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!!!!!
@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.
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.
@clora Interesting, how would you characterize your abusive partners? You said they're not narcissistic, so what were they?
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.
That is often how people get abused or tolerate their loved ones abusing people in the first place. They know that their friend/partner *isn't* a monster, so if abusers are all monsters and only abusers abuse people, then their friend/partner must not be abusing people (and therefore conclude that their behavior must not be that bad or the person they hurt must be making it up).
The fantasy that only monsters abuse people is a comforting fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.
@formication @clora Their faulty logic is not my responsibility. My father was an abuser, I loved my father, when I grew enough to see what he was doing was evil, distasteful, I disowned him. He is nothing to me now. He is dead to me. If he came at me with a knife in a dark ally I would kill him immediately. No hesitation. He is not human, but the boy he once was, was. That boy doesn't deserve to be trapped in the hell of that mans mind. That's what I think of "monsters". My best friend raped my gf. Guess what? He wasn't my best friend after that.
@formication @clora And when I say rape I mean the kind with tears and begging while the rapist laughs, and then after the fact brags about the crying and the begging and the laughing. This isn't fake rape bullshit.
He just acted like that out of nowhere?
@formication @clora He found out I was dating her and he's a sadistic narcissist so of course he got jealous and had to tell me about how he caused someone I love pain. I knew they had been together but I didn't know it wasn't consensual. Both their stories were the same so she wasn't making anything up.
@formication @clora I understand. I'm thinking now about how I knew there waa something wrong with him, but I thought it was something other than it was. I thought he waa a victim. I thought people were bullying him. I helped him so much. Then he revealed himself when he felt comfortable enough. I know he was thinking about killing me. I found a huge gouge out of my granite counter, I asked if he dropped something on it and he said he got mad and stabbed it with a knife, like he found it funny. I remember he stood up and said he was going downstairs, figured he was going to the bathroom, came back up like nothing happened. I trust my gut more now. If I don't like someone, I don't need a reason, they're not a victim, they can fuck off away from me is what they can do, because the next time I'm faced with one of these people I'm not going to react well.
@formication @Jazzy_Butts @clora
In fact, most rapists know how to camouflage themselves as harmless feminists.
Oh I definitely wasn't doubting the story.
I've thought a lot about how the ex of mine who raped multiple of my friends showed a lot of warning signs, and I overlooked them at the time because he didn't match my idea of the monster I thought rapists must be.
Since then, I've realized that if I assume people can have plenty of other positive traits and still end up being abusers, I find myself much more willing to look critically at people I care about and look for warning signs, because me being willing to do so doesn't inherently mean that I don't trust them or that I think they're likely to actually be a monster.