Every other Saturday we will post links relevant to survivors. Please feel free to discuss these links in the comments, or post more links! Trigger warnings appreciated, and self-promotion welcome. Blanket trigger warning for all of these posts. […]
What are some forms of self-care for you that people don't typically suggest/encourage or think of as self-care? - Are there things that you do to take care of yourself that you've had a hard time recognizing as a form of self-care? Have any of your needs gone unmet because of this? - Are there things that others often suggest as self-care that just don't work for you? What are they, and do you know why it is they don't work for you? If you can articulate that, it may help with explaining to those people why they should stop suggesting that to you, or possibly help you figure out what it is that you need instead. - Is it helpful for you to, as Miri put it, "distinguish between the self-care we do to replenish and sustain ourselves, and the self-care we do to prevent ourselves from falling to pieces completely"—in other words, to think about self-care very differently depending on what you need in the moment? What kinds of self-care work better when you need to replenish/sustain, and which work better when your goal is to just keep yourself together?
It’s a weird feeling, to suddenly need certain kink things, to have a sudden craving so strong it suggests sometimes dangerous lengths and abandonment of boundaries and safety practices. I never know how long these things’ll last. Sometimes it’s just a day, sometimes it’s months. And it sure doesn’t feel like it will ever stop. (It’s everywhere and everywhen, how could it stop?) And it can be years in-between, and I can forget how to handle them, get out of practice, lose all my contacts and coping strategies. I don’t expect it to happen again.
Color psychology analyzes a lot of common associations between colors and emotions. Blues and cooler colors are supposedly soothing, greens and earth tones are grounding. Many restaurants are painted red with the intention of making customers hungry. It can be beneficial to understand how particular colors may influence or trigger you, since you could see those colors anywhere. What do different colors make you feel or think about?
In the last two posts I’ve outlined two of the major ways in which ace survivors are used as rhetorical devices--by using them to win political arguments and by creating a monolithic narrative of The Way Sexual Violence Happens to Aces. If you’ve read this far, you might be worrying about whether you’ve done either of these things in your own writing. You might be wondering how to avoid using aces as rhetorical devices while still writing forceful, argumentative pieces. This part is for you.
Every other Saturday we will post links relevant to survivors. (My apologies for being a few days late in posting this, and for not posting a question on Friday. I had some unexpected difficulties this past weekend that ended up keeping me away from my computer. I am fine though, [...]
I’m a “bad” rape victim. A Model Rape Survivor doesn’t know her attacker. My rapist is essentially a stranger to me, but that night was not the first time I had met him. She is dressed modestly and cannot be held responsible due to those clothing choices. I wore one of my shortest dresses and no bra when I walked into his apartment. She’s virginal and chaste, only doing the appropriate sexual things with appropriate people. I considered myself a virgin at the time, though I’m sure other people might disagree, but I’d gone to his place to mess around in the first place.
For a lot of survivors, trauma is kind of cyclical, and different seasons tend to bring with them different kinds of triggers or feelings. Sometimes we don't even realize the effect that seasonal changes have on us, but simply feel like things are suddenly different, and have a harder time coping without understanding why. It's a good idea to give some serious thought to how seasons can affect us, so today I want to offer some questions to get you thinking about that. Do seasons affect the way you experience your trauma? - Do you tend to feel more easily triggered during certain seasons? - Do seasons tend to affect your mood more generally? - Do you have different triggers or challenges to navigate during different seasons? - Are some of the ways that you use to cope not accessible to you during this time of year? Or, do you have more ways of coping than you would normally?
In this post I’m going to discuss the way bloggers construct The One True Narrative of The Way Sexual Violence Happens to Aces. This can take several forms. First, the author may assume that all ace survivors fit into a particular narrative of sexual violence (usually corrective rape by an allosexual romantic partner). Second, the author may acknowledge that sexual violence against aces may happen in multiple ways, but may highlight one way as more important or “real” than the rest.
Every other Saturday we will post links relevant to survivors. (But since Saturday was Halloween, we’re posting today instead.) Please feel free to discuss these links in the comments, or post more links! Trigger warnings appreciated, and self-promotion welcome. Blanket trigger warning for all of these posts. […]
