JHSC dood

My father-in-law just passed away.

Haven't talked about it on here because, well. He was the type of person who was a model citizen in public and an absolute monster in private. And it's a hard thing to condense everything that entails down into a single 19-word sentence. Because you feel like you have to include every detail, but at the same time, good lord, those details.

So.

The funeral is next week, so we'll be traveling home for that. Braced for all the well-wishers who only knew his Public Face to share their sympathies and give their condolences. Focusing on the fact his pain IS gone, and he IS at peace, and now hopefully the rest of the family can begin to heal from everything his pain and discord did.

If you are living with a person like this, please know it is not your fault, and you CAN get out. Here are some resources:

If you’d like to help offset some of this week’s funeral-travel costs, my Ko-Fi is ko-fi.com/therapygolems

If donating to a rando on the internet feels hinky to you (fair!), please consider donating to Bikers Against Child Abuse.  

Reblogging this because I haven't had the energy to talk about it, but, the monster/broken child in question was my dad.

On top of it all, we had to get an autopsy done, and my family had COVID when we went back the first time, so of course I got it after avoiding for four years and had to go home. Waiting two weeks plus for a funeral sucks.

Sometimes in therapy I feel like I don't have trauma in some correct sort of way. Like I'll be explaining that my childhood wasn't even really traumatic, just kind of bleak and boring. The worst my parents ever made me feel was disappointed, but not surprised. it was all so very mundane. And whenever some therapist asks me what I mean, I'll tell some random story that I happen to remember off the top of my head of what my childhood was like, or one that I think illustrated what kind of people my parents were and what their relationship was like.

Like this one time I remember when I was like 10 or so, I can't remember where we were going but the whole family was getting into the car, and dad started bitching at mom about how come when their first car was in his name, it was their car, and then when they had their own cars they had his car and her car, but now that they only have one car again, it's still just her car.

And then mom bitterly pointed out that the reason why he doesn't have a company benefit car anymore is because he lost his lisence for driving drunk with the kids on board while she was on a business trip. (And while mom didn't bring it up at the time, he had also tried to cover this up and act like nothing had happened. And she wouldn't have found out if my (11/12-year-old at the time?) sister hadn't thought of calling one of mom's friends like "hey cops showed up and took dad so we're home alone now idk what we're supposed to do now" and she came to watch us and told mom.)

...And I was like 10 and sitting quietly on the back seat listening to them bickering about this because they still both bothered to be mad about it. Not mad enough to get divorced or anything, but still bitter enough to bitch at each other about each other. And a therapist will be like wow how did that make you feel, and ???

Bored of it? Disappointed, but not surprised? That was just what life was like. Quietly waiting for bitter adults to be done bickering with each other because you can't do anything to fix this and while they could, they won't do anything to improve their lives. Life was just like that.

Emotional Neglect and Complex PTSD by Pete Walker

Not to sound like an edgelord but in a way I find this whole thing unreasonably funny. Imagine being such a disappointing parent that your kids got a permanent brain injury from the whiplash of being just that disappointed in the way you were as a parent.

Bitch daughter/Bastard son

I missed the one year anniversary of this post, but I wanted to celebrate this all the same. Happy one year(+) to this comic, and the day I stood up for myself and went no-contact with my family.

—

Curious Georgiana (via grrrlstudies)

I know I’ve reblogged this before, but it bears re-reblogging (?).  This is how you respond to abuse, this is how you give people control over their bodies/uteruses, this is how you act as a generally non-judgmental and compassionate person.  I love this story so fucking much.

(via coffeewithants)

And THIS is one of many reasons why we need to safeguard access to birth control.

Parents should not be reading your journals

Parents should not be searching through your trash 

Parents should not be snooping on your private social media messages 

Parents should not be taking your bedroom door off 

Parents should not be invading your privacy 

reblogging this because when they go through my phone and find my tumblr they’ll see this

As an actual mom, I approve this message. If your parents say it’s a normal part of parenting, no. No it’s not. They are wrong.

If your parents think this is normal - which it is not - I would refer you to these lines from This Be The Verse (source: The Poetry Foundation) by Philip Larkin:

whenever you're thinking about 'keeping children safe online' remember that 'parental controls' on internet use (more accurately, domestic spyware) are statistically three times as likely to be keeping a child's abuser informed about them than to be keeping them safe from predatory strangers, because family members account for 30% of CSA perpetrators and strangers account for 10% (the other 60% is split between family friends and acquaintances and people in trusted positions of authority like doctors and priests)

Continuing the theme of abuse blogging today, earlier I saw a post talking about the phenomenon of wanting to outlaw things (types of media or depiction of certain topics mostly) because "they can be used to groom" or "were used to groom (me/someone I know)"

And I don't want to air my personal trauma on op's post, but like they said, anything can be used to groom, because the problem isn't The Thing Itself but the motivations of the groomer

It's like that posts about wooden sailing ships where people keep saying "hope you like scurvy" or "weren't these used in the slave trade" as if somehow the ships themselves caused those things to happen

Literally anything can be used to groom. Any topic. Any interest. Any object. Abstract concepts like 'relationships.'

My dad groomed me by:

1) being my parent and having constant and unlimited access to + control over me from birth, the ability to define reality and normalcy for me, and enjoying a bunch of social conventions that meant anything he did to me was basically seen as his business and no one else's and the default assumption was that any intimate contact he had with me was harmless or necessary

(I can remember, as a child being taught about bad touching in school, thinking that "only your doctor or parents should touch you in these places" sounded an awful lot like an abusable loophole)

and that it would be worse to baselessly suspect or accuse him of abuse and be wrong than to let me be abused because there wasn't proof

(It was in fact pretty fucking obvious and every so often I think about every single teacher, family member, and other adult in my life who saw how I was and did/said nothing, and how many of those adults actually seemed genuinely contemptuous of me for my Obviously Traumatized Child Symptoms And Behaviors, and am briefly overcome with rage)

And 2) being nicer to me than he was to my brother, treating me like I was special, and doing fun things like taking me on trips.

A lot of the things he said and did to me as a child were self-evidently abusive and dysfunctional, like outright telling me it was normal for parents to have favorites, not only playing me and my brother against each other for his affection but me and my mom, telling me he knew me better than I knew myself and could tell what I was thinking and feeling just by looking at me, making me into his personal therapist and constantly telling me in graphic detail about the abuse he suffered as a child + his history with drug use and abuse + his marital problems with my mom + his mental health issues + his sex life and sexual interests (this also functioned as a way of training me to keep secrets, because he'd tell me things he Wasn't Supposed To so then I'd feel like we were co-conspirators and I was special and mature, etc etc)

but the fundamental thing underlying all of these specifics was making me feel special and uniquely loved by him, and then manipulating those feelings and that attachment in order to use me for his sexual as well as emotional gratification without having to worry about me fighting back, arguing, or telling anyone.

A lot of the stuff he did would have been otherwise normal if it wasn't him doing it!

There's nothing wrong with taking your kid on a business trip with you because you travel for work and it means they get to go all around the country and see places they might not have otherwise, if you're not molesting that kid.

When I was very little, he had a ritual where every weekend he'd ask me to name three things I wanted to do that I'd never done before, and then we'd go do those things. That's a great way of introducing your child to new experiences and bonding with them and making them feel like you love and value them and their thoughts, if you're not molesting that kid.

So are we going to ban parents staying in hotels with their kids? Roadtrips? Daytrips?

I do think there are a lot of problems with the current nuclear family structure as well as the social and legal concepts of 'the family' that make it much easier to abuse children and much harder for those children to get help, but the solution isn't "no one should ever have a child because parents can abuse their kids", it's to create structures that make it harder to abuse kids with impunity and easier for abused kids to get help.

This is just one specific instance of abuse, but I think it's illustrative of the flaw in the "ban all things that could plausibly be used to groom" reasoning. There isn't a single thing or topic you could have banned that would have kept me from being groomed and abused.

The reason it happened is because my dad was a deeply dysfunctional person who ended up with access to two children who couldn't leave and didn't know any better, and the only thing that might have kept it from happening in the first place was if social support systems existed so that my mom hadn't been so afraid of being a single mother when she got pregnant with me that she married him despite knowing it was a bad idea and being warned away by his own mother.

"If gross stuff that makes me uncomfortable stops existing, abuse will stop" is a child's logic. You weren't groomed because of porn or Twilight or incest fiction or shotacon hentai. You were groomed because a person decided to manipulate and abuse you using whatever tools they thought were most effective, and if those specific ones hadn't been available they would have used something else. Blaming the material is like running into a door and blaming it for being there.

i cannot possibly overstate the psychological damage of growing up being abused in a way that is considered so disgusting as to be literally unspeakable and treated as such.

every single person on this website and everywhere else needs to take a long fucking look at how they talk about and think about csa and how it might fucking feel to have things that literally happened to you be considered so taboo that frank depictions are declared obscene or so disgusting so as to be talked about only in whispered tones

CAN YOU EVEN BEGIN TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRAUMA THAT COMES FROM YOUR ABUSE BEING TREATED LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE THAT MUST BE BURIED LEST IT CONTAMINATE OTHERS BY ITS VERY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DESCRIPTION OR EXISTENCE

i had friends on here that used to be very frank and open about their status as CSA survivors. because they insisted on talking about the subject frankly and with depth and nuance they were called pedophile apologists, which was quickly shortened just to pedos, and constantly harassed. one teenager specifically sent someone she knew to be a csa survivor links to triggering materials in an attempt to get them to reconsider being friends with me because i was also considered a pedo.

the way online spaces decided to Protect The Children from pedophilia has done no such thing, just like we warned you it wouldn't. instead it gave bullies and bigots a perfect label to slap onto any victim they wanted, at the direct expense of csa survivors everywhere. it's also been horrible for queer artists of all sorts. we have been saying this over and over for a decade at least.

im so fucking ANGRY

seeing a lot of takes recently (and this was popular during john green’s time here too) that adults who make content targeted towards kids or teens are automatically, not just cringe, but suspect? which is such an insane thing to believe because like…..who else would be writing books for 8-year olds? other 8-year olds? learn to just admit you don’t like someone or their work without implying they’re a pedophile, my god

Fucking thank you!

Reminder that one way to isolate minors for more easy abuse is to teach them to fear and suspect all other adults. Because adults are supposed to be responsible for helping kids in trouble, and many of them will do so given the chance. So if you want a kid to "accept" (be unable to escape) abuse, then you don't want them to have any other trusted people to describe what's happening to, because then you risk those adults interfering.

Don't trust anyone preaching this philosophy.

The safest kids have a wide, trustworthy, safe social net, with lots of options for someone noticing if something is amiss if something is infact amiss.

I’ve recently seen people say, across social medias, that they automatically distrust anyone who’s going into nursing, teaching, social work, etc. I’m starting to think that all of this “abusers gravitate toward positions over vulnerable people!!” talk may have done incredible harm without nuance.

Your big life and world philosophy cannot be unmitigated, completely unprocessed anxiety and trauma. You’ve just turned “all people of x type/group bad” woke. No good will come from always searching for ways to validate your crippling trust issues.

(CW grooming and csa)

I have a lot of feelings about the “minors should never have any kind of contact with adults they’re not related to” discourse point, because… I was the kid those people claim to want to protect. I was a minor who was groomed and sexually abused by someone older than me.

And in retrospect, you know what I wish was different about that situation? I wish I had had more adult friends. Because the reality is, there wasn’t really anything my parents could have done to stop me from being friends with this guy, and with how my relationship was with my adult family members at the time, there was literally a 0% chance I ever would have told them what was going on. Some of my friends my age knew, but they were just as inexperienced as me and thought that an older guy being interested in me was soooo coooool. But I often think to myself, what would have been different if there had been an adult in my life who I had trusted enough to talk about that with, and who could have said “Wait, how old is this guy? Whoa, that’s not okay”

I’m in my late 20s now, and I feel lucky to have friends who range from their late teens to their 60s. And I really enjoy having such a diverse array of friends! I can give my younger friends advice on stuff like college and entering adulthood and other things I have experience with that they don’t, and I can go to my older friends for advice on things like buying a house and managing a career and how to not be scared of getting older. And it brings me comfort to know that if my younger friends end up in a situation like the one I was in, they can talk to me about it and I can be the person I once needed for them.

If your concern in any situation is “a vulnerable person might be abused”, the answer is always going to be to give them more people who can help them, not fewer. And if your response is “they can get support from people in their family”, I have very sad news for you about who most children are abused by.

Holy fucking shit

yeah I’d carry that one over too

Stuff like this hit's really close to home with me because I had an abusive paternal figure growing up. It's easy for you to assume that this is an outrageously extreme example that someone's prolly just blowing out of proportion; don't. Abusers often use tactics like this. It's about control and taking control away from their victims. This also means controlling the narrative, and controlling who the victim can talk to about their issues. The thing is, over issues like this, the best response is to assume the victim is being legit. Even if they're not, wishing them well won't have anywhere close to the same repercussions as assuming a legitimate victim of abuse is lying. I'm only saying this bit here because there are people in the notes of this post trying to play this entire post off as a hoax. I am talking to them personally now. You are not helping anyone except the abuser. The best-case scenario here is that you are a child who's never had to live with abuse. Because the worst-case scenario is that you yourself are an abuser. Either way, the best thing for you is to stop.

this this thiiiiis AND adding to clarify, one of the biggest signs of abuse is that it sounds fake. which is bizarre, i know, but it’s part of the control.

it’s hard to take abuse seriously even when it’s happening to you. abuse is terrifying, it’s seriously fucked up, so victims don’t want to think it’s real. this happens to everyone. it’s how the brain protects itself.

OP wants to believe that of course their husband is a rational good hearted person who just needs to understand tha water and lights cost money, they’re not hurting the OP on purpose, this is a misunderstanding. no one would do anything so bizarre deliberately, right? it’s unbelieveable. sounds fake.

and it sounds fake to other people, too. OP can’t tell the story without sounding like a crazy lying bitch. i guarantee you if she brought it up in front of a third party, her husband would deny that it’s happening.

that is the abuse. that is gaslighting. he is changing her perception of reality to one that he controls. he is saying, Bizarre and crazy bullshit will happen to you and you have to fucking accept it as normal, and if you dare to talk about it no one is gonna believe your story.

The only thing I can imagine that could explain this is that he's deliberately trying to make her think she's crazy. And it's working.

She needs to get out.

This is sometimes referred to as the “Trunchbull Method”, yes, like the horrifically abusive principal in Matilda.

She does it on purpose, and actually explains why in the book.

Essentially, if you are going to be abusive, she says you should go 150%. Really commit, be as wildly over the top as you can… that way, if your victim ever does get the courage to tell someone about it, what you did will sound so outlandish that no one will believe them.

“Our principal doesn’t like pigtails, so she picked a girl up by her hair and threw her over the fence.”

No parent would believe that… it’s too far. Surely no one would do that. (But if you know the story, you know it happened.)

“My husband leaves every light in the house on and every faucet running all day, and says that it’s literally impossible not to… and when I’ve tried to explain why it’s a problem, his excuse is that I’m not a mechanic, so he doesn’t have to.”

It sounds unbelievable… no one would be that stubborn and off-base, right? And most people who hear that won’t believe it. Which is how her husband wants it.

If he can break her down and make her doubt her own sense of reality and logic over something as trivial as a lightbulb, that leaves her wide open to manipulation on major issues like money, pregnancy, property.

The Trunchbull Method is insidious, especially when there’s no physical abuse and it’s just emotional/verbal. With the right conditioning, most of the victims don’t even see it as abuse.

Notice how she’s the sole member of the household with a job, that he’s mooching off her and has been for some time, and has been gaslighting her (while wasting hundreds of dollars, if not thousands) for months, to the point where she is genuinely wondering if she is insane…

…and even when people point out the abuse, she still firmly believes that it’s not? She wants to reach out for help, but she still feels guilty, because he tells her it’s her fault… and a part of her believes it.

This is exactly how this method of abuse works. When someone tells you what’s going on, and it sounds like abuse, calling them a liar or saying you don’t believe it will only ever help their abuser.

Believe them. Help them. Make sure they know you support them. Help to ground them in reality if you can, assure them that they aren’t crazy. That their thought process is rational.

example: “You’re right- turning off lights when you leave a room is very easy. And small children learn to turn off faucets when they’re done with them. You’re correct. His behavior doesn’t make sense, and neither does his excuse.”

Make sure they know you’re in their corner and will stand by them.

On average, it takes seven tries to leave an abusive relationship. Seven.

The more support a victim has, the faster that number goes down.

Generally speaking, if someone's describing really bizarre abusive behavior - behavior that doesn't seem logical and that doesn't make sense to you - consider that if they WERE lying, they'd probably make up something that sounded a little more believable, because they know how it sounds.

(AITA for wanting to report my doctor, who is my sister’s best friend, for telling her I'm on Vyvanse, a HIPAA violation?)

An excellent fucking message

I feel like a lot of people don’t really fully grasp the idea that abusive parents exist and are both common and, to a degree, socially acceptable.

Like, they may be aware of the fact but have not yet actually integrated it into their worldview, personal beliefs, or policy proposals.

This becomes particularly obvious when people try to start a panic about trans charities or schools supporting trans minors “behind their parents’ backs” as if parents are just entitled to full control by default and would never do anything bad if they learned their child was trans.

If my own father had ever learned I was trans the most realistic range of his reactions would have been between “kicking me out of the house” and “literally just killing me”.

And I am far from the only one in this situation. LGBT people as a whole are disproportionately represented among homeless youth precisely because so many parents are unsupportive. Outright murder is more rare but has also happened before.

It is ridiculous to just assume parents are safe by default.

It is ridiculous to just assume parents are safe by default.

It is ridiculous to just assume parents are safe by default.

It is ridiculous to just assume parents are safe by default.

I couldn’t agree more and I don’t think we can ever say this enough. It’s been one of the hardest things in my 15 years of openly discussing the child abuse I survived…people are overall uncomfortable when I say anything about it but they can get REAL WEIRD when I challenge their firmly held notion that “family = good.” Some families are good but believing they are by default? It’s laughable if it wasn’t so scary.

I think people freak because when you raise this issue, it treads out of them thinking of my situation as “a couple of bad apples” and into asking questions about how we treat kids in our systems and even begging questions about if THEY THEMSELVES were abused or are abusive or controlling toward their kids they see as their possessions or extensions of themselves. People don’t like it when you pick at the seams of their carefully crafted façades.

Some people’s greatest threat in life ARE THEIR PARENTS. If we don’t acknowledge that, we leave kids in harm’s way. If you’re out here spouting “parents riiiights” bullshit, you’re likely just invested in maintaining coercive abusive control over kids, to prevent them from learning anything that will expose you for the abuser you are 🤷‍♀️

btw being excessively nonconfrontational is NOT a positive trait. it does not mean u are “too nice” or just too kind to hurt people, it means u have a problem communicating and you need to work on it.

There are people in the notes saying that the alternative reason is that they’re doing it because of trauma and i gotta say that

1) same. I did have this same problem and reason for doing it.

2) this is not actually an alternate reason. You guys also have a problem communicating and while you can trace exactly WHY you have trouble communicating that doesn’t mean it’s okay to treat everyone like they’re potentially your former abuser and that you DO still need to work on this.

‘This behavior comes from trauma’ and ‘This behavior is harmful to you, to others and to your relationships with others’ are two truths that can co-exist, and that do co-exist quite frequently.

If you are the child of wealthy parents, this does not make you rich: it makes you a possible client of wealthy patrons

I have encountered children of rich parents denied tuition funding bc they came out as gay. I have encountered children of rich parents forced into psychiatric confinement begging their parents on the phone every night to please let them leave. I have encountered children of rich parents accustomed to living a life of luxury, cut out of their family’s wills for their disobedient attitude, and left unsure how to live an ordinary life bc nobody taught them. I have encountered children of fabulously affluent and abusive parents who can effectively buy off judges and pay to have them hunted down if they run from home. If you don’t have discretion over your money, it is not yours; and if your “wealthy” lifestyle is subsidised with strings attached (which it always is), you are not wealthy yourself

Financial abuse is a real thing, and people should seriously look it up. I’ve seen people whose parents refused to fill out FAFSA forms so then they couldn’t get student loans to get an education away from their family. And people whose parents “expected contribution” was more than tuition so they got nothing, meanwhile they’re about to be kicked out of the house and off health insurance. I’ve heard stories of people who went into fields they absolutely hated because otherwise their families would cut them off, and people who avoided getting necessary medical care because while yes their parents insurance would cover it, it would mean being forced to live exactly the way their parents wanted them to (not being openly queer, not studying the things they want or living the places they want, not being able to escape). And while not all of them would count as Rich™️, they’re certainly in comfortable situations, enough so that they could absolutely destroy their children’s lives

I know at least two survivors of childhood SA that were continually controlled by their abusers well into adulthood through money. One was also institutionalized as a child despite being obviously an abuse victim because when your parents are rich they can just do that.

Another friend managed to get a criminal investigation opened against their childhood abuser who had a conservatorship over them and then it just… vanished. Their abuser paid off the police to make it go away. They had to flee across country, go into hiding and fight a multi-year legal battle to get out of the conservatorship.

This is what happens to the children of rich people.

just in case anyone sees this who is in this situation, if you're at risk of being homeless, you can fill out a FAFSA without your parents' information so it doesn't matter if your parents won't give your their information or if their expected contribution is high. initially my younger sibling was told by the aid office at their school that they didn't qualify for anything since they didn't have our parents' info, but that is incorrect. there's a different application if you're at risk and my sibling ended up with a full scholarship after providing documentation of their situation.

From studentaid.gov: