Red Flag Archives

[content: abusive relationships] Not everything is your problem

realsocialskills:

When someone is abusing you:

• It’s ok not to care why they’re doing it
• Their circumstances aren’t your problem
• Neither is their childhood
• Neither is the possibility that they’re playing out abuse patterns they learned as an abuse victim

These are larger social issues. It’s important that some people work to address them.

But not you. Not with regard to your own abuser. You don’t have to wait for huge social problems to be solved to be allowed to demand that a specific person stop abusing you.

It’s ok, and advisable, to focus on protecting yourself.

(via fromonesurvivortoanother)

More Sexual Coercion in Abusive Relationships [tw: sexual abuse, manipulation, emotional abuse, kink/bdsm]

Thinking back on my most recent abusive ex, I think there are a lot of things he did that were grooming me for sexual coercion.

Even at the very beginning of our relationship he would regularly compare me to his previous partner in seemingly “good” ways. He liked that I liked sex and had sex with him frequently and that he and his last partner (whom he was with for like 7 years) would sometimes go two whole weeks without sex. GASP!

One time during sex the condom broke. I went in and got tested just in case I had something I could have transmitted to him. He didn’t get tested. I went on birth control because I didn’t want to risk having another condom break. We stopped using condoms after that. He complained that they reduced his pleasure or whatever. But I had a really bad reaction to the birth control. I was severely depressed and constantly suicidal. I told him about my symptoms and he wouldn’t respond. I told him I wanted to get off of birth control numerous times. He said nothing. And finally when I confronted him about not discussing it with me, we had a huge argument and I just decided to stay on the birth control.

A while later he complained that he could tell I wasn’t present during sex and wanted to know what I was thinking about. Reluctantly I talked to him about my interest in kink and subbing. He said that me thinking about being subbed by him was the same as him pretending he was having sex with Pamela Anderson instead of me. He told me that my interest in being subbed was unhealthy.

After that, I didn’t enjoy sex with him and could not reach orgasm. I constantly worried he’d think I wasn’t “present” or could tell I was thinking about being subbed and get upset with me. He did get upset sometimes. But he would never mention anything until after he reached orgasm. When I told him I wasn’t enjoying sex as much because I was constantly worried he’d get upset with me afterwards he said it wasn’t his fault. I was responsible for how I internally reacted to him getting upset with me. (But of course, he wasn’t responsible for how he reacted to me thinking about being subbed. Because that’s just wrong, obvs.)

We broke up and got back together several months later. I brought up some of this stuff right at the beginning and he said he didn’t care what I thought about during sex anymore. Slowly I was able to enjoy it more, but never fully.

He started asking me more questions about my boundaries with regards to subbing.  I mentioned one night that if he wanted to, it would be fun if he woke me up to sex in the morning. He didn’t, which I was fine with. But for weeks and months after that he would bring it up, saying he wouldn’t want to because he wouldn’t know when was it okay to do that. I explained that if I told him the night before I would be okay with it and if not I could use a safe word. But he still said I might change my mind and he might not know and that I might hold it against him. Basically, to ease his concerns, I ended up being more and more lenient about my boundaries of when he could do this and told him in case I did change my mind I would never hold him accountable for that. When I told him my other subbing fantasies, my likes, dislikes, and boundaries, he would accuse me of “topping from the bottom”. He also said that if I was really a sub I’d let him do what he wanted not what I wanted. He acted as if my boundaries were a secret plot to manipulate and control him.

During our previous relationship he told me he was poly (6 months into the relationship, the day he moved in with me). Basically he said he wanted a poly relationship without any boundaries. So when we got back together I made him explain exactly what he needed before I could decide if I wanted to be in a relationship with him again. He said in theory he’d want a no-boundaries type of poly relationship but he didn’t want that in practice. He said it might be nice to make out with other people. I triple-checked with him that that was everything and he said yes.

But slowly over the next 2 years he started changing his mind about what he wanted from me in a poly relationship. He wanted fewer and fewer boundaries, until towards the end of our relationship he said he wanted no boundaries again. He said he wouldn’t want to sleep with other people if the relationship was going well, just when we weren’t getting along. Which obviously made me afraid to do anything to upset him. And very slowly he got me to agree to fewer and fewer boundaries with regards to “polyamory”.

A couple weeks before we broke up he mentioned that we hadn’t had sex in a few weeks and that he wanted to have a talk about it. Immediately I thought about his complaints about his previous partner who sometimes went 2 weeks without sleeping with him.

We never had a talk about it because we broke up. But looking back, I could see where he was setting this up to go. I would be more and more afraid of upsetting him for fear that he’d seek out other relationships. My interest in having sex with him significantly diminished the more abusive he became, but I knew if I went 2 weeks without sleeping with him it would be a huge issue for him which might cause him to sleep with other people. I would be coerced into to having sex whether I wanted to or not. My boundaries with BDSM would slowly diminish the way my boundaries with polyamory did until I somehow thought that I had agreed for him to beat and rape me.

[tw: victim blaming, emotional abuse, abuser logic]

A comparative piece about living in an oppressive society and abusive relationships

manhatingbabyeater:

The media and our culture behave somewhat like an abuser and living in this oppressive culture is like being emotionally abused. (I’m not saying they’re identical, but there are definitely similarities. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s experiences.) I’m not going to get into specifics, but we are neurologically affected by media and cultural paradigms on a subconscious level. When you are told over and over that you are not desirable, or white enough, or thin enough, or whatever, it is human to internalize that over time.

My last abuser repeatedly accused me of being selfish during the 3 years we were together. (He called me lots of other things, but not quite as much as selfish.) When I told him how much it bothered me and that I was starting to believe it he refused to take accountability. He pulled the same bullshit he often pulled which was, “It’s not my fault you believe it.” Or, “You choose to believe it.” And, “You’re responsible for your own actions, not me.” And, “You’re playing the victim.” Or, “Well if you don’t think it’s true, then don’t take my word for it.”

And I just find anything similar to that shit really triggering. It’s as if a reasonable, human, neurological, biological reaction to being told something over and over is MY fault. It’s like punching someone in the face and saying, “It’s not my fault you have a bruise.”

And it is completely derailing because, hey, here I was telling him something he did was hurting me. But the whole, “You’re responsible for your own actions, not me,” only applied to my behavior, never his. Every conversation we had was about what I did to him and what I did to myself.

Any external reaction to the culture is criminalized, pathologized, or limited to the rich. Regulations, protesting, boycotting, vandalism, etc. (somewhat how reacting with anger and power in an abusive relationship is punished or results in gaslighting.)

We are being blamed for our own internal reactions to a culture that constantly tells us we’re not good enough while simultaneously being blamed for fighting against that culture in any meaningful way. Likewise this turns every conversation we have into a conversation about how we harm the dominant forces in our culture and how we are harming ourselves. And that conversation never gets to be about holding our culture accountable for anything. Again, the “you’re responsible for your own actions, not us” concept only applies to us and never the media and/or culture.

Basically, we are told to accept the culture for how it is, never try to change our environment, and blame ourselves for any reactions we have to it. And then told that is empowering. And that is abuser logic.

(Source: manhating-babyeater)

[tw: gaslighting, emotional abuse, grooming]

So here is an event that happened between me and my ex-abuser.

We went to the grocery store to get stuff for lunch. He also got a couple things for himself and I got a couple things for myself, one of them being cereal. I told him I wanted to split the cost. So at the counter we split up the items: half the groceries plus his items, then I paid for half plus my items. We made the food together and ate it. The next morning he told me he ate several bowls of my cereal, which, whatever. And when I left I gave him most of the food to keep like a loaf of bread, and vegetables, etc. Pretty uneventful, right?

Then, several days later, he asked me to pay him for those groceries!! ha! And I told him no, I already paid for them and he even ate some of my food. (Plus I regularly cooked food for the both of us and rarely ever got money from him because I told him I didn’t want it.) And this is an email I got from him about it.

“as an example, consider something that happened the other day. i asked you if you intended to give me any money for the food i bought this weekend. i asked you without any expectation. it did not really matter to me if you did or not, but i was wondering, so i wanted to clear it up - you even said to me in the grocery store that you wanted to split it up later. you responded by telling me that you had “helped pay for most of it” and that i had “eaten half your cereal.” my understanding is that those are not true statements. without going into the details of why, i believe actually that those are considerable exaggerations beyond the reality of the situation.

i realize that this may seem a bit like pointless bickering, but i am using this as an example because this is precisely the dynamic i see occurring basically every time i have an issue with something that i choose to address with you.

to some extent i think an important question is, do you disagree with me? do you believe those statements are true, or that they are exaggerated?

the way i feel in this type of situation is that i have been rendered completely powerless to make any sort of meaningful statement. i asked you a very simple and honest (and rather unimportant) question which needed only a simple and honest answer. instead the response i got exaggerated reality enough to the point that it made it seem as though it were preposterous to even consider that you might “owe me some money.” this leaves me with two options: to appear selfish and inconsiderate by requesting money when, according to your version of reality, i obviously do not deserve any, or to point out what to me was the obvious untruth of your statements, which then takes me into the land of how horrible i am for calling you a liar. either way, i lose - i am the unfair one, i am the unreasonable one, i get chastised.

i perceive this as manipulative, because it forces me into a position in which my concerns do not matter, in which i cannot “win.” i have to accept your will in such a situation because, based on my experience with you, i am practically assured that you will argue with me if i take the issue further, on one of the two grounds i mentioned above, and arguing with you over an extra 5 or 10 dollars in my wallet disinterests me to say the least.

i don’t feel that this is manipulative in any malicious way. it honestly seems a lot more to me like a kind of defense tactic designed to make you not look selfish, by distorting the truth enough to cover up the simple fact that you didn’t want to give me money; except this in itself appears much more selfish than wanting to keep your money. even worse is that you manage to portray me as being unfair, even though i don’t believe there was anything unfair about what i did or said, and i do believe your behavior was unfair.”

(bolding mine) There was another huge wall of text prior to and after all of this as well. Just paragraph after paragraph of this shit.

So much fucking gaslighting here. And so much “don’t argue with me because it makes me the victim of your controlling manipulative abuse”

I particularly like this statement: “…this is precisely the dynamic i see occurring basically every time i have an issue with something that i choose to address with you.”

So basically he was pissed off that I regularly stood up for myself when he was being unreasonable.

catheterqueen:

Clocking the hours I spent/spend

trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me

what I could have done differently

if I was abused

how I was abused

what abuse is

why it is abuse

why I was abused

researching abuse

venting about the abuse

being angry about the abuse

sad about the abuse

embarrassed about my abuse

writing about the abuse

unlearning the abuse

convincing myself it wasn’t my fault

questioning myself

making fun of you

fantasizing about beating you up

the hours I spent convinced other people would think about me the same way you did

that no one could like me

the hours I spent at home avoiding you

the hours I spent recovering when I ran into you

the hours spent worrying I’d run into you again

literally every day for 2 1/2 years

and then there’s the 40 hours of therapy

and the 3 years wasted on being abused by you

hours I could have spent doing anything else

working on other aspects of myself that I want to change

hours I could have spent passing my classes

or just, you know, having fun

and I’m sending you the bill

Oh, also YOU OWE ME 200 FUCKING DOLLARS FOR THERAPY, SHITBAG!!!

(Source: manhating-babyeater)

Emotional Abuse and “Polyamory” [tw: emotional abuse/isolation]

My last abusive ex (also referred to as shitbag, as his name is triggering to me) and I were in a monogamous relationship. I made it very clear that was what I wanted. 6 months in I thought things were going really well. My fucked up roommate who had no sense of boundaries was moving out, so I asked him to move in. The day he moved in, he told me he didn’t believe in monogamous relationships. The. Day.

He started saying shit about how he wanted to know that he could have another serious relationship with someone else if he wanted to, travel with them, and be able to depend on me to still be here when he got back. I told him I would definitely need there to be limits on who we dated and how serious it got. He said that was controlling and that if I “really loved” him I would want him to date/fuck whoever he wanted. Even my friends.

Even. My friends. Just a heads up to all the readers out there: That is a manipulative-as-fuck isolation technique.

It gets better! I asked him to imagine how he would feel if I slept with his friends. His response? “My friends would never do that to me.”

His friends would never do that to him. But he would be willing to do that to me. With my friends. And it was possible they might do that to me.

When we first started dating he told me that before we were dating there was a point in which he thought my best friend and roommate were going to have an orgy with him. And was really aloof when my feelings were hurt, acting like I was making too big a deal about it. So the isolation wedge had already been planted at the very beginning of the relationship.

He broke up with me like a month after he moved in because in his words I was “highly abusive”, but he left it open like we could get back together later if I stopped being so abusive and childish. While we were broken up he was spending the night with an acquaintance/friend of mine.

We got back together like 6 months later. I told him before we got back together that I needed to know exactly what kind of open relationship he wanted. He said after years of being together, it would just be nice to make out with people. I asked him about the things he had said previously and he said, “I didn’t explain that very well. In theory that’s what I believe, but that is ridiculously idealistic and that isn’t something I would actually want.” I agreed to get back together with him as long as that was the case.

He was living with his ex girlfriend by then, and continued to live with her for the rest of our 2 1/2 year relationship. She was basically his mother. She cleaned for him, set up a garden, made him dinner and a cake on his birthdays. Made collages from pictures of the two of them when they were dating. One time I went to his house and there was like a poster sized photo of them from when they were dating, hugging each other, where he could see it from his bed.

He slowly moved away from what he originally said when I decided I would get back together with him, toward his previous ideas about open relationships and fucking my friends and that I should even be happy for him if I really loved him. He also said the only times he ever wanted to sleep with other people was when things weren’t going well between us. And things weren’t going well when, you know, I would retaliate against his abuse. He started complaining that I wasn’t happy enough, and he wanted to be with someone who wasn’t so negative. He let me know that eventually he would leave me if I didn’t change, but he wasn’t sure when.

He set himself up as the “victim”, stating that I was discriminating against him because he was polyamorous. He said, “I’mthe one in the most difficult situation here because if I sleep with someone else you might break up with me.” He implied that I was giving him an ultimatum and being controlling again.

Basically he isolated me by making me fearful of who I was friends with and wary of having friends who were women. He set it up so that if I retaliated against him there would be very hurtful repercussions. I was afraid to ever stand up for myself because that would prompt him to want to sleep with other people. And he was policing my emotions because if I wasn’t optimistic enough, he was going to leave me at some unpredictable moment. And he did this all while making it seem like I was doing it to myself and victimizing him.

Activity Time

catheterqueen:

One of the things my therapist did with me, to help me heal from my abuser convincing me I was abusive, was ask me how much I believed I was abusive. I said it was 50/50. (I think she started this activity with me because I didn’t believe it 100%. So if you believe you are abusive 100%, this may not be helpful for you.) She had me define what I thought abusive behavior was and wrote it on one side of the board. Then on the other side of the board she had me define not abusive behavior.

(If you’re interested in partaking in this activity I strongly suggest you define these things for yourself before reading the rest. And of course, I’m NOT a therapist, so use this information accordingly.)

Read More

(Source: manhating-babyeater)

While we’re on the topic [tw: emotional abuse, alcohol]

catheterqueen:

So my last abusive ex started out the relationship by not making any decisions. When I asked him for input on what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, or what he wanted to eat, he would always say he didn’t know or didn’t care. Gradually I stopped asking him and just started making suggestions, “Do you want to do ___________?” He would always say he was okay with it. And then eventually I moved more towards like, “Let’s go do __________.” Anyways, at some point he decided I was controlling him, that we only went where I wanted to go, and I made all of the decisions. I explained that I tried to get his input but he never gave me any, apologized, and started asking him what he wanted to do again.

When I started on birth control, I had severe reactions to it with regards to my mental health. I started on anti-depressants for the first time in my life, but my moods were still really unpredictable. One night we were drinking some wine and had a conversation about feminism in which he started complaining that men experience just as much sexism as women. So naturally this infuriated me.

After I made my final point it occurred to me that I was extremely angry. I told him I couldn’t talk about it anymore and we could finish the discussion later. He followed me around my apartment demanding that I listen to him, accusing me of “censoring him” and being controlling. I repeatedly told him I couldn’t talk about it right now, wandering around my apartment trying to get away from him. I started crying and begging him to talk about it later. Eventually I started drinking all the wine out of the bottle, crying and screaming at him that he was an asshole and I hated him. I think I might have pushed him away from me, I don’t recall. He said I was abusive and scolded me for drinking so heavily, telling me how emotionally unhealthy I was. When I tried to defend myself, telling him how angry he made me, he pulled the whole, “I can’t make anybody angry, you choose to be angry”, refusing to be accountable for anything he did.

A couple months later he went to visit his family. He called me one night while he was with them, crying and saying he had to break up with me. He told his brother his side of the aforementioned story and his brother concurred that I was abusive. I asked him if he told his brother what he had done, following me around while I repeatedly told him I didn’t want to talk anymore, or that I was on birth control and was having mental health issues at the time. He hadn’t. But he continued, saying that he told his brother about me and his brother said it’s impossible to have a relationship with someone who has been abused, he tried once, and it just didn’t work. So, he said he still had to break up with me because I had been abused. Eventually he decided he didn’t want to break up.

But yes, he started out positioning himself as the victim in the very beginning, never making any decisions and calling me controlling because of it. And later he refused to respect my boundaries and when I eventually fought back, he told me I was abusive, and convinced his family (and me) that I was abusive.

(Source: manhating-babyeater)