Trauma didn’t make me nice, I consciously made me nice because I don’t want anyone else to suffer like I did. Trauma didn’t make me strong, I made me strong. Don’t you dare ever tell me my trauma made me anything but scared, broken, and confused. Don’t give credit to the abusers for me being a good person. They didn’t make me good, I made myself good.
id love for someone to please explain to me how i ended up terrified of any kind of intimacy while craving it constantly all at the same time
Abuse bro
Saving these tags bc I mean. Look at them
i swear to god, men raising their voice is the most terrifying thing in the whole world. they dont understand, like its an immediate panic response, game over
I actually had no idea women found this so scary
my downstairs neighbors fight on a regular basis, and every time he starts yelling i’m a little afraid he’s going to kill her. i have no reason to think this except that he is a man and he is angry
My math teacher has a loud voice and a temper and he scares the living shit out of me almost everyday. He’s made me and other kids cry more than once and he and his teacher buddies make a joke out of terrifying students.
this was women in general? i knew my gf didn’t like it but I was unaware if this affected most women
Yes, it does
As a woman, I had no idea it effected other women like this. I was too afraid to even talk about it. I thought I was weak. Thanks for bringing attention to this.
My dad thinks it’s funny that I used to cry when he raised his voice. I freak out whenever some one does. Once my director did, and I started crying I couldn’t stop. I’m glad to see I’m not alone…
This is so important– seeing how common this is– and I also want you all to know that this is not normal. It isn’t something instinctively ingrained into women, to be afraid of men. There is no natural state of men being a threat that women constantly have to be afraid of. This is cultural. So many women and girls here have a mutual understanding of this feeling, and I think it really shows an unsettling truth about our society, particularly about how men are raised to act and how so many women have this defensive reaction gradually develop. It’s so important that these people have their voices heard, because it teaches us about problems that we just can’t deny the existence of any longer.
I’m glad I’m not the only one
My fellow men, pay attention. I didn’t realize how scary this could be until one of my exes explained it to me, and it’s heartbreaking.
Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)
Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.
I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.
I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.
Don’t tell me it’s too hard, that you just can’t do it, or that you “shouldn’t have to.” I’m 53 years old and just now getting the hang of it, and if this old dog can learn something new, so can you.
Note to guys: It really, REALLY doesn’t matter if you’re thinking, “but I would never…”
History is littered with the bodies of women who believed a man “would never.” This includes women killed by men who honestly, deeply, truly believed they “would never”… right up until she said that one thing or moved in just that way and he just got so mad, just that once, and pushed her or punched her or slashed her or shot her… just once, y’know, to shut her up, or because she was flinching and didn’t she know that HE’S NOT LIKE THAT and I’LL TEACH HER TO BE AFRAID OF ME…
We are trained, from infancy, that Men With Loud Voices are a source of pain from which we cannot escape, and attempts to escape may result in more pain. And as soon as we’re old enough to comprehend a world broader than our immediate circle, a world that extends into the past and will run into the future, we realize that there is no way, no way at all, to tell which men “would never” and which men “would never… except if.”
We live or die on that “if.” And any man who doesn’t like facing that hyper-vigilance can work on fixing OTHER MEN, not women’s fear.
The reaction shouldn’t be “not all men are like that;” it should be “no woman should have to live in fear.”
It’s telling that so many people will hear a story of long-term abuse and say, “why did she stay with him?” and not “why did he treat her like that?”
This made me cry.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t the only one. Like even if I hear OTHER people fighting and the guy raises his voice I always KNOW that he’s gonna kill that other man or woman…..even if he’s not. It’s just what the raised voice does to me
To this day, all the men in my family do this to me when they want to shut me up or intimidate me to do what they want.
My ex, as gentle a man you could hope to meet, did this once, along with grabbing me by the neck and pinning me to the wall because I was doing something he didn’t want me to do.
It’s like Louis CK said once about the equivalent being a world were men could only date a half-bear half-lion and hope for the best.
Tbh I thought it was common knowledge. Like, I just assumed everyone knew that getting loud and/or moving aggressively towards women scared the fuck out of us.
I’m actually glad to see it’s not. Doesn’t make me any less scared but it tells me that when this happens it’s not always on purpose. So there’s that.
I had to explain to my partner that I’ve had exes try and kill me before and I can’t deal with his anger. at first he just tried to explain that he’s not mad at me or that he wouldn’t hurt me but he saw the kind of wreck it makes me and eventually he understood that that has never mattered before and now if he gets mad he usually goes outside or messes around downstairs with his fishtanks.
my partner used to be a head chef in a resort, used to build cars and he’s a manager in a factory, he’s used to yelling at everything and everyone when stuff isn’t working but once he realised how painful it was for me he controls himself when I’m there and comes and finds me to explain why he was mad when he’s calmer (so I stop freaking out that it’s my fault).
he’s a loud, explosive, confident man with a hair trigger temper and he can still pull himself together and control that anger for the most part around me now, so there’s no “but I’m just like that” or “I can’t help it” excuses to be had.
if you know you’re frightening people and using that ingrained fear of abuse against them to get what you want idk what to say to you except stop.
i’m not at all surprised to learn that a lot of men don’t realize that raising their voices and encroaching on a woman’s space will scare the crap out of her. i bet that a lot of them do it unconsciously, and they really don’t mean to do it.
and they can learn not to! so guys, don’t do that. learn how to not scream at your partner and how to not back her against the furniture when you’re pissed at her. and if you know what you’re doing and you know that it scares her, and you’re doing it anyway so she’ll do what you want? you’re a dickbag and a bully and i hope she leaves your ass.
and ladies, no, you are not alone in being freaked out when a guy yells at you. (or when you hear a guy yelling at someone else.) which is depressing as hell, but the good news is that the men in your lives can learn some self-control. and if they won’t? i hope you find the resources and the courage to leave. because that shouldn’t be normal, and no one should have to live with it.
Being abused can seriously affect your ability to distinguish between “not obviously pleased” and “obviously displeased” because abusers go from Neutral to Hostile for absolutely no discernible reason, and eventually you start worrying that everyone is going to be like that and you start feeling this urge to make absolutely sure that the people you actually care about aren’t mad or upset, because to you, “there’s no evidence that they’re not angry” is the same as “there’s evidence that they are angry”
all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt
but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.
so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears
…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.
#thanks Youre welcome. I’m writing out all the shit I learnt from the cptsd specialists when I was in the hospital because so much of it was brand new information for me, (and i consider myselr fairly well educated on my illness) and even being there for only three weeks gave me enough info to completely change how im viewing my plans in terms of treatment and recovery.
I figure it will also be extremely relevant to a lot of my friends on here, but it’s going to take me a while to sort it all and write it out in a readable way. But I’m working on it.
More people are concerned with why women stay in abusive relationships than why men are abusing women
real talk
Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via mommyslittlesunshine)
Wow
(via blackwidoww)
Excellent. Absolutely excellent, and the very best part, the part where he nailed it because I could never get past all the rest, is identifying that we need to ask questions about John, about what is going on with men.
I agree with the above statement, we nee to start figuring out why men are hitting women, why are they raping women, and why a lot of them aren’t taking responsibility in it. You can have all of these women self defense classes and shit to get people to learn how to defend themselves from these acts but until you attack this at the root it’s just going to keep growing back.
Holland Roden on the upcoming Peter and Lydia scene (x).
Holland goes on to say that while she’d like to have portrayed some kind of PTSD from the relationship that is definitely still there, the scene time-wise (they had like, three or four seconds to look scared or shaken or something) didn’t really allow that kind of emoting.
I am so fucking unimpressed with this writing and I really hope the actors can pull it off without making it seem like the show completely brushes under the rug what was in essence a complete season of an abuse narrative that was never talked about again (except maybe once in passing).
(via perseused)
