#victim blaming tw
cw: depp/heard trial, abuse
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if johnny depp defenders can go on all day about how he’s just like them forreal because they were also completely falsely accused of being a bad person once uwu, then so can i, here goes:
no matter what you think of amber heard, the shit you’re doing to and saying about her on the internet right now is fucking triggering to survivors and you need to stop. you are so convinced that you’re justified because you think you know she’s lying, but you don’t. you don’t know. you can’t know. you’re basing your conviction on how she divulges information, that her memory isn’t always entirely complete and correct, how she performs her grief; and i’m here to tell you that all of these are things survivors do.
trauma is locked behind layers of dissociation. that means memory is altered, distorted, distant. some things are perfectly in focus while some cannot be recalled. time and place is often unclear. and i wanna emphasize, even normal non-traumatic memory is notoriously unreliable. add to that the way fear responses affect the encoding of memories and you end up with something “fragmented, associated with intense arousal, readily primed and triggered, and poorly contextualized into memory”.
another effect of this is the division of narrative memory and emotional memory. that means on the one hand you may have poorly intelligible (for yourself and others) emotional fragments floating around in your brain, that can be triggered easily and lead to flashbacks or meltdowns. on the other hand, you may be able to recall something traumatic with clarity, but without emotion, or with a poor connection to the emotion.
when the brain processes hugely painful and scary experiences, it often gets tripped up and doesn’t fully integrate them. you can think of it like the different things that make a memory - outside narrative, thoughts, physical sensations, emotions - getting stored in separate boxes instead of coming together to make a whole.
therefore it’s not uncommon for survivors to recount traumatic events like they’re talking about the weather, or for their emotional reaction to their own story to seem mismatched or disconnected, or for them to mix up the exact order of events, or for them not to recall everything (such as, “i was in the kitchen and then i was in the bathroom and i don’t know how i got there or how much time passed”). their expressions and gestures may not fit the emotion you would expect given the topic (not to mention, all humans emote differently and bodylanguageanalysisisjunkscience).
it’s also exceedingly hard to talk about painful, intimate things while people and in this case even cameras are watching you. you are very aware of their expectations of how you perform your trauma. expecting any person to behave natural and authentic under this sort of pressure is asinine. having to restate your trauma over and over again is hard enough, being judged for it and knowing there are people watching, ready to tear you apart, is at best triggering and at worst retraumatizing.
the expectations you are projecting onto amber in order to be a “convincing” victim cannot be met by a real person. victims forget, victims show disparate emotions. victims also very often, both during and after the abuse, exhibit irrational and erratic behaviour, they might become aggressive and fight back against their abuser, taunt them, provoke them, even attack them; or lash out at others. none of that makes their claims of abuse false.
this is the personal part, i cut a lot of what i originally wrote because it felt too intimate, but i wanna try: my trauma doesn’t look like amber’s, but my experiences of gaslighting and victim blaming are starkly reflected back at me in the way she is treated by media and observers. every time itried to go up against what was happening to me, or reach out to a person of authority to help, it was turned on its head. my pleading, my crying, my detachment, my aggression, my confusion - all were taken as justification to either say that i was causing it, i was to blame, or that it wasn’t happening, i was imagining and misinterpreting things, i was making things up, i was a liar. to this day i sit in therapy and have to hear my therapist tell me that my emotional expressions don’t feel authentic, and i know it’s because i can’t connect to them, i can’t touch them, i’m floating somewhere above my head, i’m always watching myself. i know that if i were sitting in a courtroom to try and prove what people did to me, i wouldn’t remember it right, i wouldn’t show the right emotions, i would try to overcompensate and come off as fake.
regardless of what you think of amber, abuse survivors are reading your posts and seeing your videos, and the message we receive is very clear: that you wouldn’t believe us if we spoke out, because we can never be the kind of victim you deem acceptable and believable.
as a survivor, you really can’t win. whatever you do will be used against you.
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more about trauma (pdfs):
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terfs dni, i’m trans & not aligned with you
This is a series! Masterlist here!
This chapter is another Flashback so if you want to read only the “current” storyline you can skip this, it just adds context.
Content: Box Boy Whump, BBU, dehumanization, domestic abuse, victim blaming, conditioned behavior, shock collar, alcohol mention
Riley had spent a busy night fielding drunks at the Diamond nightclub away from Mr. James. Usually he did this by getting in their way and steering them along to one side, but sometimes, like tonight, someone actually tried to start trouble. Mr. James was the kind of man who occasionally made enemies, or found himself resented by lesser businessmen and their cronies.
The sight of a huge Guard Dog pet in his studded collar and black leather motorcycle jacket, looking like a particularly young and restless Hell’s Angel, was enough to make people think twice about trying to take a swing at Curtis James. Well, most people. Every so often, someone was angry, and drunk enough to be stupid.
