Ways you can tell someone is from a ‘strict’ household on reddit. All of these are signs of abuse.
All of this.
For me, the revelation was this comic by Matt Groening from the Childhood is Hell collection
It was the part about “Never Tell Anyone What Goes On In This Family” that hit me. I got that EXACT LINE VERBATIM from my parents on several occasions. Back when I was little, I guess I considered it as “I suppose they just value privacy or something” but only in my later years did I realize how much it could be manipulated for ill intent.
people who encourage calling the cops in case of domestic violence situations have obv never had the cops called in domestically violent situations.
they’ll arrest & endanger the victim’s ass too. especially if they’re nonwhite & undocumented, and almost always is detrimental. so NO don’t encourage people to call 911 n ask for pepperoni pizza.
it’s better to document instances of abuse, HAVE A SAFETY PLAN, then leave and take legal action that you have control over.
If a child is overwhelmed, remove them from the overwhelming situation.
If a child is hungry or tired, address those needs.
If they are throwing a tantrum in the department store, take them somewhere quiet and let them cry until they are calm. They’re probably just bored or cramped or overwhelmed and need a minute.
Address the cause of misbehavior, not how it manifests.
Make sure things like transitions, when you are leaving or moving on, are clearly communicated. Sudden transitions can be a huge trigger for tantrums. Best to try and mitigate with proper advance notice.
Explain your reasons to children when you are enforcing rules
Listen to children when they explain their objections to rules. You don’t have to agree with them all the time, but you should listen.
Understand that you, the adult, can also be overwhelmed, tired, hungry, and frustrated too. Acknowledge, to your kids, out loud, how these things are impacting you and apologize if you snap at them unfairly. Again, this is modeling emotional response.
Make the rules clear, simple, and consistent. Don’t change what the rules are based on your mood that day, or if you must, explain it before hand. If you normally let them play video games in the car, but you can’t today because your head hurts and your driving to a new place and you need to concentrate so you don’t want the sound to distract you- explain that to your kids. If they counter with “I have head phones. Is that ok?” Then, yeah. It’s ok.
If you need to have consequences for their actions, then actually follow through. Don’t threaten with consequences that you won’t really do. That makes it a lie, and makes it super ineffective in the future.
Make consequences fit the behavior. Explain why that is the consequence.
Some good consequences might include: cleaning up a mess they made, taking a cool down time for a few minutes, not getting to a special treat like a trip to the movie theater with their friends, etc. Remember, we are trying to avoid physical pain as a form of punishment.
Speak to children respectfully and prompt them to speak respectfully back.
Choices. Give kids a reasonable, manageable number of choices. Do you want to wear the green shirt or the blue shirt? Do you want Cheerios or waffles? Carrots or green beans? Do you want to give grandma a hug or a high five? Older kids can handle more choices than younger ones.
General rule of thumb: You aren’t trying to raise an obedient child. You’re trying to raise a thoughtful, respectful adult. And you have to be a role model, not just in what you say, but also in what you do.
I think a lot of people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being forced to grow up too fast”. Having things they weren’t ready for pushed on them, whether that was being sexualized against their will or tasked with raising younger siblings in a parent’s absence. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where vulnerability is acknowledged and a strong boundary is maintained between dominant people and their potential victims. Hence the “I don’t care how mature she is; having sex with a 17-year-old is wrong” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are valid.
I think a lot of other people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being infantilized against their will”. Things like growing up in a family that didn’t acknowledge your sexuality, or being institutionalized, or being disabled and therefore seen as a child long past the age of maturity. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where their agency is affirmed and no one will try to control them “for their own good”. Hence the “I may be young, but please believe me when I say I know what I’m doing sexually” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are also valid. And neither group deserves to take precedence over the other,
I, personally, fall into the latter category. My experience of abuse involved being treated like a petulant child who didn’t know her own mind or desires. I could not be in charge of my spirituality – of any aspect of my inner life, really. I couldn’t have the things I wanted; I couldn’t even be trusted to know what I wanted. And all of it, all the micromanaging, all the gaslighting, was allegedly for my own good.
So when I see statements like “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says”, I have a very deep, very instinctive middle-finger reaction. I have had enough of being told that what I want doesn’t matter, isn’t important, and isn’t even really what I want. I can’t make my own decisions? Fucking WATCH ME.
That said, the statement “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says” may be enormously beneficial for someone from the former group! I can absolutely see how, if someone has been sexualized against their will from a young age and groomed into wanting things they now regret, that someone might find it empowering to admit “I said I wanted it, but I wasn’t really mature enough to make that decision, and the adults in my life were at fault for that”. We just have to be mindful of splash damage to Group B, who will, predictably, prickle at the notion that what they say doesn’t matter.
It applies in non-sexual situations too. Someone from Group A, who was forced to drop out of school and raise their siblings after the death of their parents, might say something like “teenagers just aren’t capable of taking care of children. they’re still developing; they deserve to have a youth”. Meanwhile, someone from Group B, who is developmentally disabled and has fought for years to be allowed to babysit their siblings, will see that and think “fuck you, I’m just as capable as anyone else”.
I also think each group makes the mistake of projecting an abuser-centric view onto the other. Group A, for instance, might accuse Group B of secretly wanting to sexually coerce young women, while Group B might accuse Group A of wanting to sexually restrict those same young women. This is a mistake. Because both groups are speaking from their own trauma, neither is necessarily serving the needs of abusers. They are talking about what they, personally, need in order to feel safe and to extend aid to those like them, and both models are valid. We just can’t pretend that one can exclude the other.
This is relevant to a lot of the discourse.
this makes a lot of sense to me, and also explains why i crashed so dramatically into all the pedophile drama. i’m definitely a member of Group B, who chafed all my adolescence at being condescended to and controlled, and couldn’t wait to be grown up and powerful. i hated the idea that i was too young to do anything, especially anything sexual, and i admired my upperclassmen who maturely discussed smut and yaoi like they were suave experts. i had sex as soon as someone i liked was offering, at 16, and never regretted it. i was really enthusiastic about sex in my late teens, and had as much as i could. i was writing smut by the time i was 18.
so to me, 16 always seemed like a perfectly normal and healthy age for consensual age-appropriate sexual relations, and i was totally startled to find out a lot of 16 year olds disagree. i was then an idiot who realized way too late that it’s incredibly creepy for a grown woman to be arguing with teens that they are too old enough to have sex, and by the time this fact was rammed through my dense skull i had said some stuff that Group A people interpreted (incorrectly but understandably) as sexually predatory. and of course, call-out posts never include a user’s apologies or retractions…
ironically, my abuse was a kind of group C – people being rulebound and judgy in a very personal and dehumanizing way, controlling and punishing not because they wanted to infantilize me, but because they saw themselves as heroes and me as a monster. they didn’t want to make me into their baby doll or their sex toy or their ego stroker or anything at all; they wanted me to not exist.
which means the entire fucking discourse is a huge trigger to me, whichever side it’s coming from. although the anti side is much MORE triggery, seeing as they tend to play the hero/monster game.
i was seen as a monster because i’m autistic – my expressions are wrong, my tone of voice is wrong, my eye contact is wrong. pretty much everyone in my childhood except my parents, and uncountable other people through my youth and adulthood, many of them in positions of power over me, decided i was Bad or Not Real and treated me accordingly, and nothing i could do would change their minds. now roach is being seen as a monster ecause she’s been honest about her lived experience, by people who actively campaign to spread vicious rumors, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.
I think a lot of people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being forced to grow up too fast”. Having things they weren’t ready for pushed on them, whether that was being sexualized against their will or tasked with raising younger siblings in a parent’s absence. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where vulnerability is acknowledged and a strong boundary is maintained between dominant people and their potential victims. Hence the “I don’t care how mature she is; having sex with a 17-year-old is wrong” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are valid.
I think a lot of other people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being infantilized against their will”. Things like growing up in a family that didn’t acknowledge your sexuality, or being institutionalized, or being disabled and therefore seen as a child long past the age of maturity. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where their agency is affirmed and no one will try to control them “for their own good”. Hence the “I may be young, but please believe me when I say I know what I’m doing sexually” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are also valid. And neither group deserves to take precedence over the other,
I, personally, fall into the latter category. My experience of abuse involved being treated like a petulant child who didn’t know her own mind or desires. I could not be in charge of my spirituality – of any aspect of my inner life, really. I couldn’t have the things I wanted; I couldn’t even be trusted to know what I wanted. And all of it, all the micromanaging, all the gaslighting, was allegedly for my own good.
So when I see statements like “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says”, I have a very deep, very instinctive middle-finger reaction. I have had enough of being told that what I want doesn’t matter, isn’t important, and isn’t even really what I want. I can’t make my own decisions? Fucking WATCH ME.
That said, the statement “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says” may be enormously beneficial for someone from the former group! I can absolutely see how, if someone has been sexualized against their will from a young age and groomed into wanting things they now regret, that someone might find it empowering to admit “I said I wanted it, but I wasn’t really mature enough to make that decision, and the adults in my life were at fault for that”. We just have to be mindful of splash damage to Group B, who will, predictably, prickle at the notion that what they say doesn’t matter.
It applies in non-sexual situations too. Someone from Group A, who was forced to drop out of school and raise their siblings after the death of their parents, might say something like “teenagers just aren’t capable of taking care of children. they’re still developing; they deserve to have a youth”. Meanwhile, someone from Group B, who is developmentally disabled and has fought for years to be allowed to babysit their siblings, will see that and think “fuck you, I’m just as capable as anyone else”.
I also think each group makes the mistake of projecting an abuser-centric view onto the other. Group A, for instance, might accuse Group B of secretly wanting to sexually coerce young women, while Group B might accuse Group A of wanting to sexually restrict those same young women. This is a mistake. Because both groups are speaking from their own trauma, neither is necessarily serving the needs of abusers. They are talking about what they, personally, need in order to feel safe and to extend aid to those like them, and both models are valid. We just can’t pretend that one can exclude the other.
This is relevant to a lot of the discourse.
this makes a lot of sense to me, and also explains why i crashed so dramatically into all the pedophile drama. i’m definitely a member of Group B, who chafed all my adolescence at being condescended to and controlled, and couldn’t wait to be grown up and powerful. i hated the idea that i was too young to do anything, especially anything sexual, and i admired my upperclassmen who maturely discussed smut and yaoi like they were suave experts. i had sex as soon as someone i liked was offering, at 16, and never regretted it. i was really enthusiastic about sex in my late teens, and had as much as i could. i was writing smut by the time i was 18.
so to me, 16 always seemed like a perfectly normal and healthy age for consensual age-appropriate sexual relations, and i was totally startled to find out a lot of 16 year olds disagree. i was then an idiot who realized way too late that it’s incredibly creepy for a grown woman to be arguing with teens that they are too old enough to have sex, and by the time this fact was rammed through my dense skull i had said some stuff that Group A people interpreted (incorrectly but understandably) as sexually predatory. and of course, call-out posts never include a user’s apologies or retractions…
ironically, my abuse was a kind of group C – people being rulebound and judgy in a very personal and dehumanizing way, controlling and punishing not because they wanted to infantilize me, but because they saw themselves as heroes and me as a monster. they didn’t want to make me into their baby doll or their sex toy or their ego stroker or anything at all; they wanted me to not exist.
which means the entire fucking discourse is a huge trigger to me, whichever side it’s coming from. although the anti side is much MORE triggery, seeing as they tend to play the hero/monster game.
i was seen as a monster because i’m autistic – my expressions are wrong, my tone of voice is wrong, my eye contact is wrong. pretty much everyone in my childhood except my parents, and uncountable other people through my youth and adulthood, many of them in positions of power over me, decided i was Bad or Not Real and treated me accordingly, and nothing i could do would change their minds. now roach is being seen as a monster ecause she’s been honest about her lived experience, by people who actively campaign to spread vicious rumors, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.
After a year working in a women’s shelter I think my biggest issue with the anti-domestic violence movement as it stands is: All these models and programs are kind of built around the assumption that everyone involved knows how to have happy, healthy, respectful relationships, and resolve conflicts peacefully, and they just… choose not to, for some weird reason.
Whereas my lived experience was that healthy relationships, problem-solving, and conflict management are skills that a lot of people never learn during critical developmental periods in childhood, and if we want to solve the problem, we have to get involved in the intensive work to teaching them to adults.
And in my opinion, this view doesn’t let abusers off the hook. It’s the opposite.
We used to assume that abusers could behave decently if they wanted, but just chose not to, so if we yelled at them enough, or if they just wanted to hard enough, they would. (Or at least, that’s what abuser intervention looked like under the Duluth model)
Whereas… at the shelter, I more than once found myself saying, “I don’t think he’s actually capable of being the man you want him to be. And if he decided tomorrow that he was going to change, it would take years. You can’t make your decisions for your immediate future based on what might happen when your baby is in grade school. You have to go off what he’s like now.”
When someone tells me that the person hurting to doesn’t mean to hurt them, they just can’t help it, that… is even more of a reason for them to cut the connection, in my opinion. Because if they’re doing it involuntarily, they don’t know what it is or how to stop.
just moving along like everyone else 