STOP BEING NICE TO PEOPLE WHO ANNOY YOU
IF SOMEONE ANNOYS YOU, AND THEY WON'T STOP, AND THEY KEEP ANNOYING YOU, MAKE A THREAT!!
IF THEY KEEP ANNOYING YOU, FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE THREAT!
IF THEY KEEP ANNOYING YOU, INCREASE THE SEVERITY OF YOUR RESPONSE!
YOU'RE WELCOME, STOP GETTING RAPED.

IT CAN BE AS SIMPLE AS SPREADING A RUMOR, YOUR THREAT COULD BE THAT YOU WILL TELL EVERYONE BAD SHIT ABOUT THEM.
IT COULD BE A LIE, A SIMPLE "I KNOW WHAT YOU DID", INSINUATING YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO, A GOOD POKER FACE CAN SCARE SOMEONE SHITLESS.
AND IF THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE BANTZ AND PUT YOU IN A SELF DEFENSE SITUATION, JUMP WITH JOY, BECAUSE YOU NOW HAVE FREE LEASE!

I saw someone speak about their experience being abused sexually and it made me so mad that they let it happen, because they didn't have the confidence to stop it. It wasn't violent it was manipulation. So I want ALL OF YOU TO HAVE THE CONFIDENCE TO STOP IT! I WANT ALL OF YOU TO HAVE THE COOD BLOOD NECESSARY TO STAND UP TO TYRANNY, NO MATTER THE FORM IT TAKES, SMALL OR LARGE, BIG OR LITTLE, SMASH IT WITH ALL THE LEGAL MEANS AT YOUR DISPOSAL, SHOW NO MERCY, SHOW NO REMORSE, MAKE THEM CRY, MAKE THEM POUT, MAKE THEM STOMP THEIR FEET, AND PRAY THEY THROW A PUNCH SO YOU CAN BITE THEIR FUCKING FINGERS OFF WHO CARES IF YOU DIE IN THE PROCESS BITE THOSE FUCKING FINGERS OFF AND GOUGE THOSE FUCKING EYES, DEEP GOUGE, GOUGE, HOOK, AND RIP, GOUGE, HOOK, AND RIP!!!!!

@Jazzy_Butts what if i liked it

@clora It's all fun and games until the discard. Narcissists always discard. If you're doing things you don't want to do because you think it'll get you love, and then the love never comes, that's painful.

@Jazzy_Butts the person who was abusing me eventually strangled me half to death & i ended up heading to the ER w/ a minor brain injury
im totally fine now, but yeah, that one played itself out
tbh though most of the people who conditioned me to conflate emotional abuse and affection in the way I do now couldn't fairly be characterized as narcissists, & certainly didn't "discard" me in most cases in that sense

@clora The discard is emotional not literal, first comes love bombing, then devaluation, then abuse, and finally discard.

@Jazzy_Butts lmao if anyone is love-bombing and discarding in my relationships it's me, that tends to be my response to adverse relationships rather than the nature of them

@clora Interesting, how would you characterize your abusive partners? You said they're not narcissistic, so what were they?

@Jazzy_Butts @clora Humans are extremely complex, and human interactions even more so. Unfortunately, this means there are a huge number of ways one person can abuse another, and they aren't always straightforward enough to fit neatly into the categories we've made.

Our categories and narratives outline common trends and general warning signs to look for, and those are a useful first-order approximation of the world, but ultimately individual interactions need to be accounted for individually, and at that point trying to squish the situation into a specific label rather than dealing directly with the situation does more harm than good.

@Jazzy_Butts @clora Beyond that, ultimately what I chafe at here is that there needs to be something wrong with someone for them to hurt someone else (and especially that all of those things fall under the same label).

Everyone has reasons why they hurt people. Sometimes they follow a common narrative, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they straightforwardly fit a pre-made category and sometimes (often) they’re more complicated than that.

Looking at personality disorders specifically, the rates of overlap between various distinct disorders are huge, and studies have generally found that a large amount of the time, different psychologists don’t even agree on which DSM personality disorder any given person has (to the point where they almost removed distinct personality disorders from the DSM-V, replacing them with scales of different types of dysfunction).

It frustrates me when people insist that if someone is abusing someone else, that first person has some distinct disorder that makes them a bad/broken person. For one thing, because it doesn’t really correspond to reality, and for another, because it lets us off the hook for the monsters within ourselves. We congratulate ourselves or those we love for not fitting some (frankly, arbitrary) cluster of (deeply subjective) symptoms and we think that’s good enough, but it’s not. Those specific traits are not a good proxy for whether or not we’re abusing someone / someone prone to abusing others.

Actually dealing with and minimizing the prevalence of abuse requires acknowledging gray areas, and acknowledging that abusers aren’t just monsters who all fit into some pre-defined set of categories. Striving to perfectly label the set of people who fundamentally are abusers is a fool’s errand. If we want to address abuse, we need to address abuse itself and the circumstances that lead to it, not focusing on labeling a loose group of people who tend to have certain traits that tend to lead to them abusing people. All the latter does is give us the false reassurance that we can weed out the “bad” people and wash our hands of them and that abuse will be resolved.

Apologies for the text wall.

@formication @clora But they are monsters. They are literally broken human monsters. Like werewolves. See? Allegory. Metaphor. Easy to understand. So they're like werewolves, sometimes they may be perfectly nice people, but sometimes they change. And sometimes they're an asshole no matter if they're "transformed" (out of control self) or human (in control of self). When a person goes offline, off the rails, off script, for that moment they become less human (metaphorically). The more extreme the deviation from egalitarian norms, the more extreme the loss of humanity. Small things result in small loss, the larger the deviation the larger the "loss of face" or loss of humanity. Take it far enough, and organized society will have a "werewolf" killed. This is why murderers get the death penalty. This is why it's ok to use deadly force against imminent threat to life or limb.