Every day since age 7 I've wanted to give my body back to the earth to avoid further exploitation.

Questions and discussion about sexual or other abuse or assault, and support and help for survivors.
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This area of the boards is expressly for support and help for those who are currently in or have survived abuse or assault. It is also for those seeking information or discussion about abuse or assault. Please make every effort in this space to be supportive and sensitive. Posts in this area may or do describe abuse or assault explicitly.

This area of the boards is also not an area where those who are themselves abusing anyone or who have abused or assaulted someone may post about doing that or seek support. We are not qualified to provide that kind of help, and that also would make a space like this feel profoundly unsafe for those who are being or who have been abused. If you have both been abused and are abusing, we can only discuss harm done to you: we cannot discuss you yourself doing harm to others. If you are someone engaging in abuse who would like help, you can start by seeking out a mental healthcare provider.
noaccount
not a newbie
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2019 2:34 am
Age: 29
Pronouns: they/them
Location: usa

Every day since age 7 I've wanted to give my body back to the earth to avoid further exploitation.

Unread post by noaccount »

It's not safe for me to write here because staff here have expressed that people should be viewed and treated differently on the basis of misogynistic psychiatric labels that have been put upon them but I'm choosing an at-least-novel alternative to suicide in this moment.
The only notable thing about rape was how unexceptional and exactly like the rest of my life it was.
"How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure." - The Absconding Archives
al
not a newbie
Posts: 390
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2016 10:17 pm
Age: 31
Awesomeness Quotient: I make zines!
Pronouns: they/them
Sexual identity: queer
Location: Colorado

Re: Every day since age 7 I've wanted to give my body back to the earth to avoid further exploitation.

Unread post by al »

Hi noaccount,

I'm so sorry that things feel this way. It sounds like pretty painful, and like it's felt this way for a long time.
I read a while back that you have a love for one of my favorite books (Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World), and I just wanted to say that I'm glad for all the times that you've chosen alternatives to suicide so far. No matter how many hearts or umbrellas or skulls it took to get there. <3
Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. -Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully
noaccount
not a newbie
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2019 2:34 am
Age: 29
Pronouns: they/them
Location: usa

Re: Every day since age 7 I've wanted to give my body back to the earth to avoid further exploitation.

Unread post by noaccount »

Unfortunately it's not really a matter of feelings. I've incurred more trauma and more violations from mostly every cultural project I tried to take part in - I took on conflicts that were far more than I could handle at a young age and I am still quite sure that, if I had NOT done so, the outcomes would have been worse - not rising to confront medical and school-based abuse against classmates, gender violence within activist groups, etc, would have just positioned me to be more beaten-down into subservience.

Unfortunately after setting boundaries with the former partner I described in my first post here, it seemed for a time like I could be around them platonically, but they were essentially using and gaslighting me and spent most of a year stringing me out and destroying the foundations of my felt-sense of reality and getting angry every time I tried to get true information from them about what was happening. (while pretending that their current partner was 'making' them do things they were freely choosing to do, so they could dodge any responsibility, and when I said that sounded abusive, telling me that I was not qualified to know/think about whether any action was abusive or not.) We only finally ended contact when I said I would go public with their behaviors towards me and they said that me choosing this was blackmail and abuse of them.

Writing here also is a form of self-harm - As a consumer/survivor/ex-patient, it is a self-destructive impulse to expose my injuries in a forum where discriminatory treatment based on medical diagnosis is advised as such:
https://scarleteen.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=8807
A non-ableist/saneist way of approaching the situation would have been to let the concerned boi know that they might need to "be extra-cautious," or "[ask themself] if they feel they [didn't] have real choices because [their girlfriend] set up all of [her wants] as needs" based on the girl having specific actions, beliefs, attitudes or statements that showed a sense of entitlement to control others - rather than encouraging people to treat girls differently on the basis of a presumed disability.

This is especially important because, as staff also wrote recently, "because vague statements like that often cover up more specific biases." And the vagueness of personality-diagnosis has been excellently explored herein:
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neur ... ess-321555

A lot of our diagnosers could have more honestly described us as having Not-Doing-What-You-Were-Told-To-Do-While-Being-Beaten Disorder.
Here is a useful article on the topic:
Failure to Comply: Madness and/as Testimony
https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjd ... ew/366/598
"How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure." - The Absconding Archives
Heather
scarleteen founder & director
Posts: 9703
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:43 am
Age: 54
Awesomeness Quotient: I have been a sex educator for over 25 years!
Primary language: english
Pronouns: they/them
Sexual identity: queery-queer-queer
Location: Chicago

Re: Every day since age 7 I've wanted to give my body back to the earth to avoid further exploitation.

Unread post by Heather »

Noaccount: I'm very sorry to hear that you feel my response to that user about their relationship was ableist or misogynistic.

I've reviewed my responses there, and the history of that user which informed that conversation. I stand by my responses and do not personally feel that they are either of those things. However, I will be asking a couple others on the team here to review them (I also asked for that the last time you voiced these concerns) as well, since I am obviously going to be biased about my own responses. In the event they feel someone outside our staff should review them/me, I will certainly respect that. If anyone in this process advises or directs me to do any work around this or make any changes to my own protocols, someone will follow up with you and let you know what that entails.

Moving forward, and in alignment with the user agreement you said you agreed to when registering, please direct complaints about our staff or services to our email, where we can better and more appropriately address them. Since it sounds like you have issues with me personally, it may be helpful to know that I am not the person who filters our general email, so if you have concerns about anything going through me first for any reason, that is not how that works here.

Separate from that -- and, I believe, more importantly -- you have said you do not feel it is safe for you to post here and are now saying that you are engaging in self-harm by posting here. It is very important to us as an organization that we not enable anyone in any kind of self-harm or danger to themselves. You are telling us that posting here is self-harm for you, but are still posting here all the same, and that creates a conflict for Scarleteen as an organization very concerned with everyone's safety.

Because I feel your conflict here primarily seems to be with me, I'm going to give over the larger decision-making about this to other staff. For right now, to do what I think I can as the only person present at the moment in the interest of your safety, I'm just going to change your permissions so that your posts will be reviewed by someone else (again, not me) before they go live.

Because you also have expressed suicidal feelings in these posts, I want to be sure you have some resources for anytime-support with those feelings if you need them. The Trans Lifeline hotline (which is also inclusive of nonbinary people and generally just a wonderful service) is: 1-877-565-8860. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is: 1-800-273-8255.

You'll hear back soon from another staff member via email about the whole of these issues soon.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
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