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It is frustrating to see that people really seem to think it’s survivors who are least invested, patient, or hopeful in their abusers’ change...
Do people not get that hope & love are often major parts of why ppl stay? That seeing the best in your abuser is a survival strategy?
Do people not get that hope & love are often major parts of why ppl stay? That seeing the best in your abuser is a survival strategy?
And that they, more than anyone else, usually know the ins and outs of their abusers’ trauma, vulnerability, lovability? And that they have likely wrestled with their humanity the most? That they have often poured in more love and effort than the friends peers & fans around them?
There is such little curiosity about how survivors feel and why... so many deeply patronizing assumptions.
So much implicit encouragement towards survivors in TJ sphere to keep loving & taking care of their abusers, to keep waiting for that potential to show up. Tell me this isn’t an extension of many survivors’ inner voices convincing themselves to give their abusers one more chance.
It troubles me that survivors are expected to/praised for trying every last option in the book while they bleed themselves dry before doing something more ‘drastic’ is justifiable. Some acts seen as retaliation from survivors is better framed as self defense & community defense.
Years of DV work have taught me that making survivors jump through hoops and prove their efforts is very much a policing thing, very much a legal systems thing, is this not yet another iteration of seeking “perfect victims”?
Unlinking your sense of personhood & responsibility from the feelings & acts of your abusive partner is actually a huge part of healing from abuse. Freeing yourself from being responsible for their anger, their blame, their self hate & misery. Living as yourself for yourself.
And it really makes my heart hurt that so many survivors who’ve gone through literal hell to say, enough, I’m done, this can’t go on, are saddled w/ the demand again to walk on eggshells for their abusers, have to be so watchful and scared all over again. This is transformative?
Half the struggle of recovering from abuse is in IDing what happened as abuse, manipulation, grooming, things minimized as nothing in the relationship. But naming the acts is too dehumanizing (for who?) so it all has to become...harm? Who’s not capable of holding complexity here?
It is okay to walk away. It is okay to give up on something that hurts and violates you. It is okay to refuse continued enmeshment. Resetting the extreme power imbalance that intimate violence creates takes a long time, even/especially within yourself. https://twitter.com/theleilaraven/status/1284672805662007296?s=21
Every community has its versions of victim blaming and silencing. Keep it in the family, pray to God about it, think of the children. Activist communities imagine they are above this, when in fact cultish in-group/out-group dynamics & rhetoric abound. It is all in plain sight.
https://twitter.com/hyejinhere/status/1284746334558253063?s=21 https://twitter.com/hyejinhere/status/1284746334558253063
https://twitter.com/hyejinhere/status/1284745371952939008?s=21 https://twitter.com/hyejinhere/status/1284745371952939008
Muting notifications now 
if you found this thread helpful please consider joining my close friend Jenny’s survival giving circle. She is a queer disabled survivor with severe nerve injuries from her assault; she relies on this fund to keep her going. https://fundly.com/jeegivingcircle
if you found this thread helpful please consider joining my close friend Jenny’s survival giving circle. She is a queer disabled survivor with severe nerve injuries from her assault; she relies on this fund to keep her going. https://fundly.com/jeegivingcircle
