The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Something I want to be careful of is the vilification of gaslighting. And by that, I mean that I want to draw a line between "this behaviour has harmful effects and we need to stop doing it" and "the people who gaslight are evil manipulators deliberately trying to drive you insane".

The reason why I want to draw that line is because characterizing it as the latter makes it too easy for people to distance *ourselves* from acknowledging when we do it. "I am not an evil manipulator, so I can't be gaslighting anyone." Even "evil" abusers see themselves as the victim in their stories.

The reason they abuse is because they have a *belief* that the actions they take are genuinely right, good, acceptable, appropriate, or warranted. Many of them feel that they are a good influence on others or that they are trying to better their victims or doing what they do for their own good. They can't change until they recognize that they are doing something wrong.

So when we use the latter definition, we give them justification room in their minds to excuse their actions. But if we use the former, then we ALL have to take a look at our own behaviour and keep working on bettering ourselves, and we can do that without the cognitive dissonance fighting us and telling us that we are a "good person" so this can't apply to ourselves. This makes it harder for outright abusers to excuse their own actions if the culture around them encourages this kind of reflection and correction of everyone.

Gaslighting is such a normal part of our society that we're mostly all raised with it all around us. That makes it difficult to identify when we do it ourselves.

One of the classic examples I use to illustrate non "abusive", well-intentioned gaslighting is a mother trying to get her child to eat her vegetables, the child says she doesn't like them, and the mother says in exasperation, "yes you do, now just eat them."

We likely have gaslighted people in these kinds of minor situations many times over our lives and never realized it, so never recorded it in our memories. Why should one of these totally normal conversations stick out in our minds, especially years later? It's *the way things are* in so many circumstances.

I can't remember anything specific but I'm sure I've said to people at various times "oh, yes you do!" when they said they didn't like something or didn't want something, and I'm sure I had good intentions when I did it. I'm not "evil", I'm a meat body driven by a belief engine and a product of my environment, which means I'm flawed.

The best I can do now is to be mindful of my language and try not to contradict people when they tell me their inner landscape. If I have reason to doubt them, such as suspecting *them* of trying to manipulate me, maybe I can ask for confirmation or I can point to conflicting *behaviour*, but I will try not to outright tell other people what they are feeling.

In this post, I want to be clear that I'm doing something that I often rant against doing - stretching the definition of a very importantly narrow term. Gaslighting is not simply remembering things differently, or even *just* telling someone with confidence that their memory of a thing is wrong, even if the "thing" in question is part of the other person's inner landscape. The original term "gaslighting" is, in fact, the second definition I used in my opening paragraph.

In the movie Gaslight, which is where the term comes from, a husband is *deliberately* changing the level of the lighting in the house (created by gas lights, not electric lights), and when the wife comments on the change in light, he *deliberately* says there is no change, so that the wife comes to doubt her own senses over time. The husband does all this *deliberately* so that he can have his wife committed to an asylum so he can access her money. This is a 1940s villain caricature, an evil mustachio'd villain who knows he is doing evil and doing it maliciously and selfishly.

The problem is that this is not how real life "villains" operate. And that's the point that I'm making here. It's important to keep a narrow definition of terms like "gaslight" and "abuse" and not round up just anything uncomfortable to these terms. But we have to *also* make sure that we don't keep the definitions so narrow that it only applies to people in black hats cackling in their lairs and stroking their white cats while they plot world domination.

Because that leads to everyday, ordinary people doing horrible things and justifying themselves because they are not evil villains. We have everyday, low-key examples of people trying to convince other people that they are not experiencing the things that they are experiencing. This is not the same thing as correcting people's flawed memories or understanding of factual claims, although that can also be weaponized. I'm talking about "yes, you do like broccoli!" when you do not, in fact, like broccoli.

These small little disregards of our inner landscape *lead* to large disregards of other people's inner landscapes, because it's the same thing but a manner of scope. The mother *believes* that it's in her child's best interest to eat veggies. And she's right, it is in her child's best interest, and the mother is, in fact, in a position of authority and power over the child to do "what's best" for the child. This is the nature of that relationship.

So it's a very small step to go from a parent / child power dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour, to a romantic partnership dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour *for one's own good*. This is a tool we have been given by our society, so it's a tool we may not even notice that we are pulling out and using because our brains are little more than belief justification engines.

And if our society has also encouraged us to see villains as black hatted evil caricatures of people, then our giant justification engines are going to work overtime to make sure that we are not Bad People(TM). And since we are not Bad People(TM), we therefore cannot be doing the things that Bad People(TM) do.

And THAT is the point of this piece. Gaslighting, the action, needs to be understood as a Very Bad Thing, but it needs to be separated from our personal identities as a thing that only Very Bad People do. The action is a tool that we have all been taught how to use. It's normal and reasonable for people immersed in a culture that uses this tool to reach for the tool themselves. It is an *inappropriate* tool, but the people who use it are regular, everyday people who have understandable reasons for reaching for it.

And now that you know it is a common, ubiquitous even, tool in all of our toolboxes, we ought to be on the lookout for when *we* reach for this totally normal, common but unhealthy tool. Gaslighting is not a tool reserved only for the most evil of all evil people. It's a tool that everyone has been exposed to, and taught how to use. All you have to do now is teach yourself how to put that tool down and reach for another one.

OTG don't start a relationship with someone who is in the process of leaving an abusive partner!  And for fuck's sake, don't get upset when they act inconsistent or seem to reconcile or "go back" to said abusive partner.  Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head and they really need to find their own identity before beginning a new relationship.

Escaping one abusive partner into the arms of another creates a coercive dynamic because of the fucked up shit going on inside the victim's head, *even if you try very hard not to be coercive*.  The key part here is the loss of identity.  Abuse wipes out victims' identities, and without a clear sense of who they are as an individual person, they are unable to create healthy boundaries for themselves in other relationships *which makes those other relationships coercive by nature*.

You cannot force someone out of an abusive relationship before they're ready, and you SHOULD not encourage them to leap straight from the abusive relationship to a new relationship, poly or otherwise.

Be "on call" for them to go pick them or their stuff up at a moment's notice, field or facilitate the finding of a new place to live so that their abuser doesn't find out about it, believe them and give them space, and most importantly, don't take it as a personal rejection or blame them when they inevitably backslide in some way including going back to their abuser.

Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head.  If you can't be a proper support system for a victim, which includes not pushing them into leaving before they're ready and not complaining about how hurt you feel or that they "used" you or "played you" or "ditched" you when they end up not leaving or they gradually stop talking to you or they go back to their abuser, then back the fuck out of their lives.   Otherwise, you risk making things worse for them.

For a better idea on how to be a "proper support system" for a victim, check out the resources in the back of Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft which includes books on how to be the loved one of an abuse victim.

This was in response to a "couple" who wanted advice on how to start a relationship with "a third" who was trying to escape an abusive partner.  Other people's responses were ... abhorrent.  Some of them argued for this couple to "just go get her out of there" and a few suggested that it's not the best idea but you can be careful or otherwise not treat this like an actual life or death situation that it could become.

To that, I must give a reminder:  escaping from an abuser is the most dangerous time for a victim.  This is the time abusers are most likely to escalate the violence to murder.

This is not only dangerous for her, it's dangerous for everyone around her.  She doesn't need to escape into your home, she needs to escape to a place that knows how to keep her safe from an escalating, now pissed off abuser and that fully understands the situation she is in.  Every time you hear about some woman and her kids or her parents or her new boyfriend being murdered by an ex, it's almost always during the time she is trying to escape the ex.  Everyone around the victim becomes a target for an enraged abuser.

What do you think an abusive ex, hell bent on power and control and now extra pissed off that his little punching bag is leaving, is going to think of the new boyfriend *and girlfriend* who "stole her away"?  He's going to *blame* the couple and polyamory as being a bad influence on his girlfriend and believe that he needs to teach everyone a lesson and reassert his authority.  This is the time when previously emotional-only abusers escalate to physical violence too.

I can't stress enough what a dangerous time this is for her and why the concern needs to be what's in her best interest, not what's in your pants.  That's also why you can't force her to leave if she's not ready.  Only she understands the extent of the danger she is in, and if her mind has to rationalize why she stays in order to keep herself safe, then that's what she needs to do.

Please, everyone, read Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft.  This is so much more serious than most people who haven't been there really understand.

Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic.  The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks.  But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music.  I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded.  The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman".  It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too.  In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

Watch on YouTube

I wrote this post on Facebook 5 years ago. It turned out to be disturbingly prescient for a relationship I started after this post was written and ended more or less for this reason.

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Me: I need this information to assess where I should place my boundaries.

Them: It hurts me that you would even ask me about that!  Don't you trust me to tell you?  Your boundaries make me feel bad.  Don't you care about me to let me in?

Me: Sure, it's cool, I'll just do the emotional labor so that you don't feel bad.

If people wonder why I'm so standoffish and hard to get to know on an interpersonal level, this is why.  It's easier to keep people at a distance than get into fights over who should be shouldering the burden of emotional labor.  If I push, I'm a nag or I'm disrespectful of someone's hurt feelings.  If I don't push, then I don't feel safe so I place my boundaries farther out and then I'm "cold" and "emotionally distant".  Which hurts their feelings.

When I was a portrait photographer in a studio, I used to have lots of clients bringing in their toddlers and babies.  It was my job to make their bratty, cranky, frightened children look like the advertisement photos of baby models who were deliberately selected for having traits conducive to producing flattering portraits (including temperament and parents whose patience was increased by a paycheck).  I would spend more time than I was supposed to, patiently waiting for the parents to get their kids to stop crying and fussing.

Every single session, the parents would exclaim how patient I was!  How did I do it?!  What I couldn't tell them was that I had built a barrier in my head to tune them out.  I just ... spaced.  I did not notice the passage of time and I wasn't really paying them any attention.  I just let my muscle memory control the equipment and make the noises that got kids to look and smile.  It's an old trick I adapted from getting through assaults by bullies as a kid - tune out, mentally leave the body, make the right mouth noises to get the preferred response.

That kind of emotional labor management takes a toll.  I couldn't express any irritation or annoyance at the client and I couldn't leave to let them handle the kid and the photographing on their own.  So I learned to compartmentalize and distance myself while going through the physical motions.

But the price?  I now hate kids.  I used to like them.  I was a babysitter, a math tutor, and a mentor and counselor.  I originally went to college to get a counseling degree so that I could specialize in problem teens from problematic homes.  Now I want nothing at all to do with kids unless it's an environment where I am teaching them something specific and I can give up on them the moment I am no longer feeling heard or helpful.

That's not what made me not want children, btw.  I was already childfree-by-choice at that time.  I just still liked them back then.  Now I can only stand certain specific kids who are very good-natured, interested in my interests, and able to function independently (as in, introverted and not dependent on my attention).

So, yeah, I can do the emotional labor.  But the cost is high.  Doing the labor for too long, to the point where I have to shut myself off from empathy to bear the consequences of doing that labor, results in my emotional distance.  That's what happened with my abusive fiance.  He wanted a caretaker, not an equal partner.  Everything I did to remain an independent person "hurt" him. I bent a little in the beginning, as I believe partners are supposed to do for each other.  But eventually catering to his feelings while putting my own on the back burner took its toll.
 
So I shut down.  In the end, I was able to watch him dispassionately as he lay on the concrete floor of our garage, supposedly knocked unconscious by walking into a low-hanging pipe conveniently in the middle of an argument.  And then calmly walk upstairs without even a glance behind me to see if he was following.  He described my breakup with him as "cold", like a machine.  I had run out labor chips to give, even to feel compassion as I was breaking his heart.

Of course, I didn't recognize his behaviour as "abuse" until years later, or I might have bothered to get angry instead of remaining cold.  Point is, emotional labor isn't free, and if you don't pay for it in cash or a suitably equitable exchange, it will be paid by some other means.  I don't mean we should never do emotional labor for anyone, just that it needs to be compensated for because it will be paid one way or another.

Since this method has served to end several relationships with abusive men where I never felt "abused" because it didn't "stick" (I just thought of them as assholes), I don't feel much incentive to change it, even though it would probably be better to either not take on so much emotional labor in the first place (which is hard not to do because I *want* to do some forms of emotional labor in the beginning as an expression of love back when I'm still expecting a reciprocal exchange) or to leave or change things before I run out of fucks to give.

But I do eventually run out of fucks to give and I do eventually stop taking on too much emotional labor.  And it always seems to surprise people when I do.  Because I was so accommodating before so that I wouldn't push "too hard" or seem "too selfish".  But that always comes with a price.  People are often surprised to learn that.

www.quora.com/Is-there-a-difference-between-a-dominant-and-a-true-dominant-in-a-D-s-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Is there a difference between a dominant and a true dominant in a D/s relationship?

A. Yes, a "true dominant" is someone who doesn’t have a fucking clue what BDSM is all about and is using the language and the culture of kink to hide behind and excuse just being an asshole.

Everyone else understands that we all have a variety of tendencies and preferences and kinks and interests, and when someone's tendencies lead mostly towards the collection of behaviours and interests that are generally categorized under the heading "dominant", they can take on that identity label if they so choose.

But anyone who tries to gatekeep what a "true dominant" is, or calls themselves that, is anything but.

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-considered-being-dumped-as-a-blessing/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever considered being 'dumped' as a blessing?

A. Yes. I was dating a man who was abusing his other partners. I do not feel that he abused me, but only because I, coincidentally, hadn’t done anything that triggered his insecurities that led him to abuse his partners.

Abuse comes from a belief that it is OK to control another person. At the time, how I behaved was exactly what he wanted from me. So he had no need to attempt to exert his control over me because I was already doing what he wanted.

Then he got another girlfriend, and shortly thereafter she started dating someone else. That triggered his insecurities. So he attempted to control her to assuage his insecurities. She resisted that control, so he tried harder to control her, and it spiraled into abuse.

By the time I finally saw what was going on between them, *really* saw what was happening and not just believing what he was telling me about their relationship, I was in a position to be open and available to new relationships myself.

But because I saw how he was treating her, I got angry at him. I decided that I would not coddle him by making any concessions in my new relationship to make him feel better. I was just going to throw him in the deep end by allowing my new relationship to progress however it wanted, with no feedback from him.

He *really* did not like that. He had never before had a partner who didn’t give him a voice in her other relationships. He felt personally betrayed because his vote in my other relationship didn’t count.

Because his relationship with his victim had escalated to a ridiculous level, *all* of his other relationships were suffering. So he was constantly putting out fires - first trying to rein in his victim, and then trying to soothe his other partners (who he had already cowed into submission) who felt neglected by how much time he was spending reining in his victim.

Every relationship in his life was falling apart because of his one partner who kept resisting his control. His other partners had long since given up control to him, and I (until that point) hadn’t needed any controlling.

So his reserves were low. He had no more patience and no more ability to handle a partner who resisted him. And then I came along and did something that freaked him out (I started dating someone new), and not only did I resist his control, but I did so easily and without any conciliatory or apologetic attitude about how my resistance to his control might make him feel.

His victim, who did not realize he was trying to control her and all the drama was because she knew something was wrong but she couldn’t figure out what - she would resist his control but she would feel really badly about it because she couldn’t seem to understand why she kept "hurting" him.

I, however, had no such confusion. When he attempted to insert himself into my other relationship, I said plainly and immediately that he had absolutely no say in the matter of what I did with my body or time or emotions and he certainly did not get a say in what my new partner could do with his own body, time, or emotions.

I stood my ground. This shocked him so much that he dumped me with almost no build-up, surprising everyone around us. To all of us in the network, it seemed that my relationship with him was the only stable one he had. We didn’t have any of the constant drama that came with his victim trying to figure out why the gaslights kept changing levels (that’s a reference to the movie from whence the term "gaslighting" comes), and we didn’t have any of the arguments that he had with his other partners about how they never got to see him anymore because all of his time was taken up trying to manage his victim.

He and I were wickedly compatible in almost every way. We were even more compatible in some ways than he was with his wife of 20 years. So, to everyone in our network, our breakup came out of nowhere. It took one email exchange over this new partner of mine, where he insisted he should have a say in our relationship and I said absolutely not, and then he dumped me.

At the time I was hurt and angry. I had just lost my place to live and had to be "rescued" by a friend offering me a spare room, only to have that "friend" torture my cats while I was away resulting in both of their deaths. That was the 2nd of what turned out to be 7 moves in 2 years. I lost my housing, my cats, my boyfriend, and even my new partner decided to move to another state right when we got started (although we did not break up), and even my local community staged a coup against me when I tried to oust a guy who was beating his wife so I lost my entire social network too.

It was too much for me all at once, and I fell into a suicidal depression. A few months after that breakup, his victim finally escaped and she and I had several opportunities to talk about our experiences with him. I learned about a lot of things that happened in their relationship that I hadn’t known at the time because of the way that he controlled the narrative of their relationship.

So, in hindsight, him dumping me was probably the best thing he could have done. If he hadn’t, I would have stayed with him and continued to try and work with him on getting past his insecurities when he actually had no intention of getting past them because they were too valuable as a tool he could use to control his partners. I would have continued to minimize his abuse of his victim because I couldn’t see her side as clearly while I was romantically linked to him (although I had begun to see more of the truth before we broke up).

I was not ready to leave him, so I would have stayed with an abuser for much longer had he not made the decision for me. And I’m glad now that it didn’t drag on longer. I didn’t get out of there without scars. I’m not sure how bad the damage would be if I had stayed longer. As it is, I’m still not fully recovered. So I can only be grateful that he didn’t string me along any further.

When I look back over my past and think "would I really erase this from my history if I could?", most of the time I don’t think I would. As many people have said in other contexts, the experiences I went through have made me who I am today. Going back in time and preventing myself from having some of those bad experiences means I would not have come out the other side as the person I am now. So a lot of those experiences I would go through anyway.

But not this one. I would erase this entire relationship if I could. I would erase all the good memories along with the bad ones. I would do this for a couple of reasons - 1) I don’t like having all those happy memories tarnished by the after-knowledge that he was ultimately abusive and he fundamentally does not believe his partners can make decisions for themselves; and 2) I do not think that he deserves the memories of our good times or of my intimacy and vulnerability. I would take that away from him if I could.

Since I can’t rewrite history, all I can do is be grateful that he ended our relationship before I would have.

I just read a thing that said "abusers are good at making your anger seem worse than their abuse."  And I thought "yes! They do!"

But then I thought a little more about my last abusive ex.  See, he would do this thing, where he would try to control his partners' behaviour, and they would do a thing that resisted that control, and then he would get angry at their resistance and call it "abuse" and accuse them of hurting him, of not caring about how their actions affected him, of destroying the relationship, etc.

If anyone accused him of "overreacting" or of blowing things out of proportion or of doing anything at all that was "too much", he threw it right back at them that they weren't allowing him to have his feelings (because all feelings are "valid", yo).  He was VERY good at making it seem as though his victims were making his anger seem worse than the so-called "abuse" his victims were doing to him when they resisted his control of them.

I still remember the day one of them called me up in tears, hyperventilating, totally freaking out because she may or may not have broken some fucking rule they had, depending on how the rule was interpreted, and she was upset not because of what he might do in retaliation for breaking the rules, but because she thought she was a horrible, thoughtless person for 1) breaking the rule and 2) not knowing if the rule had been broken because she didn't get clarification on this point.

I made a blog post a while back where I used actual quotes from one of our email exchanges post-breakup where I told him that I did not want him to contact me again except to apologize for one very specific act he had done during the breakup, and he responded quite indignantly about how he didn't "consent" to me placing "limitations" on the conditions under which he was allowed to speak to me.

Dude, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

 

So, I realized that it's not so much that abusers do particular things like making your anger seem worse than their abuse.  Because someone skilled in abusive tactics will make it seem like YOU are making THEIR anger seem worse than YOUR "abuse" of them, when in reality, their anger is part of the abuse.

And also, as I've learned, we all have abusive tactics that we have learned just through exposure to it throughout our lives, from our families and our culture.  So when we are mistreated, we ALL reach into our own bags of tricks, and some of the responses we pull out can be pretty shitty too.

So sometimes (in my experience, basically all the time), it can be really difficult to tell who is the abuser and who is the victim, even if you apply the axioms "follow the lines of power and see who has the locus of control" and "the one who is trying to run away is probably not the abuser".  In this same relationship example, we all thought that the victim was the abuser at first because she was the one doing what seemed like controlling things.  You see, he was also deeply fearful of losing the relationship.  Abusers are in real pain and feeling real fear.  What makes them abusers is how they deal with that pain and fear.

So, to prevent her from ever getting up the courage to leave him, he would play on her fear of losing the family group, which would fuck her shit up, thinking that she could lose everything at any given moment, and it would trigger her anxiety about being "left out".  To relieve her feelings of being left out, she would request that no sex happen among anyone unless the door was left open in an implicit invitation for her to join, even if she didn't want to join.

To me, that seemed incredibly controlling.  But he was desperately afraid of losing his relationship with her and he desperately needed to make this a whole group thing with no individuality or independent-ness, so he made it seem like he was "acquiescing" to her demand to control the sex he was allowed to have, even though "everyone subsumes their identity into the group relationship and we are all one Borg, resistance is futile" was exactly what he was going for.

I'll be honest - the reason why I had a hard time believing that she was being abused is because I had a history with her as a metamour through another partner, and she tried to control our relationship then too.  So it seemed totally in character to me that she was being controlling, even though it was contrary to every value she *spoke* for.

But her controlling behaviour was a *reaction* to HIS controlling behaviour, just as it was the last time (she had just gotten out of a relationship with an abusive metamour and used controlling tactics as a survival technique).  Most of us develop toxic coping mechanisms to prolonged exposure to abuse.  He provoked it by preying on her fear of being alone, left out, of losing the family group.  And then, when things escalated to a level where I could more clearly see who was pushing whom, he strung her along by making it seem as though she were the one dismissing his anger to make it seem worse than her "abuse" of him.

So, it's not that abusers do any particular thing or particular tactic.  It's that abusers flip the script.  They take whatever tools you give them, whatever scripts that society gives them, whatever is available, and they flip it to make it seem like their victim is the "bad guy".  Some abusers are sophisticated about it and it can be really hard to tell that this is what they're doing.  Others, like a particular villain in a TV show I'm watching right now, are really fucking obvious about it (#ProTip - if someone says "the whole world is against you / doesn't believe in you / is holding you back, and I'm the only one who accepts you / believes in you / trusts you / encourages you / is not holding you back", then they're being abusive, just FYI).

This is why I am not a fan of Non-Violent Communication.  It's a ridiculously easy tool to convert into an abusive weapon, and we ALL have abusive tendencies - yes, even you, dear reader, you are not above this shit - so I've never seen NVC used in a healthy way.

And I don't need anyone to tell me "but I use it all the time!" 1)  I'm sure there is someone out there somewhere for whom it has never been warped into a tool of abuse - statistics guarantees that this must be true somewhere - and the fact that someone like this exists is not the point; and 2) I just got done pointing out that we all have abusive tendencies, so in this rant, I am dubious of anyone's claim that they have never misused a communication tool because I believe we all have, either knowingly or unknowingly, simply because we are all fucked up and I'm not letting you off the hook for this.

I'm digressing.  The point is not NVC specifically.  The point is that abusers flip the script.  The point is for them to make you question your reality, to question "who is the bad guy here?" and to come up with the wrong answer.  And they will use whatever script they have access to in order to flip it.

So, an abuser may make your anger at them seem worse than their abuse of you.  But they may also make it seem as though YOU are making their anger at you seem worse than your resistance to their control of you.  Sometimes anger is the correct and necessary reaction.  When someone is trying to control you, your anger is appropriate.  Anger is my primary defense mechanism, so let me tell you how hard it is for me to admit this next part...  But sometimes anger is also a weapon, and you are totally correct to resist their anger at you, because their anger *is part of their abuse* and their efforts to make it seem like you're the one minimizing their anger *is part of the abuse*.

And I don't have an answer for you.  I don't have a checklist for you.  I don't have a listicle for how to make it easier to tell which is which.  We can follow the lines of power (if they control your income, if they are your superior or supervisor in business, if they own the place where you live, if they influence who your friends are, etc.) and we can try to tease out who is running away and who is doing the chasing.

But those have limitations.  Many abuse victims do not try to run away for a long time.  Many of them are only *capable* of being abused because they're desperate to hold onto this relationship so they submit to the abuse out of fear.  Or out of grooming - where they get the victim to submit to a small violation, and then the next larger violation is excused because it's so close to the first one the victim let through, and how can you let one go and not the other, you hypocrite?

And many people gain power over a romantic partner in ways that are invisible to outsiders.  How many of you ask your friends the details of their economic situation?  How many of you know who controls the income?  When romantic partners are business partners, can you really tell, from the outside, that a division of labor based on skills doesn't have an element of power built in, such as one person controlling the money?

 How many of you have witnessed those private conversations where one person steered another away from building intimate friendships with people the first person didn't approve of, and they did so subtly, without overt threats?

How many of you can *really* tell the difference, from the outside, between "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me" vs. "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me, except I know how desperate you are to please me so that even mentioning this will make you choose the option I prefer even though I have said it was OK to choose the other option because we both know it's not really OK to choose the other option"?

In fact, how many of you can really tell the difference between those two things even from the inside, when you're right in the middle of it?  From either side?  The human brain is not logical or rational, it is a justification engine.  We are very good at justifying all kinds of things to ourselves and others.

And abusers are particularly good at this.  Which means that, since our brains are optimized for it, we are all capable of abuse.  Abusers flip the script - whichever script we have, an abuser will turn it around to justify their control of their victim.  And even they might not realize that they're doing this, because of that justification engine thing.

But they will take whatever is handed to them and use it to control.  If that means they use your desire to seem "fair" and "impartial", if that means they use the "all feelings are valid" principle, if that means they ride the coattails of the #MeToo movement, if that means they flip the gender script, if that means they *use* the gender script, if that means they use social justice language like my ex, if that means they use their social capital, if that means they use your good faith - whatever it means for them, that's what they'll do to come out looking like the "good guy", or if they can manage it, like the "victim" themselves.

Abusers flip the script.  Even if they have to use "flipping the script" to flip the script, as long as it makes you question who is the abuser and who is the victim, they're doing it right.

www.quora.com/For-women-would-you-move-into-a-house-with-a-couple-that-share-a-3rd-female-and-that-would-make-you-the-4th-female-All-share-a-bed-and-have-sex-with-each-other-Why-or-why-not/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. For women, would you move into a house with a couple that share a 3rd female and that would make you the 4th female? All share a bed and have sex with each other. Why or why not?

A.

1. I could not live with people who “share” other human beings like they’re a milkshake to be shared on a date.  I could not trust them to treat *me* as a human being, because they have clearly shown they are willing to dehumanize people for their own gratification.
    
2. I could not live with people who call women “females”.  There’s a whole body of literature on what’s wrong with that term.
    
3. I could not live with people who assume that cohabiting automatically means “would make you the 4th female”.  The question assumes that “move into a house” necessarily implies a polyfidelitious arrangement.  I’m not sure what kind of houses y’all have been living in, but I’ve had a number of roommates and housemates, some of whom were also romantically involved with each other, and never was simply “move into a house” defined as “would make you the 4th female”.  In order for that to happen, there would have to be an invitation to join their polyfidelitious relationship, not just live under their roof.
    
4. I am straight.  I am not sexually attracted to women.
    
5. I have autonomy.  To require me to have sex with anyone, even if they were the gender of my orientation, is coercive.  Even when I do enter into a romantic and sexual relationship, I still retain the ability to give and revoke consent at any time.  Sex is never a *requirement*.  If, at any time, someone is required to have sex with anyone in order to maintain their housing, that is deeply coercive indeed.  Certainly I would never get into a relationship with someone where sex with *other people* is required in order to maintain the relationships I want.  That’s really fucked up.
    
6. Even though I do enjoy group sex, I do not enjoy it all the time.  Every relationship needs to be nurtured on its own, which means that each of the 4 people in that house needs to be able to explore their individual relationships with each other person independently and each of those relationships needs to be able to grow in whatever ways that relationship wants to grow.  Forcing all of the relationships to be the “same” is also coercive and codependent.  So even assuming my orientation matched *and* I was interested in a sexual relationship with each person, I still wouldn’t join a group that expected group sex all the time.
   
   I was actually in a relationship that did that in a defacto way.  It was quite toxic and insidious.  They never said that group sex was expected or required, but they all insisted on spending so much group time together that nobody ever really got any alone-time with each other, and every time someone had sex without the others present, somebody would have some kind of emotional crisis about being “left out” or “abandoned” and it took weeks of tears and arguments to make everyone feel better again.  It was so bad that I eventually lost interest in sex completely because it was a minefield.
    
7. I have several sleep disorders.  I do not co-sleep well.  I always have my own bedroom for my own health and sanity.

In short, there is absolutely nothing about that scenario that is appealing and everything about it is a red flag for an abusive situation.  And I say this as someone who has a spouse that is a straight man who has (at least) 2 other partners where the 4 of us get together and have some kind of kinky group sex.

The difference is that there is no cohabitation, no expectations or requirements of co-sleeping, definitely no coercion where everyone is required to all have sex together (the 3 of us women are not actually in direct sexual relationships with each other, we are just all in a relationship with him), and none of us are treated as objects to be “shared”.  We all respect each other’s autonomy and see each other as human beings, not “female” animals, sex objects, need fulfillment machines, nannies, bang-maids, harem members, or possessions.

Every word in this question drips with entitlement, assumptions, misogyny, and co-dependence.  I wouldn’t enter into a scenario like this if I was homeless and desperately needed a place to stay for survival.

I've been watching Cobra Kai. I hesitated to watch it because, even though I was a Karate Kid fan, I a) didn't want them to screw it up and b) had some complicated feelings about making the villains into the protagonists.  As I keep saying in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, I am character-driven. If I don't like the characters, I won't like the story no matter how well it's told, and if I do like the characters I will probably like the story no matter how terribly it's told.

Which makes unlikable protagonists very challenging for me. And Cobra Kai is about an unlikable protagonist.

One of Franklin's favorite books is about an unlikable protagonist. He holds it up as an example of how to write that kind of character well. I disagree. I hated that character from the beginning, I never felt sympathetic towards him, and I wasn't surprised at all at how bad he turned out to be (I may have not guessed the very specific details of the ending, but I wasn't surprised that he turned out as evil as he was).

Some unlikable characters are popular because we love to hate them. Bestor from Babylon 5 is one of these for me. He's written in a pretty nuanced, complex way, and yet I still hate him no matter how many little humanized tidbits the show throws at us to make him relatable. I think those humanized bits make him so deliciously evil that I really enjoy hating him. I want him to suffer and I enjoy every time he loses.

Then there is the "flip the script" or "mirror" method of telling a tale from the other perspective. Such as in Maleficent, where we are presented with an origin story or "reasons" why someone's actions may have been interpreted as evil depending on the perspective of the storyteller.

If you look at a war in progress, the "other side" is evil because they're the other side, but if you tell the story from that other side, then the first side is evil because THEY are the other side. Maleficent waging war on humans makes complete sense when those humans keep coming into fae lands to massacre all the fairies. But to the humans, she's an existential threat.

Johnny Lawrence is not Maleficent. There is even an episode where he tells someone else the story of Karate Kid but from his perspective, where Daniel LaRousso was the bully. And I can see how he reached that conclusion. But he's actually wrong. It's like how I can see how Republicans reach their conclusions, but they're factually wrong about them.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. He is the bad guy. No amount of "understanding his reasons" changes that. And yet, I care about what happens to him. A lot of the time I want him to suffer, but I want his suffering to teach him a lesson so that he'll stop being an asshole.

This isn't an origin story. But it kind of is. Now that Johnny is an adult, he is able to perpetuate the abuse that he suffered as a kid onto a whole new generation of kids. So we can see exactly how you can take someone who is kind and compassionate and considerate and slowly warp him into someone who is cruel. And how that can be done without even necessitating malicious intent.

Johnny Lawrence is, and always was, an asshole. But it's possible that he may have a redemption arc. What I'm liking about this show is that it's not a clear arc. It's also possible that he will never find redemption, depending on where they take his character. As long as his methods result in what he sees as success, he has no reason to see why he's a bad guy. Both possibilities is what makes this story interesting for me.

That's where the conflict really is - will Johnny redeem himself, or is this just a Walter White or Thanos situation? He succeeds and yet remains a bad guy with no redemptive arc? Some people will just straight up tell you in what way they are evil and completely believe they are in the right. Nazis, racists, misogynists, domestic abusers, etc. Johnny could be written by people like that, or by people who want to tell that kind of character's story. Or he could be written by people who want to believe that even those kinds of people can see the light. Which character is Johnny Lawrence? We'll find out.

I think the actor playing Johnny is pretty brave to bring back this character and tell his tale. At least, in the way that it's being told. If this had been basically like that one space movie where it's just a 2 hour ride justifying violence and violation because reasons, I wouldn't be saying this. I think this show (so far) stays on the right side of the line between *explaining* violence and *justifying* it.

After completing the first season, I don't like Johnny Lawrence. I'm not supposed to like him. And I dislike him enough that I'm not even rooting for him. He could change, and I would be glad to see that change, but I don't root for him to win the fights he gets into or hope that he comes out ahead in his interpersonal conflicts. I want him to get his ass kicked. I want the people in his life to leave him. I want him to fail. But if he somehow manages to learn from those failures and become a better person, I'd like to see that too. He is simultaneously an exercise in hope for growth and in schadenfreude. He's Schrodinger's anti-hero.

I don't like him and I'm not rooting for him. But I'm *invested* in seeing what happens to him.

And *that's* how you fucking write an unlikable character.

Everyone else is fairly boiler-plate, and yet also still well written and acted. Each of the characters has a predictable path or an archetypal role. But there are a *lot* of them. This isn't a black hat-white hat good vs. evil story where everyone is basically the same character (or no character) except for the one rogue they throw us as a bone.

There are several different archetypes in the show, each with their own arcs and developments, and each face enough nuanced conflicts that their arcs have several pivot points that could take them in one of several directions.

But this show is really about Johnny Lawrence, an unlikable character as the main character. This is more than just an anti-hero story. In all the anti-hero stories that are popular right now, they're anti-heroes but they're also somehow likable. They're bad guys but they're charming, or they're ethically grey but sympathetic, or something along those lines.

We've been "flipping the script" for a while now, telling anti-hero stories or telling a story from the villain's perspective. And in order to get the audience to be invested, ultimately we end up making those characters likable who just make poor decisions or who have something terrible happen to them.  While terrible things did happen to Johnny that molded him into the person we see now and who makes poor decisions, he is ultimately someone who is not likable. He is toxic masculinity personified.

They had a difficult job here, because the '80s movie was pretty standard with writing the antagonist as a clear-cut villain. Johnny was a bully and there was no real reason for his bullying other than he was an asshole. Yes, his sensei made him an asshole, but he was definitely an asshole with no depth underneath.

Now we want to tell his story? Not how he became an asshole, but to tell the story OF an asshole? How do you give depth to a character originally written as shallow? He has to really be an asshole, even with that depth. There has to be a reason why he seemed to take pleasure in beating the shit out of Daniel and why he treated Ali the way he treated her.

He is very much like a lot of my backstage coworkers, who are assholes and, honestly, unlikable, but I can get along with them fine because they're real people and real people are messy, complicated creatures.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. I don't like him. I'm not supposed to like him. I'm probably supposed to root for him? But the writers and the actor keep him as an asshole so maybe I'm not supposed to root for him. Either way, I'm not rooting for him.

But I am invested in him and his outcome.

I think this show is exploring a lot of complex themes and emotions and ethical dilemmas. In some ways, it's still a little heavy-handed, like the original source was. But by telling the story from the antagonist's perspective while still maintaining those same morals and themes, it complicates the story and gives it a lot more character and a lot more grey areas.

And I really liked the pinnacle season conflict in which it didn't matter how that conflict was resolved, Johnny Lawrence could not win either way. So how do you root for him when both outcomes would suck for him? You choose which moral lesson you want him to learn from the two possible losing options?

In anti-hero stories, we root for the protagonist to succeed at, what is actually an "evil plot" - we want Danny Ocean to rob the casino. In Bandits, we want Joe & Terry to succeed at robbing banks and to "get the girl" Kate. We want Dexter to continue to kill people, or at least not get caught for it. We want the bad guys to get away with what they're doing because they're the protagonists and we get attached to them.

But I don't want Johnny Lawrence to succeed. I'm not rooting for him. I don't like him. And I'm not supposed to. At least, not yet. So they gave us a conflict in which he can't win, even if he succeeds. He is still unlikable. Anti-heroes are likable. Or, at least, sympathetic.

I do not like stories with unlikable characters at the helm. I like to dislike certain unlikable characters as foils or villains. And I really strongly dislike stories that romanticize or justify unlikable characters ("but he was abused!", "but she wanted it!", "but he started it!"). I'm also totally over "privileged white man has some kind of challenge that actually a lot of people have but his challenge turned him into the asshole he is today, so let's spend yet another show explaining his story" kind of tales.

But, at least through season 1, I think Cobra Kai does an excellent job of creating a realistic, nuanced unlikable protagonist that is keeping me engaged and invested in the outcome. And I have to say that I'm impressed. I heard good things about the show, but I was still expecting to not like it, or at least find it meh. Instead, I actually think it's really good. I'll get back to you after a few seasons before I go so far as to say it's brilliant. But it could be.

https://www.quora.com/My-friend-fed-me-a-pot-brownie-knowing-that-I-hate-drugs-and-am-an-athlete-This-was-a-month-ago-and-Im-still-furious-Am-I-overreacting-or-should-I-involve-her-parents-school-officials/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper 

Q. My friend fed me a pot brownie (knowing that I hate drugs and am an athlete).  This was a month ago, and I'm still furious.  Am I overreacting or should I involve her parents/school officials?

A. Let me tell you a little something about the kind of person who would do this sort of thing.

I react poorly to alcohol.  I do not get a “buzz” or any of the euphoric sensations that other people get.  Instead, my core body temperature actually rises (which is different from simply feeling warm or “flushed” - a core body temperature change is a serious problem, which is why getting a fever is a serious symptom) and I get a burning in my shoulders very similar to a lactic acid burn.  At its best, this is an uncomfortable feeling.

Because of how common alcohol is in our society, people have a really hard time accepting that I do not like to drink.  They see it as “harmless”, which makes people feel entitled to try and push alcohol on me.  With the rising acceptance of marijuana, I am seeing this same trend with pot, which I similarly react poorly to.

So, in my early 20s, I dated a guy who thought of alcohol as completely harmless and didn’t understand how I could react the way I said I did.  He did not believe me, and so took it upon himself to lace some strawberries with alcohol and dip them in chocolate to cover the taste, knowing that chocolate covered strawberries were one of my favorite treats and that chocolate covered strawberries are generally considered one of the more “romantic” foods that a man could offer to a woman.

I noticed the taste right away, because I also strongly dislike the taste of alcohol.  It’s kind of like the thing where some people think that cilantro tastes like soap.  I’m just not wired to enjoy alcohol - it doesn’t react normally with me and I definitely don’t taste it the way other people do.

At the time, I was annoyed that he did not believe me and that he would try to trick me into getting drunk by feeding me laced strawberries.  Alcohol being as culturally accepted as it is, however, I did not recognize the extreme consent violation for what it was.  I mean, even his mother thought it was funny!

He and I did not work out for a variety of reasons that I only later recognized as his refusal to accept my autonomy.  We broke up eventually, but remained on speaking terms.

One day, years later, we were having a phone conversation, and we had gotten into what was becoming our “regular” argument every time we spoke - he insisted that I was The One and why couldn’t I just see that and come back to him, while I insisted that I was quite happy where I was, thank you very much.

But this argument was different.  Somehow we ended up on the subject of what if I had gotten pregnant while we were dating.  He told me the next thing in a way that was not a confession, but managed to come across as threatening.  He admitted that he had been sabotaging the condoms while we were dating, hoping to get me pregnant so that I would have been tied to him forever.

I told him that I had always been pro-choice and I would have had an abortion if I had ever gotten pregnant when I was not planning on having a child at that time.

He got really quiet for a moment, and then when he spoke next, his voice was low and intense.  He very calmly said that if he ever found out that I had aborted “his child”, he would hunt me down and kill me.

This is the mindset of a person who does not believe in bodily autonomy.

His brother, by the way, was at this time serving time in prison for killing his own wife and infant child.  So this was not an idle threat.  And he phrased it in the future tense, meaning that if he ever found out even sometime in the future that I had hidden an abortion from him, even some 30 years later he would still hunt me down and kill me.

Of course he would have no issue with drugging me with alcohol without my consent.  He fundamentally did not believe that I am a person who is entitled to make decisions about my own body.  In his very core, he believes that what he wants for my body trumps my own wants for my body.

Your friend might not actually believe she has the right to murder you if you do something to your body that she doesn’t like.  But she still does not believe that your wants for your body are the only wants that matter.  She still believes she is entitled to do things to your body, not only without your consent, but against your express consent.

This is a dangerous person.  You were fortunate that no lasting harm actually came to you, either in the form of injury under non-consensual drugs in your system or with regards to your athletic endeavors.  You got an empty chamber in that Russian Roulette game.

But she’s the one supplying the gun and the bullets.  You, or someone else, might not be so lucky next time.  And there will be a next time, because she doesn’t see anything dangerous with holding a gun to someone’s head.  It’s just “pot”, right?  What does your right to your own body matter, when her beliefs about your body contradict it?

Maybe nothing extreme or serious happened as a consequence of this one situation.  That’s not the point.  The point is her beliefs.  She does. not. believe. in. your. bodily. autonomy.

This is a very dangerous person to be around.  You are absolutely right to continue to be upset at this.  I won’t tell you that you “should” involve any set of authorities, because only you can decide how invested you want to be in holding her accountable.  But I think she *ought* to be held accountable and she needs a very hard lesson in what autonomy is and why she is not entitled to anyone else’s, before she harms someone else.

With all the sexual assault cases coming out everywhere, I had the opportunity to talk to my mother this week about my very first assault (details to follow).

Honestly, it happened so long ago and was taken care of so thoroughly, that I was starting to doubt it had ever happened.  But then my mother casually mentioned it, so I know it did.  When I was about 5 or so, my godparents' son-in-law tongue-kissed me.  It was at my godfather's retirement party and I was the only kid there and bored out of my mind.  So I went around trying to find an adult to toss the ball around with me in the yard.

Dale said he would.  So we left the front, more formal, room where the party was happening, and walked through the back family room on the way to the back door.  He stopped me before we reached the door and made me sit on the couch.  I was annoyed, because I wanted to go outside and play.  He said some things that I don't really remember, weird pedo type things about how much he liked me and wanted me to respond in kind.  He had me sit on his knee, he rubbed my stomach and chest in a circular motion, and he asked for a kiss.

Groomed by the Baby Boomers to always give "family" a kiss and be affectionate, I complied, but with a quick peck on the cheek as I was getting really annoyed at not making it outside.  He said "no, I mean a real kiss" and put his wet, mustachioed mouth over mine and pushed his tongue inside my mouth (to this day, I do not like kissing men with facial hair).

It didn't last very long, but I thought it was gross and I knew it was wrong somehow without really knowing why it was wrong just that it was gross, but I also didn't want to cause a scene (another thing my proper, middle-class, Boomer family trained in me), so I merely hopped off his knee as soon as he let me and insisted on going outside to play.

I no longer wanted to play with him, but, not knowing what else to do that wouldn't interrupt the party, I just pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened and we played ball for a little while.  I have no further memories of that party until the car ride home that night.

It was dark by the time we left.  Mom asked me if I had a good time from the front seat of the car, and I immediately told her what happened.  She and dad stayed calm and they asked why I waited so long to say anything.  I said that I didn't want to interrupt the party.  Mom asked me questions to make sure she had all the details, still remaining calm, and when I was done, told me that I had done the right thing in telling them and that they would take care of everything.

Sometime later, mom said that we would never be seeing Dale again and that he was being punished for being inappropriate with me.

I eventually learned the story of what happened, but I'm not sure how.  I have the feeling that my parents never spoke directly of it to me after that day, but it was spoken with me present to the relevant family members who needed to know what happened, and it was spoken of with, in my opinion, the right degree of disgust, horror, and also "it's not really such a big deal that the child should feel bad about herself".  I don't really know how better to explain it than that.

My parents went to my godparents' daughter (Dale's wife) and told her what happened.  She was pregnant with their only child at the time.  She confronted him, and somewhere in the confrontation (I have no idea if this was all one argument or over a period of time) she learned that he had molested other children besides me.

She decided that he would never set eyes on their child and threw him out, going through a divorce while still pregnant.  I'm told he visited the hospital when the baby was born, but as far as I know, that's the last time anyone ever had contact with him.  I have the feeling that she also pressed charges, but I don't feel confident in that feeling and have no details in my memory about that happening.

My family (those who know the story) seemed to have always responded with exactly the right mix of emotional reactions.  I came away from that encounter with the following lessons:

1) My parents were a safe place to go when a grown-up didn't treat me right.

2) If you report bad grown-ups, the good ones around you will protect you.

3) What happened to me was awful, but

4) it was not so awful that I have to feel bad about myself in any capacity.  It was a big deal that he should be harshly punished for it, but it also wasn't a big deal that I needed to worry about it or feel sullied or dirty or tarnished or broken or at fault or anything else that people typically feel after an assault.

5) I am worthy of love and respect no matter what.

6) There is something Very Wrong with men who like significantly younger women / girls, with men who have urges or attractions for young women / girls / children, and with the culture of men in general that excuse, dismiss, and/or promote these kinds of thoughts and behaviours including entitlement to other people's bodies and emotions, but there is nothing wrong with the women / girls / children who are the recipients of the attention.

While my parents certainly have their faults, and we definitely do not see eye to eye on a lot of things, and like most people, a lot of my issues stem from my parents and my childhood, my parents are *also* very good parents and responsible for most of the good things in my life as well.

This came about because, apparently, more than 20 women who are alumni of my private, all-girls' religious high school have come forward with accusations of sexual assault from teachers at that school and the President (who was the principal when I was a student) just resigned amid the allegations that she dismissed and covered up all the accusations over the years.

The accusations range from more than 30 years ago (before I was a student) to just over 10 years ago, meaning that some of those assaults probably took place while I was attending.  Mom wanted to know if I had ever heard of any such incidents.

I had not.  In my 4 years at that school, I had not once heard any rumors or stories or accusations.  I can't even think of more than 2 male teachers in the entire school at the time I attended.  I even had a friend who was being assaulted by her father, and because of my own lessons in this subject, I turned to the nearest authority figures, my parents and my guidance counselor, and they immediately put things in motion to help protect and rescue my friend.  But that was the only thing I knew of while I was attending that school.

However, I still believe my alumni sisters.

And not just because of some blanket "always believe any and all accusations against men" generic philosophy.  The President stepped down from her post because she thought all the accusations were a "distraction" from all the good work that the school did.  She maintains that she did not ignore, dismiss, or cover up anything, that no assaults ever took place, but since there is now some witch hunt (she did not use that phrase) against her, her presence and the accusations associated with her, are a "distraction" from the school's overall reputation and good deeds.

She thinks the past needs to stay in the past, and that everyone needs to focus on the present and the future of the school and all the good it has done.

That alone confirms her guilt, in my mind.  A truly honest, innocent authority figure who cares about the well-being of the girls in her care would not be afraid of opening up the past to scrutiny if there was nothing to hide.  As the conservatives are so fond of shouting, if she did nothing wrong then a look into her past should exonerate her, shouldn't it?  A look into an innocent past should only showcase the exemplary history of the school and all its good work.  A stellar history only provides a robust foundation for an equally stellar present and future.

The only people *these days* trying to downplay "the past" seem to be people with a past they want to hide.  One would think that one with nothing to hide would instead be proud of one's past.

I have no real point.  I'm not really trying to impart some Pro Tip or advice, I'm not trying to tell a moral fable, and I'm also not really making some current events op-ed, although this post does have a little bit of all the above.  I guess I'm just processing the feelings I have from that conversation with my mother.  I'm kinda relieved to have my memories of that early assault confirmed, right about when I started to doubt my own fallible memories (yay aging and self-gaslighting?).

I'm very proud and grateful for my parents.  I got to express my gratitude to my mom for how they dealt with that situation, and I don't think I had ever done that before.  I'm pleased that we have a moment in our culture where accusations are finally seeing some daylight.  We still have a long way to go before there is any real justice, but we are at the precipice right now where things could be making a turn that we, hopefully, can't go back on.

And I'm a little bit uneasy at hearing the news of such long-term sexual assault happening right under my nose at my high school.  I have only skimmed one article about it, so I'm going to go look up some more to see if any of the accused teachers were publicly named, to see if I knew any of them.  One, in particular, is actually an extended family friend, so I'm a little trepidatious to find out about him.

I think I'm about out of words on this subject right now.

**Update**  Yep, one of the teachers accused was my Spanish teacher, Mr. Fernandez.  He was also a distant friend-of-the-family.  I had not met him until he became my teacher, but he was known to my parents.  I have very strong ties to the world of soccer.  My cousin is a world-famous college soccer coach and his wife is a professional soccer player and 2-time Olympic gold medalist.  This Spanish teacher is also a former Olympian, playing soccer for Spain before I was born.  He was friends with another Spanish soccer player who was friends with that college coach cousin of mine, and that's how our worlds intersected.

So my parents were actually excited to hear that he was going to be my Spanish teacher.  I have no inappropriate associations with him, personally, nor had I been told of anything involving him while attending the school.  The entire sum of my memory of him is sleeping through his class because it was the first period after lunch, and between the heat of the afternoon in the un-air-conditioned building and my sleep disorder that says daytime is sleep time, I never once made it through a class in the 2 years I took Spanish from him without nodding off.

My one clear memory of him was crossing the stage at my graduation ceremony, where he was one of the teachers to shake our hands as we crossed.  He shook my hand and whispered some joke about making sure I stay awake in my college Spanish classes.  That's it.  That's my strongest memory of him.

However, I still believe my alumni sisters.  It's just weird to think of all that history with him and never catching a whiff of the trouble.  And I also wonder how my family reacted to the news, those of them in the soccer circles who knew him personally.  It must be difficult to learn about a trusted family friend being accused of sexual misconduct with minors.

I hope they reacted appropriately.  But since all of this is only being made public after his death, it's also a lot easier to react "appropriately", because nobody has to actually terminate a friendship over it.

This teacher was not the only teacher accused, just the only one whose name I have learned whom I knew.  I'm still processing it.  I will also continue to attempt to learn the identities of the other teachers being accused.  The only other name I have found out was definitely not a teacher during my time there.

I wish this was taught alongside the messages not to allow someone to hit you.

When I was a kid, I was bullied.  I had no lessons in how to deal with strong emotions.  So my emotions exploded outwards in fits of physical rage.  I broke a lot of shit.  My parents would get mad at me for being so destructive, of course, but there were no resources for telling me how *not* to be destructive when my feelings were just too big for my body.

I learned to swallow my rage at being bullied and it turned inward instead, towards self-harm, depression, anorexia, and suicidal thoughts.  As an adult, I continue to battle explosive rage and depression.  The physical violence, however, seems to have been pretty well taken care of with the suicidal depression and the apathy that it manifests as, which I haven't been able to shake in the last 5 years.

I'm basically now that lab rat who is so used to a horrible existence that I have no motivation to change it even when given opportunity, because I don't believe it will really change.

When I was a teen, I was engaged to someone who damaged property every time he got jealous.  I was absolutely confident he would never hit *me*, and, to be fair, I still am.  But this was not a healthy dynamic whether he ever hit me or not.

So when I got engaged a second time a few years later to someone who threatened to break my collectible figurines if I dared to sleep on the couch after arguing all night about him sexually assaulting me while I was trying to sleep, it took longer than it should have for me to figure out this was abusive.

As in, I eventually managed to leave him (with most of my possessions intact), leave the state, and grow into middle age before I learned that this also counted as "abuse".  I left him because I thought he was a jerk, not because I recognized what he was doing as abuse.

Abuse, according to all the after-school specials, was someone hitting me. I have never been hit by anyone other than my parents, and even then it was rarely and always followed by extreme remorse.  Breaking objects was just what people did when they got mad.  We even have pop songs about it.  Some people enshrine it in their ethnicity's culture.  It's normalized.

My rage as a kid was the result of long-term abuse from my peers.  I had no other way to process it because I was not given the tools necessary to either empower myself to escape the bullying nor to manage my emotions.  It was never about showing my power over someone else, it was about being *powerless*.  I expressed my property destruction in private, usually on my own things.  My rage was not intimidating, it was impotent.

And when I realized it was hurting my family to see me be so destructive (even if it was my own possessions I was breaking) as well as hurting me because it was my own stuff I was destroying, I turned that rage inward so that my family would suffer even fewer effects of my rage and I'd stop losing possessions.  As an adult, I express my rage with hurtful words on the internet.  But the closer a person is to me, emotionally, the less hurtful my methods of dealing with them are.  I save my rage for the relative safety of the internet.

But an abuser saves his rage for only those *closest* to them.  While most people abuse because they feel fear and insecurity, their abuse is intended to *take back* the control that they feel they are owed.  It is not an expression, a venting, of an already-lost control, the way my rage is.  Their rage is *the tool* they use to gain control back.

They might genuinely be hurting, as I was, but their hurt comes from the loss (or fear of the loss) of control over you, whereas mine comes from the loss of control over myself to someone else.

I rage because I keep having my autonomy taken from me.  Abusers rage because they keep having their toys taken away from them.  Neither are healthy, but only one is abuse.

When people rage, they want you to see how much they are feeling.  When someone's rage is to show you that they have the potential and the desire to hurt you because you are not allowing them to control you, that's abuse.  That's violence.

I wish I had known the different kinds of rage, the different expressions of fear and pain, and the different ways that control is exerted when I was younger.  I would have made different choices.  I also wish there had been resources for managing emotions.  It would have helped both with the crushing pain of being bullied AND with the crushing anger that leads to bullying, which later leads to misogyny and racism and acts of terror and abuse.

Everyone wants to feel sympathetic towards the stories of mass shooters who were supposedly bullied as kids, as if being bullied turns us into sociopathic killers.  It doesn't.  But emotions that are too big to handle on our own does turn us into a wide variety of monsters, depending on what those emotions are and where they come from.

Since we don't have those resources, the best we can do is recognize that these emotions (and their expressions) in particular are violent, abusive, toxic, and learn how to avoid and escape from them.  When someone breaks your stuff and slams doors and furniture, it's a message to you of their anger and of how much they want to hurt you.  It's meant to show you how bad things *could be* if you don't manage their emotions for them right now.

I scream at people to leave me alone.  Abusers intimidate people into staying put.  It's not enough to just not allow someone to hit you.  They have to not intimidate you by violence *near* you too.  Because violence *near* you, in your direction, is still violence *at* you.

A comment in a thread that I ought to archive somewhere. I know I've told this story before, but fuck if I can remember where it is now.

This is in response to Person A who is interested in Person B, but Person B is partnered and the partner pre-vetoes Person A. There is this idea that the person who just got vetoed should not have any bad feelings about it because they were never a partner to begin with, and any pre-existing partners should always get priority over people who aren't even partners yet at all.

I've heard this story a hundred times, and, as far as I'm concerned, all it does is serve to train people that their wants and needs are not important, so that when they do finally get into relationships, they are already accustomed to being doormats and can accept second-class citizenship in little bite-sized pieces until they are completely subsumed by an abusive relationship.

First, your wants don't matter because you're not even a partner. Next, your wants don't matter because you just barely started dating (the old "of course a new partner isn't equal to a spouse! You wouldn't sign over the mortgage to someone on a first date, would you?!" response). Then, your wants don't matter because, although you've been dating a while, you're still the "newer" partner. And, of course, your wants don't matter later because you signed up to be a "secondary", so even if you end up dating for a decade, you're still never as important as the "primary", who may actually be "newer" than you.

It's a slippery slope that is not a logical fallacy in this case because it's actually how this mindset plays out. So here is my commentary to that:

---

That whole "I'm not yet a partner, so it should be OK to prioritize an existing partner over someone who isn't a partner at all" can muddy the waters pretty well.  That's why I take it out of the immediate situation and look more at the patterns and the philosophy.  It's not about how he's treating me, it's about what he thinks is acceptable and what isn't.  He's not just putting *me* on hold in favor of an existing partner, he's putting *himself* on hold in favor of someone else.  He's voluntarily giving someone power over his autonomy *and he thinks that's OK*.

In addition, I have a bias that this particular method is not actually a successful one in terms of building security.  So he'd be doing all this agency-denying crap for no reason, because it doesn't solve whatever problem it's being used to solve.

To give an extreme example, take my abusive ex:

He had such massive insecurity that even the mere thought of his wife being interested in someone else would literally send him into a catatonic panic.  His method of dealing with this insecurity was to infringe on his wife's agency by not allowing her to do specific sexual acts until he desensitized himself to the idea.  He actually used PTSD treatment language, as if him self-diagnosing as PTSD justified this.

So, his wife started dating someone but she couldn't kiss this new boyfriend until her husband (my abusive ex) first visualized it without going catatonic.  Then she could kiss the new guy but only when her husband was present, until he could watch them kiss without going catatonic.  Finally, she was allowed to kiss her own boyfriend without an audience.

Then, he had to visualize her open-mouth kissing ... and go through the whole process again.  Then he had to visualize the new bf touching his wife's breasts over the clothing ... etc. etc.  They literally built an excel spreadsheet and ranked every single sexual act and sexual position to keep track of what she was allowed to do with her bf and whether she could do it without an audience or not.

The thing is that my abusive ex *did*, over time, get accustomed to each specific act.  So over time, the wife racked up a whole list of specific sex acts that she could do with her bf that didn't send her husband into a catatonic tailspin.

They saw this as "growth" and "improvement".

What they never understood is that the *process itself* was harmful because he *never* reached the point where he recognized that he was denying her agency or imposing on her autonomy.  They both just saw a growing list of specific things that didn't freak him out and said "see? It works? He's getting better! He's becoming more secure!"

But he *wasn't* because *every new thing* still freaked him out and he still had to go through the process every single time.  He never learned security. He learned that infringing on his wife's autonomy was justifiable.

I didn't see this pattern at the beginning because 1) he deliberately kept the details of this method from me when we started dating, and 2) I didn't want that kind of power over anyone and said so, and he insisted that our relationship would be different from the one he had with his wife, and it was ... until it wasn't.

Just by coincidence and the way my own libido works, I happened to not be interested in a new person for the next couple of years, so his wife's relationship with her boyfriend kept "growing", and I didn't have my own new partner to challenge him.  When I finally did develop an interest in someone new, he fell back on old patterns, as one tends to do when one is mired deep in fear.  He tried to insist that, not only he but our *entire network* needed to give approval to any new partner I had before I became sexual with that new partner.  Because the underlying premise never changed - that anyone should have the power to infringe on another person's agency.

That does *not* work for me.

So I resisted. In the ensuing argument, he revealed to me that he had grown interested in this other woman, let's call her Chloe.  Years ago, I had a partner who had tried dating Chloe.  It was a disaster.  She has some of the worst communication skills of anyone I've ever met.

In the early days of our relationship, when we were still getting to know each other and exploring and explaining how we each do things, I had mentioned that I cannot be metamours with her.  I would not tell anyone that they couldn't date her, but if someone that I was dating *did* date her, I could not date them anymore.

So, later, when he became interested in dating her, he chose not to date her in deference to me. He *used* this in our later arguments to convince me that I should defer to him with my new partner.  He insisted that, because he gave up a relationship for me, I should be willing to do the same thing.

I was *horrified* that he would have passed up a relationship that *he wanted*, without even talking to me about it, just because he thought I would say no.

He also brought up another partner that he *did* end up dating, whom I'll call Sierra, pointing out how he waited until he had my approval before dating her.  I told him at the time that I was not giving "approval", that he was free to date or or not as he saw fit.  I thought he understood that he could still choose to date her or not, and that just because I liked Sierra and had no problem with them dating, this was not my "approval", nor my "permission".  But he didn't understand that, because he brought up Sierra, and the fact that he only started dating her because I said it was OK, in this later argument.

So, during this argument, I got mad at him for giving me this power when I explicitly told him that I didn't want it. But especially now because he did this whole self-sacrifice thing without even telling me about it and expected his sacrifice to persuade me to make the same sacrifice in his favor.

Very little infuriates me in a relationship more than "I did this thing for you that you didn't know about and you don't want, so now you have to do the same thing for me!"

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

So, not only did this whole "put someone else off until security magically appears" not work, it was a sign of a pattern that wove itself very deep into how his relationships work.  The act of denying someone their agency to assuage one's own fears reinforces itself when the fears are temporarily relieved.  All this method does is teach people that denying one's agency is justifiable.  

And it doesn't just teach the people doing the agency-denying either.  It teaches us to accept it from others with small, incremental steps.  Kind of like how abuse works.

[This is a post I made on FB on May 6, 2018]

Y'all, I'm watching a master gaslighter at work.  I thought my ex, who had me convinced that his victim was the real problem, was good.

Amateur. 

I then thought that this Missing Stair, who has left a trail of broken victims throughout her city and somehow managed to stage a coup against me which I caught wind of and yet she still convinced half the online poly community that I was unreasonable and on a power trip because I put a stop to the coup, was good.

Hobbyist.

It's truly impressive to watch a real pro categorically deny ever having done or said things when there exists actual print evidence that they did, and to see people fall one by one, like dominoes, into the pro's camp.  And there's nothing that can be done.  To speak up after the smear campaign has started is to create "drama".  And Hades forbid we have "drama" in our communities!  To keep quiet to avoid "drama" is to allow the accusations to go unchallenged, which makes them believable.

Any attempt at a defense is met with hostility by people who heard the first accusations and have chosen to "believe the victim" rather than look into the situation.  Remember, abusers often use our sympathy and empathy against ourselves.  In our current subculture climate, they can cry "victim" first, and be automatically believed, setting up their victims for a no-win situation and further traumatizing them. 

As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the difference between a true victim bravely stepping forward to share their story and prevent future abuse, from an abuser crying "victim" first to win over public approval and support and further traumatize their victim, without a thorough, deep dive into the situation, which most bystanders are not in a position to do. 

And the more gaslighters I have the misfortune to meet, the more and more difficulty I have in telling the difference because I keep meeting better and better gaslighters.  They just keep upping their game. 

This one is fucking *good*. 

I'm starting to think that when men go through a breakup, there should be, like, this mandatory "rehab" building where they get put, where they don't have any contact with any people for a few days, they get fed, get comfy accommodations, and are only given squishy things or non-breakable things. They have to go there and just feel like shit for a while, all by themselves.

Only after a couple of days when the most acute pain has faded, then they get to talk to counselors who are especially trained in anger management and loss processing. The counselors can make a judgement call about when to let them out, whether to allow contact with loved ones and when, and whatever else needs to be decided for their recovery.

Only when they're deemed to have processed their anger and grief in healthy ways are they allowed back into society. They may still be going through the process of loss, because some breakups take time, but its that initial destructive period of anger and hurt that is the most threatening.

And if men can't figure out how to feel angry and hurt without property destruction, revenge, control, or making a "statement", then they ought to be put in isolation until they can get a handle on it.

Women too, because I've seen some really fucked up shit from women going through a breakup, but men have the power of society behind them and much fewer resources for helping them process difficult emotions.

Sometimes I see men going through breakups and I just want to lock them in their rooms for a while and take away their phones and internet until they calm the fuck down and stop trying to *make* their exes do whatever it is they feel entitled to making them do ("pay for it", "come back", whatever).

I recently had a friend who, until their breakup we all called *his girlfriend* the problem child (and she really was - manipulative, controlling, the whole 9 yards), ended up getting Baker Acted by his ex-girlfriend because he used a suicide threat to get her attention. He was held for several days with minimal contact outside.

I think that was probably the best thing she ever did for him. When he got out, we still had to metaphorically spank him occasionally to get him to stop fucking calling her and trying to "win her back", but it was *much* less destructive than before.

The longer it takes me to finish this breaking up book, and the more breakups I witness because of how many people now come to me with their breakup stories, the less lenient and lovey-dovey I become over how people should breakup. Now I just want to lock everyone in padded rooms until they come to their fucking senses and stop being jackasses.

Maybe we should pipe in some pro-agency inspirational messages to the rooms like 24-hours a day for some cultural reprogramming or something. Apparently it's going to take some sci-fi Russian super-soldier training methods to make people just STOP FUCKING TRYING TO CONTROL YOUR ROMANTIC PARTNERS, INTERESTS, AND EXES AND DEAL WITH YOUR OWN GODDAMN EMOTIONS

The thing about new partners, is that I end up revisiting a lot of memories of old partners. When I'm in a new relationship, we talk about ourselves, and part of ourselves is our past that made us who we are today. So I end up going over a lot of old stories, partly as illustrations for how I want to be treated or want not to be treated, and partly because I'm just sharing stories of my experiences and who I am.

I don't know if "ironic" is the right word, but what got me on this tangent tonight is not a "new" partner, exactly, but talking with my most recent ex-FWB during our breakup, rather than as part of the "get to know each other" stage in the beginning. Perhaps because our relationship was less than a month, and the breakup came suddenly, and he's actually doing his part of the breakup well, some things that I associate with a "beginning" didn't happen until the end. This isn't really relevant, I'm musing tonight.

Anyway, during one of our breakup talks (because a good, compassionate breakup where both people are being kind and considerate of each other often takes several discussions and check-ins to make sure everyone is OK), I got to talking about some of my abusive exes.

Here's the thing... when I was growing up, all of our "afternoon specials" about abusive relationships were about domestic physical violence. I knew all the warning signs for a physically *violent* partner, but I knew absolutely nothing about an emotionally abusive or psychologically controlling partner.

Over the years, I've told a lot of stories about a lot of exes. In the last decade or so, as I've had the opportunity to meet and know some truly amazing people, when I've told these stories, I've been met with horrified reactions. I was not prepared for the strength of the horror in these reactions. To me, these stories were about jerks, sure, but "horror"? I mean, they weren't great stories, but I also thought they were run-of-the-mill "bad", not "abusive-bad".

Now, with a lot more education on what abuse is, I can look back over my relationship history and see that I've actually been involved with a whole bunch of abusive men. Remember, when I started telling these stories, I was not aware that they were tales of abuse. So I'm not retconning my memories, which can happen pretty easily. I can look back over the time I told one particular story, and at the time I thought it was normal-bad, but now I can see that *the story I told at that time* was actually abusive-bad.

So I've been in a lot of abusive relationships. But what I always had going for me is a strong sense of self. You can ask my mother about this. She and I have been locked in conflict over my agency for literally my entire life. She describes me as "headstrong" and "independent". From day 1. What would happen is that I would get into a relationship with someone who I saw as confident and "strong", and because I was excited to be in that relationship, he would treat me well.

But eventually NRE would wear off, and I would start showing more enthusiasm for my own life than for his. And, being an abuser (which means he believed he was justified in controlling his partners behaviour to match what *he* thought they ought to do), he would employ various psychological tactics to bring me back in line and to behave more like I did in the beginning of the relationship when I was drugged out on NRE.

But my strong sense of self would kick in and I would always resist. And he would escalate, and I would resist harder. In a very short span of time, one of us would get pissed off enough at the other to break up. So I didn't recognize these relationships as abusive because the conflict would be relatively short-lived and always resulted in a breakup, usually with me angry rather than sad over it.

Over the years, I have been faced with some form of the question "how would your exes describe you?" from a variety of sources - Cosmo quizzes, new partners, friends, etc. One of the things I pride myself is on being honest about my "flaws". So I would usually answer these questions with something along the lines of "cold-hearted bitch". That was, I believe, the most common parting shot I would get from exes.

I have always been described as "cold", as "unfeeling", even been accused of sociopathy on more than one occasion. Some days I would agree with those descriptions. Other days I'm baffled how anyone could think that of me. You see, one of the reasons why I'm polyamorous is because I feel. so. much. I have so many feelings that I'm often overwhelmed by them. I sometimes feel like River Tam from Firefly, when her brother finally starts to make progress in diagnosing what her captors did to her when they experimented on her brain - "She feels everything; she can't not."

I went out with a guy not too long ago who is way into the woo. I find his beliefs to be completely absurd, but I do find some of the language he used to be useful as metaphor. When we first started talking, he described me as "empty". He said that he "looked into me" and found just this empty space where he expected to find ... I dunno, "me", I guess. Later, as I began to trust him and to develop feelings for him, I let my guard down and he noticed. He discovered what all that "empty space" was for. Whatever emotion I was feeling at the moment floods into all that space. He said he had never met anyone who felt so much at one time. He said he couldn't even see how he once thought I was "empty" before. I said that I was never "empty", I just had walls up and was only letting him see me controlled.

I feel a lot. I feel so much that it's just too much to keep up continuously. I have to shut down every so often, just to stay sane. In fact, one of the primary symptoms of my depression is apathy. When all the bad shit gets too overwhelming and sends me into suicidal ideation, I just stop feeling anything. I think this is the main reason why I haven't managed to kill myself yet - I want to be dead but I don't feel strongly enough about anything to go through with it.

Back to my long history with abusive men. Gendered abuse has some particular traits. Women are socialized to be nurturers, caregivers, to be polite, to consider other people, to do emotional labor. Men who want to control women can use this as a form of control.

"Why would you hurt me like that? You don't want to hurt me, do you? You should stop what you're doing so that I don't feel hurt by it."

"Now, now, be a good girl..."

"Stop being so hysterical..."

"Pull yourself together, you don't want to make other people uncomfortable, do you?"

When my former metamour was being abused by our mutual partner, he accused her of hurting him for wanting to be with her other partner. She wanted to do a thing, he would get upset by it, she would try to understand why he was upset, he would accuse her of hurting him. This would immediately stop her in her tracks, as she spent the next several days wracking her brain to understand *why she was hurting him* so that she could stop.

Not me.

I moved in with my abusive fiance, against everyone's advice. Almost immediately after moving in together, he began trying to control me. He wanted to change my clothing, change my career, force me into a homemaker role. I even asked him several times why he said he loved me, since he didn't seem to like me very much.

One of the many things that he would do was coerce me into sex. He would try to initiate sex very late at night when I had to wake up early the next morning. I would reject him, so he would wait until he thought I was asleep, and put his hands between my legs and try to take my underwear off without waking me. Most of the time I had not fallen asleep yet, but I would pretend to stay asleep, hoping to discourage him but it never did. Every single night I would "wake up" to him molesting me and I would yell at him to leave me alone, and he would start an argument that would keep me awake for *hours*, trying to talk me into having sex.

After a few weeks of this nightly molestation and some chronic sleep deprivation, I started trying to leave the argument. I would get up to go sleep on the couch. As I reached the door, he would threaten to break my prized figurine collection unless I remained in the room. So I would grab my pillow and sleep on the bathroom floor, which was *technically* still in the room.

When you're in a relationship with someone, you typically work under the assumption that both of you are operating in good faith. At least, people with reasonably healthy views on relationships do. Sure, there may be conflict, but we assume that we are both on the same team and that we both want to resolve the conflict, and that we both care about each other so nobody would want a resolution that actually compromised the other person's integrity or sense of self or value system.  We might be *angry*, but we don't feel that our partners are out to get us deliberately.

This is how abusers get their foot in the door. They are not operating in good faith. So I spent those weeks arguing with him because I earnestly believed I just had to make him see why this was hurting me and he would stop because he didn't *really* want to hurt me.

But by the time I was willing to sleep on the tile floor with my head next to a toilet? I no longer believed he was operating in good faith. I was not able to leave right away, but with all my big emotions and the constant attempt to wear me down, I had to find some way to live there until I could leave.

Enter the coldness.

Once I started to believe that he really did not have my best interests at heart, I went cold. I shut down. We weren't simply not seeing eye-to-eye, he fundamentally did not see me as a whole person. He saw me only in terms of how I could support his story arc. So I stopped caring about him in return.

One of the things I had suspected him of, was being a pathological liar. At first, his lies were ridiculous but, again with the good faith thing, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Looking back on them now, I can't understand how I ever thought they could even possibly be true. But I was young and naive and in love. He made up all kinds of outrageous stories, which I will save for another time because this is already very long. Now that I had lost the rose colored glasses and I could finally see the flags were red, I decided not to believe anything he said and to start calling him on his shit.

One day, we were driving home from my parents house (where I did my laundry) and we got into one of our repetitive arguments in the car. We lived in an apartment complex with a carport underneath the apartment units. I pulled into our slot, got out of the car, got my laundry basket from the back, and started walking across the low-ceilinged carport towards the stairs to our unit, all with him still arguing about whatever.

I had gone cold. I was simply refusing to argue any further. I just couldn't expend any more energy or emotion on this same fucking argument one more time.  I said what I had to say and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. He did not like that, and kept arguing at my retreating back. He hated it when I went cold.

Suddenly, he stopped talking, mid-sentence. I heard a rustling, and when I looked back, he was lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious. I assumed he was faking. I stood there for a moment, watching him to see if he would get up. Then I adjusted my grip on the laundry basket, turned on my heel, and walked up to our apartment, leaving him lying on the oil-soaked concrete.

I went upstairs and started putting the clothes away. Eventually he came into our bedroom, holding his hand to his head and walking unsteadily. Slurring his words, he said that while we were arguing, he somehow managed to walk into one of the low pipes in the carport and knock himself unconscious (he was 6'4" and the carport ceiling was about 6'6" high so he had to duck under the plumbing pipes).

And THEN, while he was unconscious, a mugger came and stole his wallet. He woke up just as the mugger grabbed it and ran away. Most of his fabrications were stories intended to illicit sympathy from me, so that I would stop being mad at him and start feeling worry and concern instead. This was the most transparent lie he had ever told (and he had told some whoppers!).

So I said "oh my god! A mugger! We better call the police right away!" He immediately tried to talk me out of it, while I "argued" how important it was that we file a police report. I mean, what if the mugger came back? What if he tried to rob *me* while I'm down there alone, at night? He doesn't want anything bad to happen to me, did he? I picked up the phone and actually hit 9-1 before he finally came clean.

He made the whole thing up because I was so mad at him and he just wanted me to stop being mad at him. So I dropped the act and the phone, said "no shit", and gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

This story, and several others, have been running around my mind for the last week or so. Particularly the part about being "cold". It used to bother me. At least, when I wasn't actively in one of my defensive modes where all my emotions shut down, it did. But this week I realized something. I frequently go "cold" at the end of a relationship, but talking with my ex-FWB about some of my experiences with abuse, I noticed the pattern. I go "cold" as a response to abuse.

This abusive fiance was deliberately trying to manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour. In this particular story, I finally got him to admit it. He didn't want me mad at him, so rather than address the thing I was mad about, he tried to make me feel sorry for him and to feel concern for him. Because he was trying to manipulate me into *feeling* what he wanted me to feel, my response was to stop feeling entirely.

Well, not "entirely". Like Hulk in one of the Avengers movies, I still always feel rage. That's always bubbling beneath the surface, all the time. But it gets compartmentalized, and in these situations, I just stop feeling.

Abusers are not evil super-villains twirling their mustachios and consciously plotting the manipulation of their partners. They are quite often people in pain. They are people who feel fear, as we all do. It's just that their reaction to fear is to hold a metaphorical gun to someone else's head and make them do things to prevent themselves from feeling fear. They are calculating to a certain extent, but mostly they just feel fear and they feel *justified* in reaching for tools of control to address their fears.

My abusive fiance abused me because he was afraid. He was afraid to lose me. So he tried to direct my feelings towards those that would tie me to him. So when I stopped having feelings, he was terrified. Apparently it's very scary to have someone you love go cold on you. I wouldn't know. If any of my exes ever went cold on me, it was towards the end of a relationship where I was probably sliding into apathy myself.

But as I looked back over my history, at all the people who accused me of being "cold", these were also all the same people who, when I tell stories about them to relatively healthy, non-manipulative people, are the ones that my friends recoil in horror about and tell me that they were abusive. Apparently this is my last defense mechanism for abuse. You can't manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour if I don't feel any emotions.

I'm kind of surprised at the realization that all those accusations of being "cold" were A) probably all true, but because B) were in response to abuse. When I think of abuse victims, I see mostly afternoon special TV characters and my former metamour who was an emotional wreck at the end of her last abusive relationship. I see people who are beaten down, dejected, shells of their former selves, but most of all, *emotional*.

But when *I* face abuse, I get hard. I get cold. I get sharp. There may be a reason why I like knives so much.

I'm not saying that being in abusive relationships doesn't leave long-term damage on me. It usually takes me a while to trust people again. And I'm very cynical. I don't like to open up to people. It seems like I'm very open because I talk about so many personal things in very public spaces. But I can talk about things while being guarded. I'm not really sharing any intimacy, even though I'm sharing a lot of details.

Apathy and coldness and hardness are my defense mechanisms. It's when you know I've reached the end. These are what come out in response to abuse, control, manipulation. I can only extend my compassion so far. When I feel like the other person is not meeting me in the middle, when they're not operating in good faith, when they're trying to control me, I take away those parts of me that make me vulnerable to harm and control - my emotions.

Becoming a knife edge is my response to abuse.

Everyone: please learn that you are lovable *to someone* and worthy of love and that anyone who thinks you are "too" something or "not enough" whatever IS NOT THE RIGHT PERSON FOR YOU.

If people don't like something important about you, you are not going to "scare off" potential partners, you are dodging bullets.

Gaslighters and manipulators will take advantage of the cultural trope (overwhelmingly applied to women) that you have no value without a romantic partner and you must change yourself to find a partner, to keep a partner, and to make your partner happy. This is bullshit. This is how they deflect and get you to accept toxic behaviour, abuse, and general shittiness.

Not everyone HAS to like you. Not everyone WILL like you. That's OK. Don't let that fact become a weapon to manipulate you.

Not only is it OK if people don't like you for a thing, it's what you want. It's how you tell who is compatible with you and who will love you for who you are, your core self. It's a valuable screening tool. Use it to your advantage, don't let it get used against you.

---

Brought to you by the boring response of men telling me that I'm "too intense" or "too aggressive" to "attract a man". The appropriate response to that is not to tone myself down. It's this:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[deep breath]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Dude. No, srsly, dude. Anyone who is intimidated by me or thinks I'm too much is not man enough to be worthy of being my partner.

I eat the weak.

http://qr.ae/TUNDQL

Thanks to some experiences with people who use "agreements" as weapons and who also hide their abusive behaviour behind social justice language, I have become extremely averse to words like "agreements" and the casual use of the term "rules".

I was always pretty anti-rule, but a lot of things are treated as rules while being called other things. And I've discovered that the words we use are important because they subtly and subconsciously influence how we think and view our partners and other people, especially when we use agency-denying language in jest or casually.

So I have written an answer to the common question "what are your relationship agreements" that I'd like to archive on my blog to share every time the question comes up:

I don’t have very many “agreements”. I learned the hard way a long time ago that some people use the word “agreement” as a blunt object with which to beat partners over the head. I don’t do “rules”, which are things that are imposed on other people that dictate their behaviour (and sometimes their emotions and choices). I do “boundaries” which are lines that I draw around myself where I don’t want other people to cross.

Some people treat “agreements” like “rules”. You can usually tell that someone is treating an agreement like a rule when you discover what happens when someone “breaks” the “agreement” or wants to change it. If there are punishments, if breaking or changing the agreement is seen as a “betrayal”, then it’s probably a rule in disguise.

What I do is, I have certain things that I *prefer* to do with my own body, and I tell my partners what those things are so that they know what to expect of me. If I change my behaviour for any reason, then I notify my partners as soon as possible that I’ve done or am planning to do something different, so that they can make informed decisions about their own body (mind, emotions, time, etc.) based on my choices.

The things that I prefer to do is to get tested once a year for HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, & chlamydia (what I refer to as The Big Four) and also HSV +1&2. If I have not had any new partners in the last 6 months, and my ongoing, regular partners have not had any new partners, then I might skip a testing period. But if I am considering taking a new partner then I will get tested right before so that my tests are the most current possible. Then I also prefer to get tested about 2 weeks after I take on a new sexual partner.

I prefer to see the actual tests results on paper for my partners before we have genital contact or fluid transfer for the first time, and 2 weeks after any ongoing partners take on a new sexual partner. I also prefer to keep an open dialog with all potential partners and ongoing partners about our sexual history, our current STD test results, our interests in potential new partners, etc.

I tend to use condoms only for birth control, and I tend to prefer having sex with men who have had vasectomies so that I don’t have to use condoms for birth control. I don’t consider condoms alone to be sufficient protection in the absence of discussing sexual history, STI testing, and sexual patterns so I don’t generally have even barriered sex with people I’m not comfortable having unbarriered sex with.

I prefer to choose sexual partners who have similar STI risk profiles as me - people who prefer to get tested regularly, only have sex with partners who get tested regularly, who openly and frequently discuss sexual risk and history and behaviour, who tend to have a relatively stable number of partners, who have had vasectomies, and who have paper test results that they are willing to share with me.

We do not make “agreements” to do these things, these are just things that I tend to do and I prefer to date people who also tend to do these things. Should either of us make choices that differ from anything we discussed that our partners can expect from us, then we talk to each other about the different choices we have made (or want to make), and we each evaluate the new situation and make our respective choices based on the new information.

I have found this to be the most statistically likely to prevent me from unwanted consequences for sex and to also be the most respectful of everyone’s agency. This allows everyone to be in charge of themselves, to have complete autonomy over their body, mind, emotions, and choices, and to still respect the risk we might place on our partners through our decisions.

---

**Added**  I  received a comment on my Facebook post of this article and I like my response to it that I'm adding it here.  The comment was about a person who responds negatively to agreements being broken, not because they're "rules" but because they believe their partners should find them safe enough to come to them and renegotiate any agreements that aren't working instead of just breaking them, because their own personal integrity requires them to keep any agreements they make and so only make agreements that they can keep, and because many times people will break an agreement and then dismiss this person's upset feelings as if they are not responsible for breaking their trust.

Here is my response:

And that's exactly why I don't make agreements. I basically treat them as promises, and I don't make promises that I can't keep. For most things, since I can't tell the future, I can't guarantee that I can keep an agreement or a promise. And, yeah, when trust is broken, it's understandable that someone would be upset and want that broken trust to be acknowledged.

For most reasonable people, things like "we both agree to pay half the rent" and then a few months in, having a conversation that goes "honey, I don't think I can make my share anymore, can we change this agreement?" are conversations that are had and people don't generally flip out about one person "betraying" them if they can't make their share anymore.

Those are expectations and agreements about how two people are going to treat *each other*. You will pay for half our our shared expenses, and I will pay for half our our shared expenses, and that is how we will help each other survive.

But most of the abuse that I see comes from "agreements" between two people about what one person will do *with their own body, mind, emotions, and time*. When someone makes an "agreement" about what they will do with their own body, time, mind, and emotions, and then they change their mind about that, whether it's something talked about before or after the fact, the other person they made that agreement with takes that as a personal betrayal, even though it was the first person's sole property, so to speak, to do with what they will, "agreement" notwithstanding.

The casual way that people mix these two types of "agreements" up under the same label of "agreements" is the danger, and, in my experience, most people are not savvy enough to separate these two things out when discussing their relationship arrangements.

I make "agreements" all the time, where I "agree" to come pick someone up from work because their car is non-operable and they need a ride somewhere, or where I "agree" to call them before I show up at their house to give them some notice, or where I "agree" with them on where to go for dinner so that we find a place that we both want to go.

These are not generally the sorts of "agreements" that get people into trouble. I mean, they *can* ... lots of people do things like agree to pick someone up and then totally flake out on them and leave them hanging. But when it comes to  people asking "what kinds of agreements do you make in your relationships", this is not generally what they're asking about.

Usually, they're asking about having sex with other people, falling in love with other people, spending time with other people, and spending money on other people. These are things that are better handled by discussing *boundaries*, because these are things that only one person can *own* and stake a claim to (excepting money, in states with shared property marriage laws).

I will make agreements with someone on how I will treat *that person* and how I want that person to treat me. This is discussing our boundaries. I say what my boundaries are, they say what their boundaries are, and we agree to respect each other's boundaries. Then, if for some reason, one of us feels that we can not abide by that particular agreement anymore, we discuss it.

But I will not make agreements with someone on how I will treat *my body, time, mind, emotions, or money* with respect to other people. My time away from my partners is my own time and I will not make agreements with my partners on how I will spend that time away from them. My body is my own, and I will not make agreements with my partners on what I will & won't do with my own body, etc.

It is the lack of awareness of that division (or the deliberate blurring of that division) that I see causing problems (and becoming abusive, in many cases).

It's one thing to get angry because a partner had sex with me without telling me that they recently had unprotected sex with a new partner without trading test results - that is a violation of my ability to consent. That is a "betrayal".

It's quite another thing to get angry just because they had sex with someone else, even if it was unprotected and without trading test results, and even if it goes contrary to their preferences. That is not a violation of my ability to consent. That has nothing at all to do with me. That has to do with *their* body, and I am not entitled to control of their body. That is not a "betrayal" of me.

And I will not be punished anymore for things that I do with my body, my time, my mind, my emotions, and my money just because somebody else had an expectation of the things I would or ought to do with my stuff. They are not entitled to those things, even if they have reasonable expectations of what I would do with those things.

What I do with the things that are mine are not a "betrayal" of someone else. But as soon as you say the word "agreement", people take any deviation as one.

So I don't make "agreements". I state the kinds of things I am *likely* to do and try to only date people who are likely to do similar sorts of things.

This is your occasional reminder that I have actually had to pull my knife on a man 3 times in my life, since I started carrying one.

Assault, harassment, and intimidation are regular, "normal" parts of most women's lives, and definitely a part of mine. In absolutely none of the cases where I had to pull a knife out and brandish it was I "dressed for it" or "asking for it" or "sending mixed signals".

In all 3 cases, it was actually after work and I was wearing my military cargo pants and steel toe boots with no makeup or attempt at hair styling. I was in a casino lounge with my other coworkers, minding our own business and not interacting with any other patrons, at a party at a friend's house in a conversation with my ex (who was not the one I pulled the knife on), and at a gas station working on my car.

There are *lots* of times when, in retrospect, I should have pulled a knife on a date or a "friend", but because they were not strangers, I just kept giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to find non-violent ways out of the situation. I even remained "friends" with many of them or continued to date them long after the fact (or while the behaviour was ongoing).

Being attacked by strangers, while common, happens less often than being assaulted by "friends" and partners. Had I pulled a knife on someone I had some kind of relationship with, I guarantee you that I would have been accused of "overreacting" or of being the aggressor or the "assaulter" for having escalated it to violence with a weapon. We are taught to fear Stranger Danger when the worst of our danger comes from intimates.

But, the thing is, it has *never* occurred to me to pull a weapon on a partner or a "friend". Because each and every time, the severity of the assault is not fully recognized until afterwards, when I've had time to see that my brain won't stop replaying the incident and I'm getting more and more upset over it, since I couldn't afford to react in the moment or else risk escalating something, namely his wrath.

My instinctual response is to freeze, make myself smaller, and smile to placate him into thinking it's not a big deal so that he doesn't get angry at me. The last time I actively fought back against a "friend" who was assaulting me, I got my shoulder dislocated for the effort. I have not fought back since then (I think I was 14?). I go very still instead.

When my ex-fiance used to sexually assault me at night by touching my genitals when he thought I was asleep, if I would get pissed off at him and try to leave the room to go sleep on the couch, as I was attempting to get out of bed, he would tell me that if I left right then, my precious figurine collection (which I loved dearly, almost everything in that collection was a gift) would be damaged.

I know now that this is a clear cut case of abuse, but that's not something I knew back then and I'm not entirely sure that, had I been told, I would have recognized it as abuse while I was going through it. He never once laid a hand on me in anger, or threatened to, and I never feared that he would. *That* was something I would recognize as abuse. But not the sexual assault and not the threat of property damage.

It would never have occurred to me to respond with violence to someone who was not being violent towards me, particularly with someone I loved. Partner abuse is a much more complex and insidious thing than stranger assaults.

And I have had enough of both that I have pulled a knife in self-defense 3 times so far. I'm lucky none of them had a gun.

www.wcnc.com/article/news/crime/4-york-co-law-enforcement-officers-shot-overnight-officials-say/275-508364146

Now *this* would be some irony - domestic violence offenders, bolstered by all the mass shootings and becoming more panicked and fearful of the cultural change of metoo, etc., stop turning on the charm when cops arrive (gaslighting their victims and getting away with assault) but instead start turning on the cops.

Then the over-militarized cops have to start seeing straight white men on domestic violence calls as a default threat and turn their own "shoot first, ask questions later" policy on them, possibly even supporting better gun control laws instead of doing the mental gymnastics required to be both law enforcement *and* 2nd Amendment extremists who derail the debate with arguments of "mental health".

Pretty soon, the cops and the straight white abuser men turn this into their own turf war, while the rest of us take a quick breath from the relief of the chokehold on us for a moment, regroup, and make backup plans for whichever side wins.

"A neighbor of the suspect described McCall as a friendly man and said their street is a quiet one. The neighbor also noted that McCall and his wife have children."

Because they're always friendly and quiet - that's how they gaslight their victims into thinking that the abuse isn't happening and that it's the victim's fault. This will be the most dangerous time in those children's lives - when the "friendly, quiet" white man pretends to show remorse and he gets off with a slap on the wrist and returned access to his children because "children need their daddy" even though he's a domestic abuser who fucking tried to shoot down a police chopper. This is when the kids and the wife will be the most vulnerable to retaliation.

Meanwhile, this asshole was *taken alive* (injured, but not killed) after shooting 4 fucking cops and hitting a goddamn helicopter while black men who sold cigarettes and reached for their legal gun permits upon request are dead.

I'd bet money that if we did a Google Alert for this guy, we'll be getting notices in a few months or a few years that he shot and killed his wife and kids, somehow obtaining a gun post-felony "legally" or some shit.

#BlackPeopleAreNotTheProblem #StraightWhiteMenWitihGunsAndEntitlementAreTheProblem #MaybeIfYouHadBelievedWomenFromTheStartGuysLikeThisWouldNotGetTheDropOnYou

Reminder:  Abuse makes people "crazy", so if you date someone who has an abusive ex, and you later discover that the person you're dating is "crazy" themselves, the proper response isn't to then doubt just how "abusive" their exes really were (particularly when *you saw them* be abusive with your own eyes), but to feel saddened that abuse is so ubiquitous, that your partner has been that badly hurt, and that society's first reaction to your partner's behaviour is to dismiss them as being "crazy" rather than condemn the abuse that makes them behave so irrationally.

Not that people never lie about abusive exes - my abusive ex is sticking to his story that it was his *victim* who was the one who abused *him*.  So I don't mean to say you should never question someone's one-sided story after new evidence comes to light.

I'm just saying that most of the time, when we call an ex "crazy", because of the social convention for the use of that word, it's often for behaviour that they picked up as a direct result of someone harming them.  It's either a survival strategy that no longer works when they're not being harmed, or it's contrary to reality because they no longer have a terrific grasp of reality thanks to someone rewriting their reality for them.

The things that we tend to call "crazy" (as in, "my crazy ex") are not usually the same sorts of things that abusers who flip the script and accuse their victims of being "abusive" tend to do.  If you're dating someone that you start to suspect might have lied about their ex being abusive, there's a good chance that what they're doing to make you suspect this is not behaviour that we culturally refer to as "crazy" from "my crazy ex", generally speaking.  They're probably being more gaslighty and / or controlling, than the sorts of things that we tend to label as "crazy".

Abusers who try to convince people that their former victims are the "real" abusers tend to do other things, like the things found on the Wheel of Abuse, such as gaslighting, manipulating, and other controlling behaviour.  Erratic and "emotional" behaviour and being out of touch with reality is actually more likely to be *confirmation* that the abuse was probably real.  Cool controlling or explosive anger controlling and using your fear to direct your own behaviour is more likely to be the signs that their story of past abuse may not be accurate.

If someone you're dating starts acting in a way that might tempt you to call them "crazy" (because of how we generally use that term), which then prompts you to reevaluate their claims of an abusive ex (even though you may have even seen the abusive behaviour first-hand) just because they're acting irrationally and you think this is reason enough to doubt everything they've ever told you including their abusive past even though their irrational behaviour isn't really related to lying about victimization, then they're probably not "crazy", they're still struggling with their abuse.

You don't have to stick around in that relationship if their response to their trauma is too hard for you to deal with.  Just don't call them "crazy" for it.  They're traumatized.  They're not immune from acting out in harmful ways just because they were a victim themselves, but they are traumatized, not "crazy".

I wish they had told me in high school that suicidal people usually *don't* announce to you that they're going to commit suicide, especially when followed by some kind of condition, such as "I can't live if you won't go out with me".

I wish they had told me this was a manipulative, abusive tactic and that the correct response is to immediately call the authorities and warn them that someone is a danger to themself, even and especially if they tell you not to, and let people trained in this help them.

I wish I hadn't spent 5 years worrying about a "friend" just because I wouldn't date him, and then another 10 years feeling like I was a mean person for finally snapping at him and telling him to just fucking do it then, but if he isn't going to, then stop telling me about it. And then yet another 10 years still talking to him, trying to salvage a friendship out of the girlfriendzone he kept putting me in.

I wish they taught the wheel of abuse in middle school, so that I would have been prepared for when I met all the abusive boys and men I let into my life, when I was pressured to be "nice" to them because their behaviour was "romantic", and even if I didn't return their feelings, when I was told that I still owed them kindness just because they "loved" me.

We keep arguing over sex ed in schools and whether or not to teach people who are probably already sexually active what's going on with their bodies, but we almost never talk about what's going on with their minds. I wish we taught kids how to recognize abusive tactics, in others and in themselves, and how to disentangle themselves from abuse.

I wonder who I would be today if anyone had taught me these things?

#TheWindowsWereFineToBeginWith #NotAllLessonsNeedToBeLearnedFirstHand #IBetIWouldBeALotLessAngryToday

"These people cut off contact with their own adult-child because they disapproved of them. They DIED never reconciling! Would you really ask someone to make their own parents give them up?!"

Well, since the parents CHOSE to die never having reconciled with their adult-child, then I'd say they deserved what they got.  The parents are not the ones deserving of sympathy in this story, and their feelings are not the ones I'm interested in protecting.

The adult-child, on the other hand, did not deserve to have such shitty parents, but it's also not their fault that the parents disowned them (also, can I point out the inherent issue with the phrase "disowned" involving familial relationships?  Parents are not the "owners" of children, they have their own autonomy, especially once they reach the age of majority and become legally autonomous).

There is no asking of a person to *make their parents* be shitty parents.  The parents are already shitty parents.  That the adult-child does something to trigger a really shitty response doesn't change the fact that the parents were shitty to begin with.  The adult-child's behaviour is the *trigger*, not the cause of the shittiness.

So this is a faulty question to begin with.  Nobody can ask or tell anyone else to *make* their parents do something that their parents are going to do.

For example, my grandfather refused to come to my parents' wedding because my mother is Mexican.  He was racist.  My mother could have asked my father not to marry her, to avoid pushing his father into boycotting the wedding.  Or my mother could have insisted that he marry her anyway, knowing that this would result in a rift between my father and his father.

But in reality, my parents loved each other and my grandfather was a shitty, racist parent.  If they had not gotten married, my grandfather would still have been a shitty, racist parent.  My parents getting married or not getting married didn't change that.  My mom wanting to marry my dad in spite of my grandfather not being there for him didn't MAKE my grandfather not be there for him. My grandfather did that all by himself. Because he was a shitty, racist parent.

And while no child deserves shitty parents, anyone who chooses to cut off contact with a relative deserves to not have that relative in their life anymore.

Sometimes that's a good thing - someone cutting off contact with an abusive relative deserves to have a life free of their abuse.  Sometimes it's a bad thing, but cutting off contact with a decent human being because you feel entitled to how they live their lives means that you fucking deserve to not have them in your life anymore.

So, yeah, if a parent is willing to cut off contact with an adult-child in the first place, particularly for something like the adult-child having the audacity of being their own person, then I am absolutely in favor of whatever anguish they feel at not having their adult-children in their lives anymore because they choose to do it.

There's a really simple way to avoid the pain of losing an adult-child in this particular way - don't be a shitty parent and cut off contact with your adult-children for being their own person or loving people you don't love.  That's not the fault of the adult-child, that's entirely the fault of the shitty parent.

https://theestablishment.co/so-youve-sexually-harassed-or-abused-someone-what-now-ed49a934bab1

When my metamour was being abused by our mutual partner, he accused her of abusing him. That was part of his abuse of her, but that's not actually the point I want to make about it. When he did that, she immediately wracked her brain to see how she could be abusing him.  She didn't get defensive, she was horrified. "How could I be abusing the man I love?!" She went into therapy to try and figure out how she was being abusive and how to stop. She spent weeks, months, searching her soul, tearing herself inside out to find this monster that he said was in there.

Every time someone accuses me of being awful, if I don't already agree to it, I call up Franklin and ask "do I do this? Am I this person?"

The point here is that good people are concerned with how others perceive them, and whether they have blindness when that perception differs from their own. Good people want to know if they've hurt someone so that they can stop hurting them.  Some people (who also do good things and have people who love them and who love others) do not. When accused of hurting others, they get defensive. They don't see how it was possible. They assume that their own perception of events was the correct one.

You have hurt people. Yes, you. Everyone has. You have hurt people and you have done so thinking that you were right, justified, or that you didn't hurt them at all and it's all in their head. Sometimes you are correct, but sometimes you are not. You have hurt people.

Now is a good time in our culture to own up to that. If you actually care about others, or even if you just care about what people think of you, then you will look back in your history to try and find the times when you hurt someone, or when you could have hurt someone, or when someone may have felt hurt by you even though you didn't *technically* hurt them but you put yourself in a position for them to feel hurt by you.

You have hurt people. Abuse victims know what it's like to hear that accusation and to feel concerned, ashamed, afraid that it might be true. Abuse victims know what it's like to actually care enough about someone else that when they are accused of hurting them, they stop and look.

Abusers look for "good people" who are exploitable. That compassion, that caring is exploitable. That compassion and caring is also one of their superpowers. Abusers abuse because they feel justified in doing so. They believe that their actions are the correct actions to take. There are two paths here that you can take.

You have hurt people. Which direction are you going to go from that?