#psychological abuse

were they really baseless accusations?

(image descriptions and text transcript under the cut)

first image: a pixellated, messy drawing of a person with chin length hair smiling wearily, shown from the shoulders up. behind the black line art of the person is a white crinkled paper texture. the background of the image is a gradient from faint red at the top to light gray at the bottom. there is handwritten all-capitalized text surrounding the person that reads, “why are you afraid of your own child? mom and dad? it’s only a joke, right? you’re just joking aren’t you? mom? dad?” the text becomes increasingly messy and spills off the edges of the picture.

second image: the first image, with overlaid details in two shades of red. the person’s face is scribbled out in bright red. there is messy handwritten text written sideways in the same shade of red on either side of the person’s head. the text on the left reads “take some responsibility”, and the text on the right reads “clean up your own mess”. above the person’s head is handwritten text in a darker shade of red that reads “you did this to yourselves”, and over the person’s scribbled out face is similar text that reads “and to me”. all of the text is capitalized.

second image: the first image, with overlaid details in two shades of red. the person’s face is scribbled out in bright red. there is messy handwritten text written sideways in the same shade of red on either side of the person’s head. the text on the left reads “take some responsibility”, and the text on the right reads “clean up your own mess”. above the person’s head is handwritten text in a darker shade of red that reads “you did this to yourselves”, and over the person’s scribbled out face is similar text that reads “and to me”. all of the text is capitalized.

third image: the same as the second image, but the background is now a blurry mix of black and dark red. the darker background makes the red text easier to discern and makes the black text more difficult to see.

fourth image: the same as the third image, except the red details are smudged vertically.

end ID.

to anyone suffering from psychological, and/or emotional abuse, and to anyone who has escaped that abuse and is now dealing with the effects:

it can be easy to downplay your experiences. however, mental and emotional health is no less important than physical health, and abuse that targets your mind and heart should be taken just as seriously as any other abuse. you are worth more than your abuser(s) made you out to be! you deserve love, positive attention, safety, and gentleness.

fellow survivors, you have all our love.

“he raises his voice

higher than he would his hands

and for that I guess

I should be

grateful”

- d.c.

I try so hard to be worthy of love

But deep down I know

I’m too far gone

To make the healthier choice

My heart craves the toxic love

That comes from abuse

My mind fails to reject

The stability of caos

I want to stay

In the eye of the hurricane

Hot take:

Parents who record their kids crying or having a meltdown/tantrum are bad parents

It’s even worse if they end up instigating said meltdown/tantrum for views, that’s straight up child abuse

furiousgoldfish:

If you lived with abusive parents, it meant that the rules changed for you any moment. You could have been praised for something most of the time, then suddenly one day it brings a punishment instead. You could have been allowed to do certain things until one day you got tortured for doing it, and afterwards you couldn’t even know if it was alright to ever do it again. Some things were only allowed when parents were in forgiving mood, sometimes things you absolutely had to do, you knew you’d be punished if anyone saw you doing it, or if they found out. 

You never knew what the consequences would be. You could be wildly overpunished for something as simple as failing to close a door, saying the wrong word, having a certain face expression. You would get blamed and punished for things you didn’t do. You would get punished for someone’s bad mood. You would get punished for existing next to someone who was angry and wanted a punching bag. 

There was no consistency in your life, you had to live tiptoeing and hoping you would somehow do the right thing and avoid torture, the rules would change and twist and turn against you no matter what you would do, you developed a sixth sense to figure out when someone was irritated or upset, and you would still end up hurt and abused. 

And you got told this is normal, this is just how life is, everyone has it like this. You don’t doubt it or see it as abuse, it’s just your every day, you can’t imagine living a life where you’re safe, where you don’t have to expect thousand horrible things to happen if you make a tiny mistake that you initially had no idea would even be a mistake.

Now think about that and tell me where your anxiety came from. What living like this continually would do to a person. Because once you lived like this, this mindset doesn’t go away, it’s what you’ve learned to live with, what you’ve been forced to live with if you didn’t want to be in pain every second of your life. How would you not panic and over analyze your every word? How would you not try to predict just what kind of horror could come from most mundane and common action? How would you not at least try to brace yourself for the next torture someone might have ready for you? Your senses are not wrong, they’re trained to do this, they’re experienced in trying to help you survive life in abuse. 

furiousgoldfish:

Abusive parents will trauma-condition you to obey them, they will punish your every healthy instinct, every independent thought and every resistance to their authority to the point where they fuck with your survival instincts and force you to fear for your life if you don’t do as you’re told.

Then when you come down with ptsd they have the nerve to say “You got too affected by it.”

They made sure you were extremely affected by it when they were doing it. They were the ones who wouldn’t stop until you were unable to do anything but to be controlled by them if you wanted to survive. Do you know what kind of extreme torture will get a person to obey you unconditionally? It means keeping a person in death fear.

You being affected by it so much that you couldn’t be a human being but their property was the point of it. They’re perpetrators of a torture crime. They do not get to have a say in what your reaction to it means. You’re a human being and they had no right to hurt you whatsoever. They do not get to turn around and say “Oh, actually, we wanted to get different things from torturing you, and being held responsible for it is not one of them.” 

It’s not okay to tell a child who is telling you about their abusive parent, or abusive relative or sibling, to tell them in return ‘oh they care about you deep inside, they just don’t show it’.

That is not what the kid needs to hear. That kid put faith in you that you’re going to be on their side, understand they’re hurt, they’re scared, they feel hated, they’re starting to doubt the goodness of the person who hurt them, they need a safe space to express their pain, a confidant to hear and understand their part of the story, and they need help in order to not become a victim of this person’s abuse again.

And instead, you tell them, ‘Disregard your feelings, and conclude that this person, who hurt you and turned against you and used their power to abuse you, trust that this person actually deeply loves you, and what this situation needs is you having more understanding and tolerance because this, is actually love’. Nobody needs to hear this. No body, ever, needs to hear this.

Because this will, in fact, move the kid to consider that maybe there’s still love in this relationship, and yes maybe their abuser isn’t so bad, and maybe they should give the abuser another chance, and see deeper into their actions to find love they so desperately need in order to feel safe and accepted. And inevitably, they’ll fall victims to the abuse, again, and again, and again.

What you taught them, is to accept abuse as love. You told them it’s acceptable for the people in their life, to abuse them as a ‘misunderstood’ expression of love. You told them to treat abuse as one would treat love. You discouraged them from getting away from the harm, you failed to protect them, you failed to even validate their situation and their feelings, you failed to recognize that this is unacceptable, that they don’t deserve to be harmed, that it is not okay for someone who is supposed to love them, to abuse them. You taught them to accept anyone who hurts them, as a person who secretly cares. You gave them a push to tolerate this in their future friendship, relationship, marriage. Because how wouldn’t they forgive and understand it from their friend or spouse, if they did with a family member?

You put a situation of abuse in the context where the abuser doesn’t have to stop, but the vulnerable victim needs to put their feelings of hurt away, and ‘understand better’ that this is a form of love. That means the victim is the one who needs to take responsibility for the abuse, bear it, forgive it, and assume this is okay. You didn’t even explain to this child that they don’t deserve to be harmed. That hurting them is unacceptable. You went on as if suffering harm is normal and expected for this child’s life. You told them to endure it and failed to put them out of the harm’s way.

This is what enabling looks like. This is what siding with the abuser looks like. This is grooming, neglect, emotional abandonment, investment in abuse to continue. Nobody needs to hear that. Nobody needs to be reassured that the abuse is okay because their abusers love them.

What we need to hear is that this is unacceptable. That it was wrong to do this to you. Someone checking if we’re hurt, if we’re alright. Someone telling us they’re going to make sure we never suffer this abuse again. Taking our words seriously and making sure we’re protected, and we no longer need to worry about it happening again. We need a moment of grief for what we went thru, and to be asked for forgiveness because we weren’t protected, we were left to the mercy of a person who went on to hurt us. We need to know that people will be on our side, and find abuse as horrible and harmful as we do. We should hear that the person who loves us wouldn’t do this. That even the person who hates us doesn’t have the right to do it. Our feelings should matter. Our pain should be addressed.

That’s how you’d raise a person who understands their experiences matter and their feelings and safety have value in the society. To do it any differently is neglect and invitation of more abuse into a child’s life, as if that life is the least important one and reserved for taking damage. We do not exist to be sacrificed for families to stay together. The moment we’re put into harm’s way for the family’s sake, it’s no longer our family.

psychabuse101:

When an abusive person discovers that you have a “safe place”, they will try to take it from you, prevent you from accessing it, or try to use it against you.
If this “safe place” is something like a private blog, or physical diary you use to journal all your thoughts and feelings and process them, they will go out of their way to find and read the information in them.
If this “safe place” is a group of friends, or social event you spend time at, they will prevent you from being able to see them or go there, or even insist they accompany you in an attempt to infiltrate it.

Preventing the victim from seeing friends, attending events, or using social medias can also be a form of deliberate isolation, which is an abusive tactic in it’s own right.

They will also usually feign innocence, and claim that they’re only trying to help you, or “understand you better”, and then try to guilt trip you into feeling like the bad guy for not wanting your privacy violated. They may even try to turn the roles on you, claiming “you’re so distant” or “you don’t talk to me” and the like, to try and make it look like they are the victim in the scenario.

In the case of blogs, if it has a completely different name and use picture to your known online name, then a manipulator who has found it and read it has taken time and effort to do so.
In the case of a diary, that you keep private, hidden away, or carry on your person, you know that the person who found it and read it has gone to effort and trouble to do so.

With both blogs and physical diaries, they will often claim to have found them by accident.
This is hard to dis-prove, and may even be true in some cases. However, it is important to remember that just because someone -found- a private blog or diary, does not give them the right to read it. Especially if they know who it belongs to, and are aware that the contents are somewhat private. This is willful breaking of boundaries and privacy violation.

It is important to note that even if you leave your diary out on a table in a family room, that is still not an invitation to read it!

Some manipulators may claim to have read parts of it by accident. Either they saw you typing, or saw you writing, and read what you were writing before realizing what it was. Or they claim to have found and read the journal, before realizing who it belonged to and what it was.
This is almost always a lie, but again, is hard to dis-prove because it is completely possible.
However, it is important to remember that when faced with sensitive personal information about someone else, the healthy, normal thing to do is to keep the information private.
            These things happen sometimes, people learn private details about others lives sometimes. But they keep quiet about it until the person involved comes forward about it themselves.
           (Of course this applies only to social and personal matters, if the information pertains to a crime, the appropriate thing to do is go to the police).

If the manipulator does not realize that what they have done is wrong, now having found and read the victim’s personal thought-processing, will often confront the victim about it. They will say “how dare you say this about me”, and “how dare you say that about them”, guilt tripping and blaming the victim for having negative thoughts, and not at all addressing their boundary-breaking to have gotten this information!
Whether the abuser themselves was actually mentioned in the private journal does not matter, often they assume things to be about them, to facilitate their victim complex.
If the abuser was named personally in the private journal, it still was not their place to look for and read that information.People have to process negative thoughts all the time, even about people they love and care for, that is a normal, healthy, human trait.

Alternatively, if they know that what they have done is not okay, they may not confront the victim at all, and will instead simply start giving them the cold shoulder, or being passive-aggressive towards them publicly. Or, if they read some private information about the victim, they will start talking about issues affecting the victim, and will feign ignorance about knowing that it affects the victim.
This is particularly toxic, because it is so hard to prove. The manipulator will always deny doing these things, because they know they are in the wrong, and they know that admitting they are punishing the victim for something they said privately means admitting that they violated the victim’s privacy.
This can lead to a gaslighting effect on the victim, because they don’t know what is wrong, and they may start to suspect that the manipulator has read their journal. But they can’t prove it, and the manipulator will not admit to any of it, so they have to start questioning themselves. They start telling themselves that they’re being over-suspicious, and that they are being “crazy” for suspecting something.
All of this plays nicely into the manipulators hands.

People who have been subjected to this kind of abuse often take to having “decoy” journals. Whether they’re online blogs or physical diaries, they keep semi-private, for the abuser to read, and have their true thoughts documented elsewhere, under tighter security.
This behavior is absolutely indicative of being psychologically abused by having their privacy violated, either currently or in the past.

In the case of the “safe place” being a group or event, the tactics employed by a manipulator to prevent the victim attending can, again, range from covert to overt.

This one is also complicated by the ages of the people involved, especially if the abuser is a care-giver and the victim is a minor in their care. It can also be influenced by the child rights laws per country.
If the abuser and victim are both legally adults (even if they are parent and their adult child), then it is less complicated and more obviously outright abuse.

The manipulator will usually start trying to prevent their victim gaining access to their safe place because they have noticed that the victim is pulling away from them in some way. Either the victim no longer obeys them without question, the victim is more confident in their body or hobbies, or the victim is simply not as scared anymore when the abuser tries to scare them.The abuser will notice that they are losing control. They may read it as a slight, or as abandonment.        (many manipulative people site a fear of abandonment as their driving force for their restricting and isolating behaviors. This is not an excuse and does not make it okay. They need help for their abandonment issues, not to be allowed to abuse others).

They will try and pull the victim back under thumb, and prevent them accessing this outside influence. Overt tactics involve the manipulator explicitly telling the victim they are no longer allowed to see particular friends or go to particular events. No reasoning will be given for this, often no discussion of the subject will be allowed, they will simply forbid it.
If discussion is attempted, they may shut it down by saying that “you don’t respect me if you want to disobey me”, or may even manufacture a sob-story to guilt-trip the victim into doing as they are told.
Or, they may be more covert, and simply always have other plans come up when the victim is due to go out. They may suddenly say “no, you cant go out until you’ve finished this long list of chores!” or “oh, but I need you to stay home tonight to do xyz”. This will be something that has not been discussed previously, and is suddenly put upon the victim forcing them to cancel last-minute.
      A truly intelligent, toxic, abuser may even pretend that they did tell the victim before hand about this task on this day, they will tell the victim that they must have forgotten, and gaslight the victim into believing that they simply forgot.

Some manipulators may try to come with the victim to the events or to see the friends.
This is more obvious as a sign something is wrong when the abuser is a parent accompanying child (even if the “child” is an adult themselves now). It can be very hard to spot as a manipulation tactic if both parties are either partners or friends. Because it is normal for a partner to want to meet their significant others friends, and it is normal for a friend to want to be introduced to your other friends.
However, if they start to prevent you seeing them alone, especially if they give a sob-story about why you cannot see your other friends without their presence, then something is deeply wrong.

It is important here to note that many victims who start to notice that their abuser is giving them the cold shoulder, are often accused by that abuser of engaging in this isolation tactic!

Fortunately, the simple way to tell the difference is to ask about how they behave otherwise. Often, the victim who is being cold-shouldered will be able to point to other manipulative behaviors shows by the abuser, and will mention that they have been cold and standoffish at home, as well as no longer inviting them out.
A manipulator who is trying to isolate their victim will often resort to claiming that the friends or event are “bad” in some way and that they are protecting the victim.

It is also important to establish the connection each party has with the event or group of friends. If the victim introduced the abuser to the other friends, and the abuser is now seeing those friends while excluding the victim, they may accuse the victim of “trying to prevent them seeing ‘their’ friends”, but in truth the manipulator is deliberately isolating the victim from their own support network, and painting it as abuse, trying to gaslight the victim in to believing they are in the wrong.