abuser’s gaslighting. Information about covert narcissists and narcissistic abuse is a necessary tool for escape and recovery. Telling someone who is being covertly abused by a narcissist that anything bad that is said about narcissists is immoral and false is only trapping them in the cycle of abuse and its debilitating psychological and physical effects.

I hope that G, like the other narcissists I’ve known, has a good and happy life. But I don’t want to be any part of it, and I would recommend that others keep clear, as well.

*This is not an attempt to dehumanize narcissists. Narcissists are people, not animals.

**Foreword to The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist by Debbie Mirza

#narcissistic abuse #covert narcissist #narcissistic apologists

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innovativestruggles · 4 years ago

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Extra thoughts on Daisuke x Suzue (Anime and Novel)

I was prompted to write this when a friend asked me several prodding questions on Daizue’s relationship and feminism several days ago. Obviously my friend knew where to hit the right nerve LOL

So I thought about it and I’d like to share my thoughts. I don’t know whether my DaiSuzu followers are still hanging around, but if you see this, then this is for you. This post is very opinionated of course so you may not agree with what I have to say.

I took the initiative to go back and watch some of the FKBU episodes, and then top it off with the novel. As I mentioned in numerous older posts, the novel is the original and was written sometime in the 1970s. If you can read Japanese, I strongly recommend you grab a copy and read it for yourself. It goes into a lot more depth with regards to Daizue’s relationship and there is a lot more development between the two.

Novel and anime are different yet there are similarities. What I am going to write here is purely about DaiSuzu and because there are only minute differences in their interactions in both novel and anime, I will combine the two elements together. But before I do that, I want to talk a little about Suzue.

Suzue

I absolutely love Suzue’s character - in almost every single aspect. She is strong, clever, independent and defies all odds. Her personality and interests are definitely more pronounced in the anime in terms of strength and defying the odds. She does the hard yard - a mechanic, an engineer, a creator, a pilot, a spy, an intelligence operator - she is a one stop shop and she is not just a pretty face. Then we have her novel counterpart, who shares similar traits that concerns intelligence and independence. She does intelligence and spy work for Daisuke as well, and the only thing that was absent would be her ‘mechanics and gadget development role.’ Given that the book was written in the 70s by a misogynistic piece of shit, I am surprised the author gave Suzue that level of prominence.

When I saw the promotional materials and then the second episode of FKBU, I was so excited! Finally, a strong female character who has all the ‘male dominated’ traits! I was looking forward to what the anime had to offer her, considering the creators were talking about giving Suzue an ‘important’ role in the anime. And throughout the series, her character in that sense did not disappointment. She did a lot of work for Daisuke and she was the backbone of everything. She even had to rescue him at times. What an incredible woman.

In comparison, novel Suzue, although a prominent, intelligent character, still had some level of submissiveness to her that screamed ‘I need a man to save me and do things for me’ kind of way. Unsurprising of course being written by an old fashioned man in the 70s. So the anime in a sense was a breath of fresh air.

Then we see the lack of screen time. Although Suzue was just a supporting character, she was quite prominent in the novel. The anime went through all this trouble to create such an incredibly strong female character, but gave her such little screen time. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’m just frustrated that it is always the bloody male characters that gets a lot of screen time. I don’t give two fucks about your need for a fanservice or to appease fujos, we need more female characters who are strong, clever, independent, does not need a man to save her, is not overly sexualised and gets plenty of screen time. If it’s not one, it’s another. Can’t they just bloody do it all together? Also, have three main characters, Daisuke, Suzue and Haru ffs.

Feminism & Anime

If you trawl through my blog, there are a lot of posts about women, feminism, misogyny, toxic fandoms and a lot of het ships. Although I do absolutely love my M/M and F/F ships, there is a reason for my interest in anime het ships. I am a social worker who specialises in working with victim/survivors of family/domestic violence and sexual assault (DVSA), and complex trauma. Considering the majority of perpetrators are men, and the majority of victim/survivors are women, it is important to emphasise the need for a healthy and respectful relationship. I enjoy bringing my feminist perspective to film and fiction because they are an extension of society. Film and fiction (including anime and manga) are based on societal perceptions, and characters are still, unfortunately, heavily gendered.

The anime fandom consists of real people and if you look all over social media, people talk about the characters all the time and their thoughts on them. It comes from somewhere. So when I watch anime, and when I see a male and female character get together in a manner that is healthy and respectful, they get a standing ovation from me. In particular, is when a male character treats his female partner in a way that empowers her or if he abstains from using his male entitlement to demean her. Because in society, there is still a large proportion of men who continues to abuse women in every way possible. If fans are constantly viewing content (yes, even ‘cartoons’) where women are objectified and disrespected comparatively to men, that rigid stereotype is reinforced and ingrained.

I just want to add a note here that the LGBTQIA+ community do experience DVSA as well and this post does not disregard or invalidate them in any way. The focus of this discussion however, pertains to men, who make up the majority of perpetrators and, women, who are the majority of victim/survivors.

Daisuke and Suzue

I answered an ask sometime ago about why I ship DaiSuzu and although that has not changed, I have given a lot more thought to the reasoning behind it. The one thing I dislike about Suzue is her obsession with Daisuke, both in the novel and anime. It does take away her cool, independent like character, and submit her to the idea that she is nothing without first appeasing a man (Daisuke in this case). I don’t want to put too much dislike into her character in the anime, because we never got to see what her history was like with Daisuke. In the novel, I do see elements as to why she can be a bit obsessive, and that was most likely to do with her being ‘adopted’ and given a second chance. It was her way of showing appreciation. Yet she does have romantic feelings for Daisuke, so in essence, her character was emphasised as a typical lovestruck woman 😒

Again, she was incredibly loyal and forgiving towards Daisuke in the anime, despite his shitty attitude towards her at times. You’re probably wondering, after all that I wrote about feminism, why I would still ship DaiSuzu? In the anime, that comes down to Daisuke’s trauma. It added an extra layer of complexity. Daisuke’s standoffish, cold behaviour towards Suzue was not out of a sense of male entitlement and disrespect towards Suzue being a woman, rather, it was a manifestation of his trauma. Of course, it does not excuse his behaviour, but this is the reason why I really enjoyed watching their relationship. There was a lot of mutual trust going on (which I wrote about), covert appreciation of Suzue’s skills and abilities and Daisuke’s own way of making amends with her.

In the novel, however, Daisuke does not have a history of any traumatic experiences. His personality was a lot more animated and though he does exhibit some weird behaviour towards Suzue, he does not do it out of male privilege or misogyny. He was just dense (and an idiot).

Regardless, DaiSuzu’s relationship isn’t just as simple as black and white. There are elements of feminism that intertwines the anime and what I love a lot about Daisuke was that he never put Suzue down, felt intimidated, or tried to make her feel inadequate for being more clever and more intelligent than him. He relied on her knowledge, her skills and her expertise to guide him through his missions, because not only did he trust her with his life, he believed in her skills. He quietly allowed her to do her job without questioning her abilities or intervening.

I won’t discuss how shit the anime was and how much they shat on Suzue’s character by making her Daisuke’s relative, but like I said, I was pretty impressed with the way they turned Suzue into a strong character, and Daisuke’s perception of Suzue as a woman.

And yes, Daisuke doesn’t deserve Queen Suzue. And if you were again to ask me about Daisuke’s true feelings for Suzue? I am pretty damn certain that he loves her to death - in both novel AND anime.

#if onlyyyyyyy there was a season 2 #i doubt it though #i still want to know more about suzue #beautiful precious girl #she deserved soo much more #i'm so advocating for more good strong female characters #i still do love daisuzu #even though i don't think daisuke deserves suzue lmao #i'm just biased #and i love my suzue #she queen #daisuzu #daizue #daisuke kambe #suzue kambe #balance unlimited #fugou keiji balance: unlimited #fkbu #anime feminism

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akirathedramaqueen · 2 months ago

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Thank you for such a wonderful post. <3 That is such an important topic to talk about.

All of that, just everything.

And something in the last point just tingles something too personal to me.

While Stolas is a good parent, he is a wonderful parent, really, he went through impossible with somehow being such a supportive figure and a great dad for Octavia where he didn't have any role models for that (fuck you Paimon I hope you die <3 stab stab stab), he still committed a big mistake, in my opinion, of not letting Via know what's going on.

He has put her in danger over not knowing what kind of mother she has. And while we don't know yet if Via experienced any of direct abuse from Stella, this is still not fine. You just don't hide things like that from your children.

Even though that so far we are implied to believe that Via wasn't directly abused (emphasizing 'directly' here because just existing in an abusive household is an abuse by itself), and more than that, Octavia never says a bad word about her, stays with her on weekends. Still, all it takes is one bad night for the whole picture-perfect family situation to turn out dangerous.

And now, by silencing himself and brushing it under the rug, Stolas enabled Stella. By doing that, as Teal mentioned, he has put his daughter in danger. And, by extension, let Octavia believe that all of it was just for a thrill of an affair, and not because he was handing on a thread and abused for 18 years straight. Which, as we already see, leads to a huge rift between them and renders it impossible for Stolas to protect Octavia because she does not trust him as much anymore.

It tingles something in my core because it's what happening in the real life too. While there's an active abuser and a silent parent, and silent parents sometimes can do just as much harm as abusers, especially when a kid is getting attacked too. When it's not

Now, please, stay with me while I say this—we do not blame a victim for behaving like that. Stolas survived years of abuse and had his reasons to do that, and he firmly believed he protects Via by staying silent. Still, it doesn't make it right.

We don't know how much he lied about their life with Stella, we don't know how much of that Octavia absorbed as something which is okay and normal. And she did. She fucking believes and says multiple times that, in her opinion, everything was alright before Stolas cheated on her mom, and . . . baby, dear owlet, tell me, what do you think of that same 'Not Divorced' party? How many times did you see Stella abusing Stolas verbally and physically? I'll never believe he's never seen it, however covert Stolas was. You just can't hide it perfectly.

Here's the video which is focused on kids who had narcissistic parents, and, AGAIN, please—this is not Octavia situation. Stolas is on her side, and boy do I believe if Stella would raise a finger on her, he would fucking SMITE that stupid dove bitch. But I believe that there were cases when he asked her to act quieter. When she was basically deprived of her mother's attention and Stolas couldn't help it and had to come up with a lie. When she internalized all those maladaptive mechanisms of how family should work.

youtube

Just think of it.

Hell's royalty has a culture that enables Stella's abusive behavior.

Point 1: Keeping up appearances is valued above all else. And I specifically mean the appearance of things being the way they're supposed to be. Conformity basically.

Conformity in this culture seems to include a kind of stoic dignity ("you know excitement is unbecoming of a goetia"), an air of superiority ("don't bow to that one- he bows to us!"), and, of course, some good old fashioned toxic masculinity ("cease this bitch crying").

Individuals at the very top are not immune. Even though he gets past it, Asmodeus seems to spend a lot of time and effort on keeping his relationship with Fizz quiet in order to keep up the appearance of fulfilling his "lust" role.

Point 2: The members of the aristocracy who don't conform are seen as the problem, not the members who are being cruel.

Speaking of Ozzie, there's a chance he'll face real consequences for getting out of line . . . Mammon seems pretty confident about getting revenge. Also, if Ozzie had decided that his reputation was important enough to avoid stepping in to help his partner, well . . . I'm just saying. Cultures of conformity create bystanders who stand by and let abuse happen. So it's good that this guy has the courage (and a good heap of privilege and power) to enable him to step out. Yes, I realize that the crowd at Mammon's celebrated Ozzie and Fizz, but the crowd was distinctly NOT aristocratic.

Now look at Stella's party- this woman is not subtle about being cruel to her husband.

She calls the party a "Not Divorced" party. She openly talks negatively about Stolas in a blatant attempt to humiliate him. She's not trying to hide that she hates the man.

Because he's . . . an oddball. Gentle, not as polished as others in his social sphere, awkward and mostly friendless, probably autistic. And importantly, I think, not traditionally masculine.

So Stella has no need to hide that she treats him poorly. She's proud of it. And her social circle seems to support her in it, or at least, they don't push back. Because based on the aristocracy's unspoken (or if we look at Paimon, very much spoken) value system, Stolas's failure to fulfill all of his expected roles gracefully is worse than Stella's cruelty.

Point 3: Stolas's parenting, while much better than his own father's, still reflects this value system in some ways, and that's . . . complicated.

In some ways, Octavia is doing great. She has her own interests (music! gothy fashion!) that don't seem to be based on any role prescribed to her by others. She has a genuine bond with her dad that's based on care and not on molding her into some ideal princess.

But Stolas still puts on an facade in front of Via. We know that he pretended things were fine when they distinctly weren't for most of her childhood. We could argue endlessly about whether Stolas was right (as Georgia Dow explained in her video) or wrong to stop himself from explaining the situation with Stella to Via in Loo Loo Land, but honestly, the man could let his nearly grown up daughter know that abuse was happening without all out trauma dumping. It would enable her to make more informed decisions, and I think she would want to be able to do that.

Instead, Stolas keeps it to himself. Because he feels like Via SHOULD have this picture perfect childhood. Look at the pictures that are up in his palace. Look at his attempt to gloss over the fighting in the household by taking Via to an idealized childhood destination.

A part of him still thinks that good parenting is keeping up appearances, and that the ugly things are best kept hidden. Look at how hard he still tries to avoid crying in front of people. The values he was taught as a child are part of him.

And while it's not his fault (it's Stella's fault, obviously- these are HER actions), his inability to be open allows Stella and Andrealphus to scheme and (we'll see . . .) probably manipulate Via because of her lack of knowledge.

We're meant to see the moments where Stolas breaks expectations and behaves raw and even a little unhinged as triumphant. Sleeping with Blitz. That is the sound of a fucking divorce. Actually going through with the fucking divorce. Insisting on it. Appearances be damned.

And yeah, more of that please. Because if the people around Stella stop caring about aristocratic social trappings, all she'll have going for her is her shitty personality.

Thanks @akirathedramaqueen for inspiring this post with a conversation.

#sorry Emily I made a fucking meta on meta #and again #STOLAS NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS #but he needs to realize that abuse is not something you need to fucking keep quiet about #and I am afraid circumstances will force him to before he has a chance to sort it out peacefully #AND ALSO POINTS ABOUT ASMODEUS ARE GREAT #even the person who is at the top of the food chain is forced to play by rules #how fucked up this hell world is #kind of looks like our own huh #stolas #stolas goetia #helluva boss #helluva boss spoilers #helluva boss meta #Youtube

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delimeful · 5 years ago

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WIBAR Intermission: Cultural Differences

a commission for @secretlypansexualmango !! thank you so much for your patience with me during this difficult time, I hope you enjoy reading as much as i did writing it! :)

if you’re new to this AU, you can find the first story on tumblr here and the ao3 collection here!

warnings: anxiety, tense discussion, mention of nonconsensual drug use, medical experimentation, mention of child abuse, dehumanizing language, flashbacks, PTSD

Logan paced back and forth along his floor, hands strumming the air but not noting any particular information, just… moving. A nervous tic that he’d recently been struggling to repress around Virgil.

Speaking of.

“Patton, you are certain that Virgil will not wonder where you are and come to investigate?” he asked, turning on the balls of his feet to face the little Ampen.

“Yep, I showed him how to use the tech in the washroom and he said something about staying in there all day. Turns out Humans need water to clean, not dirt!” Patton tapped his fingers together consideringly. “Now I feel kind of bad about trying to get him to dust more often, no wonder he’s all grimy.”

Logan forced his hands to still so he wouldn’t record the information. That was the whole reason they were here, after all.

“Why are you so worried about the Human finding us huddling in your bedspace like a bunch of giggling adolescents?” Roman asked, adjusting his armor plates slightly so they didn’t pinch. He perked up for a moment. “Are we finally kicking him out?”

Patton frowned in disapproval at him, and he averted his eyes. “Joking! Just joking, Pat.”

Logan hummed lightly to recall their attention. “I am seeking advice in regards to the Human— or, Virgil, rather, but I don’t want to offend him or give him the wrong idea by openly excluding him from a conversation. Hence, covert gathering.”

Patton brightened— literally, his feathers aglow with excitement. “Oh, why didn’t you say so, Lo!”

Roman sunk further down, a grumble forming in his chest. “Yeah, why didn’t you say so. I don’t think I’ve got much to contribute about him compared to Patton.”

Logan inclined his head slightly in a Crav’n gesture to hold on for a little longer. “While I will admit that you have very different opinions on Virgil, I value both your perspectives equally and as such, would like to hear your honest thoughts on my query.”

Roman didn’t shift, but the grumble eased slightly, placated by Logan’s words. “Alright, what is it?”

Patton nodded encouragingly.“I’m all ears, kiddo! Feathears, that is!”

Logan didn’t dignify the atrocious pun with a response beyond his face pinching slightly. “I’m sure you all remember the incident we had recently, with the... yawning.”

At the reminder, Patton winced and Roman glowered.

Virgil had joined them for breakfast again the prior light cycle, a rare occurrence, and had nearly startled Logan out of his seat when he had stretched his jaw unnaturally wide with a crack, apropos of nothing. Patton had hurried to reassure them it was normal, and very much harmless, but it hadn’t prevented Roman from looking visibly on edge for the rest of the morning. Virgil had fled to his room early as a result.

“I believe that it would be beneficial for all of us to learn more about Human culture, and while I have scoured many texts for information, most of it has proven to be inaccurate or downright offensive. As a result, I’ve decided that I should attempt to ask Virgil directly to share,” Logan nervously fluttered his hands. “Ideally through a Vidi.”

Patton, who had gotten all fluffed up during his explanation, now paused slightly. “I think it’s a great idea for you to bond with Virgil, Lo! I’m not sure he’d be too keen on sharing minds, though. The idea seemed to make him nervous.”

Roman snorted.

“Yes, I predicted as much.” Logan gestured between the two of them. “Hence why I have gathered you to receive insight on how best to go about gaining his permission.”

His two closest friends shared a look, Patton having to crane his neck up considerably to do so. The Ampen piped up first.

“I say you should just ask him! What’s the worst that could happen?”

Beside him, Roman made a gesture to ward off bad luck, muttering about inviting chaos. Logan held a hand to his face to ward off any headaches.

“He could say no,” he emphasized, pointing out the obvious flaw.

“That is not the worst that could happen. And anyways, if he says no, it’s not the end of the universe. You can still make a valiant effort to convince him after the fact. Write a 20 page dissertation on all the reasons he should give it a shot, or bargain with jam, or any other nerd stuff. But if you try to go behind his back--”

“He’ll never trust you again,” Patton completed, antennae lowering at the thought. “Virgil is slow to trust, and for good reason. I know you of all people can understand that, Logan.”

“Actually, I was going to finish that with ‘you might never get a second chance to Vidi with anyone, because you’ll be dead.’ Humans don’t take lightly to intrusion,” Roman clenched his hands, gaze dark.

Patton drooped more, like he was attempting to become a puddle of sad Ampen. “I know you two aren’t as familiar with Virgil as I am, but… I’m telling you, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He’s probably even more scared of you than you are of him.”

“I am not scared of a Human,” Roman insisted, scales rattling in offense. “And anyhow, we aren’t talking about a little fuzzy pollinator from a flora planet, we’re talking about a Human. A deathworlder. I know he was merciful to you, Pat, and I’m glad, but that doesn’t mean we can trust him to go against his nature. The way he acts, the look in his eye… I’ve seen it before. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe for a second that he’s harmless.”

“Roman--!” Patton stopped short as the Crav’on rose to his feet and stormed out in a huff, dramatic as always. The small alien let out a frustrated trill, tugging on his antennae for a second before turning back to Logan.

“I never said that he was harmless,” he announced pointedly. “None of us are harmless, not even me. But just because he’s got the… the potential to be dangerous doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give him a chance. Try asking him about the Vidi, Lo, and if that doesn’t work out I’ll help you think of more options, okay?”

Frankly, Logan had been hoping for something more along the lines of a guide he could follow while striking a deal with Virgil, but he nodded anyhow. Sometimes researchers simply had to work with what little they had.

He spent the next few light cycles calculating the encounter, from his words to all the possible outcomes. He had plenty of time to consider such things, seeing as Virgil was particularly adept at avoiding him.

Though the Human was subtle about it, it was hard to miss the way he found an excuse to leave any room Logan was in more often than not. Even when he couldn’t make a hasty escape-- most often because Patton was sleeping on his person-- he was always following Logan’s movements from the corner of his vision. Tracking him. It was… nerve-wracking.

Logan was much more than a creature of instinct, though, and so he persisted despite the occasional shiver sent down his spine.

When he finally managed to get the Human alone, however, it happened completely unintentionally. He was fixing a middark snack before sleep, and had just put the jam back in the coolant box when a vague emotional pulse nearby made his skin prickle.

He paused. Neither of his shipmates would be so quiet while nearby, so… He squinted into the dim hallways, searching for movement. “Virgil?”

“Uh,” said the Human, from on top of the cabinets how had he even gotten up there— “Hey.”

Logan was suddenly thankful for his dulled physical response, since it prevented him from doing something embarrassing like jumping out of his carapace. “Hello. Might I inquire— May I ask why you are all the way up there?”

The vague shadow that was Virgil shifted slightly, before dropping to the floor with a muted thump that shook the ground. Logan hoped that he hadn’t left any imprints in the floor paneling; Roman would have a fit.

“Just, uh. Just felt like it,” he answered, avoiding Logan’s gaze. “I’ll get out of your way.”

“Wait, please,” Logan blurted, and to his surprise Virgil paused mid step. He quickly pulled himself onto a nearby stool, both so he could meet the Human’s eyes better and leave an exit available, seeing as a cornered Human was not one he wanted to deal with. “I had something I wanted to discuss with you, if that’s alright. Nothing bad, simply a request.”

Despite his attempt to be soothing, Virgil’s shoulders only seemed to rise further, a defensive gesture according to Patton. Logan attempted to look as non-threatening as possible.

“And what if it’s not alright?” Virgil challenged, voice low and rough as he glanced towards the hall entryway.

Logan folded his lower hands in his lap carefully, his words measured. “Then I shall ask again another time. It is late, after all. I don’t want to keep you from sleeping.”

Virgil made a half-exhale of amusement, or maybe resignation. Logan suspected it was because tonight was one of the nights Patton slept with him and Roman, nights that Logan suspected the Human often got little to no sleep. It was a concern to bring up at another time.

“Okay, fine, discuss away. But I reserve the right to leave any time.”

Logan blinked a few times, almost surprised that Virgil had actually agreed. He tapped his fingers together nervously— now came the difficult part. “My request is in regards to the incident at morning meal yesterday. Specifically, the misunderstanding about your ‘yawn’.”

Virgil visibly hid a wince. “I already apologized for that.”

“Unnecessarily, I believe,” Logan said, causing Virgil to dart a glance at him in surprise. “You know as little about us as we know about you. It’s unreasonable to expect you not to make a few mistakes.”

After a beat of stunned silence, Virgil shook his head slightly. “Try telling that to Roman,” he muttered.

“I did, actually,” Logan said, frowning slightly at the recollection. “Surprising nobody, he didn’t want to listen.”

“Wait, what?” Virgil asked, voice coming out a bit louder than before. “I thought you guys were like… cool. Uh, good. Friends.”

Logan forced himself not to interrogate the Human on the slang, noting his embarrassment at fumbling. “We are, now. When I first came aboard the Mindscape, however, Roman and I fought constantly.”

“No. Really?”

“Yes. We were-- and still are-- very opinionated individuals. Stubborn,” he clarified, seeing Virgil struggle with the unfamiliar word. “Patton had to intervene in our bickering more often than not.”

“Huh,” Virgil uttered, curious. Logan was pleased to note that he’d relaxed slightly, and pressed on.

“But that is a story for another time. My request is actually an attempt to help prevent such misunderstandings in the future. I would like to ask you about Human culture, in order to clear up common misconceptions and help me and the others recognize unfamiliar gestures or actions,” Logan ran the words through his mind, trying to see if he’d forgotten anything. “You’re free to say no, of course, I simply assumed that it would be easier for us all, but--”

“Logan.” Virgil waited for him to glance up before continuing. “This is a lot. I’ll… I’ll think it over, alright?”

Logan nodded, enthusiastic to not be rejected outright. “Of course. In that case, I am going to head to my quarters to rest. Don’t hesitate to seek me out if you would like elaboration on anything.”

The Human nodded, seeming deep in thought as Logan ducked his head in farewell and left. He could only hope that Virgil would be open to trying.

The next light cycle, Virgil appeared quite suddenly at the entry to his lab, never crossing the threshold.

“What are you going to do if I say no?” he asked, features clearer but also somehow harsher in the light. “Maybe I don’t want you to know anything about Humans, or me. What then?”

Logan hurriedly set aside the samples he’d been comparing, pushing his thick inspection lenses up so he could see the Human properly. He took a moment to think over the question. “Roman suggested that I write a dissertation-- that is, a sort of argument to convince you-- if you refused outright, but seeing as you’ve had time to consider your options already… I will take your refusal at face value and not pester you about it any longer.”

Virgil narrowed his eyes in a gesture that was most likely not an Ampen smile. “Just like that? Seriously?”

“I am always serious,” Logan told him, very seriously. “Though I do encourage you to speak with Patton on other potential solutions not involving me--”

“I’ll do it.”

“Pardon?” Logan asked, his ears twitching. Virgil raised his chin slightly, meeting Logan’s eyes solidly in challenge.

“I’ll do it,” he repeated, and Logan noticed the way his hands shook slightly at his sides. He slowly placed his lenses onto the countertop, turning to face Virgil fully.

“Would it be preferable to talk in the common area?” he asked, spreading his hands to accentuate the question. “We are simply exchanging information, there’s no need to do it here.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow at him, and then shoved his hands in his pockets, feigning nonchalance. “Sure, whatever.”

A short trek later, they were seated in the lounging area, Virgil a careful seat away. Logan had received permission to ‘take notes’ as the Human called it, and started off with questions that seemed simple enough.

Naturally, they immediately encountered problems.

“So, you do actually keep canids in your home for defense purposes?” Logan asked, hands stalling. “Is that not dangerous? Do you train them to not recognize the home’s residents as threats? I was under the impression all of Earth’s fauna was relatively vicious in order to survive.”

Virgil dragged a hand over his face. “I guess some people keep guard dogs, but most people just get them as like… companions. We take care of them and they live with us. We… ugh, I don’t know the word for it. We trained them to not be… angry? Wild? Way long ago.”

“Domestication,” Logan suggested, and then resisted a sigh when Virgil looked at him without comprehension. “Virgil, I would like to try something, if it’s alright with you. My species has the ability to link minds and share memories, referred to as a Vidi. It would allow us to bypass the language barrier and you could show me what life on Earth is like with far more clarity.”

Virgil was already shaking his head. “I don’t want you poking around in my head. I don’t know how it works on your planet, but thoughts are personal on Earth.”

“Nor on mine. I am not a mind reader,” Logan corrected wryly. “The Vidi is more like a form of shared thinking, and if you would like, I will take no part in paddling-- guiding where our thoughts take us. You will then have control over what you share and what you ask from me. Both Patton and Roman have linked with me in the past, and suffered no ill effects, if you are worried about cross-species Vidi.”

“Well, I am now,” Virgil muttered, and hunched his shoulders. “... Can I stop it?”

“Yes. It may take a few moments, since the flow of thought is unpredictable, but I have never gotten stuck in a link,” Logan tilted his head slightly, offering a hand. “Do you want to try something simple to test it?”

Virgil chewed on his lip for a click longer before reaching out and placing his own hand atop Logan’s.

Immediately, he was seeing from a different angle, different time, different eyes. The hall was dark, but he could see uncannily well in it, noting the outline of stairs in front of him. At the base of the stairs, a light illuminated a dog staring up at him pleadingly. An Australian Shepard, though he had no idea what that was.

“Zero, it’s three in the morning,” a familiar voice grumbled, Logan feeling echoes of the sound in his throat. The words were foreign, but he could understand the meaning. He observed the dog as the memory proceeded to stumble around the house and open a door to the night, releasing Zero into the yard.

‘This is bizarrely immersive,’ Virgil commented as the memory’s gaze turned up to the stars. ‘Like a dream. But… not as weird as I thought it might be.’ The memory flickered to a cartoon alien for a moment before stabilizing again, and Logan graciously ignored the lapse.

‘Just from this alone, I have a much better concept of dogs,’ he responded, his mental voice quite enthusiastic. ‘Can you show me the devices you mentioned earlier? The ones Humans ride for entertainment?’

‘Oh, yeah, roller coasters. That’s a good one.’

The world around them flickered, and then it was bright daylight streaming around them. The memory stepped forwards, leaving behind a line that had taken ages and climbing into a seat. Another human-- slightly older than Virgil, probably too old to be working this job-- stepped over and pushed the safety bar over the memory’s lap, locking them in securely.

The ride started, and Logan’s stress levels increased along with the memory’s sense of anticipation, peaking as they hit the top of the tracks and began to topple. The memory of Virgil’s stomach dropping was well-preserved, and fear-excitement-glee surged through the memory as the scenery blurred by too fast to process. After a period of time that was both too-long and too-short, the ride came to a stop.

Virgil’s smug amusement was tangible as Logan struggled to form words. ‘Humans do that for fun, you said?’

‘Yep.’

‘... I get the feeling this is going to be a truly interesting mindshare.’

Several alarming concepts later, including coffee, sleep deprivation, gender roles, and babies’ soft skulls, Logan was itching to take some time to journal all his thoughts out and also have a brief respite from horrifying implications.

Virgil snorted, which he had learned was a Human gesture of amusement rather than a Crav’n one of disdain. He visualized an image of Logan writing with all four hands in a book, and Logan responded with showing him the art form practiced back home, which involved exactly that. Drawing a full image at multiple points simultaneously was a honed skill for some Ulgorii.

‘This has been quite illuminating, however I am hoping to end it here,’ Logan requested, pulling them back on track.

Virgil hesitated for a moment, and then: ‘I want to check something. Really quick. I need to know.’

Logan had barely agreed when the scene shifted again, this memory tinged with haze around the edges. Physical sensation was dulled somewhat, but the cold metal underneath their back was a clear enough feeling. White walls above them, and aliens in thick bodysuits leaned over them. The memory was too fuzzy to recall what was being taken, but there was a sense of relief that it didn’t hurt. Not adrenaline, then.

Above them, a couple of the harvesters spoke. Logan recognized Virgil’s intent too late to do anything to prevent it. He couldn’t simply stop understanding Common, after all.

“Drain duty is so boring. You think it’d be entertaining with a Human, but no, all it does is lie here with those freaky dead eyes,” one complained. “Are they sure they didn’t accidentally grab a braindead one?”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been here for the Dren drain,” the other responded, voice morbidly fascinated. “Thing’s practically feral, the way it lashes out. I don’t envy the escorts who have to drag it back to its cage afterwards, even with the drugs.”

“If it’s so beastly, why not just treat it like one? Put two together till they breed and train the baby to be less of a monster, same as we do with the troublesome creatures,” the harvester suggested, jabbing a claw at Virgil’s form. Logan felt sickened. ‘Virgil--’

“And risk them tearing each other apart? Humans are rare as is, there’s no way the Uppers would authorize something that might end with both dead.” The harvester took a few paces to the side, meeting the memory’s gaze with complete apathy. “Those scientists that have dibs on the body want it intact for dissection, or else we’re getting fuckall for the payment.”

The memory flickered, unstable, to an alien that only visited when they were doing the painful tests, wearing what Logan recognized as scholarly gear instead of the customary bodysuit. Virgil remembered they had snapped out words with one of the smugglers, numbers, prices, bargaining for his corpse--

Back to the little white room where they drained him, bit by bit.

“It’s pretty sedate, considering,” A smuggler prodded him, to no response beyond a brief flicker of eyelids.

“Of course it is, we picked it up off the planet fresh. Stupid thing can’t understand a thing we’re saying, so what’s there to panic about?”

The memory fractured, splitting into a thousand different fragments that flashed by with increasing speed-- panic attacks in his cell, unable to count the days he’d been locked in the too-small space, the ring, being hosed down like a rabid animal.

‘Logan,’ Virgil managed weakly, his grip on the Vidi loosening, ‘change it.’

In his alarm at Virgil’s condition, he practically yanked the share back to his own memories. He was too concerned to focus on what or where exactly he was remembering, until it had already snapped into clarity around them. He should have known better.

The memory was a mirror of Virgil’s, summoned by Logan’s automatic recall. His younger self sat on a sterile white counter, kicking his feet as around him, four machines worked to draw blood from each of his arms. He moved to shift the share again, but Virgil nudged him, distracted by the surprise.

‘What… what is this?’ he asked, despite the fact that he was surely receiving information from the memory’s perspective as they spoke.

Logan sighed, watching as a pleased doctor removed the equipment and shuffled him off to be escorted back to his room. ‘As I told you before, you are certainly not the only one to deal with trauma or flashbacks on this ship.’

“You promised me a new book,” the memory said with the voice of a child who had grown up too fast. “I sat quietly, so I get a new book, right?”

“Of course, of course,” the doctor waved him off, already moving to bottle and package the blood to be sold. Ulgorian blood, which would make a fair amount of coin at market for its use as a paralyzing toxin. “Continue being such an obedient, quiet child and you will have any book you desire, Aconite.”

Logan finally broke the Vidi off, opening his eyes as Virgil jolted sharply across from him. He studied the Human’s complexion for a moment, and then reached into the table drawer for a water jug. “Drink something. I believe you have experienced the beginnings of a panic attack during our share.”

He held the water out patiently until Virgil took it, pulling back to give him space. “Though I had my suspicions, I now see why you reacted the way you did to my designation as a self-identified scientist.”

Virgil laughed hoarsely, sipping at the water. “Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t know--” He cut himself off sharply. “You won’t do anything to me. Patton told me, and I think I knew it too, really. I was just... nervous. That you’d ask for more than I could give--”

“--or change the parameters before you could ever reach them,” Logan finished, lacing his fingers together in a wry Crav’n gesture. “There’s no need to apologize. I understand, as you now know.”

“Sorry about that,” Virgil repeated. “I didn’t mean to peek at your trauma.”

“Again, no need. It’s nothing I haven’t already come to terms with,” Logan said, and then offered him a few thumbs ups. “We are cool, as I believe the term is used.”

Virgil gave him a small grin, and Logan finally understood what Patton meant when he called Virgil’s teeth-bearing friendly.

After a discussion on how PTSD affected the mind share, they settled for focusing on simply communicating through Common. It would be better for Virgil’s language growth, and reduce the amount of traumatic flashbacks they were both exposed to. If either of them got frustrated, they simply left off to discuss the matter another cycle.

This was how, a rotation later, Logan found himself enthusiastically quizzing a Human on his dietary habits.

“I know that there are Humans who raise livestock, presumably for meat. Do Humans prefer raw meats or cooked ones? Or are there other ways to prepare animal flesh? Is it determined by individual preference?”

Virgil waited patiently, ducking under one of Logan’s flapping hands as he moved to sit down. “We eat all kinds of stuff, Specs.”

“Ah. Should we stock up on blood at our next port, then?”

A startled laugh, though Logan was only half-joking. “Okay, all kinds of stuff like plants and some minerals.”

Logan made a note to correct his notes, again. “Another incorrect assumption... I was under the impression that human omnivorous tendencies were only for survival scenarios, similar to your ability to endure blood loss. Most texts say that humans are primarily carnivores.”

“No, we’re pretty omnivorous.” Virgil shrugged. “Some people are vegetarian-- or, herbivores, I guess, but that’s a personal choice dependent on all sorts of things. We evolved to be omnivorous, we’ve got the flat teeth and the pointy ones, see?” He pulled a lip down to show his teeth, which were in fact thick and rounded in the back.

Logan half-lunged forwards, inspecting the inside of his mouth carefully. “You’re absolutely right! While you have the canines for biting and tearing meat off the bone, you also have molars for masticating tough plant matter! Oh, of course Humans don’t actually drink blood, there are evolutionary signifiers for such things and Human blood likely has little to none of the nutritional value that your body needs. Fascinating! Are these made of bone?”

It was at this moment that Roman walked in. There was a pause in which Logan realized that at some point he had moved to stick most of his hand in Virgil’s mouth to better examine his dental structure.

“Logan,” Roman started, deceivingly composed, “if you lose a finger by being a huge nerd, I am going to freak it.”

Logan executed a ‘wink’ to Virgil before responding. “Not to worry, Human teeth are dull enough that they are only dangerous if significant jaw strength is applied. I do not believe Virgil will bite me. Correct?”

“Uhn,” Virgil grunted in affirmation, spit starting to spill out of his mouth. Despite his reassurance, he looked vaguely uncomfortable with the situation. Logan hurriedly withdrew.

“Oh sure, you totally know he’s not going to bite you when he is literally drooling!” Roman howled, before turning on his heel and walking right back out of the commons. “I am too tired for this. Call me when you’re done being an insane scientist in our living room.”

Virgil wiped his mouth off on his sleeve, voice sardonic. “Doesn’t he know by now that mad scientist is your permanent state of being?”

“I have no idea why you would say such a thing. I am a perfectly calm and composed scientist,” Logan responded in a monotone, turning his nose up when Virgil started laughing. “How dare you imply otherwise. The indignity of it all. Woe is me.”

“That’s what you get for inviting a malicious human onboard,” Virgil snarked back, leaning back. “Too bad, you’ll regret it to the end of your days.”

“No,” Logan answered with a wry twist of his lips, “I don’t think I will.”

#sanders sides #ts virgil #ts logan #ts patton #ts roman #wibar #watch it burn and rust #commissioned works #space au #analogical boys share some trauma: the fic!#ive been so excited to write this one you guys have no idea #writing #my writing #please forgive me if some editing is off i am v tired

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thecreepiestcarrie · 4 years ago

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I've been quite bewildered as to how Johnny Depp lost his appeal against the clearly-biased judgement of Judge Nicol so I went through the official Court of Appeal Judgement. And what did I find there? More examples of this bias against Johnny.

I now have an answer to my question of how did Johnny lose the appeal, with all of the knowledge that we gained during this trial taken into consideration - how could it be upheld that the Sun calling him a 'wife beater' was factually correct?

Because Nicol went the way that the money and all of his not-so-covert connections told him to.

It was Rigga Morris, girl. Completely rigged. You don't just take on Rupert Murdoch's empire and win, even if you have the truth and a wide selection of the public on your side.

Basically it's 14 pages of 'Nicol said this and it's true so nyeh' and the court of appeal just dodging the many holes in his logic/judgement. Nicol is right, Johnny is wrong and everything Scum ever did wrong has a reasonable explanation and she's definitely not a gold digger and that's all that matters. No matter what Scamber says at any point in time, she is correct. Did she just contradict herself? No, she didn't, this is actually what she meant...

Page 3, section 1: Mr Depp did extensive damage to a house which he had rented and wrote offensive graffiti about Ms Heard (shown in photographs), some in paint and some in his own blood. While it does not necessarily follow that angry and jealous behaviour of this kind would involve physical violence against Ms Heard, the Judge evidently regarded it as making her allegations more likely to be true. section 2: He does not explicitly admit acts of assault against Ms Heard, but again the Judge regarded the admissions as making it more plausible that he did in fact commit such acts

A heavy feature of this judgment is the shit-ton of assumptions that are made and then stubbornly stuck to without a clear line from the evidence to the conclusion that was reached.

Page 4, section 10: Mr Caldecott’s (Johnny's barrister) first complaint concerned the treatment of what he said were clear admissions by Ms Heard, recorded in taped conversations, that she had more than once herself been the aggressor in incidents of physical violence between her and Mr Depp. [...] he said that the admissions were important because it was Ms Heard’s evidence throughout that she never initiated any physical violence against Mr Depp (as opposed to responding to violence from him): if that was untrue it was bound to put in question the credibility of her evidence about what happened.

Page 5, section 13: The admissions apparently made in these tapes were relied on in the closing submissions on behalf of Mr Depp at the trial as one of the general matters adversely affecting Ms Heard’s credibility, and the Judge addressed the point [...]

Shit Judge Nicol says:::::

"In her evidence, Ms Heard said that she did sometimes throw pots and pans at Mr Depp but only to try and escape him and as a means of self-defence. She also said at times in Argument 2 she was being sarcastic."

"In my view no great weight is to be put on these alleged admissions by Ms Heard to aggressive violent behaviour. [...] nonetheless true, that these conversations [the taped confrontations] are quite different to evidence in court. A witness giving evidence in court does so under an oath or affirmation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Questioning can be controlled by the judge. Questions which are unclear can be re-phrased. If a question is not answered, it can be pressed (subject to the court's control) and if still unanswered may be the proper object of comment. None of those features applied to these conversations which, in any event, according to Ms Heard had a purpose or purposes different from simply conveying truthful information. (para 175)"

You can't put weight on to the taped conversations/confessions from Scamber because they did not take place in court... Okay, sure, why not, let's pretend that's how you operate. If that was the case, how come the circumstances behind the creation of the evidence for her case isn't questioned/doesn't impact on how much weight he allocates to them? Why does he disallow the tapes to sway him? But then pays full attention to Scamber's evidence of texts to family/friends and writings in her diary? Selective hearing, but more like selective weighing.

Page 6, section 14: Mr Caldecott submitted that the reasoning in para. 175 showed a fundamentally flawed approach to fact-finding because it gave an unjustified special priority to the status of witness evidence. [...] He also said that the Judge’s approach in this regard was inconsistent, because in many other instances he placed great weight on contemporaneous materials when making a finding against Mr Depp.

It's true and I'm glad he said it, but in the next section, the court of appeal knocks this down. They are sticking to Nicol's bullshit story and they are sticking to it until the ship is completely sunk to the bottom of the ocean with Titanic.

Section 15: We do not believe that that is a correct understanding of what the Judge was saying [...] In our view it is clear that the Judge was making a more specific point about the weight to be attached to these particular statements because of the particular circumstances in which they were made.

Page 12, section 40: If the statement in Ms Heard’s witness statement that the $7m “was donated” to charity [...] is to be understood to mean literally that the full $7m had already been paid, that is clearly contradicted by the further evidence, and her statement was accordingly misleading.

But that doesn't call her credibility into question? Nicol believes Scamber when she says her taped confessions were sarcastic, but doesn't believe that Johnny was speaking in exaggerated falsities when texting a friend about his abuser - Nicol picks and chooses which tone to pay attention to in order to suit his own agenda.

-----

These are just some exerts that I thought were interesting and show the nature of the judgement. I'm not sure how much I will be posting about the UK case anymore (I do have some posts about specific issues sitting in my drafts (about the James Cordon appearance casting doubts over all of AH's admissions, about the audio tapes and why they are ridiculously important, about Johnny's MRSA), but nothing like the other deep dives I was doing), because as I've stated before, I have become convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt of Johnny's innocence and because now that this judgement has been handed down by the Court of Appeals, the whole UK case is all over red rover so it doesn't seem super relevant to keep going on about this trial that is now dead and buried. The evidence that I have gone through and posted here, I can make sense of that. But this judgement and any thing in a similar vein, there's no chance of me ever making sense of that, so shall I just quit while I'm ahead? Yes.

#justiceforjohnnydepp #johnny depp vs the sun #johnny depp vs dan wootton #amber heard is a liar #amber heard is an abuser #i read through court documents so you don't have to #I stand with Johnny Depp #fuck amber heard #more like Scamber Turd

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snakebusters · 3 years ago

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Snake Party Melbourne all the rage.

Snake parties are all the rage among mums and dads in Melbourne. People are lining up for snake parties in Melbourne! To learn more about how Snake Parties came about, read on ...In the late 1960's The Snakeman Raymond Hoser invented Snake Parties. At the time, Hoser was lampooned as an idiot, but the idea could not be killed. The name came from the idea of bringing tons of snakes to a kids birthday party, for the children to get hands on and hold them. These reptile gatherings soon evolved to become full-blown wildlife parties and then the so-called reptile party. Since then he has registered the trademarks for reptile party and reptile parties in Australia, involving all sorts of critters and in all configurations. The reptile party trademarks include Snake parties, snake catcher, online information on snakes, wildlife conservation activities, education in schools and so on.The whole concept of snake parties has travelled a long, long, way since then. Initially, Raymond Hoser and his reptile collection were a curiosity piece among friends and others who would come to his home to see them. Hoser would take the snakes out of their cages, do a show and tell and let those who wanted to hold them, get hands on. At the time, Raymond was more into the science of the animals that dealing with other people, but his parents were regularly entertainers of friends and invariably everyone would want to see the animals. Rather than wait for this to happen, Raymond would simply take the animals to the party, do his show and tell, and then get back to what he had to do. Typically that was study in one form or other, including what has since become many hundreds of major scientific papers. From these humble beginnings, the 15 minute "show and tell" with the snakes as the centrepiece expanded and then word-of-mouth did the rest. The reptile party show extended to an hour or more. Strangers and other people were more than happy to pay to have Raymond take time out and do what soon became known as the reptile party, or snake parties. Raymond Hoser's activities were effectively outlawed in the 1970's, as the government-run and owned zoos saw a potential break in their monopoly of the wildlife space. They wanted people to come to the zoo and spend their money there instead. The idea of a mobile zoo eating into their lucrative profits was something they had to stop and which they succeeded in.Raymond Hoser fought against the government's corrupt and dishonest banning of private ownership of wildlife in Australia for two decades and got nowhere. The enemy in the form of government-run zoos, wildlife officers from the department that owned the zoos were way too powerful and easily withstood the demands of people wanting private ownership of reptiles. The government run zoos, like Taronga in Sydney and the Melbourne Zoo in Melbourne (known as Zoos Victoria) also had the government controlled media on their sidel. That was until in 1993, when Raymond Hoser dropped a so-called curve ball and he published the best-selling book, Smuggled: The Underground Trade in Australia's Wildlife. It exposed the rotten underbelly of the illegal Australian wildlife trade, corruption in State Wildlife departments and all the animal abuse and cruelty going on in their own zoos businesses. True to form the Australian government had the book banned, got police to raid bookshops and seized all copies of the books. On instructions copies were destroyed and the media that was completely controlled by the state was gagged from reporting the story.The state controlled media, including the Murdoch Press, who only reports what the government wants them to, refused to report the story of the corruption book that was banned. Were it not for the corageous efforts of a veteran investigative journalist, Fia Cumming, this story would have gone no further and nothing would have changed. Employed at the notorious Murdoch owned News Corporation, stories she wrote about corruption were censored and banned (they say spiked in the trade) and her sub-editors, better known as government-assisting censors made sure none of her stories about full-blown corruption ever got printed. Aware of this, Fia Cumming decided to sabotage the system and get the story of the banning of the book run when the censor wasn't looking. After planning in line with a covert military operation, her story ran on the front page of all the Murdoch rags on a Sunday in mid 1993, a media frenzy followed and next thing you know, the Australian government through the environment minister at the time (Chris Hartcher) was forced to apologise for the government's fascist behaviour. He then interviewed on National TV and was forced under duress and effectively kicking and screaming to direct that the book be formally "unbanned". Police were directed to go back to policing, but as we know, not much that is done, because a lot of cops prefer to deal illicit drugs and do other things that make them more cash.The book Smuggled:The Underground Trade in Australia's Wildlife went on to become a best seller! It has been republished many times since and remains an Australian classic more than a quarter of a century after it was published. It is mandatory reading for all wildlife lovers and those with an interest in entrenched government corruption in Australia. The bombshell book forced a rewrite of wildlife laws across Australia and for the first time in decades, private people could keep and study native wildlife without getting locked up if caught doing so. This also meant that privately owned travelling wildlife shows could operate again. Once it became clear that mobile wildlife displays were legal and those who did them were not going to jail for doing hands on wildlife displays, Raymond Hoser was again able to do his reptile parties. Seizing on from ideas from others and refining them, the business plan and the nature of the reptile parties changed dramatically.Instead of owning species that he liked, Raymond Hoser targetted those that were best suited to being handled, ease of looking after and with a wow-factor for audiences at events like kids parties and birthday party shows. The snake party, sometimes also known as the Kids Reptile Party included crocodiles, snakes, lizards, frogs and turtles, with lots of different kinds and massive numbers at a time, so that even in a group of 30 people, everyone can hold the animals at the same time. In Melbourne the state of Victoria, Australia, kinders, primary schools, secondary schools and even universities seized on the opportunity to have a mobile zoo come to them and so business boomed for the reptile party shows. The concept of the travelling wildlife display for kids birthday parties has now been copied across Australia and also elsewhere, including in the UK, USA and even South Africa. Raymond Hoser taught people in all these places, who now run their own successful wildlife education and reptile display businesses. In Melbourne, reptile parties are seen most weekends and in pretty much all suburbs of Melbourne and nearby parts of Victoria. On weekdays when not at schools, kinders and the like, reptile displays can be seen at corporate events and even team building exercises for bored business people. Occasionally Raymond Hoser will spend the day simply cleaning cages, a neccessary chore that comes with owning animals. However most fo the time, he does this at night, because, put simply, he is too busy by day to do such things. Did I mention that Raymond Hoser, better known as the Snakeman is also one of the world's best known wildlife conservation icons. In terms of actual results, no one on the planet can match his score. But when it comes to wildlife conservation, Raymond Hoser stresses that everyone needs to be involved for things to work and succeed. He says it is a team game and every person should be a part of the solution.

#snake party #Snakeman #Raymond Hoser t #reptile party #kind reminder #kids #animals #hold the animals #kinders #wildlife conservation

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dammitadolfnomorecake · 4 years ago

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Once Bitten, Twice Stupid prt.16

Keith was sitting on the front steps when Lance pulled into his driveway. Their meeting for a moment, before Pidge was leaning past him

“Get in, loser! We’re going out!”

Rubbing his ear, Lance didn’t appreciate Pidge’s loud voice abusing his eardrum

“I’m fine right here!”

“Don’t be like that. We’re going ghost hunting, get in the back!”

“Lance was going to drop me in town...”

“Why? Everything’s shut now apart from the bars. Stop being antisocial and come look for ghosts with us!”

That was how Keith ended up in the boot of Lance’s bronco. Lance could feel the tension from the driver’s seat, Pidge having climbed over into the back so she and Hunk could talk with Keith, who’d barely gotten two words in thanks to the pair of them trying their best to make him feel involved. Lance had seen it on Keith’s face when he’d pulled up. Keith looking up at him like he’d kicked him to the curb without good reason. If he stopped to think about it, Keith would fill that hole in the group that his eventual leaving with bring. Plus, Keith would be there to help Matt reconnect with his family whenever that eventually happened... A whole lot of roads seemed to be leading back to Keith, and Lance couldn’t put up stop signs fast enough.

Swinging by Pidge’s so she could collect her beloved camera, Lance stared up at the visitors centre before them. He’d had enough trouble last time they were here, and though there wouldn’t be any drunks this time, he was sure his friends would find a way to make trouble all over again

“‘Sup, Losers?! This is the Garrison Trio, coming at ya with a new video. Today we’re talking another look at arguably Garrison’s most haunted address! Yep, that’s right, your favourite visitors centre, and mine, it’s the old Garrison Hospital!”

Stuck in a silent “staring but not staring” battle with Keith watching Lance out the corner of his eye, he’d missed Pidge passing her camera off to Hunk so she could film her introduction

“Tonight we have our usual favourites, Me, Hunk, and Lance, but we also have a guest tagging along to see the work we do! Pan to Keith”

Hunk moved the camera, Keith not even noticing he’d been recorded. Lance had the feeling Keith wasn’t supposed to be being recorded. Anyone who saw his face online wouldn’t be able to forget him

“Yep! Our little trio has become a foursome! The awesome foursome. Now, if you click the link below this video you’ll be able to read up on the chilling history and the role the hospital played during world war three! Let’s just say, a lot of people died in a lot of not so lovely ways. Let’s head in!”

As Pidge took the camera from Hunk, Lance took her by the arm

“You can’t film Keith”

“What?”

“You can’t film him. It’s something to do with Shiro’s work. He works on things for the government, for like big bad multimillion dollar corporations that are up to dodgy things. I totally blanked on it, but Shiro will get in trouble”

Pidge raised an eyebrow

“I didn’t know you and Shiro were that tight”

“I was taking selfies and he caught me”

The lies hurt, but Keith’s face getting out their in there videos could bring trouble on all of them, not just Keith... Any vampires with a grudge would see their faces with his and they already knew where to come...

“Oh shit...”

Lance nodded, hoping his facial features portrayed the right emotions. Hunk was the one stole the role of genius from under Pidge’s nose

“I think you’ve got a dusk mask in the glove box from that colour run we didn’t end up doing... he could wear that?”

“Perfect. You two go ahead and I’ll get it. Don’t bring it up though, he’s super socially stunted”

Pidge fluttered her eyelashes

“Is someone getting protective of their “not boyfriend, boyfriend?””

“No, but you’ll have to get protective of that camera if you don’t stop bringing that up”

Pidge’s look turned to betrayal, then acceptance

“Fiiiiine. Do what you have to do. Hunk and I will go ahead. Come on, Hunk”

Rifling through his glovebox, Lance found the branded face mask. The colour run had two components to it, first you did a 5km walk/run, then in some weird kind of sales seasonal thing, there was a kind of sideshow at the end with live music, games, and seeing it was around Halloween, a corn maze and a haunted house. They’d paid, skipped the run, covertly let themselves into the corn maze, beaten that, then hit up the haunted house. Pidge deciding they all needed souvenirs, the mask being one of them... not that it was overly spooky. It was a simple black face mask with splatters of neon paint across the front, a few “teeth” on the right side and the fun run logo underneath. It was actually kind of “Keith”. Not that he was going there.

Keith had hung back as Pidge and Hunk unlocked the visitor centre and dealt with security. Forced to do the talking thing, Lance held the mask out to Keith who eyed it

“What’s that?”

“Pidge films these things”

“And?”

“And she puts them online. I didn’t think you’d want your face out there. If anyone saw the videos then you’d have your cover blown in further missions, making it harder for you to help the people who need help. I told Pidge that Shiro did covert work for the government so you needed to keep a low profile. I’m not sure she got it, but with Matt and Shiro being tight I think she was willing to let it slide. It hasn’t been worn, and it should cover most of your face. You can use my jacket too if you want, just keep the hood up”

Keith took the mask, staring down at as he tilted his neck. Lance automatically finding his eyes trying to find where he’d bitten the man. He’d never bitten anyone before so he didn’t know the trick of healing a bite to nothing. His own marks from turning were still there for the most part. Keith’s neck was smooth, Lance unable to see any blemishes. God! What was he doing...?! Nope... Fucking Keith

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you got dragged along by my friends deciding they’re also your friends”

“I thought you said I was a useless hunter”

“No. I said you had anger issues, like right now you’re getting angry at me. Do you want my jacket or not?”

“No. This’ll be fine. She really believes, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah. That’s probably why Matt has kept his distance. She wants to be part of this world, and I’m not about to let that happen”

“So you sabotage her?”

“No. Most of what humans collect isn’t real or it’s reflections. I come along not only to show I support her and Hunk, but so nothing happens to either of them. There’s death in that place and I don’t want something bad to happen. I also don’t plan on telling her about Matt, you, or Shiro. It’s not fun lying, but it does keep them safe. If she ever finds out the truth, I know she’s going to be angry, and I’m prepared for that. You better come along, both my friends seem pretty keen on you, meaning if you hurt them, I will hunt you down myself”

“I’m not going to harm a human”

“Good. Keep it that way”

Pidge was already explaining various exhibits in the visitor centre when Lance and Keith slipped through the front door. A shudder rolled up Lance’s spine, earning him a jab in the side from Keith. What was Keith getting annoyed about? People shuddered all the time for no good reason

“What?”

“You shuddered”

“It happens”

“Don’t fob me off like that. There’s something here, isn’t there? Where is it?”

“Oh great, so vampires and werewolves aren’t enough for you now? You want to hunt ghosts to?”

What was Keith going to do? Stab it? The mental image of Keith stabbing a ghost was too funny, a snort of laughter escaping

“Look... if there’s something...”

“Relax. Yeah, there’s death here but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to acknowledge it’s presence”

“But you can see it?”

Lance shook his head. That’s what he had his trust glasses for

“Nope”

“You’re lying to me”

“I’m not lying. And keep your voice down, do you really want Pidge and Hunk to know about us?

Keith shot him an unimpressed look. Lance could have worded that better

“This isn’t over”

It could be, if Keith dropped the subject and kicked away like a bottle cap under the fridge that you couldn’t be bothered picking up, so it laid there undiscovered for another 6 months, when it and another dozen finally popped up to remind you how lazy you were about cleaning

“Oh, goody”

“Lance, come over here, you’re better at this side of things”

Lance rolled his eyes at Pidge. She was doing a bang up job making the visitors centre sound like the must visit spot as it was. Walking over to her, he eyed the shackles in the display case with disgust. He couldn’t really justify the shackling of mine broken soldiers, though some had to be chained down to prevent them from taking their own lives. He’d gone through a stage like that, not that anyone other than Coran knew. He’d had a mental breakdown with the stress of final exams the first time around. He knew too many answers and didn’t want to score a perfect score, that would have made him stand out too much. He aimed for above average on all his tests and exams, but sometimes he slipped up and got too perfect a score that drew everyone’s attention to him when all he wanted to do was blend in. He’d been beaten by a bunch of jealous classmates for his trouble, then broken down, taking himself to Coran who helped piece him back together again. Yeah, Coran would always be his go to guy

“Shackles...”

Letting the narrative of fear roll of his tongue, he talked about the deteriorated mental condition of the soldiers and how things worked when it came to getting them help and the legal issues faced by their families. Lance was kind of sure no one wanted to sit through this, because he was pretty sure he was the only one who nerded out over the law these days. Keith had moved to stand behind Hunk, who was filming, his arms were crossed, feet shoulder width apart, with an amused look on his face that Lance felt like punching.

“And thank you for that Lance, somehow you made all the legal stuff seem that much more boring than last time. Alrighty then, why don’t we go see if we can find us a ghost?”

Hunk was already skittering, letting out a squeak as Pidge motioned for him to follow her, leaving Lance to fall into step beside Keith. Great. He couldn’t just leave Keith in town once everything was over. Not with Hunk and Pidge on a mission to make the man their friend

“Are you usually like that?”

Lance had no idea what Keith meant. Sure, he might get a little technical, but it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last

“Like what?”

“All technical? Doesn’t it turn viewers away? I mean, I don’t think they needed to know about the bylaws of Garrison”

“Oh, shut up. We don’t get many views as it is”

“You’ll get even less if you spend the whole time ranting”

“I wasn’t ranting, I was explaining. A soldiers mentality doesn’t end on the battlefield. Most of them never wanted to die. Most of them never wanted to wrapped up in war to begin with. They fought for us and for what they believed in, and as a whole, we failed them. If we don’t educated people on the past then there’s not much hope for the future”

“You, like, really believe in this, don’t you?”

“I believe in the belief people hold. If that’s what you mean?”

“I mean this legal thing... isn’t there anything else you’d rather be doing?”

“Like ripping families apart so I can feast on their children?”

Keith groaned at him, Lance internally smirking. Yeah, he remembered and wasn’t going to forget any time soon

“In my defence, your lot are mostly scum”

“And what about me? You listened in this morning”

“I... don’t want to talk about that”

“Why? Does it make me all that much harder to kill knowing I actually care about my clients?”

“As you rob them in fees”

Keith’s comment rubbed him the wrong way, Lance spitting in an angry whisper

“Yep. I’m so horrible that I charged a family a whole $50 for hours of my time. You on the other hand, if I charged at douche prices, would be paying me something like $10,000 for taking up so much of my damn time. I know I’m a monster, you can lay off with the damn mocking”

Starting to jog to catch up with Hunk and Pidge, Lance wanted to go home to bed. His arm was aching, as was his ankle. He hadn’t had the chance to drink since jumping out the window and his lack of routine was really getting to him. Catching up to him again, Keith decided he still wanted to talk

“Why law?”

“Why law, what?”

“You could have been anything”

“I could have, but I don’t think you’d understand”

“Try me”

“Well, I don’t want kids out there to suffer. I don’t want to see them caught up in fights that should stay between parents. I want to stand up for them. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I’m lame and I know it”

“So your own childhood trauma pushed you down this path. What would you have done if you’d never made it into law?”

Lance didn’t miss the way his words had thrown been back at him. Shrugging it off, he wasn’t letting Keith under his skin

“I could have been a dancer. I did entertain the idea of being a hairdresser, but a vampire with scissors means risking a cut and an accidental turning. I like my job. Can’t say I don’t like the idea of yours, but it wouldn’t be my first choice of career choice”

“Will you two shut up? You’re scaring the ghosts away”

Lance’s eyes accidentally met Keith’s, both of them snorting and looking away from each other. If only they were, then they could all head home early

“Sorry, Pidge. Keith was telling me how scared he was”

“I did not!”

“Shhhh... didn’t you hear Pidge? Your big mouth is scaring the ghosts away”

“Mine? You won’t shut up”

“Both of you shut up, or you’re being sent outside to wait”

Hunk raised his hand

“Uh, can I go wait outside?”

“You’re the camera man, grow a back bone!”

Hunk gave Pidge a mock salute at her snap, which she flipped him off over. Lance made the motion of zipping of his mouth and throwing away the key. Keith gave a shrug. Apparently he didn’t hold a healthy fear of Pidge... well, that wouldn’t remain for long.

No. Keith barely lasted half an hour before he incurred Pidge’s wrath. Like a misbehaving school child, Keith was sent to sit at the top of the stairs, all because he accidentally tripped over the lip of the door frame. Pidge was sure she’d seen some kind of ghostly orb, sent fleeing by Keith’s stupidity. Making the mistake of snorting over Keith being taken down a peg, Lance was sent to sit beside Keith... both of them not looking at each other, to avoid bursting into laughter because being in a time out was ridiculous. There wasn’t anything there. The orb was a reflection of light from the camera, and that’s all that’d been to it. When Hunk moved, the reflected light disappeared, Keith didn’t deserve being yelled at... but fuck it hadn’t been funny.

#once bitten twice stupid #ashrathe rose #klance #a/b/o #vampire Lance #idiot keith #bottom Lance in future

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inanawesomewave · 5 years ago

Text

PUT AN END TO TOXIC EMPATH CULTURE

I am in a few groups on facebook for cluster b personality disorders. Some of them are exclusively for paths (socio-, psycho-), some of them are for people of all cluster b, and one of them is for people who have these disorders, and it’s also a place where people can go for advice on the people in their lives with these disorders. More often than not people will come into this group and immediately rant about their “narcopath” husband (tip: psychopathy encompasses narcissistic personality disorder just as well as it does antisocial, read a book and stop inventing monster words). They’ll start out innocent: “I accidentally looked at my husband’s phone and saw he’s been texting other girls”, or “I just had to go into my husband’s pocket for a breath mint and accidentally found a receipt for a restaurant I didn’t go to with him”. First red flag for me: they immediately tell a lie. They come to a cluster b group to talk about how they’ve been damaged by a disordered personality, and they begin with a lie. We know that, idiots. We lie all the time, and we cheat, and we steal. And we confront them. And you know what they do? They say, “you’re just a filthy fucking narc, aren’t you”. And weirdly, that specific phrase comes up a lot, “filthy fucking narc”, almost like it’s a sobriquet that’s been encouraged somewhere, in some kind of large online community, something it’s acceptable to say to survivors of abuse and trauma that don’t behave in exactly the way you would like them to, despite your best efforts to spy on them and keep them down at heel. But that’s a different thing for a different rant for a different time. We sometimes get mothers coming into the group to talk about how they’re at their wits end with their antisocial personality disordered children, how the antisocial child has cut contact with them and the exasperated parent doesn’t understand why. One of us will suggest that ASPD rarely crops up without being coaxed out by abuse and trauma, and suddenly this hand-wringing, worried parent will start shouting and kicking off. They’ll call us “filthy fucking narcs”. Another thing we get is people with borderline personality disorder (and if you think I have a needless axe to grind, please continue reading before losing your goddamn mind about this) coming in to talk about the fact they are inexplicably drawn to “narcs” and “paths”, and that this is the fault of narcs and paths, that we are drawing them in and hurting them. They tell us that they’ve suffered abuse and we wouldn’t understand, they tell us that they are hurting and we wouldn’t understand. Then we tell them that the rate of childhood abuse and trauma is just as high amongst antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders as it is with borderline. And then they’ll react by telling us they feel triggered and attacked. Ostensibly, they’ll call us “filthy fucking narcs”. More often than not, they’ll refer to themselves as an EMPATH. Just like the estranged mother is an empath, just like the obsessive wife is an empath. Because borderlines are empaths, right? That’s where we’ve gone wrong. Borderlines have reduced empathy. You don’t like that, but it’s true. Let’s talk about why you don’t like that. If you have BPD and you’re reading this and you don’t like that, ask yourself why. Because I know why. The reason you don’t like hearing that one of your diagnostic criteria is a lack of empathy, something your therapist knows about you, something your psychiatrist knows about you, something all your family and friends know about you, is because you hear “empath” and you hear “good person”. You hear “narcissist/sociopath/psychopath” and you think “bad person”. You believe the only difference between good and evil is empathy, and therefore you believe that anything you do can be easily absolved by you insisting that you have empathy, a surfeit of it, in fact. You can do whatever to whomever and whyever you want, but if you can put your hand on your heart and the end of the day and stare that person you hurt in the eye and feel their pain as they feel it, as you inflicted it, then all’s well that ends well. And I have never heard so much fucking bullshit in my entire life. And the reason I’m writing this is because today in the aforementioned group, a woman with borderline personality disorder told a lie to the group that her ex husband had paid several men to harass and stalk her. After some questioning she admitted that this probably wasn’t true, but that she’d felt like it was probably true, and because she has BPD, she feels things before she can cognitively conceive of them, so she’s prone to whipping herself up into a frenzy. But it’s fine, she said, because she has BPD, and has been abused, and has been raped, and she has empathy. It’s fine she can implicate a serious crime that never happened, because she’s sorry she did that. She’s sorry she felt that way but it wasn’t her fault. You know what else she said? She said, to someone who had called her out on her shit (non aggressively), “I’ve been raped, but a narcopath like you wouldn’t be affected by something like that”. Can we just sit on that for a second, please? We are rape survivors and survivors of prolonged abuse and trauma. But you think it’s fine and empathic of you to tell us that we didn’t care about it? That it didn’t hurt us? Think again, empath. Toxic empath culture is using your naturally occurring empathy to oppress and abuse other people. Yes, I know you have empathy but guess what! You can also be abusive. The thing about toxic empathy culture is believing whole heartedly that your empathy is what separates you from the herd, that your empathy is so unbelievably special, that you have a gift. And an interesting thing happens when you think that your empathy is a magical gift - you see what you perceive to be a lack of it EVERYWHERE. You have become so subsumed and enamoured by your own empathy that you believe nobody must have empathy the way that you do, and therefore, what do we call people with a lack of empathy? We call then narcs and paths. We call them filthy little fucking narcs. And we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, right? Because they have no empathy. Not like you though. You’re special. And sometimes I get heat on this blog for singling out BPD but you know what? It’s pertinent. How many times have I see articles explaining BPD as some damaged, fragile gift of broken empathy that is given to victims of abuse? That it’s not rage or hostility or abuse, it’s a storm? It’s gorgeous fragility? It’s complicated, she’s mixed up. We never get to hear that they have a lack of empathy though, that’s the big secret. Because borderlines have a lack of cognitive empathy, they can feel it, but they can’t understand it. Antisocials et all are the other way around. What does this mean? It means someone with BPD will feel your negative emotion but won’t understand how to talk to you about it, or ask you how you are, or interpret it. But they’ll feel it. So maybe if you’re in a bad place they’ll get into a bad place too, but their lack of cognition will prevent them from thinking to ask you what’s wrong, or how they can help you. You’ll have to help them instead. And that’s not their fault, there’s a reason their empathy broke down and they have a genuine lack here, it’s nothing they can help. So why can’t we see antisocials and narcissists with this level of clarity, and sympathy? Because if an antisocial sees someone they care about suffering, they won’t feel it, they won’t adopt it, but they can cognitively understand that your mood has changed and you need something fixing. You know, for all the evil that apparently exists in narcissists and sociopaths, I know what I’d prefer. And it’s so funny really, because in these “survivor communities”, everything has to be forced into the boxes of psychopathy and narcissism. Any bad behaviour gets pigeon-holed into these two categories. Even if someone says “my husband has a diagnosis of BPD” or “my wife has a diagnosis of OCD”, everyone will say “google NPD hun they might have VULNERABLE NARCISSISM”, “they might be a COVERT PSYCHOPATH”. Because if they can’t find the answers they need in the DSM-V, they’ll invent categories. Do anything it takes to excuse any and all bad behaviour as being part of these two schools of evil, because they cannot begin to accept that anyone else can do anything bad, because if they accepted that, they’d have to accept that they too are sometimes bad. And there’s a reason this gets me so angry. It’s not just that some people need the monopoly on pain and distress, teaching people that victimhood can only ever be messy, bloody, stormy, emotional, anxious, dramatic and LOUD, and that because of this, everyone ignores the fact that some victims of abuse end up with different personality disorders and become withdrawn, cold, remorseless, angry and manipulative because they don’t know how to function in a world that they’ve only ever known as cold and hard and something you need to survive through by any means necessary. It’s not even that things like suicidality is now only ever taken seriously if someone is yelling I AM GOING TO KILL MYSELF all the time, despite the fact that most people who end their lives leave no clue whatsoever, don’t tell anyone and even seem happier before they do it, and it’s not even that because of this skewed vision of what suffering looks like, millions of people go ahead killing themselves unnoticed because they weren’t screaming their intent and therefore we are trained to believe they’re not victims. What really fucking ticks me off is the dehumanisation. You’re an empath until you meet a narcissist or a sociopath or a psychopath aren’t you? But the second you meet one, or think you’ve met one, you get to do that thing that everyone wants to do - you get to become a psychopath, because you know deep down in your heart of hearts that nArCoPaThS are trying to hurt you and harm you constantly, that they can whiff you out in a crowded room and spend their lives trying to harm you, because you’re such delicious and precious bait. So what you do, before they can come at you and hurt you (even if it never happened! Even if you just think it happened which is the same, right? It’s okay to think that, right? You’ve been hurt, after all, and now you’ve got all this empathy just lying around and that’s hard for you), you hurt them first, but that’s not your fault, right? It’s a protective shield, yeah? It’s something you had to create to protect yourself from further harm isn’t it? Aw. Yeah. We don’t know what that’s like. We don’t know what it feels like to spend our lives accidentally creating maladaptive coping mechanisms that involve keeping others away from us. That’s you. You’re special. And when you do that, and you identify what you are because you read a Thought Catalog article about empaths and you really felt seen by the bit where it said that empaths are beautiful, strong, courageous, maybe psychic, and healers, and you thought that was probably you because you’re definitely not a narcissist, then it doesn’t matter about everyone else, does it? Because you’re an empath. Hell. You’re a God. And NOT a narcissist, they just THINK they’re special but you really are, aren’t you! And so, with your great gift of empathy your first move is to push the baddies away. Because you know deep down, don’t you, that narcopaths got that way because we wanted to be. You know that even though we also kill ourselves at very high rates, we were only doing that to fuck with you, and the trauma of losing us is actually your greater trauma and that’s how we get to fuck you over one last time. You know that when we tell you we were raped and assaulted and abused and beaten repeatedly, that we’re just saying it to hurt specifically you, because you need to keep your guard up, because you’re special. And if we are telling the truth, which would make sense when you look at the statistics which you haven’t because science is for losers and you’ve just got a hunch which means so much more than empirical research, you know that the truth to them is a labyrinthine maze of potential manipulation. You read in Psychology Today that we can only ever lie and we don’t know how to feel things. I mean there’s no evidence to support that, just like there’s no evidence whatsoever that we have a cold dead stare or that we jerk off to snuff films, but you had that hunch, didn’t you. And this dehumanisation is part of empath culture. Empath culture exists to dehumanise and demean and retraumatise narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, and it needs to stop. Because I’m not out here pretending to have empathy, but you are. So when I sit here and earnestly hope that you get everything that’s coming to you and maybe I’d like to be a part of that, I’m not lying. When you sit here and tell me that your empathy is a rare gift and that all the men you’ve dated were all narcissists and that your best friend is probably a psychopath and that you’ve never hurt anyone in your life because you’re an earth goddess, you’re lying. But you don’t even know you’re lying, because the lie has now got so big that everyone’s getting themselves involved. And this is why toxic empath culture needs to come to a close. It’s making narcissists out of everyone, and apparently, that’s the worst thing in the world. Empaths go fuck yourselves.

#empathy #empaths #abuse #healing #trauma #sociopathy #psychopath #psychopathy #narcissistic personality disorder #narcissism #antisocial personality disorder #borderline personality disorder

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avenger-hawk · 5 years ago

Note

(1/3)HELLO! It's me, Anon who loves you again(lol). But you can call me Zera since I feel like we are going to interact more now (if u want to of course). But Damn, I just went back to finally read your response and I agree so much with what you say. I have an entire essay to write back and this shitty ask will not let me express myself lmao. Anyway, those past few days I felt so shitty just because of how degratory people can be on the internet because they think they are anonymous.

(2/3)Tumblr at this point is so…f*ucked. Constant slandering denigration, muckraking and aspersions. Some people try to negate the toxic and keep it alive but this platform is a breeding place for mob mentality. I’ve seen so many people bullied out of the place just for having a differing opinion. And so many people being all woke trying to “spill tea”, “expose” real people. They tarnish people’s feelings and reputations all behind their safe anonymous cocoon.

(3/3) And they justify this abuse/slander with “I am allowed to express my opinions so gtfo if you don’t agree bitch”. They play the victim when people tell them that opinions do not mean denigrating real people for bullshit reasons with no real proof. At this point sweetie, I am just ranting. Sorry if I am bothering you with those negative thoughts but I felt so shitty those past few days and you are pratically the only one I can get behind in this hellhole tumblr shit. Also, I am writing out-

(Last Part) As I was TRYING TO SAY before the limit bullshit cut me off, I am writing out a response to your previous response to my previous ask. It’s way too long already so I will either need to send you through dm or cut it out into pieces after I have fully written everything out. Thankkk you so much for talking to me despite me being so sudden with you. I appreciate you so much and I hope you are taking care out there (both physically AND mentally). Also, loving those art reblogs

Hello Zera and nice to meet you by your name (or nickname, it’s cute anyway~) and I’m glad you like my fanart reblogs.

I am sorry that you are feeling shitty…it’s frustrating, to say the least, to see people hide behind anonymous and slander blogs, names, real people who are behind them, for an opinion, a taste, whatever. I find irritating even the words/expressions they use, maybe because as a non native English speaker I saw them for the first time used in this bad context so they are only associated to tumblr fake woke idiots and their ‘that’s the tea’ shit. And it’s ironic that they can talk shit about people however they want but when people do the same to them they justify with not only the reasons I listen in my last reply but also with this thing you mentioned, that they are allowed to express their opinion…like, what about the person they slandered? oh but they are not ‘valid’ (I hate this word too) because their opinion is wrong. Says them, ofc. Then ofc they start playing the victim because poor kids, everyone is a bully to them.

It’s ok to rant, I understand your feeling well and I’d like to tell you that if you ‘stop paying attention’ to this it will be ok, but I do fall into the frustration & irritation pit too sometimes. But it happens less often, cause I channeled my fandom time and interested on positive stuff instead and so I want to stay. I don’t want to be preachy or belittle this problem because I know how hard it is (and you can see in my blog that I struggled with these problems directly too, both from dumbasses like those you describe, and from a different kind of creep lol, and even in my other fandom there is slandering and calling out and horrible things), but recently even more, all this coronavirus lockdown (my country is in quarantine since more than a month now) and something horrible that happened to the person I love, made me reconsider certain things. At least for me, at least for now, their importance is dulled down now…Even more than before where I was already detached from fandom dramas.

And since I can see things from a detached perspective I might try ‘suggesting’ something to not let this shit get to you…because life is a b*tch and you can’t allow yourself to suffer for f*ckers who don’t even show themselves, hiding behind an anonymous, or running a shitty blog where they just shit on people, it doesn’t matter.

I don’t engage in fandom discussion (or, like they call it, ‘discourse’, another word I hate) anyway, and I recommend everyone to not engage in anything with those f*ckers. Not because you (not just you Zera but you guys in general) are scared of them but because what they want is attention, and receiving replies, reblogs, attacks, everything, is what they want. blocking them, even making fun of them like they do to others, is ok, cause it’s repaying them with their same treatment. But cut communication. Block people, everyone. These idiots, their friends, those who put likes on their shit, those who put likes on their shit but also to your stuff because they can’t pick a side and maybe they’re good people who don’t think much about these things. Block every single person who irritates you even just a little, and everyone around them. Unfollow people, but mostly block them. The fanarts I post now has little notes compared to the ones I had in the past when I posted them, because I blocked everyone who annoys me, everyone whose opinions annoy me, everyone who starts shit even though I don’t want to speak to them, like every SN/SI/canon stans and puritans and more. I unfollowed friends who followed one of those fake woke b*tches, who reblogged their stuff I didn’t want to see, and made them unfollow me. Marie Kondo my a** lol

And make it clear, so that those who’ll see these people shitting on someone who clearly said they blocked them, will realize who’s bullying who. Maybe it won’t change anything in the short period but in the long run it will, because these assholes have their same behavioral pattern, being overt or even more, covert narcissistic b*tches in need of attention, so if their target ignores them they’ll move to another, in the same ‘area’.

The temptation to check their blogs and see if they attack you, your friends, or what they do in order to protect yourself is strong, but it won’t help getting over this. I know it’s hard and I fell into this a lot, but we all should use fandoms in a positive way to get distracted when we feel like shit because of fandoms…like looking at fanarts, fanfiction or using some private chat group that you know it’s a safe space, even though I read that a dischord chat became moralistic hell unexpectedly, for some the people who joined.

Anyway, sometimes we (and I include myself) fall into this ‘addiction’ where we consider fandom things so important, and we neglect real life people and things…and negative shit like bullying, slandering and all this makes us feel horribly and it’s not different from real life bullying. Sometimes it’s even worse because we join a fandom as a distraction, an escape route sometimes for real life problems, and instead we end up feeling like shit because of it. But, as someone who spent a whole year trying to expose a very bad person who did bad things to me online, and as a person who was slandered many times and always fought back, I can say that letting this affect our real life is bad. Because real life is even harder and we don’t need more weights on our shoulders. And if something like illness or death get close to your circle of people, you realize how all this is pointless, how these f*ckers have no purpose in their pathetic lives other than making others feel bad, and how we can and must fight back everything, but not let it get inside our heads and hearts, where we must keep things we like, our fave characters, ships, dynamics, kinks, people, whatever.

Because, and really everything I say I tried and try on myself first, there will come a time where you’ll look back at this and you’ll realize you might have missed something more important in your life, real or online it doesn’t matter, both are important…Life, I was saying, sometimes is cruel in big and small ways, taking something or someone away from you when you least expect it, making it hard to do the things you like because some a**holes decides it’s wrong, online and offline (like, try feeding crows in my area and see how much hate you can get, and being hated for something so harmless is really horrible, and it’s like the real life representation of online shit imo) is too short to worry about shitty blogs run by shitty people or shitty anons~

I really hope you’re feeling better Zera, and if you celebrate Easter I wish you a happy one!

#Anonymous #replies &co #fanon and fandom stuff

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hey-have-you-heard · 5 years ago

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Hey have you heard these 50 songs from 2019

I really enjoyed this last year so going to give it another go for ‘19. I put quite a lot of thought into what actually a ‘song of the year’ for me when I was first constructing and then heavily editing the playlist that came to be my Top 50 of 2019. I think the most important thing is that above all it’s a track that I’m glad exists, sometimes this is because of the songwriting or composition, sometimes the performance, sometimes the lyrical importance and sometimes just because it sparks joy.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6bFJOjL8b8Zc2s5r1oJbsk?si=UJdqSXOTR3SQ8D3IwcmV2g

Explanations for each tracks inclusion below the fold…

100 gecs - 800db cloud 100 gecs channel a mix of Crystal Castles and Sleigh Bells with a Death Grips level appreciation for noise. It’s an absolute rush and that outro is just absurd.

Natalie Evans - Always Be Natalie Evans soft melody and sing song vocals are sublimely sweet on this heartfelt track of lost love, longing and nostalgia.

Petrol Girls - Big Mouth “If you fight back or disagree you’re the one with the fucking problem” this hits home, hard. Big Mouth is a rallying cry to speak out against oppression and discrimination, to raise you’re voice and be heard, not to be controlled.

Charli XCX ft. Lizzo - Blame it on your Love Charli has a midas touch when it comes to pop, combine that with Lizzo who has just about been the most fun thing in music this year and you’ve got a 10/10 banger.

Poppy - BLOODMONEY Poppy’s music just keeps going further down the rabbit hole. Originally playing with blending elements of nu-metal with bubblegum pop, she now seems to have transcended genre altogether to create whatever BLOODMONEY is, it’s absolutely ridiculous and I love it.

Body Hound - Bloom Get on that GROOVE! So proggy it hurts, this track from Body Hound is a technical wonderland of metamorphosing rhythms, gargantuan riffs, and just the tastiest of chord progressions.

Can the Sub_Bass speak - Algiers Word of warning, this is not an easy listen. A freefall tumble through genre and tone accompanies a stream of consciousness monologue full of racism, prejudice and political and artistic critique.

Elohim - Buckets Buckets is an onslaught of trap influences, emotional outbursts and aggressive distortion. I’m a big fan of this sound.

VUKOVI - C.L.A.U.D.I.A I know very little about VUKOVI as a band, but that riff is absolutely massive and this track has been a constant throughout my year on that basis alone.

Show Me The Body - Camp Orchestra Apparently more hardcore bands should use Banjos, because this is a damn good sound. Slowly building from a single bass line this track builds into a powerful demolishing force.

clipping. - Club Down Having thoroughly proven themselves able to do afro-futurist scifi on the Hugo nominated Splendor and Misery, clipping. now turn their considerable talents to horror core and unsurprisingly nail it. Daveed’s flows are tight as ever as he brings to life a decaying city backed by tortured screams.

Dream Nails - Corporate Realness YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB. WORK IS NOT YOUR LIFE. YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU MUST DO IN ORDER TO SURVIVE. Dream Nails are great and exactly what we need right now.

ControlTop - Covert Contracts This track positively bristles with an anxious energy. A fitting sound for the subject of the information overload we find ourselves locked into everyday.

Cherry Glazerr - Daddi There’s an icy coolness to ‘Daddi’, a disconnected sarcasm that falls away to reveal the anger and torment in the chorus, it’s a masterful bit of emotional storytelling through musical tone.

The Physics House Band - Death Sequence I Listening to Physics House latest release, the Death Sequence EP feels like a physical journey. This opener is a perfect example of this, as you’re plunged straight into a heady and disorienting mix of rhythms and counter-melody’s, the Sax guiding you through the turbulence until you land in a placid midsection, before that bass riff drags you forward through rhythmic breakdowns into an absolutely absurd brain melting saxophony and then it just keeps on going from there…

Witching Waves - Disintegration I saw WW back in the early summer, they were a bassist down so it was just a guitar and drums duo. They started with this track and it was one of the most pure punk things I’ve experienced, drummer/vocalist Emma Wigham bashing the absolute shit out of her kit . A great no-nonsense lo-fi banger.

Lingua Ignota - DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR Another, not particularly easy listen here. DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR is a dark and angry brooding track, building in intensity to release the primal rage, fear and horror of the abused. Its deeply chilling and instantly arresting. This track and the entire CALIGULA album stands as an absolute must listen.

Carly Rae Jepsen ft. Electric Guest - Feels Right I love the instrumentation on this one, those chunky piano chords and screaming guitar lift the track out and make it the highlight of an already great album to me.

Orla Gartland - Figure it out Dialing back the intensity slightly, Orla chronicles the frustrations of having to deal with someone in your life who you’re done with. The choruses burst forth in beautifully fuzzy explosions of noise. That vocal flair at the start of the final chorus is chef kiss.

Battles - Fort Greene Park Battles are at their best when they keep things simple. This is evident on 2019′s Juicy B Crypts which features some incredibly cluttered moments, but this just makes Fort Greene Park stand out all the more. A delightfully spacious piece of math rock, from some of the best in the business.

Dogleg - Fox Boy howdy, do I love me some midwest emo. Catharsis in musical form, it just makes me want to mosh my troubles away like I’m 16 again.

Tørsö - Grab A Shovel Tørsö go hard, I can appreciate that. An absolutely brutal track about the destructive power of depression and self-loathing.

“Pijn & Conjurer playing Curse These Metal Hands” - High Spirits “We were like, are we Pijn and Conjurer, or are we Curse These Metal Hands? I think we’ve settled with ‘we are Pijn and Conjurer playing Curse These Metal Hands’ …whatever that means!“ what it means is one of the most joyously triumphant pieces of metal music I’ve ever heard. Some of the guitar lines in this absolutely soar.

Lizzo - Juice Lizzo has won 2019, her message of self love, acceptance and body positivity has won her both critical and cultural acclaim and permeates her music in a way that makes it impossible to not love.

COLOSSAL SQUID, AK Patterson - Kick Punch Colossal Squid is the name given to Three Trapped Tigers drummer, Adam Betts’ experimental project. After a solo album of percussive wizardry Betts has now teamed with vocalist AK Patterson to give us something else entirely.

Evan Greer - Liberty Is A Statue Evan Greer uses the a folk punk sound to deliver an essay on the damaging influences of cis-normativity and social inequality. Of course I like this one.

Taylor Swift - Lover I wasn’t on board with this song for a fair while, but then I kept listening to it and kept coming back to it because of a roughly 50 second section which ties the track and the whole album together. Yeah, this is on here purely for the bridge, which is just beautiful.

Dodie - Monster Monster is an incredibly well written and delivered study on how perception changes with resentment and it makes me cry.

The Y Axes - Moon Moon is a delightfully dreamy piece of pop that glitters with infectious melodies, it’s lyrics a blissful embracing of cosmic nihilism, need I say more?

Ezra Furman - My Teeth Hurt My teeth hurt is a song about tooth ache, about that pain you carry with you everywhere and can’t get rid of, that ruins your days and and is one hell of a mood. Yeah it’s about gender dysphoria.

Nervus - No Nations Speaking of things being a mood, this track hits the nail squarely on the head.

Cultdreams - Not My Generation "Everyone ignores me Unless I’m on a stage talking Because they put me on a pedestal And pretend I’m just performing“ Lucinda Livingstone calls out the misogyny in our culture with a singular ferocity.

Lil Nas X - Old Town Road If there’s one song that’s dominated 2019 this is it right here. Who ever had the idea of putting that NIN Ghosts sample to a trap beat and cowboying over the top of it is an absolute genius.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Planet B It’s impossible to predict where King Gizzard’s sonic influences are going to take them next I doubt even they know half the time. Whatever they turn their hand to though they do it as if they mastered the sound decades ago Planet B is an all out thrash track with a strong environmental message.

Kesha - Rich, White, Straight Men Okay, I’m about to compare Kesha to John Lennon here but HEAR ME OUT… As ‘Imagine’ asked us to consider a world without conflict or capitalism, Kesha now posits that we should tear up our conceptions of our society based on its formation by a privileged group and imagine what kind of utopia could be built if we gave the underprivileged and minority groups a say.

Allie X - Rings A Bell The chorus here sounds like it could have been off Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, and I’m all about that sound. Combined with Allie X’s dreamlike vocals make this a certified bop.

Poly-Math - Sensors in Everything Sensors in Everything is a beast of a track spanning over 14 minutes of absurdly dense prog. Having recently enlisted keyboardist Josh Gesner. Polymath make use of the new sounds and textures available to them, at times imitating a sort of Hammond sound not unlike John Lord to the chaotic maelstrom of noise.

Calva Louise - Sleeper Big hooks on this one. Sleeper has a confident swagger to it’s sound which stands apart for the bands previous work. It’s an absolutely huge track.

Slipknot - Solway Firth Slipknot didn’t disappoint after the tease of 2018′s “All Out Life”, following up with an album which blended old and new aspects of their sound to create one of their best to date. Solway Firth is a perfect example of this matching the punishing heaviness of Iowa with the melody driven sound of All Hope Is Gone.

Clt Drp - Speak To My Seeing Clt Drp perform live was one of my highlights of the year. The filthy guitar tones, powerhouse vocals tight as heck drumming and the _grooves. _Absolutely like nothing else I’ve seen. Just an incredible band that deserve so much more recognition.

Black Country, New Road - Sunglasses Black Country, New Road released two tracks this year and now I just want more. Dense wordy lyricism plays off against ever evolving instrumentation to present a raw cut of emotional storytelling.

Her Name Is Calla - Swan Her Name Is Calla are a band that have always been on the edge of my radar, my Dad is very fond of them and saw them live a couple of years ago, but never went back to relisten to any of their stuff, then they started an album with this. I was sold instantly.

black midi - Talking Heads Talking Heads (the band) are an obvious inspiration on this track. Both David Byrne’s vocal style and the Talking Heads penchant for sharp angular melodies are on show here. But given an extra ounce of chaos through Black Midi’s delivery.

Amanda Palmer - The Ride The ride is ten minutes of bundling up all your fears and anxieties of where we are and where we’re going and just, accepting them as part of the ride. Written off the back of a prompt from Amanda asking her fans what they were afraid of right now.

Kim Petras - There Will Be Blood Okay, let’s have some out of season spookiness. Love the squelchy synths on this, there’s a huge amount of energy on this track and with it’s commitment to the horror conceit it makes for a super fun bop.

Kate Nash - Trash Kate Nash’s sound is like bathing pure nostalgia,here she spins the toxic-relationship narrative central to her work to deliver a bigger story about humanity’s, quite literally toxic relationship to our planet.

American Football & Hayley Williams - Uncomfortably Numb The other side of the “midwest emo” coin. A melancholic song built on a soft bed of arpeggiated chords and clean harmonics, Uncomfortably Numb is a heartbreaking track of losing everything and of cycles persisting thorugh generations. Employing the clever metatextual trick of referencing Pink Floyd’s comfortably Numb to mirror the generational similarities.

Glenn Branca - Velvet and Pearls Disclaimer, Glenn Branca was a musical hero of mine, his approach to music and composition being solely responsible for influence a vast number of my favourite bands. Released posthumously, Velvet and Pearls is taken from a live performance by Branca’s ensemble and perfectly captures the sense of sonic disorientation, conjuring aural illusions through an assault of intricately crafted noise. It’s an exhilarating piece that should be played as loud as humanly possible.

Brutus - War The raw emotional strength of Stefanie Manneart’s vocals instantly made me pay attention when I first heard this track. Then the song exploded into a barrage of riffs and breakneck drumming.

Valiant Vermin - Warm Coke Another slice of throwback pop, Valiant Vermin proved with “Online Lover” how much of an ear she has for pop and has proven it once again with Warm Coke. Is a real good bop.

———

Welp there it is, 50(+1) songs, I had to limit myself to one track per artist in the main 50 because according to Spotify I listened to [checks notes] 1082 new artists this year. There are a small handful of tracks I wanted to highlight from the same artists though as they offer something quite different to the tracks in the playlists, so here they are quickly with 3 word descriptions.

Petrol Girls - Skye (dead dog, sad) Amanda Palmer - Voicemail for Jill (Talk about abortion) Ezra Furman - I Wanna be Your Girlfriend (Trans Torch Song) Battles ft Jon Anderson & Prairie WWWW - Sugar Foot (Batshit Prog Insanity) Poppy - Choke (Dark Minimalist Pop) Show Me The Body - Forks and Knives (Anxious nightmare punk) Lingua Ignota - CALIGULA (the whole album.)

———

Closing Statement

Cultdreams - Statement

There has been a shadow over the entertainment industry the latter half of this decade. Whether film, music, TV or video games, the late 2010′s are filled with stories of people coming forward to bravely tell their stories about being abused and manipulated by men in positions of power. The #metoo movement as it’s come to be known has been a powerful force in giving marginalised people a voice and the ability to call out oppressors and in starting the groundwork to root out the misogyny in the seats of power, but this is a battle far from won.

While there are thousands of stories out there I want to focus on one in particular.

In 2016 a number of women spoke out about various forms of abuse by a well-known musician in the punk scene. It’s now over three years later and this group of women are in the midst of a long fought claim of defamation from this musician. If this case goes through it sets a precedent for silencing marginalised voices in the industry. They have been fighting for so long and with no legal aid available for the case they have had to finance their defense from their own pockets.

This is where Solidarity Not Silence comes in. Solidarity not silence is a crowdfunding effort to help take the case to trial without the women bankrupting themselves entirely so that they don’t have to give in to this mans demands. You can read more about Solidarity not Silence and make a donation (if you feel so inclined) here: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/solidaritynotsilence/

You can also follow them on twitter here https://twitter.com/solnotsilence

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siobhom · 5 years ago

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Fic: Something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts

Summary: Jake and Amy go undercover as a couple. Written for the @b99fandomevents Brooklyn 99 Summer 2019 fic exchange for @professionalpenthief (writer0895). Thank you for the prompt! Hope you enjoy. And thank you to my beta reader storyinmyeyes.

On AO3 here

“There’s going to be an undercover operation infiltrating a smuggling ring,” Holt says.

“Ooh, me! Mine! I want the case!” Jake says.

Amy looks at Holt eagerly, “I majored in Art history, they’re stealing antiquities, and I have expertise that will be vital to this case.”

“Well I have experience being under cover in crime families!” Jake argues.

“As I was saying, we need two detectives posing as a couple, the two of you will be sufficient.”

“Yes!” Amy exclaims as Jake fist pumps.

And Holt swiftly moves on to the next order of business, only later pausing momentarily as he steps out the door to say,

“Peralta, Santiago, I’ll brief you in my office.”

The two of them have only just sat down opposite Holt before Jake begins animatedly creating their cover stories,

“Okay, I’m Dirk Striker, I’ve been driving trucks of every black market good you can imagine since I could see above the steering wheel, I once successfully drove over an opening bridge (jumping over twenty feet of open air) to make a clean getaway and Amy is Leah Cortez a master lock picker who steals to pay for her addiction to cosmopolitans.”

“In actuality this assignment requires a certain specific dynamic…”

“Oh no, that’s the raised eye-brow of ‘I have to say something I’m not happy with,’” Amy says.

“These smugglers are very much a men’s club, previous undercover operatives have failed due to refusing to take part in their games involving predatory behaviour or had their covers blown by prostitutes they were expected to sleep with. We think the solution to this will be two detectives posing as a couple, but the idea of having to work with a woman will also turn them off.”

Jake’s mouth falls open. “Oh.”

Amy says, “So I’m supposed to be the mindless arm candy?”

Jake winces.

“Yes,” Holt says, “It’s not ideal, but it will put you in a position where they will dismiss you as a threat and won’t pay attention to your movements. It will allow you to gather evidence in a quick and effective manner.”

Amy nods. “Okay.”

“There’s more. These men are very boisterous with women; to fit in the two of you will be required to be very physically close. Of course, we wouldn’t expect either of you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with.”

“It will be fine,” Amy says, before turning to Jake, who once confessed having feelings for her, “Unless, will that put you in an awkward place?”

“You’re an awkward place,” Jake responds, “No discomfort here, none whatsoever.”

Jake is Matt, a fence, and Amy is his girlfriend Lana. They’re meeting in a cordoned-off section of a club. They’re sitting next to each other, their legs touching. He tries not to think about how nice it feels. He puts his arm around her, carefully, “Is this okay?”

Amy smiles. “Of course, let’s do this!”

Amy’s undecided on exactly how dumb she’s going to act. She’s of course got several personas prepared, of differing intellect level, but she also knows the importance of playing it by ear and is waiting to see. Within ten minutes she realises, it doesn’t matter how dumb she acts. They won’t catch on. It’s all perfectly believable to them.

She affects a semi-blank expression, and makes a point to giggle randomly and throw out random comments, that heavily imply she’s completely misunderstanding the covert conversation taking place. Jake’s voice is a low murmur, she pays some attention to it, but she’s confident Jake knows what needs doing, and thus she’s more focused on their surroundings, on picking up any clues. Some of the girlfriends hang out in a corner and she thinks she’ll have a better chance of slipping away if she’s over there. She won’t suggest it herself though; she’ll get Jake to send her over there during the next meeting.

She can see Jake holding back from clenching his jaw against the sexist comments at times, but only because she knows him so well. But from the others body language, she can tell that he’s not committing to the act as well as he needs to.

She tells him so on the way to their room (after ensuring no one is around of course).

“I’ve watched the footage. Have you seen the way these guys treat their girl-friends. You have to be ruder and more grabby.”

“I don’t want to though.”

“Matt thinks Lana’s a thing, his possession.”

“Matt is gross.”

“True. But Matt is going to bring down this smuggling ring.”

Jake freezes as he enters the room. “There’s only one bed.”

“That’s because I asked for a room with only one bed,” Amy states, “We need to maintain our covers, and these guys are careful, we don’t want anything to tip them off.”

“Cool, cool, cool, cool. We can just sleep in shifts, a few hours at a time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, come on,” Amy says, gesturing at the bed.

Jake clutches his hand to his chest faux dramatically. “Are you trying to take advantage of me?”

“Definitely, now get in.”

As much as it makes him feel sick, Jake knows Amy’s right about his behaviour around the smugglers. Matt makes a point the next day to be more possessive and verbally abusive towards Lana. He hates himself for enjoying the feel of Amy under his hands, against his body. What if she finds out, she’ll think he’s disgusting, just like Matt.

Correction: he is disgusting. Amy’s just doing her job, she trusts him, and he feels like he’s betraying her.

He stands in the shower that night, scrubbing roughly, thoughts spiralling, he feels unclean. He hates having to treat Amy that way. And he hates that having her pressed against him makes him feel warm and happy and like he’s found home. It’s wrong. It’s all so wrong. It’s painful.

Amy can’t help but feel a little guilty, sure she was pushing Jake to be extra touchy to make their cover more believable and productive, and it’s genuinely needed to get the job done, but she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t also part of her wanting him touching her.

It’s wrong, she knows. But she wonders, if maybe, there’s something still there, something that could still happen between them. But now, Jake’s been in the shower for twice as long as usual, and she knows he’s freaking out, and she’s certain this was the wrong way to go about it. (Even if she had only been thinking about the case when she agreed to this).

Jake put on a wide smile before stepping out of the bathroom. But Amy, because she’s Amy, still says, “We should talk about what’s wrong.”

Jake sighs, running a hand through his hair. “I can’t…I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

Amy gestures for him to sit. “Tell me.”

And he wants to, he really, really, wants to. But making this whole thing about him feels unbelievably selfish. Sure, he feels sick and dirty, and like he’s coming undone. But at least he doesn’t have to actually go through it like Amy does. It must be worse for her. He shouldn’t make this about him.

“No, it’s okay, I probably just need to spend a few hours watching property brothers repeats and then I’ll be fine.”

“Jake, Holt said we shouldn’t do anything we’re uncomfortable with: you know he didn’t just mean me right? If we need to we can find another way to catch these guys.”

“It’s not that I’m uncomfortable. It’s just that…” Jake covers his face with his hand so he can’t see her reaction, “I really like how it feels when we’re touching.”

Amy says nothing, waiting for him to continue.

Jake stares at her, “Aren’t you mad?”

“Why would I be mad? You’re doing your job. You can’t help how you feel. I’m actually glad. I like how it feels when we’re touching too.”

Jake’s gaze is awe-filled, “You do?”

“Yes. Now tell the truth: do we need to find another way to catch these guys?”

Jake chuckles. “No, I’m good.”

The same as the night before, they lay on opposite sides of the bed, this time the strip between them feels like a chasm. Amy reaches out, fingers too bold, before she draws them back.

“Jake, would you like me to hold you?”

“What?!”

“You like being the little spoon right?”

Jake shrugs. “It makes me feel safe.”

Amy nods. “And secure and I know you said you’re good with all this, but I know the whole Matt act is hard on you. And sometimes touch can be grounding when you’re feeling outside of yourself.”

She knows Jake wants to say yes, it’s written all over his face. She also knows he’s going to say no.

“I’m fine. I don’t need you to…”

“I would like it too. We both just admitted we liked touching each other, so what’s the harm in a couple of friends taking some platonic comfort in each other.” They’re the opposite of the words she wants to say, but she knows now isn’t the time to push for more, being undercover like this makes it too complicated.

“Okay.”

The feel of being held in Amy’s arms is amazing, the best thing ever; even better because it isn’t part of an act. It’s a choice, both of their choices.

Amy gets closer to the band of girlfriends, gaining vital pieces of info, fitting them together with what Jake has gathered begins to give them a solid frame of the network. They spend their nights platonically cuddling. And Amy wonders how things ended up like this, whether she missed her moment, whether she should just slide her hand lower.

She mentally lists the reasons she shouldn’t: 1) at this point that almost feels like it would be a betrayal. 2) Jake needs a friend now more than he needs a fledgling relationship. 3) It would hurt Jake even more to pull off the act if they were actually together. 4) Starting a relationship whilst undercover pretending to be in a highly unhealthy relationship is a terrible idea. 5) Despite, or perhaps because of, their conversation about liking the touching, and then the actual touching Amy’s beginning to doubt whether Jake still even wants a relationship. He hasn’t made a single move, despite them spending their nights curled up together- which was her move she would like to point out.

The gathering of evidence of the various members of the network is a slow trudge, until it isn’t.

(They pin down the head using a stray pharmaceutical receipt of all things).

They celebrate the case hard-won.

And go back to their separate lives, without nights spent together, and it feels like they’ve lost something they never had.

Now is the time, Amy thinks. But it feels like the spell has been broken. They’re back in the real world now. The days slip by grey-tinted.

They are stilted, coming back to themselves.

It’s been a month since the smuggling case ended. It all seems like a dream now, some distant surreal memory. Their moment has well and truly passed. They are friends, and it’s good.

And then Jake asks, “Can I have a cuddle?”

And she wordlessly takes him into her arms, and for once ignores her lists and rules and endless cautionary self-chastisements, and kisses him.

Jake wakes to early morning light streaming through the window and pulls Amy’s arm around so she’s holding him. And it’s more amazing than ever, because she shuffles closer, hand against his chest, and her lips press kisses to his shoulder.

He is home.

#b99 summer 2019 fic exchange #b99fandomevents #brooklyn 99 #peraltiago #jamy #fic #my peraltiago stuff #my amy santiago stuff #my jake peralta stuff #my brooklyn 99 stuff

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infpisme · 6 years ago

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9 Things People Don’t Realize You’re Doing Because You’ve Been Abused By A Narcissist

1. Constantly doubting your self-worth. Where once you were self-confident and assured, you are now in people-pleasing mode. Your friends and family notice that you are always on edge, doubting your strengths and experiences. You’re constantly explaining yourself, deflecting compliments or evading opportunities to shine. You obsess over whether you’re worthy, attractive, appealing or desirable enough. You begin to wonder if you’re the one who’s toxic and abusive when you start reacting to the abuse (after all, narcissists are prone to projecting their own behavior and calling us narcissists as a defense mechanism). You start to think that you must be the problem if you’re being treated in such a horrendous manner. This sort of self-blame is common after abuse, but it is one that is rooted in the effects of trauma, not reality.

2. Questioning your ability to make the right decisions or perceive reality correctly. Narcissists are masters of warping our reality and inviting us to play in their funhouse (more like torture chamber) of distortions, falsehoods, smoke and mirrors. When you’ve been gaslighted for so long into believing that what you’re experiencing isn’t real, you doubt whether you’re even perceiving your own reality correctly. You second-guess your decisions and feel a tremendous amount of conflict about doing what’s right for you versus what you’ve been conditioned to do for the narcissist. You develop a sense of cognitive dissonance (conflicting thoughts and feelings) about the toxic relationship as well as other major facets of your life.

3. Chasing after toxic people. The more toxicity a narcissistic partner brings into your life, the more likely you’ll gravitate towards people who subject you to similar trials. It’s because you’ve been subconsciously programmed to abusive behavior as a new normal. As a result, you might have a very distorted perception about what healthy behavior actually entails.

Instead of searching for healthier alternatives, those who have been abused by narcissists try to “search for a rescuer” but wind up encountering more people who are toxic. These experiences can compound the trauma you’ve experienced. It can mirror the self-sabotaging beliefs the narcissist has trained us to believe in. It perpetuates the vicious cycle. When we feel alone and abandoned, we’re less likely to know we deserve better.

4. Self-sabotaging. Narcissists program you to self-destruct. They subject you to cruel insults, harsh put-downs, subtle sabotage and taunt you with perceived flaws, manufactured insecurities and a hyperfocus on your shortcomings. By doing this, they commit covert murder with clean hands. You’re so taken aback by their attacks that you suffer from anxiety about your competence, your skill sets and even your God-given talents.

Why? Because the narcissist has convinced you that all your strengths are actually weaknesses. They do this on purpose to rob you of your sense of confidence and independence. Once you believe all the cruel things they say about you, you’ll start to sabotage yourself in the areas you naturally flourish in. When you catch yourself sabotaging yourself or engaging in negative self-talk, always ask yourself, “Do I really believe this about myself? Or is this what the narcissist wants me to believe?”

5. Being people-pleasing and perfectionistic. Every time the narcissist criticized you, they planted seeds of self-doubt which burgeoned into full-blown insecurities after the relationship ended. You did everything to please your abuser to gain their approval or even just a moment of peace from their crazymaking. So it’s no surprise that when the relationship has ended, the pattern of trying to please people remained. People-pleasing and perfectionism are survival mechanisms that developed early on so that you could try to ward off any form of violence (be it physical or emotional). So long as the abuser approved of you (even just temporarily), you felt in the clear.

The challenge in the aftermath is to become the observer of your perfectionistic tendencies as well as your habit of people-pleasing. Instead of judging these habits, mindfully observe your thoughts and feelings whenever you’re tempted to do something that is not authentic to who you really are.

Ask yourself, “Why am I really doing this? What do I think I have to gain?” Examine the root of each compulsion as it arises and find a healthier alternative that honors what you really want and what you desire. To start overcoming needless perfectionism, start to self-validate and approve of yourself. When you’ve done something well, give yourself some healthy praise instead of waiting for someone else to validate it for you. Habits can be hard to break, but new habits can form to replace destructive ones.

6. Withdrawing from others and isolating yourself. Abusers isolate you so you begin to isolate yourself as well. The narcissist is so charming and likeable that they are able to depict themselves as the sane ones while they provoke their victims into becoming unhinged. With a perceived lack of support from others, you start to feel as if you have no one there to help you. Your body, mind and spirit is reeling from the trauma and is trying to process it.

Although a period of hibernation is normal after abuse and sometimes much needed to begin the healing process, don’t isolate yourself from professional support or validating people who understand what you’re going through. Reach out to those who can help you, those who’ve been there and those who have a solid understanding of what narcissistic abuse feels like.

7. Falling into abuse amnesia. When the narcissist tells you they miss you, you’ll start to romanticize the relationship. When the narcissist shows good behavior, you’ll be tempted to fall into “abuse amnesia” as a coping strategy and rationalize that they were good, upstanding partners all along. You might fall prey to their “hoovering” attempts to get you back into the abusive relationship.

To counter abuse amnesia, it’s important to have a list of abusive incidents or at the very least, behaviors you experienced with this person. This will help you to reconnect to the reality of the abuse and keep you grounded in what you experienced. Confiding in a therapist and/or a trustworthy friend can also help to increase social accountability; when you find yourself rewriting the abuse, they’ll be there to help you get back on track and remind you of what you’re not missing out on.

8. Protecting your abuser. Being abused means that we become trauma-bonded to the abuser. This is very much like Stockholm Syndrome; we were taken emotionally “hostage” by this predator and we’ve learned how to protect them, defend them and cater to them in order to survive. That is why survivors often feel compelled to talk about how happy the relationship is, even when they are suffering behind closed doors.

That is also why survivors of narcissists may not come forward right away to friends and family members about the abuse; they fear that they are overreacting, too sensitive, or imagining things, just like the abuser has told them. Even after you break free of a narcissist, you might still be prone to protecting the abuser’s image at the risk of your own welfare.

This can manifest in many different ways, from the major to the minor. You might refuse to cooperate with law enforcement on revealing the details of abuse or become argumentative with loved ones who call out the abuse for what it is. You might refuse to get an order of protection even if the narcissist is stalking or harassing you, for fear of retaliation as well as a warped sense of loyalty you developed to the narcissist during the relationship.

When fighting the urge to protect the abuser, remember that the abuser never protected you. They never protected you from the pain they inflicted upon you or the consequences that came with it. Your only duty after leaving an abusive relationship is to protect yourself, first and foremost.

9 . Having a warped sense of boundaries. One of the effects of being abused is that our boundaries become extremely malleable. We’re more compelled to say “yes” to things we desperately want to say “no” to. We’ve lost our sense of agency and control over our lives, so it takes time to rebuild our boundaries and reclaim our power. It helps to remember your basic human rights after you’ve been violated. These include the right to say no, the right to protest unfair behavior or mistreatment, and the right to feel angry and express it non-abusively.

You can also create a list of emotional and physical boundaries you commit to honoring in the future with any relationship or friendship. These are customized to your needs can include boundaries like, “I don’t tolerate anyone lying to me” and “I don’t respond to threats or ultimatums.”

Take small steps to practice your new boundaries and follow through with them. When a toxic person tries to put you down, stand up for yourself in whatever way you can – even if it just means walking away from the interaction. Being assertive doesn’t always require a grand gesture – it just requires your willingness to prioritize your safety and wellbeing. When a friend tries to take advantage of you, start calling them out – even if it’s just in a polite but firm manner. Start asking yourself every day whether you’re doing something to please someone else or because you really want to do it.

It takes practice, but you will get there. No matter what you are struggling with now, you can reclaim your life and your power after being abused by a narcissist. In fact, you can thrive.

Source: though catalogue

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